Trying to find a way to articulate the spectrum of cargo cult to idolatry that is useful. Many cargo cultists who realize that the divine exists within a thing, but aren't forced into faith.
Not sure I have the language and reading to articulate this, so I will try to work around my limitations.
If we look at an idol, we have a (relatively) well delineated idea, represented by a single figure, a mythos that articulates the boundaries of the idea or ideas through narrative.
When we look at an object of cargo cult worship, we see the empty shape, without the meaning.
So if we look at very weak idol today, such as freedom of speech, we can see the true believers who can explain why it's essential for iterative governance, etc, and the cargo cultists who muh private company.
BAP is fairly explicit about elevating masculine beauty to encourage masculinity. Masculinity is not a mere aesthetic flourish, but physiognomy matters.
With a strong idol, it's very difficult to rationalize ascribing its inversion to it. The weaker the idol, the easier a cargo cult relationship becomes.
Not sure I'm happy with how this thread worked out. Iconoclasm encourages centralization, imo, and cargo cult comprehension is a step towards iconoclasm (denaturing the icon), but with added obfuscation.
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What hadn't occurred to me until now is that an old argument I've seen and used, that "green" people are actually watermelons (environmental veneer on communist center) is an insufficient explanation of the green movement.
The green movement is now circling in on a divine (unfalsifiable) locus (human driven climate change) that is reverse engineering Gaia worship. If you view "environmentalism" as an idea or ideology encompassing healthy stewardship of nature, you're going to be exasperated.
Everyone is fired up over this, even typically even keeled mutuals. What's happening (ignore the specifics for a moment), is that this gentleman is insulted, but the insult is *imperceptible* to many (most?).
Her tone is flat to joking, and she's phrased her insult with sufficient plausible deniability that it's possible that she herself does not perceive the insult.
"I always found it funny when other people consider themselves members of a noble lineage, while I live in their ancestral seat and am therefore queen" is an insult. It's basically the straw man for "cultural appropriation" being bad.
One of the smartest leftists I've interacted with on here had a take that amounted to a restating of a right wing position while pointing and sputtering. We're approaching a leftist singularity.
The leftist response to this observation would very likely be a "no true Scotsman," which is what all their "I'm a leftist, not a liberal" pleading ultimately amounts to.
This is most stark when you look at an internally consistent "leftist" like Greenwald or Aimee. The distance between them and a Jim Lindsey is quite consistent, whereas the majority of the left is lately a scattered mess.
@shadowcat_mst@0x49fa98@arguablywrong@logicbot3000@hradzka The thing that is most difficult to understand and accept about wokeness is that it is only new in the aesthetic sense. It is an old instinct best articulated as "deterritorialized idolatry." It morphs and mutates and is difficult to slow and impossible to destroy.
@shadowcat_mst@0x49fa98@arguablywrong@logicbot3000@hradzka The two challenges it presents are 1) it is fluid, and ensnares those who try to fight it by bogging them in layers of specifics that ultimately don't matter but directionally, and 2) it is faith based, which triggers cognitive dissonance.
@shadowcat_mst@0x49fa98@arguablywrong@logicbot3000@hradzka When this iconoclastic impulse is in balance with the conservative instinct, you get relatively slow social change (not necessarily technological change, though). When there's too much of the iconoclastic urge, you get what we have now (defending arithmetic).