Stuff and Such

"Ultimately, what matters is less the vibe itself and more the vibe shifts it undergoes. Every culture starts ‘young and trembling,’ still haunted by the monsters of childhood, ‘all the dark and daemonic in itself and in nature.’ The Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Homeric epics in Greece, the Vedas in India, the fractured bones of the Shang dynasty in China, the Gospels and Apocalypses of the Magians, the Gothic mode in Europe. From there it grows into self-confident youth: pyramids, Doric temples, the Upanishads, the early Zhou, the great theological councils, the Renaissance. When it reaches maturity there’s usually some great conceptual achievement, the vibe fully realising itself in thought. Socrates, the Buddha, Confucius and Laozi, Mohammed, the Enlightenment. That’s the high point: it’s all downhill from there. Culture becomes intellectualised and abstracted; it still repeats its previous forms, but in a less and less organic and vibey way. It’s become ungrounded. In the last stage before it dies, a culture ossifies into a civilisation, which is universal and all-encompassing because it lacks any other qualities. For Hegel the universal is the telos of history; for Spengler it’s the death-knell. Lifeless and deformed new ideologies, the corpse-form of the original vibe: Stoicism, Buddhism, Chinese Legalism, socialism. ‘Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world-city.’ Babylon, Rome, New York: the horror."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/286890

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"Outcomes are paradoxically more stable under the minority rule — the variance of the results is lower and the rule is more likely to be emerge independently across populations.

What emerges from the minority rule is more likely to be be black-and-white."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/175602

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