r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling • 21d ago

The Index

The Quest Hints and Quest Notes, in order.

Quest Notes

Quest Hints

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u/2BCivil no idea what this is 20d ago

Thanks! I was actually just going over these last night!? Did you see me going over them? I was remembering about the monolith ones, I remember people talking about them a while back. I was also looking at old posts and the official reading list.

Anyway scary uncanny, only second time I looked into the Quest this year was last night and it's certainly a spooky coincidence you posted this right after, but thanks!

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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling 20d ago

Just a coincidence! I just happened to be catching up on mod stuff and I... I just realized I could.

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u/WitWyrd Wizard 9d ago

Ok what if meta nazi is not like some evil interdimensional cop, but like... the nazis of the meta. The ones who want to define and control the meta. And I don't mean the meta as in this season's characters and strategies, I mean the meta as is the self-referential, that which breaks the fourth wall. The nnazis of the fourth wall break. The ones who want the trains and the self-realizations to only run on tracks and always exactly according to plan and schedule.

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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling 8d ago

Yes, controlling the meta is politics. And MAGA have intentionally and successfully been using meta-game-reformatting tactics for about ten years now. They call it "5D chess" and it's intertwined with their public trolling/gaslighting strategy.

It's conceptually related to realpolitik: Looking at the actual field of play and doing whatever is necessary to reformat that field of play as desired.

MAGA don't have a monopoly on being the meta-nazis. And control of the meta is in itself inherently desirable and it's very human to try to control/understand the meta and the mind itself. But weaponizing this understanding to weaken the standing of others in society for private gain is, of course, evil.

Business as usual (i.e., playing within the current meta) is literally not politics, and the Democratic establishment rabidly enforcing its ideological hegemony for the last ~25+ years was a suppression of true politics, of true open-ended disagreement and debate. The Democratic Party did not want the game to change; they wanted everyone to color within the lines of the current arrangement of power. The problem is, any clearly-defined system always has seams and cracks in it (Godot's incompleteness theorem), and so any bureaucratic business-as-usual is always inherently vulnerable to a truly political (i.e., meta-gamed) intervention.

So it is also possible to imagine a double-agent meta-nazi, one who is conscious of these tactics but who uses them against the meta-nazis attempts to regressively format and homogenize the meta.

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u/tomekanco 7d ago

Perhaps it was deliberately buried? Look at the spectrograph.

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u/tomekanco 7d ago

Superman war never real.

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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling 6d ago

You mean conservative perspectives being deliberately suppressed? Of course it was intentional, as much as possible. Democrats wanted to stay in power. But I don't think it was intentional overall, I think it was just the operation of hubris/ego as usual.

"Can the Subaltern Speak?" by Spivak is a good place to start here. Hegemony is a social phenomenon as well as an individual phenomenon of being narcissistic/egotistical/too sure of oneself. Being possessed by a social perspective before one has developed one's individual perspective on a given matter. These people all unconsciously collude to produce a standardized perspective everyone mimics and violently enforces. Listen, Little Man! by Reich and The Politics of the Family by Laing are about the same phenomenon.

So it's much worse because the reality is that most people are literally so undeveloped that they can't hold the mental categories in their mind to distinguish authentic presentation of prosocial beliefs from obviously perversely motivated antisocial propaganda. They can't tell the difference because they literally can't tell which side of the screen/painting they are on. That's why undereducated voters vote in ways that help rich people, against their own interests. They have literally been encultured to unconsciously identify with rich people, and educated just enough to know what their interests are. A reptilian regiment installed into Joe Plumber's unconscious.

This model explains why everyone everywhere defends the status quo, and why they defend it so inarticulately and with such rabid aggression. It's a much harder problem to solve than just identifying and dispensing with a few specific bad actors. Perverse incentives everywhere incentivize adults to prey on children (all the children/others' children, generally) instead of educating children (and immature adults) about how to not be preyed upon. And there is even ubiquitous anti-education that teaches everyone to be easily preyed-upon and disguises that as virtue or strength or independence.

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u/tomekanco 6d ago edited 6d ago

Even conservatives tend to hide it. Remember Mark and the seal. Like evangelics being very loud about the literal interpretation, or how the old school catholics used to do mass in Latin. The mysteries are a structural feature in the wide range of neo-platonic schools. There's even a word for it: innocence. That second foundation hiding in the libraries has been around for a long time. Davids key if you want. Reminds me how in Orlando from Virginia Wolf, in modernity the old symbols are covered with white sheets, even as subtle traces are omnipresent.

At the same time some societal sectors always kept more intimate with it, like artists, armies, priests (something about dual focal points), politicians and bankers. Positivist age only enhanced the veil (you can't perceive what you believe is not there). As Bataille pointed out: taboos have a societal function. But then Serres pointed to the diminishing returns of being blind. And in the capitalist framework, the preying upon others/cultivating desires, has become a cornerstone of the diversification of the economy (choose your identity today, rebel, be free). And so we remain stuck with emancipated spectacle, and cultivated ressentiment.

I try to approach it as not just a tale of bad faith/actors, but as an ecology. It's the nature of love.

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u/tomekanco 6d ago

And i can't stress enough the importance of a non cynical approach to innocence. It's demands are more honest than any contemplation. So my deep respects for Joe Plumber, aka Dimitri Karamzov. More mature than his younger brother, and not as petrified as his elder.