"The value of a human being today is measured in terms of his economic efficiency and his erotic potential—that is to say, in terms of the two things that Lovecraft most despised."
lol. Houellebecq presaging a lot of his own soon-to-come preoccupations here
If none of his proteges outside Bloch got this, it's almost certainly because they, like Lovecraft, were possessed by Cthulhu's 1930s progressivism, which promised a utopian deliverance from Evil.
Coincidentally, Lovecraft wrote all his "great works" before this change of mind.
You want some true "Lovecraftian vertigo," as Houellebecq calls it, the contrast between forces hundreds of millions of years old, and the exact moment of the present?
How about that Lovecraft's theme about his own life was "Nothing ever happens"—the exact motto of /pol/?
This quote deserves more to be said about it: Lovecraft's disciples might not have gotten it "rationally," but they certainly got it viscerally, that's why they became disciples
Lovecraft was the Velvet Underground of horror writers, everyone who read him was swayed by him
They memed his works into the literary consciousness because they couldn't get it out of their own. And his heartbeat has only grown louder since then, not fainter
In a class of college students in 2001, maybe 1-2 might have known who he was. In 2021, I bet *most* do.
The modern person, like Lovecraft's disciples, feels what he did more and more viscerally, whether they like it or not, no matter the sweet solutions those profs are promising
They can't escape their senses, no matter how much they, like his protagonists, are horrified by them
An unwilling mind is forced to confront horrors beyond his comprehension, and from there dark truths he wishes he never knew. Many such cases.
I believe that Houellebecq was one of them, too.
(All of this, by the way, is from Michel Houellebecq's HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes both of them. Recommended to me by @yama_pain )
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Nevertheless, the outer-productive regions were still able to sort of maintain themselves as industrial zones and city-feeders until the Regime stripped their means of life, industrialization, from them
Now they have neither the ideology to replace themselves nor the economic means to support themselves to provide for the cities that robbed from them (and, to be fair, enriched us all) for centuries
The old system broke down. All that remains, for the system, is mass migration
We are out of Afghanistan because of Trump, and we are *in* Ukraine because pols like the Clintons + Bidens turned it into their personal colony/paypig
Trump's foreign policy was his greatest achievement for Americans. We need not just one Trump, but fifty Trumps
Americans buy into lies like Iraq and now Ukraine because our eternal political class has convinced them to believe in lies, against our own interests as citizens
It is not a "fringe concern." Our guy literally ran our policies. And they absolutely ruled for the American people
This is apparent from the first day that Trump won election. When our domestic ruling class declared that "Russian interference" was the only reason he won
And went on to impeach him over it. Look, that's fucking weird, no Americans cared about Russia then
The Cathedral is at least a century old, but I think it's just now gone through a phase transition, as it exhausted a lot of its liberal premises of equality
While at the same time discovering it has captured enough of the people and the elite to *abandon* equality
Which means it has the power to enforce its next phase, "equity," i.e. equality through use of force
While it shares things with previous forms of illiberal leftism, this is a uniquely American evolution of it, and also one that draws on modern forms of "force"
Regular reminder that this was already diagnosed in The Elementary Particles 25 years ago. Reason and its infinite promises of liberation from any guiding strictures doesn't lead to better lives
It leads to a form of frozenness, an inability to judge and take action
The book's parallel narrative preemptively demolishes the MedGold-level response to this, "just increase the fuck rate," "just talk to her dude" The 20th century's two totems were pure reason and free sex. Both are shown as dead ends, incapable of giving humans what they need
The two horns of the ideology turn out to be twins in what they promise: liberation from the bounds of our basic being
Which is why both broke when they were put into practice. The outcome of both characters in The Elementary Particles is disgust with themselves.
Unusually insightful article by a Zoomer about Zoomers, that gets at my main idea about the current age: the post-war order is a paralyzing agent, an ideology that strips us of all spirit + will to act
Most visibly as he describes it in youth + children
This to me is the key passage. Combined with being stripped of all meaningful values—turns out "diversity" doesn't provide personal, human meaning—
This draining of spirit leaves people angry, but unaware of what they're angry at. And unable to act against it even if they knew
In short (and this isn't a uniquely Zoomer problem, it's just most concentrated there) there is an immense sense of betrayal, with no actual understanding of what that betrayal *is*, and no spirit to change it