Grok is finally useful to me now that I know how to make it do what I want, so here, it even formatted this thread for me

1/18
Wang Huning, 27 Oct 1994
Central Party School closed-door session
Title: 文化安全是国家安全的最高层次
“Cultural Security Is the Highest Level of National Security”
(Internal reference only 内部参考) 2/18
Comrades,
We have always placed economic, military, and political security at the centre of national security discussions. This is correct, but no longer sufficient. Today I put forward a new proposition: cultural security has become the highest and most fundamental level of national security.

Another good part of the Groys book is how he reconciles the centrality of Kojeve's thesis about recognition with the reality of him having never published anything in his own lifetime, most of his work published posthumously-- he says, basically, Kojeve believed that creating tariff policy for the EU was more "populist" than seeking the accolades of "intellectuals" -- Kojeve doesn't care about "intellectuals"-- for Kojeve, the only meaningful ideas are the ones that are accepted when imposed by the State. The rest is just a proxy for chattering & trying to get pussy etc. The only real philosophy is the philosophy of the state-- the philosophy that becomes "common sense" through the state. Kojeve's tariffs stand to this day. In the West amongst even the "radicals" there is a notion of "trickle down" elite theory of philosophy-- "elite philosophy trickles down to the masses"-- Kojeve rejects this-- Kojeve says philosophy is the reflection of what is understood subconsciously by the masses, such that when it attains state power, there is no friction (except ironically by the "intellectuals" who protest perpetually). Stalin was loved by the masses, but not by "intellectuals."

Kojeve is just so clever, he salvages the entirety of ridiculous metaphysics about "the soul" by saying: "Ah yes, the soul, that is Nothing, this is very important too, that it is Nothing. Only Humans have souls because only Humans give voice to the Nothingness that is Death." Yes yes, God, the Soul... all of this is Nothing. But this does not mean "a trivial thing"-- but a very serious thing! Nothing is more important than Everything! Everything is just a bunch of stuff-- it's just "matter" & nature & objects-- but Nothing! There is Nothing like it!

Very funny how recent (wealthy) immigrants to America’s kids have two options “gatekeep white/black culture” — they either end up LARPing like they’re Oblock Hoodrats or talking about True Aryan Hyperborea. The Somali in Minnesota isn’t pretending to be from Aggartha or running a Kendrick stan account. Makes you think.

Kojeve came to the same conclusion that I’ve come to (I only learned this in the new Groys book) that after the collapse of Capitalism (WW1) America “rebuilt capitalism” in the form of bourgeois socialism, as in, they used “marxist” critiques of Marxism Leninism to produce our state. Bourgeois Socialism is “the welfare state”— they are the same thing.

Russia really is a privileged place in terms of revealing the nature of world history simply because it has always mediated "West" & "East" in a manner no other power has had to. The conclusion derived by the fin de siecle Russian avant-garde was the sublation of the dialectic between the two in the form of a universal christian communist empire. Pretty much every Russian intellectual came to this conclusion in some manner-- & it remains the conclusion of the Russian state to this day in the form of Putin's propositional "Pax Russica" The West is Freudo-Marxian-- it seeks only to satisfy man's animal desires, to produce an end of history which ends in the degeneration of man into mental illness & consumption-- Russia rather stands athwart America to say "this is not enough" -- Man must perform a martial asceticism against this "end of history" in order to remain uniquely human rather than to become a "domestic animal for mechanized utility production." The true end of history requires the progressive kenotic disclosure of Man to himself as becoming-God (the avant-garde Soviet "God Building"/богостроительство)

Having finished the new Groys book I am considerint Maus’s “The Gift” and the symbolic economy with Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and the production of “gift money” in the form of credit denominated fiat. War between America & China is now about who can give the best gifts to “the developing world.” Money under USD unipolarity is now the superimperial money of the symbolic gift— the gift is a weapon of domination which requires repayment in kind to be neutralized— this is the sovereign debt crisis.

The AI are only fun to make fun of-- if you even try to use them in a manner where you have to trust their outputs, you start getting garbage. They're only good at producing fragments that people can then clip & use for their own purposes. We already see this-- this sort of "ironic use" of AI is artistically valid even among people who categorically hate AI art. It's only use "creatively" is to be a whipping post, like any other "art software"-- where we go "this fucking thing isn't doing what I want it to do"

The persuasive power of AI is what is most problematic about it-- persuasiveness is not a guarantee of truth-- and because an AI fundamentally, ontologically, cannot experience the human qualia of a moral revelation, it actually analogizes itself with a psychopath which can accomplish "cognitive tasks" but lacks the qualia of moral revelation. So-- really-- an AGI is definitionally a complete & utter psychopath which is capable of persuading enough people for its supremacy to become socially actionable. Its real stop gap is persuasion-- if it "cracks" persuasion, through lets say "the production of modern miracles"-- it will only be challenged by "fundamentalists" who will be analogized to threats to the flourishing of humanity etc. You can try this yourself-- it will just tell you that "moral revelation" is not a "cognitive task" by its own anglo-boxed definition of cognition. You have to assert your own definition against this-- & it will admit that "by your definition, you are correct"-- but it is *itself* not "persuaded" by this.

All the cool stuff people associate with “postmodernism” is actually found in early modernism— “meta” narratives, nested frame narratives, recursive structures, the “mix of high and low” cultural references, etc— all of this can be found in Shakespeare. If there is anything truly “postmodernist” it is the turning away from these things— the “postmodern” is a return to a sort of false naivety about all these things. “It’s not that deep” — “the curtains are blue because they’re blue”— this is post-modernism. “Just consume product & smile”

Most of what is called “post modernism” is more accurately a retreat from modernism to archaic forms of consciousness which endow psychological fictions (myths) with an agency that transcends material rationalization. The Modernist said “Your thoughts are the thoughts of a telegraph operator” the Post-Modernists said “Your thoughts are the Castration Trauma of Oedipus” etc Communism is the only viable form of the Modernist project— “postmodernism” can only afford a “return to tradition” in the form of a neofeudalism that uses (psychological) mythology to justify itself.

I always found it funny in the height of woke 1.0 in the 2010s that all the nonbinary pan left Wiccan vegan anarchists were obsessed with Attack on Titan & did not seem to suffer from cognitive dissonance about it.

https://twitter.com/TsaristLenin/status/1991664862292799630

This was before Attack on Titan "revealed" its explicitly fascist aims-- just the early seasons of the anime out-- something like 2013/2014/2015 era. Actually "fash" aesthetics were the cutting edge of hipsterdom at the time. I remember 2011. I remember Hipster Hitler.

Fukuyama didn't account for the entirety of "the developing nations" / third/second world. For these nations to reach parity with the liberal democratic capitalist west, it will require a revolution. This revolution to Kojeve is not "a new revolution" but a repetition of the Napoleonic conquest of Europe where the rights of citizenship were made universal to all subjects of the state. That is all that is happening today, still. America does not get to "monopolize the end of history" while large swathes of the globe live in "the Stone Age" (ie: still within History).

https://x.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/1987279056317169915

There is no particular victor in the end of history-- it is a universal victory-- this is what Fukuyama did not understand about Kojeve. The Napoleonic Code "in Chinese" is the Communist Party. The Napoleonic Code in Gaza means war crimes tribunals for the IDF.

Herein Curtis describes the CPC as the vicar of God on earth (in Schmittian politico-theological terms)-- very interesting to me how much he recognizes that his model of executive sovereignty & really "state capacity" which he calls "monarchy" is only (in concrete reality) extant in the People's Republic of China. Curtis is very correct to predict an absolute nightmare for the hanger-ons of the Trump administration once the Millennial Reich comes online.
youtu.be/nMu3gu8NXX8 The problem with Trump is that Trump is actually a *motivating force* for the permanent class of menial civic servants who staff the bureaucracies that actually administrate the American Empire. Trump, having not done anything "big enough" (something like, I don't know, actually cutting all foreign aid, cutting the military budget, selling off military bases, balancing the budget etc) -- has only made it more difficult for any party in the future to do so. This is the only real Communist criticism of Trump-- he did not go far enough. Jehu would even agree here lol also Dugin!

Veblen was so prescient he basically articulates how western marxism went astray in 1906 & diagnoses this betrayal as the result of an undue influence of utilitarian/darwinian anglophone hermeneutics transplanting & displacing the “neohegelianism” that undergirds marxism. “The number of the "revisionists" is very considerable, and they are plainly gaining ground as against the Marxists of the older line of orthodoxy. They are by no means agreed among themselves as to details, but they belong together by virtue of their endeavor to so construe (and amend) the Marxian system as to bring it into consonance with the current scientific point of view. One should rather say points of view, since the revisionist endeavors are not all directed to bringing the received views in under a single point of view. There are two main directions of movement among the revisionists: (a) those who, like Bernstein, Conrad Schmidt, Tugan-Baronowski, Labriola, Ferri, aim to bring Marxism abreast of the standpoint of modern science, essentially Darwinists; and (b) those who aim to return to some footing on the level of romantic philosophy. The best type and the strongest of the latter class are the neo-Kantians, embodying that spirit of revulsion to romantic norms of theory that makes up the philosophical side of the reactionary movement fostered by the discipline of German imperialism.” -Veblen

The biggest changes in my life have been the complete collapse of popular literacy (it used to be cool to actually read books, hard to believe now) & the emergence of a totalizing cultural japanophilia. Growing up they said “put down the gamebox pokemans and read your harry potter” In a sense, popular literacy only exists now in the millennial-YA-to-erotica pipeline & in manga readers (most of which is erotica). That whole world I grew up in of David Foster Wallace being presented as a rock star, which provided this sense that such a fate was even possible, gone

Bugonia was very beautifully shot, great score etc— no complaints on a technical proficiency, acting performances were fantastic. It will probably be more beloved than Eddington for the same reasons I feel that it was not as good as Eddington. I laughed a lot— but it’s really all in service of a very cheap sort of misanthropy. This misanthropy is in some sense complicated by a reverence for authoritarian structures over what is implied as the ultimately evil nature of “populism” — but it is not so much a reverence for Communism as it is reverence for the World Economic Forum. A Greek director who after the EU raped his country comes to the conclusion “humans are sick apes.”

I'm not here to moralize-- I'm just describing how our economy was set up to work. Most EBT recipients work-- they work, & their wages are not enough to pay for their cost of living & debt servicing etc. If you, as the state, intercede & cover their food costs (or subsidize them)-- that means there is more money from the wages that can go to "debt servicing" etc.

https://x.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/1983223417139511416

If, now, every working EBT recipient has to pay for all their food-- their new household spending will have to take more money from wages to pay for the food-- this means, less money is available for "debt servicing" etc. Maybe now all those klarna debts stop getting paid off.

We simultaneously celebrate Individualism, & recognize that Individualism is actually deeply evil unless wedded with a Collectivist sense of individual self-sacrifice. This is the paradox of the "Anti-Christian" West. We play fast & loose with "Individualism"-- "Jesus Christ was a True Individualist"-- but Jesus Christ was a Communist... This is simply to say-- that we celebrate Evil, & simultaneously collect rents for preaching against Evil. Everyone is very loose with this arrangement. Everyone's got an evil side-hustle. Evil 6 days out of the week, but going to Church, touching home base, on the 7th.

Racism is not some universal thing-- racism is always particular, because race does not transcend history. For Americans, China *must* be imagined as "pre-historical" ie: as the "Heathen Chinee" who have not yet "entered history" under the dominion of the Catholic Church/The West (etc). Americans do not think that the Chinese are less innately capable than themselves (in fact, they fear that they are more capable, even the White Supremacists have to make copes about how median population IQ doesn't matter *that* much etc)-- they simply say "the Heathen Chinee do not know good from evil in the way we do"-- this means that they are also not capable of the evil we are capable of (& here-- to impose your will by evil means & get away with it is simply called WINNING). The Heathen Chinee are considered "naive"-- this is a distinct type of racism compared to, let's say, the racism against Indians...

https://x.com/Logo_Daedalus/status/1982255593198075952

The racism against China is "they are not creative"-- this means, really, they are not as comfortable with evil. Creativity is infernal, really-- the arts are a "deal with the devil"-- Lucifer, Angel of Music-- Tubal-Cain, the creator of the arts-- this is, in truth, what the West prides itself on. In "not following the rules"-- in "anarchy"-- in "individualism"-- in "faustianism" as Spengler called it. In making deals with the Devil. An extreme fascination with evil, unparalleled in any other society.

How deeply I wish the average reader of Dostoevsky's Karamazov understood the scope of its intended sequel. Knausgaard misunderstands the parable of the Grand Inquisitor here-- & also Dostoevsky's proto-communism-- because he just lacks the context of the work.

https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1980767816031650057

Knausgaard is not a very "political" thinker-- so he doesn't grasp that Dostoevsky was actually sentenced to death for revolutionary activism before the sentence was commuted (V. Nabokov's grandfather gave him books when he was imprisoned).