What “Slaughterhouse-Five” Tells Us Now
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
this sentiment underlies the misperception of risks like terrorism, school shootings, and child abduction.
tangentially, billy pilgrim was a great little southern folk rock band. wish they'd made more music.
It was not a horror novel like Cujo but it sort of was in its own way. It had a huge impact on me, though. I'm fairly sure it was the first book that ever made me cry.
SL5 is about one thing. PTSD. PTSD was not a diagnosis when the book was written, but it is at least clear to me, that the book is about a fractured man trying to repair itself by creating a world view that is comforting to it. His becoming unstuck in time is, in my mind, simply a sci-fi flashback, or perhaps, flash-forward in this case?
The belief that time is linear is not universal. Another fictional take on 'eternal recurrence' is explored in Ouspensky's 1915 Strange Life of Ivan Osokin. The protagonist becomes conscious of having lived the same life repeatedly, and struggles to fix his mistakes.
It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.
Abbreviated weeb version: Re:Zero. Also, All you need is Kill. (Aweebrviated?)
It's a valuable metaphor, though I reject the concern that the timeline of every quark is scripted.
Let's say I implement a huge, immersive, highly emergent video game, where all of the entity states are recorded, but all of the random number generation is constantly seeded by a feed from CloudFlare's lava lamps. I could present the entire history of my toy universe as a single, static 4 dimensional data object. I could even save that data on a 2D surface, then set the archive as a physical object on my mantelpiece. Yet the timeline of every entity in that toy universe wasn't scripted.
A character gets born, lives, dies, repeatedly, in different circumstances. At one.moment he manages to remember something that a being from outside time tells him between incarnations, in "limbo" / "bardo" type of setting.
All the people in the world is that same character, only transpoted in time. All the worst villains he faces are himself, all the best saints he meets are his (future) selves. This world is entirely by him.
The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. [...] When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.
Player Piano, which purports to be “not a book about what is, but a book about what could be,” is such a totalitarian society – not one organized by terrorism but by economic-technical coordination of vested interests. Its society is one that appears, as its main character Paul Proteus notes, as a “clean, straight rafter,” that, once the surface is scraped away, is rotten to the core.
[0] http://www.vonnegutreview.com/2013/06/player-piano-one-dimen...
It's like 1st-world problems being described as legitimate oppression.
If going against society results in you losing your job (because your employer doesn't want to deal with bad publicity), losing your home (because you can't make rent/mortgage payments), losing your friends (because anyone who hangs out with a [racist/rapist/fetus-murderer/scammer/person who refuses to sign things they can't read/etc] suffers guilt by association), and possibly starving to death in the street (if you can't convince anyone to charity you some food), then that society is totalitarian, no matter how subtle they are about it.
Current western society isn't nearly that bad[citation needed], but that's neither because it's impossible nor for lack of anyone trying.
Or: a system where [people, as distinct from bureaucracy, hostile memeplexes, corporations, etc] have virtually no authority and [bureaucracy et/vel al] wields absolute control of every aspect of the country, socially, financially and politically.
Moreover, the fact that this is even an open debate suggests that calling the current state of affairs totalitarianism is a bit exaggerated. There are multiple groups currently vying for control of every aspect of life, with no single group having complete control, and people throw in with the one they feel closest to. I don't know what that is, but it doesn't match totalitarianism.
Any given group being intolerant of contrarians is not “totalitarian”, it’s just a group following group instincts. Otherwise you might as well argue that most animals are totalitarian, which is 1) patently absurd and 2) dangerous (since you are effectively arguing that totalitarianism is the natural state of any society).
Totalitarianism is not just about reaction to dissent; it requires a proactive side with structured ideology and a conscious effort to fashion all elements of life (public and private) after such ideology. Whether you really have something like this in Western society, is very debatable. Consumerism might get close, but you can still live and thrive without being a consumer, if you really want, and you won’t be jailed for it.
When you say “subtle totalitarianism”, you are highlighting some elements of Western life that could fit a totalitarian environment, but you are also ignoring all the rest that points in the opposite direction: organised dissent, freedom of expression, tolerance and survival of alternative lifestyles, and so on. This is normal: a lot of sociological constructs are not binary. But you cannot say that a society is totalitarian if it fits only a few of the characteristics of observed totalitarian systems.
I might concede that, after 1990, Western societies have somewhat sleepwalked into something closer to a “totalitarian capitalism” than they were before; but I think we are still far from the excesses of actual totalitarian societies.
Similarly, I think we've made strides in thinking about what oppression means - what allows us to say that those non-"1st-world" places are oppressive but ours are not? Is it a matter of quantity or quality? The language here is not merely hyperbolic (though this feature does remarkably well in being provocative, which is the point of activism - Marcuse was a lifelong activist), it's substantive.
When you appeal to the the "basis of Western society" in your comment, it reads more like normalization - how could such a thing be totalitarian, after all, it's the basis of Western society. That's actually the point I'm making, this basis conditions us to see only the worst examples as totalitarian/oppressive/"bad". The unspoken point seems to be that because it is the basis then we can't describe it as totalitarian. To me, that's not a logical conclusion.
>Marcuse’s engagement with the issue of totalitarianism relies on the understanding of the transformation of reason and for him this transformation is exemplified by the emergence of positivism as the dominant means of making sense of the world. He argues that the totalitarian character of advanced industrial society and its concomitant ‘totalitarian rationality’ (Marcuse 2001 [1961]: 52, 55) have specific, potentially devastating, consequences for the members of that society. Most important here are what Marcuse conceptualizes as ‘matter-of-factness’, ‘psycho-logical neutrality’, and ‘repressive desublimation’.[0]
>In advanced industrial societies, Marcuse says that the unit of production is totalitarian in without it determines the activities, attitudes and skills involved in social life. It defines and regulates also the aspirations and individual needs. Thus, the creation of false needs and control of these needs have corollary the disappearance of the border private / public life: only the consumer remains. It is this unique ontological condition that Marcuse called “undimensionnelle.”
[0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230250857_6
Note well: I am not saying that the economic system does not have its oppressive aspects. I am not saying that those aspects should not be improved. But I am saying that calling it totalitarian is cheapening the word "totalitarian". There's real things that the word applies to, and stretching it to apply to the economic system may help make your point, but it also hides the difference between the economic system and real totalitarianism. And there is a real, massive difference, which needs to not be swept under the rug of rhetoric.
(Also, positivism is dead as the dominant means of making sense of the world.)
This just dances around the core question, though: you say we've seen "real" totalitarianism, but by what do you judge that standard other than the uncritical ideological framework that's most common? Of course the treatment of the Uighurs is totalitarian, but that says little about what is and isn't totalitarian. Marcuse's claim isn't that "economic system" totalitarianism is the only kind, he's saying that the limiting of the concept in today's world is a result of technological and instrumental rationality, just as is the limiting of various other concepts - we conceive of totality, freedom, peace etc. within our rationalities, but Marcuse is saying that our very conception of what is rational changes in the advanced industrial age just as it changed in past ages more obviously (e.g the early Rennaisance moral opposition to a tradesman collecting profit other than by remuneration for his work of doing the transport).
>But I am saying that calling it totalitarian is cheapening the word "totalitarian".
Why couldn't it be the opposite - that the limited construction of the folk (generally uncritical) concept of totalitarianism is a restriction which works well to serve the interests of advanced industrial society?
>And there is a real, massive difference, which needs to not be swept under the rug of rhetoric.
Marcuse (nor any of his followers) argue that the forms of totalitarianism are qualitatively the same - in fact to do so would be self-defeating, because they want to draw a distinction between folk concepts of totalitarianism and critical concepts - and that is only possibly by accepting there is a difference between, for instance, the treatment of the Uighurs and economic totalitarianism.
>Also, positivism is dead as the dominant means of making sense of the world
Marcuse is not strictly referring to philosophical logical positivism, since even by the time he was writing this application of the concept was waning - he is reacting against the "positivist" sociology which was dominant at the time (and some scholars would argue still is). The dispute (the "Positivism Dispute") refers to the debate over the notion of "historicism" and in particular revolves around Karl Popper's criticisms of critical theory methodology.
These kinds of word games are what turns me off of philosophy. Like the argument that there isn't a multiverse, since "universe" includes everything and would include alternate realities. Congratulations, you know Latin roots. That is all I have learned.
>I have already referred to the self-validating hypothesis as propositional form in the universe of political discourse. Such nouns as "freedom," "equality," "democracy," and "peace" imply, analytically, a specific set of attributes which occur invariably when the noun is spoken or written. In the West, the analytic predication is in such terms as free enterprise, initiative, elections, individual; in the East in terms of workers and peas-ants, building communism or socialism, abolition of hostile classes. On either side, transgression of the discourse beyond the closed analytical structure is incorrect or propaganda, although the means of enforcing the truth and the degree of punishment are very different. In this universe of public discourse, speech moves in synonyms and tautologies; actually, it never moves toward the qualitative difference.
Interesting thread, and worthwhile commentary, mostly improved by your post -- but this one sentence is kind of a trainwreck. By "without" did you mean "that"?
[0] https://www.the-philosophy.com/marcuse-dimensional-man-analy...
If anything what keeps coming up is that it seems strange to them that we think we're all that different from those countries (as if we're on a higher plane, basically).
Those are 2 claims, in which neither makes sense to me, probably due to a lack of detail. Did they make sense to you when you wrote it?
If it's 'legitimate', are you referencing the oppression of the majority as a proxy for western society?
Economic coercion - The threat or act by a sender government or governments to disrupt economic exchange with the target state, unless the target acquiesces to an articulated demand.
It's possible that 'economic coercion' is now a misnomer, having been used to mean something else specific, initially. I have referenced a definition, for simplicity. Feel free to audit. As it stands, it is not oppression, unless any given demand is supposed to equate to the status of oppression?
You can survive without participating in the economics, it just benefits you more to participate, where lifespan and pleasure is concerned. That isn't coercion any more than checking the material you put in your mouth is biological oppression, it's a linear optimization you're free not to make.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/introducing-the-scarlet-e-...
A little factoid I found interesting -- Vonnegut was inspired in part to write it by the holocaust denier David Irving's book "The Destruction of Dresden"
http://lipstadt.blogspot.com/2007/04/kurt-vonnegut-and-david...
quote
> "Vonnegut helped perpetuate that myth and spread this form of denial. He probably did so initially unwittingly. But since the publication of that book enough has been written to show this is not true and he could have corrected it has he been so inclined"
I know someone who survived Dresden, and what those people went through was terrible. However, it was an inevitable consequence of stopping an ideological movement that did not value humanity in the least. When you hear people touting their ideology and how they can't respect people's rights because they're trying to achieve a greater good - watch out.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the...
https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/debate-over-japanese-...
Sadly history tends to fade and now the Germans were just a tragically misunderstood people doing nothing wrong.
I wonder how you'd feel if you or a family member endured a horrible death by firestorm due to the machinations of a government which happens to rule the nation in which you currently reside?
On whose perfect soil do you presently live?
To be fair I could easily see it being much higher but that figure is the best we have.
[Harrison Starr] raised his eyebrows and inquired, “Is it an anti-war book?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war books?”
“No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?”
“I say, why don’t you write an anti-glacier book instead?”
What he meant, of course, was that there would always be wars, that they were
as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.