"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 )
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
You know what, here's the hottest take I can drop, Stephen King *should* have been the next Poe or Lovecraft, he had both the imaginative horsepower, the narrative mastery, and the sense of horror necessary to become this.
Some of King's work, especially his early ones, and *especially* the first four Gunslinger novels, prove this. He had it in him. Immense, insane imagination, the sensitivity was there.
Bad. Ass. Author. But there was something just a little off. He couldn't quite do it.
So wait—my most volcano-scorching-hot take is that early Orson Scott Card, the Mormon, is the greatest horror author of our age. He sold out later but his '70s/80s shorts are the most horrifying works I've ever read from that period. Even more terrifying than King
lol, right. "We at the highly scrupulous Intercept would never 'expose' our political enemies, who we definitely don't report on because we hate them. We just wait for any outlet with even lower standards to make these people a matter of public interest—and *then* we expose them"
This is Activist Journalism 101, it's a completely incestuous movement, "respected" outlets know they can just sit back and wait for millennial bottom-feeder outlets to "do the work" for them
Then they're allowed to link to it, as legitimate journalism, and launder it upwards
As this process has continued it's become even more pathetic than that, their justification isn't even some VICE article written by a 21-year-old college girl, it's literally "online speculation"
Oh wait "Multiple links to speculation," so now we get to launder it into fact
So while it's true that Trump really didn't even want to do anything that outrageous, the reason the system spent five years squealing like it was dying was because even that much would have kneecapped it
Not ended it, not at all—but crippled it, yes
Look, to me, neoliberalism has two core modules: its economic module, and its social module
Leaving the latter aside, its economic module is globalism, there's no arguing that. And two of the core components of globalism are free movement of goods, and free movement of people
I don't really "believe" this. But as the traditional means of manipulating a population toward the desired goals become less and less effective, actual supervillainy is going to become more tempting—esp as you still own the means of propaganda. They'll defend whatever you do
Again, this is a logically consistent position for them to take. If differences in racial outcomes are widespread, persistent for generations, and resistant to all interventions, those differences have to be caused by *something*
This is the Gordion knot multicultural liberalism has made for itself, and why it's doomed. It has no escape hatch, it either has to admit that yes, society *is* oppressing marginalized groups... or yes, turns out there are significant genetic differences between groups. Whoops
It can attempt to buy itself a little time by saying the differences are "cultural," but progressivism will just reroute this into a form of oppression
What, are you saying your culture is *better* than ours? How can yours be "better" when it's marginalizing everyone else?