[HN Gopher] Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
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Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression (2017)
Author : greenie_beans
Score : 111 points
Date : 2024-05-11 02:16 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thecreativeindependent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thecreativeindependent.com)
| myrloc wrote:
| Great read. Thanks for sharing. I am not familiar with Adam
| Curtis' work but will be looking for more!
| 000ooo000 wrote:
| His 4-part Century of the Self series is on Youtube, IIRC.
| Interesting watch. Hypernormalisation didn't grab me as much.
| aporetics wrote:
| I think "Can't Get You Out Of My Head" may be of more
| interest, topically, to hacker news readers, because it
| converges on the use of computing as a means of controlling
| social unrest.
| switch007 wrote:
| Can watch it here https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-
| out-of-my-head/
| mhh__ wrote:
| Hypernormalisation is kind of a miss.
|
| It might be true, but it doesn't work because Curtis himself
| is hypernormalising -- he isn't a journalist, he tells
| stories and emotions rather than a left-brained truth.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| As noted below, Century Of The Self would probably be the best
| starting point:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04
| krmboya wrote:
| Got started with the series "All watched over my machines of
| loving grace".
|
| I think more engineers and technologists who build systems that
| affects people's lives at a large scale need to watch those.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| If there wa required viewing for entering big tech. This
| would be it.
| mhh__ wrote:
| I'd go as far as saying that he's the only genuinely serious
| person in his domain (on TV at least) at this point .
|
| Others have recommended "the century of self" for example which
| is great but I highly recommend his earlier stuff like
| "Pandora's box" and "The Mayfair set"
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I am not familiar with Adam Curtis ' work but will be
| looking for more!_
|
| You're in for a treat, then. He has hours of wonderful
| documentaries.
|
| https://watchdocumentaries.com/tag/adam-curtis/
| brakmic wrote:
| Adam Curtis Documentaries on YT:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m25q3it0rDs&list=PLtsknc8NVn...
| Animats wrote:
| Huh.
|
| _" Computers can see us as large groups, but they're glum and
| only aggregate us to sell us stuff. In reality, the computers
| give great insight into the power of common identity between
| groups. No one's using that."_
|
| That's from 2017. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case. From
| ISIL to Q-Anon to MAGA to LGBTxx, finding dispersed but like-
| minded people and using them to build a political movement is now
| common. Worse, automated blithering with LLMs works all too well.
|
| _" The history of modern self-expression dates from the
| hippies."_
|
| It goes back further than that. Find a copy of "Swing Kids". The
| "music is the weapon" concept of the 1960s and 1970s was
| mainstream for a while. Back when being in a band was a big deal.
| Before Live Nation got to decide who performs where. Now music is
| just a business. Even rap.
|
| We have a huge problem trying to get society to go in useful
| directions. People have forgotten how to make democracies work.
| So we get autocrats.
| surfingdino wrote:
| It goes even further back to the days of late 19th/early 20th
| century and artistic communes. The first time someone monetised
| it on a large scale was Bernays who repackaged Freud's
| psychoanalysis and sold it to US government and companies. His
| "torches of freedom" campaign tapped into the women's right
| movement and desire for self-expression. The tobacco industry
| was very pleased with the outcomes, because until then women
| did not smoke cigarettes. Bernays also wrote "Engineering
| Consent" and "Propaganda", which he renamed as Public Relations
| after WWII. Curtis has an interesting documentary on the
| subject.
| badpun wrote:
| Exactly. In the US culture specifically, in the XX century
| before the hippies, there were limited pockets of "self-
| expression" (discarding previous culture, really) as depicted
| by Henry Miller, and later the whole Beat Generation. Only
| after that, this tendency picked up enough steam so that the
| masses picked it up, in the form the Hippies movement.
| chefandy wrote:
| That wasn't true in 2017, either. Though the author makes some
| interesting points, he conflates catalysts, causes, and
| cultural movements and just calls it all self-expression, and
| casually makes some rather eyebrow-raising assertions in the
| process. This reads more like an idea he was trying to hash it
| for himself rather than a well-considered piece.
| borgdefense wrote:
| That pretty much sums up Adam Curtis to me and I would say I
| am quite a fan.
|
| He is an amazing propaganda film maker but have to take him
| with a huge grain of salt.
| chefandy wrote:
| Yeah I hadn't actually read anything from him before, and
| maybe this was just the wrong piece to start on, but this
| doesn't inspire me to find out. The points were
| interesting, but not nearly enough to justify being that
| glib when there are people making more interesting points
| who know what they're talking about. I'm an art school guy,
| so I'm well-versed in the idea of imprecise conceptual
| thinking and conveying how things feel rather than how they
| actually are-- that's art. But presenting how things feel
| _as_ how they are isn 't called art, it's called bullshit.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| > He is an amazing propaganda film maker
|
| What would you say he is advocating for that you call
| propagandizing? Not that I disagree, per se, just curious
| how you'd articulate it.
| andybak wrote:
| Is this your first day on planet Adam Curtis?
|
| ;)
|
| I love his stuff but you really need to treat it as "thought
| provoking but utterly lacking in rigour". Treat it as a
| jumping off point for topics that might be new to you and as
| a nudge to view things from a different angle.
| Animats wrote:
| In the post-LLM era, that just isn't good enough. Now that
| we have well-written automated probabilistic meandering
| text generation, "thought provoking but utterly lacking in
| rigour" copy is everywhere. Usually followed by a clickbait
| link.
|
| It's the end of a whole second-tier literary genre.
| andybak wrote:
| I disagree. AI will be able to do "rigour" before it can
| do "thought provoking".
|
| Part of Adam's appeal is the fact that behind it is a
| human being struggling to understand the world and
| struggling to explain it.
|
| LLMs are incredible but nobody cares what a hyper-evolved
| Markov chain pretends to say about culture.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| Llm output is not thought provoking.
| chefandy wrote:
| Yeah new to me, and I think I've had my fill. There are
| people saying things just as interesting that aren't
| shamelessly glib about it. As I said in my reply to your
| sibling comment: I'm an art school guy, so I'm well-versed
| in the idea of imprecise conceptual thinking and conveying
| how things feel rather than how they actually are-- that's
| art. But presenting how things feel _as_ how they are isn
| 't called art, it's called bullshit.
| andybak wrote:
| To be honest, his forte isn't the written word. Watch a
| documentary or two. He has a fascinating style and is
| eminently (maybe too eminently) watchable.
|
| "New Adam Curtis documentary just dropped" was really a
| thing for a fair while in the UK.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Cab Calloway was a pretty radical dude, in his day.
|
| The Beats were proto-hippies. Many Hippies arose from the Beat
| movement.
|
| The Hell's Angels were a bunch of pissed-off military veterans.
| They were into their own brand of self-expression.
| SomeoneFromCA wrote:
| Now I got to read all the books, referenced in the article. Will
| start with Patti Smith. HORSES! HORSES!
| keiferski wrote:
| I follow the contemporary art world pretty closely, and a feeling
| I often get is that it's merely a giant collection of individuals
| expressing themselves in a way that fits into the market system
| of galleries, museums, auctions, etc. There are of course artists
| focused on political causes, but for the most part it is entirely
| devoid of any centralized ethos or ideal.
|
| While this situation is freeing for the individual artist, I
| can't help but look at previous eras - say, the Italian
| Renaissance, or the high point of Ottoman miniature painting [1]
| - and admire the _lack_ of complete self-expression. Instead, you
| had a much narrower focus of acceptable work and topics, with the
| result that artists were all engaged with basically the same art
| forms and the same topics, across the entirety of the artistic
| community. For example, both da Vinci and Raphael were painting
| Madonnas [2], whereas today you 'd certainly never have two
| world-famous painters in direct competition working on the same
| type of painting - because their value is determined by their
| individuality and self-expression, not their expertise/skill.
|
| This is a widespread post-modern culture thing and not limited to
| art, of course, and probably won't go away for a long, long time,
| or at least until you get a massive society-wide idea like
| Christianity to take root again.
|
| 1. The book "My Name is Red" by Orhan Pamuk is all about this.
| Great book. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Name_Is_Red
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_(art)
| squigz wrote:
| > you had a much narrower focus of acceptable work and topics,
| with the result that artists were all engaged with basically
| the same art forms and the same topics, across the entirety of
| the artistic community. For example, both da Vinci and Raphael
| were painting Madonnas
|
| Mightn't this have to do with the fact that most paintings back
| then were commissioned by rich clients, who were probably
| competing with each other in some way? "Aha, my painting of
| Madonna is better than yours!" sort of thing
|
| (I know nothing about art history, so I'd be happy to learn why
| this is silly :P)
| keiferski wrote:
| That might have been a part, but it's more that the idea of
| self-expression as the _prime value_ in art is mostly a 20th
| century thing. The falling off of skill, realism, and other
| similar metrics is also a 20th century thing and largely came
| from photography and mass manufacturing. There 's probably an
| essay or book out there covering the two intertwining topics,
| but I can't think of any offhand.
|
| It's also worth noting that artists themselves were more
| directly competitive. Da Vinci and Michelangelo had a bit of
| a rivalry, for example:
|
| https://artrkl.com/blogs/news/art-history-feuds-
| michelangelo...
|
| https://www.historyextra.com/period/renaissance/leonardo-
| mic...
|
| You can't really imagine this happening between top
| contemporary artists today. "Gerhard Richter says he's a
| better painter than Takashi Murakami," is a headline that
| wouldn't make much sense.
| squigz wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation
|
| > The falling off of skill, realism, and other similar
| metrics
|
| Can you elaborate on this? Are you saying artists now are
| generally less skilled than artists from back then...?
|
| As for realism: isn't this still very much the goal of
| plenty of video game design, TV/movies, and various other
| forms of art?
| keiferski wrote:
| Sorry if that wasn't clear. I didn't mean that artists
| are less skilled today, but that realism and technical
| skill are generally considered less important today than
| in the past. "Top" artists today are usually not
| considered so because they have amazing technical skills
| at drawing/painting/etc. The metrics for success are a
| bunch of other things I won't get into here, but
| hyperrealistic portraits aren't typically considered to
| be art worthy of being in Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth
| (two of the top contemporary art galleries.) Whereas they
| would have been in the era of say, Durer.
|
| Video games, movies, etc. typically do care more about
| skill and realism, but they're a different thing from
| "fine art", i.e., art in art galleries.
| squigz wrote:
| That makes sense, thank you!
| keiferski wrote:
| Your video game comment made me think: maybe the modern
| equivalent of the art scenario I mentioned is in
| commercial art like video games or movies, both of which
| still have genres and are often directly compared to each
| other - "Call of Duty is a better FPS than Medal of
| Honor," and so on.
| smokel wrote:
| It makes a lot more sense to consider Hollywood and video
| games as the proper successors to classical art, and to
| see contemporary art as only a small strand in the
| evolution of art.
|
| Somehow someone managed to convince the world that
| Hollywood is not real art, but some other arbitrary weird
| stuff is.
|
| (To avoid confusion, I personally love the arbitrary
| weird stuff.)
| borgdefense wrote:
| Youtube and tiktok also.
|
| The world knows this is art but some bullshit artists,
| pun intended, in New York pretend like it is not. Then
| other bullshit artists in other cities follow what the
| bullshit artists in New York are doing because most
| aren't creative or free thinkers at all.
|
| I love galleries personally but it is a class of non-
| creative, closed minded, bullshit artists at this point.
| boppo1 wrote:
| Artist here. Artists are indeed less skilled today, but
| there is an effort to improve the situation (ARC). Google
| 'twilight of painting'.
|
| Concept artists are highly skilled, but they do something
| different than the painters of yore. They turn around
| decent looking stuff in a few hours. It's very
| impressive, but it (naturally) lacks the depth &
| thoughtfulness achieved by painters like Caillebotte.
| watwut wrote:
| The thing about technical skills in drawing today is that
| you can learn them. Artists do know how to draw hyper
| realistically and if you have good fine motor skills, you
| can systematically learn it. End result is like a
| photography tho and it all costs a lot of time.
|
| Meaning, whereas in the past, if you was the first one to
| figure out, say, perspective or some color, you was able
| to draw what others could not. You did something knew and
| you are remembered for it. Today, if you can draw super
| realistic portrait, you are one of many talented artists
| who learned that from a books and classes.
|
| > As for realism: isn't this still very much the goal of
| plenty of video game design, TV/movies, and various other
| forms of art?
|
| No one knows artists behind video games. I do not thing
| realism is the distinguishing things behind artists who
| do video games, movies or tv. It is more of scene design,
| lightning, camera work etc that gets to be judged from
| the art side.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _There 's probably an essay or book out there covering the
| two intertwining topics, but I can't think of any offhand._
|
| 'The work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction' by
| Walter Benjamin is a great read. There's a short but dense
| preface outlining the topic in purely Marxist terms;
| Benjamin was a Marxist and the essay was written in 1935
| following his flight from Nazi Germany. However, the body
| of the essay develops its argument from first principles
| and doesn't require familiarity or agreement with Marxist
| theory to appreciate.
|
| https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
| brandall10 wrote:
| The way I think about it is high art is considered
| innovative for its time.
|
| By the time of the advent of photography, the skills of
| realistic painting had been fully fleshed out. Aside from
| the ultra-realism movement, there was no where left to go,
| hence turning inward w/ impressionism forward.
|
| As modernism progressed, the avenues left to explore seem
| to get increasingly wild and crude in an effort to say
| something different... seemingly all that's left now for
| modern art is to share some unique perspective of the
| world, the rougher the medium, the better. Marcel Duchamp's
| Fountain is spectacular to me because it really called
| where it was all ending up.
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| I think that there is something else happening. We as a
| society don't really recognize industrial design. Some
| Youtube channels like 'Technology Connections' does.
|
| Perhaps in the future we'll spend more time recognizing the
| mastery of craft that industrial designers put into
| creating household lamps and such. Especially since the
| history is pilling up and ready to be mined for interesting
| content.
| verisimi wrote:
| They didn't have cameras, either, back then...
| anigbrowl wrote:
| They did have _camera obscura_ and other optical devices to
| assist with the realization of perspective.
| verisimi wrote:
| Right - but the point of the portraits was for rich
| people to have their likeness captured. Nowadays, this is
| simple with cameras - a big driver of the market
| disappeared.
| smokel wrote:
| I'm not sure if this trend will continue for as long as you
| fear.
|
| Individual expression had had some boosts during the
| Renaissance, during Romanticism (perhaps due to atheism, as a
| first response to globalism, and due to scientific discoveries
| regarding the mind) and again after World War II (perhaps due
| to the "American Dream" propaganda, and perhaps even as a way
| to fight communism?).
|
| A strange culture developed where narcissistic art critics
| praised even more narcissistic artists, supporting the notion
| that these artists were actually responsible for their amazing
| ideas.
|
| I sincerely hope that I'm not the only one who is no longer
| interested in this state of affairs. Aside from some misguided
| nonsense, the woke cancel culture seems to have provided some
| welcome balance here, and when the dust settles it may become
| preferable again to be a modest artist once more.
|
| I for one am not so convinced that individual expression is
| worthy of so much praise. I'd rather see people care for the
| weak instead of for the wealthy. Perhaps Hacker News is not the
| best place to vent such ideas though :)
| keiferski wrote:
| I think it'll continue as long as high-end artworks are
| financial instruments. There is _a lot_ of money invested in
| the idea that a painting by X well-known artist is worth
| millions and will continue to be worth millions.
|
| That said, the art market is currently way down, and just
| anecdotally I feel like a lot of New Money (especially tech
| money) isn't that interested in art as much as the previous
| rich oligarchs were, so it may simply become less popular
| over time.
| SebFender wrote:
| If there's one critical thing we need is differences in
| opinion. Please continue sharing as it forces me to think
| differently - here and everywhere.
|
| I'm all for helping others, and especially the weakest. But
| when I see students and other folks with full bellies and
| ideas considered the "weak" that's when I'm lost.
| badpun wrote:
| > Individual expression had had some boosts during the
| Renaissance, during Romanticism (perhaps due to atheism, as a
| first response to globalism, and due to scientific
| discoveries regarding the mind) and again after World War II
| (perhaps due to the "American Dream" propaganda, and perhaps
| even as a way to fight communism?).
|
| My understanding is that "individual expression" has been
| with us firmly since Romanticism (it was Beethoven who first
| promoted the idea that great artists are above kings). The
| whole "art for art's sake", artist as a high priest of
| culture etc. - these were all ideas that dominated the XIX
| century. They kind of withered in XX century after WW1, WW2
| and Holocaust, and were replaced by post-modern modes of
| expression (i.e. we abandon search of the truth via art,
| because there is no "the" truth).
| scruple wrote:
| > I follow the contemporary art world pretty closely, and a
| feeling I often get is that it's merely a giant collection of
| individuals expressing themselves in a way that fits into the
| market system of galleries, museums, auctions, etc.
|
| Same. Agreed. Where are you finding art elsewhere, then?
| keiferski wrote:
| In terms of fine art, I mostly just follow individual artists
| and read art history books about past art movements / art
| forms. I don't have any specific suggestions, unfortunately.
| Daub wrote:
| We can probably travel the first clear instance of such self
| expression to the romantic era. Probably Goya who was the
| Spanish court painter but whose uncomissined black paintings
| were uniquely personal.
| keiferski wrote:
| No I'm sure you can find clear examples of painting purely
| for self-expression much earlier than Goya. What's new-ish is
| that the structure of the art world/market is set up to
| incentivize self-expression.
| Daub wrote:
| > No I'm sure you can find clear examples of painting
| purely for self-expression much earlier than Goya
|
| Name one.
|
| Perhaps one can mention artists like Caravagio and El
| Greco. But all such artists addressed themes that were
| common: the bible and the clasiics. The unique thing about
| the romantic movement was that they placed immediate human
| experience above god and godliness.
|
| Honestly, check out Goya's black paintings and you will see
| what I am talking about. I challenge you to find an
| equivalent precedent.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Ironically the "individual self expression" is uniform - a
| certain kind of tame depoliticised artistic creativity marketed
| as a hustle. It's there all the way down from Gagosian to Etsy.
|
| And there are good reasons for it, and also good reasons why
| you'll find ab ex in bank foyers and very expensive homes.
|
| https://news.artnet.com/art-world/artcurious-cia-art-excerpt...
|
| There's always been a tight and complex relationship between
| art, money, and power, and there's always been a propaganda
| angle, or at least a statement of public values, to public
| imagery.
|
| But so far as I know the 20th century was the first time state
| agencies began inventing new aesthetic traditions for political
| ends (socialist realism in the USSR, ab ex in the US).
| spinach wrote:
| It's easy to look back at history and build a simple narrative,
| but during that time a lot of art was being made even by
| amateurs and people without much money. And the majority of
| drawings and paintings that are done are going to be lose to
| time and only the most well cared for survive. And then there
| are different types - pottery, basket weaving, etc. In several
| hundred years, the majority of art created now will be lost and
| people will be able to create a simple narrative about the art
| of our era as well.
| detourdog wrote:
| I see art and religion as completely misunderstood in modern
| times. Art was the original science of materials. Early
| creatives simply manipulated the surrounding materials until
| they achieved mastery and understanding. This is what drives
| human achievement. Once a repeatable understanding is achieved
| the development effort morphs into science.
|
| The contemporary art world was birthed from the financial
| industry. The financial art world can be very different than an
| individual's study of materials and the surrounding culture.
|
| The financial art world of today may have no relevance to what
| is deemed art in 2054.
| leetrout wrote:
| > The financial art world of today may have no relevance to
| what is deemed art in 2054.
|
| People with both money and art will not let that happen
| verisimi wrote:
| Great comment. The tax loopholes require art!
| dgellow wrote:
| Lots and lots of artists recreate the same pop-culture
| characters over and over, with their own style. Doesn't that
| count?
|
| We even have remakes, reboots, prequels, sequels of movies,
| books, comics, games. Evolving universes and styles.
| olsonjeffery wrote:
| Capitalism and atomized market actors have subsumed the feudal
| patronage arrangements of the ancien regime.
|
| Would you say that you love this current system, but hate the
| outcomes?
| orwin wrote:
| Agree, but i don't think postmodernism can go away. One thing i
| find fascinating about postmodernism is how antagonistic it is.
|
| As it core, it's deeply anti-metanarrative, and i think that
| it's main structural characteristic. Which is, in a way, a bit
| anti-intuition, as we like to understand the world with meta-
| narratives.
|
| I won't go into politics (basically, all parties create
| metanarrative, all use postmodernist arguments against each
| others), but one sign the world is really becoming postmodern
| is the state of particle physics, where physicists are more and
| more critical of theories seeking to unite general relativity
| and quantum mechanics. Once string theory and other "unifying"
| theories are completely abandoned (probably won't happen, but
| i'll never know), postmodernism will have become mainstream.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| I don't disagree, but post-modernism's anti-meta-narrative
| and anti-institution sensibilities are a response to the
| failings of meta-narratives and institutions as they exist
| within modernism. Specifically the gaps in meta-narratives
| and institutions in terms of what and who they don't apply to
| are self-evident and their mere existence is a powerful
| critique of modernism.
|
| Post-modernism too can't escape critique embodied today in
| the constellation of meta-modernism's ideas.
| specialist wrote:
| Great comment, thanks.
|
| Yes and: What of all the non-famous artists?
|
| I know nothing about (contemporary) art. But my SO attended
| Gage Academy, an atelier model org intent on training working
| artists. (Versus most higher-ed art studies which train degrees
| in art.)
|
| > _...but for the most part it is entirely devoid of any
| centralized ethos or ideal._
|
| The Gage artists give a lot of thought to balancing individual
| expression and earning a living.
|
| If there is a shared ethos or ideal among this local community
| of artists, I'd guess it's: how to keep making art.
|
| https://gageacademy.org
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| The "art world" is wildly divorced from the tastes of the
| majority of people in society - one could uncharitably but not
| inaccurately characterise the modern art world as a means to
| arrange for low cost materials to be purchased for vast sums in
| tax advantageous ways.
|
| If we look at an art form where there is a lot of validation by
| the majority of people, tv and films, we see people "painting
| the same thing" all the time because that's what the
| "zeitgeist" is interested in
|
| 500 years ago there were very few books and the west European
| zeitgeist was mostly the bible anyway.
| glitchc wrote:
| This. The modern art world is predominantly a tax evasion and
| racketeering scheme, designed to transfer assets outside the
| influence of national and international law.
| mymythisisthis wrote:
| If feel that with Youtube you get a touch of the Zeitgeist.
| There are some milquetoast channels like 'Hoovie's Garage',
| 'Rich Rebuilds', that tap into what average people are
| interested in watching.
|
| You can also see the small changes in the medium; everybody
| at once adopting click-bait titles once one person was
| successful with it. As soon as a channel gets some success
| like 'Hand Tool Restoration' then everyone starts doing the
| same thing.
| code_biologist wrote:
| If anyone reading this likes handtool restoration but has
| not come across the "my mechanics" channel, you have to
| check it out!
|
| I agree with your assessment, but would add that sometimes
| fads popularize people with such skill and attention to
| detail that their success is well deserved. My Mechanics is
| one of those cases.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Curtis expresses disdain for our generation's reluctance to form
| groups and struggle for power. But I'm more inclined to think
| this is a good thing. Power struggle between groups is a zero sum
| game, while individual freedom is not. It's true that individual
| freedom also leads to power structures, and that those can be
| oppressive to certain groups. But I think that problem is better
| addressed with individual and universal human rights.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Yeah, I see some good points in what you just said. I see
| certain ideologies like patriotism, seem to isolate us into
| camps, and then people that desire power through these ideals,
| use those constructs to control populations in each of the
| countries of the world.
| 65 wrote:
| When everyone is individualized and alienated from each other,
| you wind up with a deep emptiness in a population looking for
| community and organization to fill the void. This is exactly
| the methodology Stalin and Hitler took to get people on board
| with totalitarianism. People are fundamentally social animals
| who need community and social structures, and making everyone
| into an individual creates instability and allows for
| sociopaths to rise to power to fill those gaps.
|
| I suggest reading the book The Origins of Totalitarianism by
| Hannah Arendt.
| badpun wrote:
| Power struggle is always there, the question is only if your
| group pushes back. If it largely doesn't for a couple decades,
| you eventually get results like young families cannot afford a
| basic place to live in 2024 in some of the wealthiest societies
| in the history of the planet.
| SebFender wrote:
| Great read - and exactly my thoughts when I started seeing my
| kids and all their friends get a bunch of tattoos... Around the
| pool they all now look the same. Oversimplified, but that made me
| laugh.
| katmai wrote:
| are you mental cuz? imagine trying to get everyone connected to
| the oxygen supply cuz the air is running low, and a bunch of
| idiots running around knocking into everyone else, start raving
| about the "dangers of self expression" and miniature painting.
|
| i mean, yes.
| Karellen wrote:
| > There is another definition of freedom which simply says, "In
| whose service is perfect freedom." By giving yourself up to the
| Lord, you free yourself of the narrow cage of your own desires
| and your own selfishness.
|
| ...and that's where they lost me.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i don't think he's evangelizing, that's more meant to be an
| example.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| And even if it's not it would be like saying all of Lord of
| the Rings is garbage because I found out Tolkien was a
| catholic.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I could be reacting from my bias towards individuals, self
| expression with this response.
|
| I'm not seeing this is a problem of individual self expression.
| At least in the way it's described in this article, which I
| understand is to be, we're all over the place expressing
| ourselves in different ways and we can't come together on
| singular, or central topics.
|
| I see trends, in art, specifically movies where the writers are
| definitely clued-in on the troubles of the time.
|
| I think the actual problem is politics itself, which is kind of
| an artificial construct that puts people together for causes that
| are not their own, or even not directly supporting the common
| causes.
|
| Because political movements end up getting co-opted by people
| that have vested interests in profiting off of, and controlling
| society for some specific benefit that does represent the will of
| the people.
|
| I see local Grass-roots movements that are not politically
| motivated by some particular political party to be more
| representative of the truth and moving toward actual resolution
| for societies problems.
|
| Maybe I'm talking about the same thing I just don't like the idea
| of politics itself, at least in the perspective of a party based
| system.
|
| A great example of this is EFF podcast: Open Source Beats
| Authoritarianism [0]
|
| [0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/02/podcast-episode-
| open-s...
| jgalt212 wrote:
| a wise man once said, art without aesthetic appeal is just
| commentary.
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| "Capitalism is about self-expression" is a garbage statement that
| made me wish I hadn't read that far into the article.
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