Buddhist Amazon, Nietzschean Reactionaries?
Does lowering your propensity to group identification make you a leftie?
Some say that Buddhism is more conductive to insectivization. Is neoreaction its life-embracing nemesis?
2030 US regime. General populace follows simple creeds, focused on justice. AmZen centers are esoteric monasteries. How does 120 IQ tech no-code-developer life look like?
Neo-monks meditate to reach Nirvana. One of the Buddhist ‘three marks of existence’ - basic ontological truths - anatta. Permanent ego death. The argument goes that you can conceive yourself as a set of aggregates. But you wouldn’t say that one of them is necessarily ‘you’. Therefore ‘you’ don’t exist on a fundamental level. (I didn’t delve into the emergent argument against that, but there must be one. ) On your way to Nirvana you detach yourself(?) from these aggregates, so in the end ‘you’ don’t reach Nirvana. But in a social sense, you do. Extinguishment of flame. Not of life, but identity.
Personal detachment and identity politics
Identity. Now we reached politics. Detachment from identity - is it a fundamental leftist project? No. We must say that there is a tendency to uproot identities. Markets do that. Right wing authoritarians do that on conquered territories.
Let’s just keep to the 2021 +- 10 years. Within these bounds, uprooting and replacing identities is a populat political project. Right wingers also construct identities - ‘neo-reactionary’. Also at the cost of uprooting other ones - conservatism and libertarianism. Leftist identity politics doesn’t need exposition here. It almost seems that the Buddhism - leftism link failed. There’s a RW POV that Thielbucks made a psyop and therefore the distinction is conserved. That might be investigated later.
Anyway, it is obvious that hippies are lefty. They are alsoengaged with New Age and like to appropriate stuff like Buddhism. The link is obviously undeniable in the empirical. Apathetic human drones will complain less about lack of pay raises and long hours. And leftists seem more fluid about their identity, too. Boomer hippies going to work after all these raves and acid.
That’s the sort of questions that need to be considered in this topic. Let’s move on from economics back to philosophy.
A sprinkle of operations on sets
The moment of ‘anatta’ insight itself. Mathematically ‘anatta’ is creation of a conception of self as a set {} of properties. Then contraposing that to the intuition of self as a simple primitive(primordial) object. Then discarding the second one.
After the insight practice should follow. Meditation strengthens that argument and its assumptions. Also empirically. The rival-to-instinctive set gradually overcomes the instinctive one. And the instinctive one loses properties. That terminates in set {} overcoming the default instinctive, as the latter goes to size 0. Empty set. ( The graph of coming together is different depending on many factors.f For example left vs right hand path.)
Now, as an object that loses properties, you lose something more. For every property of objects there is a set containing them. To have a property = to be part of the set of objects containing that property. So as you grow in enlightenment, you lose engagement with the world. Skin in the game of the earthly struggles. That seems consistent with experience. Ashoka’s missionaries aside, Buddhism doesn’t seem to be the most prozelitic religion. At least through their monks. Their books seem to be stronger.
Doesn’t seem far from the ‘insectization’ now, does it? That demonstrates how meditation decreases your group-based social interaction.
To see further, put things on a different axis, let’s move from Asia to Europe.
The European Buddhist is Schopenhauer. He had 2 nemeses - one before, one after him. (In terms of peaks of popualrity). Then the rightist - vitalism of ZeroHPLovecraft and BAP seems to tie into that. Nietzschean embrace of life as it is. They want to construct new values. Through Borgesian technology and mercenary life full of cheek clapping.
There’s something they’re missing though.
Nietzsche was all about the Superman. He wouldn’t stick to ‘this is natural, this is so trad and based’.
They are humanists. Really deeply. Nietzsche - and even Hegel were more aduacious. More modern, more daring towards the absolute. Am I missing something or is this disappointment valid? Or maybe Nietzsche is a bad benchmark?