[HN Gopher] Gateway Books: The lessons of a defunct canon
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Gateway Books: The lessons of a defunct canon
Author : samclemens
Score : 18 points
Date : 2025-05-15 16:23 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thepointmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thepointmag.com)
| pvg wrote:
| https://archive.is/1jnLk
| alephnerd wrote:
| Interesting take, and I can see that as well. That said, I think
| alternative forms of media like television, video games, and
| potentially even social media shorts might be able to recreate
| portions of that experience.
|
| The medium (books, tv, social media, video games) shouldn't
| matter so long as it is forcing you to challenge preconceived
| notions.
|
| And that's where I think the current malaise lies - reward
| systems that are basically min-max with extra steps will not
| reward challenging or risk taking content. That's the downside of
| removing friction.
| khazhoux wrote:
| For many CS/math people, this is what Godel Escher Bach was. Read
| it at age 15 and it opens your mind to this alternate higher
| universe of amazing ideas.
|
| I don't think most people who own it have actually read more than
| a chapter or two, but that's ok. Its essential function turned
| out to be to _inspire and unlock_ a part of the young
| intellectual mind.
| dgan wrote:
| indeed i bought it in my late twenties, to pass time. After a
| couple of chapters I already found it repetitive and i stopped
| reading somewhere in the middle :/
| khazhoux wrote:
| Yeah, the actual content is not all that great imho.
| vmilner wrote:
| I got a lot more out of his Metamagical Themas (scientific
| american columns) collection book. Eg Lisp and making self-
| referential sentences ("This sentence contains three a's, one
| b, ...")
| khazhoux wrote:
| Yup, Metamagical Themas and The Mind's I
| stereolambda wrote:
| How paradoxical. Man rejects books about rebelliousness because
| of negative social proof. Over time has increasingly
| sophisticated collectively-held ideology about why they are bad.
| Initially, it apparently was about pure artistic merit, a notion
| since more or less purged. No matter, the justification meanwhile
| morphed into something else. One might start to think there was
| actually something to these "forbidden" tomes, now that they are
| actually (again?) frowned upon by your Lit professors.
|
| Not saying these are universal masterpieces. To every reader
| slightly different books will be the most enriching. It's true
| that at a certain age, there is often a transformation from the
| young adult interest in self to interest in the wider world. But
| the self is still what humans have, so it's not like it ever
| ceases to be relevant for one's experience.
|
| While there is something romantic in _finding a subculture, even
| one just slightly adjacent to the mainstream, [being] more
| chancy_ , on reflection I'm glad we no longer have it like that.
| (In fact, we probably regressed a little bit because of the
| decline of open internet and Google, and the move to group
| chats.) But today's youth can find and pirate whatever they want.
| The establishment is founded more on pure concentration of money
| and financing for legacy institutions, not actual technological
| hurdles like it used to be.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, one of my fond dreams from my youth was of _The Glass Bead
| Game_ and the possibility that such a system could exist, but
| these days, no one seems to have heard of Hesse.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Required reading when I was in my early twenties, now 50 years
| ago. I don't think I could stand it now - I found the prose
| style somewhat irritating back then (possibly some crappy
| translations are partially to blame).
| WillAdams wrote:
| Yeah, my sister, who has become fluent in German has noted
| that it reads much better in the original.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| The precursors would include Piers Anthony (unrereadable, not
| least for being terribly misogynist and worse),
|
| But along with Tolkein the "spec fic"' on this list might well
| include Robert Heinlein (and Frank Herbert if he wasn't
| mentioned).
|
| Heinlein made precisely one of the promises well articulated:
| that beyond the apparently venal and banal world of one's own
| surroundings, a richer adult world, indeed at a "higher pitch."
|
| In Heinlein's case this was a somewhat narrow world reflective in
| an oblique way. of some real-world problems: exclusivity. In his
| world, a particular set of political and moral ideas (his ideas
| about sexuality were are also arguably not re-readable) is often
| collectively arrived at by his precocious characters, who trade
| knowingly in it, and have a relationship to the normies that is
| at best charitable or pitying and often caustic.
|
| It was quite a thing to realize as I aged past 16 that he was
| painting not just a fantasy, but one which was not just not
| awaiting around the corner, but literally un-realizable,
|
| because the attitudes and behaviors of his characters however
| good on the page, are completely absent from lived experience--at
| least, in anything like the way he promises. It's not just that
| the ideas and value he enshrines are not widely held; it's that
| they cannot are arguably not sustainable and are almost certainly
| incompatible with both individual human psychology and
| potential... and do not and cannot serve as a foundation for the
| sorts of exclusive societies he imagines.
|
| In many of his earlier works, progressive sexually liberated
| intellectually liberal but socially formal cultures have
| naturally, inevitably, become the norm; and humanity has thereby
| thrived, leaving behind what he contends is its primitive
| imperfections.
|
| By his later works, he tacitly acknowledged and indeed made
| central the struggle between the embrace of such values and
| social and political structures; and a "normie" culture
| permanently mired in those imperfections.
|
| Moving here to the Bay Area in the 90s I met a lot of people who
| had encountered these ideas at the same impressionable age; and
| who like me, to some real degree expected to find (or make)
| communities adopting many of those ideas.
|
| Indeed there's probably another more somber essay here: tracing
| the history of those specific ideas from their source, in a
| through-line to crypto-utopian effective altruism and its dream
| of libertarian city states unshackled from the normie masses,
| down into the ugly mire of resurgent openly racist zero-sum class
| war fascism and the shrill ideas of Curtis Yarvin.
|
| It is easy to imagine disappointment then anger at the non-
| existent (sexually liberated) libertarian gun-owning utopia of
| genteel Heinlein,
|
| metastasizing into what its adherents understand as Randian
| "Will" to _make it so._ To build, damn the consequences, move
| fast and break things--most of all the ugly banal venal
| complexities and inherent pluralism and ambiguities of the
| normies ' world.
|
| It must seem like a noble fight, in pursuit of a shared vision,
|
| but it's a vision that as described ITA is fundamentally and only
| an adolescent one.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Humour, or at least the attempt at it, seems to be the main
| thing.
| lykahb wrote:
| I read Catcher in the Rye as a teenager. Even then I perceived
| some of that rebelliousness as trying too hard. A reminder that
| life at school sucks and many things are meaningless is hardly an
| epiphany.
|
| Those books come from the times when the counterculture barely
| started getting commercialized. The market niche for the angsty
| teenagers, who self-identify as intellectuals, is quite filled
| with YA, movies and games. One modern outlet that comes to mind
| is the rationalist community - it provides a distinct perspective
| to view the world, together with the feeling that you see it
| better than others.
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