It's early in the morning. I woke up at 5:00am from a mild nightmare. I read an internet comment where someone threatened to kill me, telling me that I would be choking on my own blood. I didn't wake up scared; I just woke up with no hope of going back to sleep. Then the following sentence immediately came to mind:
“Our culture has formed a deep epistemic-schism that makes it appear is if there were two realities.”
Then I thought of mitosis. So I looked up a PBS CrashCourse video on the subject. The image that I had in mind was of the telophase of mitosis where a single cell forms two quasi-poles (centrosomes) that pull the cell into two parts.
What is interesting about this metaphor is that DNA is like a zipper that splits in two, which fits into my intuition that despite the fact that both sides appear to be fundamentally different are actually mere inversions of the other side. Granted, I don't fully trust this intuition, but that is where my head is at.
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I created a Twitter.
I asked James about Q Anon because it seemed like Q related stuff was getting much more traction recently. Oh, am I late to the party. He pointed me to two interviews of Sarah Hightower. She's an Aum Shinrikyo expert and looks at Q conspiracy through the lens of cult-studies. I created my Twitter account so that I could follow her.
I am afraid she might be too influenced by studying Aum. Or maybe I don't understand her finer points well enough. She seems to think that there is a massive cult forming in the US which is based around the Q Conspiracy.
I won't call Q a cult because the problem is that Q does not have definitive leadership. However, there are certain cult-like qualities. But the cult-like qualities are not merely cult-like; they are quasi-religious and mythological in nature. I think we're dealing with something more broad than a cult.
I would go as far as to say that this is more like the emergence of a culture.
I think Q-Conspiracies are the folklore and mythology of this emerging culture, and they are (somehow) compatible with American Christian religious values. Q-Conspiracies are transmitting and communicating values—not facts. Values are transformed slowly over time; they are not reasoned with through logic. This is the world of dreams.
I'm not sure if this is the sign a culture that is in the process of emerging or if it is in its death throes.
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My ideal leftist movement? Pragmatic, patriotic but not bellicose, the kind of left that is pro-union, the kind that is distrusting of large corporations but not anti-business.
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I didn't realize until recently that one of my closest friends in the army has become heavily influenced by Q. He used their language but never name dropped Q. He was convinced Trump was a genius. In 2016-2017 he tried to comfort me by saying to trust the plan.
One of my first exes, who is very conservative, is also up the Q hole, sharing "proof" of massive pedophile rings. I didn't realize that there was a common thread between my army friend and my ex because they're such different people.
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Photography is a matter of perspective.
It's interesting to apply this to profile photos and uploads in a generalized way.
If a person only takes selfies, they're liable to be a mirror-gazing narcissist.
If a person only has photos taken of them by other people, especially by a photographer, they're liable to rely to heavily on the perceptions and perspectives of others.
If a person has a diversity of pictures, that is a good sign.
If a person has over-curated photos, that is a bad sign; they're liable to hide the bad parts. (Which I am guilty of.)
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I have a hard time framing things. —I think it's why I can't finish any stories.— When I go through my old sketchbooks, I draw in fragments. I never complete one picture. I would do best to draw a square and then fill it in with an entire picture even if it's simple bullshit.
The Problem: disembodied, alienated, lacking context, ungrounded.
We frame things out of necessity.
On psychedelics I learned that "all things are connected". But that truth took too much space in my head. I lost myself in that idea, that interconnectedness.
The frame is Apollonian. The great unified mass is Dionysian.
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How would I go about drawing a Jungian Mandala? In a way it's a meta-frame (frame as referenced above).
Metaframe. Framing frames.
A mandala is a representation of a lens/paradigm more than it is of a frame.
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Went down a Random Rabbit Hole: Discovered the phrase Metamodernism.
On the wikipedia page, there is a reference to a 2010 paper that refers to metamodernism as being derived from Plato's metaxy (middleness/moderation) rather than meta as "aboutness" or "abstraction."
This is important.
From wiki:
For the metamodern generation, according to Vermeulen, "grand narratives are as necessary as they are problematic, hope is not simply something to distrust, love not necessarily something to be ridiculed."
Vermeulen asserts that "metamodernism is not so much a philosophy—which implies a closed ontology—as it is an attempt at a vernacular, or…a sort of open source document, that might contextualise and explain what is going on around us, in political economy as much as in the arts."[11] The return of a Romantic sensibility has been posited as a key characteristic of metamodernism, observed by Vermeulen and van den Akker in the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron,
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My brain and/or heart has decided that it wants to listen to Billie Eilish. I don't want to want this. But I do, so I will, in this case at least.
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The rabbit hole deepens: https://metamoderna.org/what-is-a-metameme/
Hanzi Freinacht seems to be saying that the metameme is the meme (idea/ideology) that unifies other memes (according to a particular process). It might be the caffeine talking, but holy fucking shit, this guy is interesting.
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From https://metamoderna.org/what-is-a-metameme/
...memes are developmentally determined, and that goes for all memes from the pure technical to the more ideological. That means that not any kind of meme can emerge, or take root, at a given time and place, but that the possible memes that can emerge and prosper are limited by which other memes currently exist. More specifically, the kinds of memes that may emerge in a given context depend on the overall developmental level of that cultural context’s other memes.
This reminds me of CG Jung's quote where he says he treats the contents of the unconscious like animals in the garden, they come up and visit him, but they have a life of their own.
A metameme is thus a non-randomly ordered collection of memes in which the memes that don’t fit in with the other memes simple cannot emerge or co-exist without breaking the very logic of what holds the metameme together. Each metameme builds on its predecessor, but it is by definition not merely a further development of it. Not only is a metameme the overall context in which all other memes are ordered, non-randomly, but also the basis of which they are rejected if they don’t fit the overall logic and structure. So what differentiates one metameme from another is that they are always in direct opposition to one another. Just like modernity was in direct opposition to the ancien régime that came before, the postmodern metameme is in direct opposition to modernity. And with that opposition follows the threat of replacing its predecessor. Scary stuff. This dynamic explains much more of history than what it’s usually given credit to.
Hmm. This is like a more sophisticated version of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectic .
Further reading his work he seems to overlap the two words ideology and meta-meme.
Meta-ideology, there's a word I could use.
Today we are living in a particular multi-centered time where the gravitational shredding of society is particular noticeable. Somehow the old conflict between left and right (in economic terms) has diminished in importance compared to the rifts felt by the conflict between the pre-modern, modern and postmodern metamemes—something that has been amplified by today’s globalized and multicultural society.
This type of cleaving is somewhat loosely related to what I described earlier as mitosis.
Modern > Post Modern > Metamodernism (as an attempt at unifying the Modern with the Post Modern)
Hanzi seems to believe that there is a clear path of development—that Postmodernism is more sophisticated than Modernism and that Metamodernism is more sophisticated than Postmodernism. This is in agreement with Kuhn's theory of paradigms, which Hanzi directly mentions.
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Oscillation between ideas/things is apparently something important to metamodernism. I relate to this very deeply.
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An old blogpost of mine bears a significant resemblance to an article linked to an article linked to an article (3 deg. separation) written about metamodernism. Not sure what that means, but it is interesting.
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I need to look up the following two metamodern authors: Quentin Meillassoux and Karen Barad.
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