“The left can’t meme.” This statement is itself a meme, (a meme is vast, its superficial expression may indicate a host of secondary discourse: see for example the 4chan classic “Milhouse is not a meme”, is not only a meme, but a meme that precipitates a call-and-response discussion of what constitutes a meme, and of the boundaries of memehood, (and this discussion is also a meme; either the same one, or at least a sibling, a piece of a set))
Isn't it about people with no practical worries, doing things with no practical consequences, and no spiritual depth. If something goes wrong everything just resets back into a plastic land of plenty.
At the end, once the main characters decide that their extremely limited personas have run their course, over many, many lifetimes, which is exhausting, they let go and stop being such pathetic (anti-)stereotypes.
I doubt Michael Schur intended it, but the muse works in funny ways. His hackneyed politicised characters can't find realisation in hell or even in heaven! They need to be suicided into the unknown. They're pitiful and limited, all the way up until that point. Morality is unexamined, vision and spiritual experiences are beyond them, alternative thought is invisible. The "suicide door" is the one they need to step into to stop being so empty.
Even after almost infinite lifetimes, I felt that a light breeze would change their sense of direction. They're like little children.
Is Schur damming the types of people he knows? Is he damming himself? His culture? His characterisations? Is he aware he is doing this, or is he so small-minded that he can't even see the full implications of what is speaking through him? Are the most successful memes so much from the unconscious that the writer often neither recognises nor understands their full implications?
What's the difference between the individuals in the show and a well-looked after and intellectually precocious 8 year old? 8 year olds can discuss the "trolley problem". 8 year olds know what "right" and "wrong" are and rarely question it. Time lasts forever for 8 year olds. Isn't going through that "suicide door" merely letting go of childhood?
Thanks for your review. You have no doubt gained merit by subjecting yourself to hours of pain in order to report back to your fellow men pop culture images, gestures and sounds in time ca. 2021. Your synopsis reinforces what I've observed in real life; and reveals that certain behavior shared within an increasingly hysterical system is based, it seems to me, on feminized Dada.
Meaning the underlying content is a type of emptiness and irony. The emptiness is annihilation. The worship of blacks is ironic since the white creators and actors, Schur, et. al., would never go near black doctors, professors, airline pilots, schools, real estate, etc., in this world. And black "philosophy" is voodoo or reparation pablum – which those whites who engage in this sort of work can pretend to believe in but equally avoid outside the make-believe world of the studio.
Therefore, the premise to the story is an elaborate inside joke meant to browbeat and humiliate white men, and nothing else at all.
Sep 6, 2022·edited Sep 6, 2022Liked by Zero HP Lovecraft
"But there is a new problem: in Heaven, everyone is a wirehead, because endless pleasure with no struggle degenerates the mind. The humans are now tasked with reinventing heaven, which they fix by adding a suicide door where you can, purely of your own volition, choose to permanently cease to be. This makes heaven meaningful again and one by one, the characters commit suicide after experiencing a nirvana-like sense of pervading peace."
Ah, that description gives me a quiet familiar feeling that you had induced in me once: Disgust.
By the way, "The Green New Deal" story that you wrote caused me to feel disgust. It also made it harder to go to sleep for a while. No, I don't mean to discredit or insult your writing talent by writing this, or seemingly comparing it to that show.
The notion of denying the prominent black characters of the show the agency of sin is an interesting one. I had found the same issue with the show Orange is the New Black, in which most of the main characters (all of whom are women) are portrayed as victims of circumstance, rather than as willful criminals. Perhaps these people are laudable within the "Progressive morality" (as you put it) precisely because they are fundamentally inhuman (that is to say, incapable of choice).
Yeah, of course the show is just 21st century progressive eschatology. Be nice, worship minorities, DON'T HAVE KIDS, and then just die white cis-het scum. Whatever. Still all very pointless.
"• Maybe the most ridiculous things about this progressive catechism are the little details. In a a casual quip the end, they note that Aristotle and Socrates did not get into heaven “because they defended slavery” and the only noteworthy Greek who did make it in was Hypatia of Alexandria, ostensibly for having a vagina. The problem with this is not the condemnation of slavery per se; it is the progressive hubris that is willing to consign every person who ever lived before 1965 to eternal damnation."
I am having a hard time understanding how this bit fits in with the rest of the piece. If I am reading you correctly, you offer a criticism of The Good Place based in its positing of a moral framework based almost solely on a progressive version of self-actualization, one that is divorced from any sense of absolute morality or even from mere cause and effect.
I noticed this about the show myself. For instance, the way the show demonstrates that Kristen Bell does not belong in the Good Place is through a series of progressive faux paus like failing to join a boycott against a putatively sexist coffee shop. Even her drunk driving is played as a sin against the consensus that it is not good to be the kind of person who drives drunk as opposed to being an action that might actually cause undue harm to other people.
If I have interpreted your criticisms correctly, then I am with you so far. But then you add this bit about slavery and pre-1965 morality. If we are to posit a belief in an absolute morality, or at least one firmly grounded in outcomes instead of self-actualization, then what's the argument that the year of the offense ought to matter? It feels as if you are making a de facto argument in favor of moral relativism within a piece that is ostensibly a criticism of moral relativism.
The show has a spiritual dimension?
Isn't it about people with no practical worries, doing things with no practical consequences, and no spiritual depth. If something goes wrong everything just resets back into a plastic land of plenty.
At the end, once the main characters decide that their extremely limited personas have run their course, over many, many lifetimes, which is exhausting, they let go and stop being such pathetic (anti-)stereotypes.
I doubt Michael Schur intended it, but the muse works in funny ways. His hackneyed politicised characters can't find realisation in hell or even in heaven! They need to be suicided into the unknown. They're pitiful and limited, all the way up until that point. Morality is unexamined, vision and spiritual experiences are beyond them, alternative thought is invisible. The "suicide door" is the one they need to step into to stop being so empty.
Even after almost infinite lifetimes, I felt that a light breeze would change their sense of direction. They're like little children.
Is Schur damming the types of people he knows? Is he damming himself? His culture? His characterisations? Is he aware he is doing this, or is he so small-minded that he can't even see the full implications of what is speaking through him? Are the most successful memes so much from the unconscious that the writer often neither recognises nor understands their full implications?
What's the difference between the individuals in the show and a well-looked after and intellectually precocious 8 year old? 8 year olds can discuss the "trolley problem". 8 year olds know what "right" and "wrong" are and rarely question it. Time lasts forever for 8 year olds. Isn't going through that "suicide door" merely letting go of childhood?
Thanks for your review. You have no doubt gained merit by subjecting yourself to hours of pain in order to report back to your fellow men pop culture images, gestures and sounds in time ca. 2021. Your synopsis reinforces what I've observed in real life; and reveals that certain behavior shared within an increasingly hysterical system is based, it seems to me, on feminized Dada.
Meaning the underlying content is a type of emptiness and irony. The emptiness is annihilation. The worship of blacks is ironic since the white creators and actors, Schur, et. al., would never go near black doctors, professors, airline pilots, schools, real estate, etc., in this world. And black "philosophy" is voodoo or reparation pablum – which those whites who engage in this sort of work can pretend to believe in but equally avoid outside the make-believe world of the studio.
Therefore, the premise to the story is an elaborate inside joke meant to browbeat and humiliate white men, and nothing else at all.
"But there is a new problem: in Heaven, everyone is a wirehead, because endless pleasure with no struggle degenerates the mind. The humans are now tasked with reinventing heaven, which they fix by adding a suicide door where you can, purely of your own volition, choose to permanently cease to be. This makes heaven meaningful again and one by one, the characters commit suicide after experiencing a nirvana-like sense of pervading peace."
Ah, that description gives me a quiet familiar feeling that you had induced in me once: Disgust.
By the way, "The Green New Deal" story that you wrote caused me to feel disgust. It also made it harder to go to sleep for a while. No, I don't mean to discredit or insult your writing talent by writing this, or seemingly comparing it to that show.
The notion of denying the prominent black characters of the show the agency of sin is an interesting one. I had found the same issue with the show Orange is the New Black, in which most of the main characters (all of whom are women) are portrayed as victims of circumstance, rather than as willful criminals. Perhaps these people are laudable within the "Progressive morality" (as you put it) precisely because they are fundamentally inhuman (that is to say, incapable of choice).
Yeah, of course the show is just 21st century progressive eschatology. Be nice, worship minorities, DON'T HAVE KIDS, and then just die white cis-het scum. Whatever. Still all very pointless.
So what is the chief end of man?
"• Maybe the most ridiculous things about this progressive catechism are the little details. In a a casual quip the end, they note that Aristotle and Socrates did not get into heaven “because they defended slavery” and the only noteworthy Greek who did make it in was Hypatia of Alexandria, ostensibly for having a vagina. The problem with this is not the condemnation of slavery per se; it is the progressive hubris that is willing to consign every person who ever lived before 1965 to eternal damnation."
I am having a hard time understanding how this bit fits in with the rest of the piece. If I am reading you correctly, you offer a criticism of The Good Place based in its positing of a moral framework based almost solely on a progressive version of self-actualization, one that is divorced from any sense of absolute morality or even from mere cause and effect.
I noticed this about the show myself. For instance, the way the show demonstrates that Kristen Bell does not belong in the Good Place is through a series of progressive faux paus like failing to join a boycott against a putatively sexist coffee shop. Even her drunk driving is played as a sin against the consensus that it is not good to be the kind of person who drives drunk as opposed to being an action that might actually cause undue harm to other people.
If I have interpreted your criticisms correctly, then I am with you so far. But then you add this bit about slavery and pre-1965 morality. If we are to posit a belief in an absolute morality, or at least one firmly grounded in outcomes instead of self-actualization, then what's the argument that the year of the offense ought to matter? It feels as if you are making a de facto argument in favor of moral relativism within a piece that is ostensibly a criticism of moral relativism.