Degreebling 3/4: Crisis of Meaning

What do Imperial Star Destroyers have to do with depression among youth?

No one there is sad!

The short answer is that if getting into the Imperial Academy and serving on badass starships was an option, no one would be sad.

You surely think I'm joking, no? What I'm saying is true, from a certain point of view.

Many people, from those alive it's Jordan B Peterson that is the most known for this cry (fun intended), that there's a crisis of meaning among youth.

I said in the first post:

Degreebling is modernity. Scientific method is a degreebling-engine.

What is then the opposite of the crisis of meaning?

It is adventure.

Adventure, in any setting: sci-fi, cryptocurrency funds, or Bronze Age, is more phenomenologically textured than the 'ordinary life'. Feels more meaningful. Many hail the lack of adventure as the foremost modern woe. It is often construed to be a symptom of the overmemed 'meaning crisis'. I won't say much more about it here, besides that we'd want AGI to avoid it.I don't consider this basic assessment to be controversial, but there is more to it.

This post is the second of a series investigating the concept. Checkout the first post of the series, which describes what it is and compares interpretations across sources. Degreebling has been forgotten since 2021. We need to revisit it. Put it back into the discourse and our minds. In this post I make the cause for a balance theory of degreebling, a concave POV on it. I examine the causes. They are in this order: psychological, cultural factors, political economy and finally material economy.

Psychological - We Enjoy Greebled Things

We go upstream from our feeling of crisis of meaning. The first observation is the correlation between greebleness of things with the fact of us seeing them as meaningful.
We humans like greebled things. Each coffee shop wants to be unique. The one I'm writing this in is indeed cozy, with woody walls and staff that merits a second look. Still, there's many of both out there, none truly unique. Perhaps I shall grow memories with one of them. Then I'd make a unique relation. There would no longer be a similar one out there, as I made this one mine (eigentum). Is that what Stirner wanted?

Meaning is greebling creation. We want story settings to have texture. We are bored of repeats.
We want every nook and cranny to be special, hiding something.
The textured universe has many stories to tell. Open world games try to do this, with many little side quests. Any mythos plays the same role...

"After Star Wars was released, it became apparent that my story — however many films it took to tell — was only one of thousands that could be told about the characters who inhabit its galaxy. But these were not stories that I was destined to tell. Instead they would spring from the imagination of other writers, inspired by the glimpse of a galaxy that Star Wars provided. Today it is an amazing, if unexpected, legacy of Star Wars that so many gifted writers are contributing new stories to the Saga."
―George Lucas, from the introduction of Splinter of the Mind's Eye, 1996 "Splinter of the Mind's Eye"

There is the drive to know lots of lore. Kids reading about dinosaurs, or nerds obsessing over the lore of their favourite universe. Gossipy aunts and whispered secrets. No archetype is free of this. All of it is greebling too. You greeble that what is meaningful to you. You ignore and simplify to yourself that which you don't care about.

That's the first bias we have with respect to greebling. It can be hijacked, Goodharted.

That is what I hinted at in the part about class 3 phenomena:

It seems the original notion was not a real addition of complexity, but an illusion of it. Knowledge didn't increase either.

Consider the physical act of greebling as movie prop making. You have a starship and add some details. It's fake, all smoke and mirrors.

Adding bits to make them more meaningful. There are nerds out there categorizing every one of these spikes. Is that a turret, a sensor array or a barracks unit? (With lots of love to nerds out there).

As we're about to see, this pattern of fake meaning is all the rage nowadays. Why? It scales up well in groups.

Cultural - Our Culture Hinges on the Greebled

As can be expected, groups mirror the individual approach. Whatever is more meaningful to the group is discussed in more detail.
If not, it's omitted, simplified away with a stereotype or heuristic.

There's plenty of examples. The tabloids fascination with scandals, Brazilian telenovelas are all a symptom of this. Middle aged women obsessing over teen romances - a period when all emotions are felt more strongly - are seeking for that world where every individual gesture, meeting is mysterious. Where the steps to romance (activity they value), are as of yet undeciphered.

Mature woman that knows what she wants says the sex phone line advert. That MILF-y archetype is quite the reverse of teen love!
You can only have sex with so many people in so many positions, in the casual, detached way. Sooner or later you'll get entangled in some drama. For better or worse.

Drama is a magnet for humans, creating meaning through itself.

Is there even a metanarrative without drama?
Once in school, a history teacher in a lesson about Enlightenment wanted to put us through some atheistic propaganda.

She emphasized how Javier Bardem’s character in Goya’s Ghost declined to accept Christ at his execution. Here is the video, you can see him throwing away a cross given to him by a priest.

So dramatic…

Surely now sex, life and death are topics with many particularities and passions, but money-making is not perverse, it's all about cold calculation?

You could guess that if human relationships are greebled, markets and powerhouses of efficiency the corporate are, must surely be degreebled af? You'd be wrong.

Economical - Mask of Greebling, Reality of Degreebling

Anti-Oedipus (p29) contains a mention of Freud-Marx parallelism 'the famous equation money = shit'. That is quite true.
Business plans and consumer plans. Human passions are centrally invested in these undertakings.

HR class serves to create meaning ceaselessly. To run new courses, new policies, to keep things interesting. Do the HR hate it when someone is referred to them? They present a deeply worried look, but they're at the peak of a greebling power trip. They can demonstrate their status through the Power of Correctness-ship.

That's only the internal apparatus. The kayfabe of stock markets, wants prospective drones to believe in the success, great IPOs, bountiful profit margins and seductive 401s. The Wolf of WallStreet and the upcoming FTX movie (I'm hyped).

FTX: the Movie casting

They're so good at it that many a boy with a martial destiny internalizes it fully, falling to the lifestyle worthy of an ant worker drone.
And the grindset folx have their narrative foil in the Soyjack Consoomer. Two bugmen souls, one producing, one consuming. In Mammon they will be free.
One has more power, true. But both relish in the fake greebled world, memeing themselves into ignoring the mass production side of Funko Pops.

What is the spiritual remedy to these?

Unless we go full hermit mode, where every gust of the wind is a divine breath, we are entangled in the greebled nets of meaning where the corporate world wants to capture us. Few go with the BAP route. Few have networks. Many jump at the transcendent with religion. What if one doesn't like any of these? Wat should one do then?

Every age has attempts to cure every woe, even if unsuccessful.

The folk remedy of our age is memes. Memes, poasting give ironic respite from the quantity dominated jobs: from wagecucking service jobs, through water management systems, to investing in multi-billionrino companies. Yeah, 'quantity dominated'. That was purposeful, as now we go deeper into the esoteric grounds for our fakely greebled condition.

Material Economics - Reign of Quantity

Quantity Accelerationism and Rene Guenon

Working in the first half of the 20th Century, Rene Guenon was a thinker concerned with the esoteric more than with the economic. Yet he witnessed the world of his age and described it in the 'Crisis of the modern world', and in 1945 follow up goated: 'Reign of Quantity and the Signs of Times'. In the latter text we find a reference to the biblical story of Cain and Abel as a portrait of the relation of reign of quantity. I interpret it thus:
Abel, the pastoralist, has his offering to God accepted. He can forge relations to his stock. Every time he kills one of his sheep he lets go of a being he cared for. They depend on him, and he on them. They have some concept of him. There is a certain mutual intelligibility, a bond. And bonds are necessarily meaningful.

Cain's offering is vegetables. The deal is not him being a miserly vegan in the nutritional sense, but his relation to his work.
Plants, like bugs, are anonymous beings. Relation, of the sort Abel had with his sheep, is lacking here.

Abel guards his sheep himself, maybe with help of a dog. Cain doesn't need that. If he uses animals, it's domesticated cattle that he forces to work for him, micromanaging it. Abel's dog is an independent creature co-herding with Abel (frens-coded).

Cain does not have a dog. Not a cat either. He'd invent a scythe had God not cursed him, and a combined harvester soon after.
Green revolution breeeeeeding more wagecucks reliant on centralized agriculture.

The ‘reign of quantity’ is disgusting to a certain sort of assemblage. This assemblage is the brave Jungian hero. It can be an organization or a person. That is a feature of this World. Yet like the soyjacks and grindset sigmas described above, many fall into the trap of fighting the wrong evil.

For it is good to cultivate that disgust. But how to avoid the fate of fighting the wrong evil? We need to examine the pros of degreebling first.

Degreebling Steelmanned - We Like Degreebled Things

The drive to symmetry is a strong human pro-organizing (pronomian) principle psychologically. It is often autist-coded. Autists have the tendency to degreeble everything, even when that's not necessary.

As with the finance bro there is the mirror, narrative foil to the degreebling autist. The degreebling normie.

The hot stepsis from 1999 Cruel Intentions. She had no business to be that hot

If the autistic world of ideas is the degreebled world, the reign of quantity is the social world. You need to appear in the ingroup meeting enough times to make your tulpa memorable. You need to present correctly. You need to show up and work always on time and work overtime to get that promotion.

Bateman just wanted to fit in…

Degreebling is predictable, comforting. Cozy apu pictures are degreebled. The Longhouse is degreebled.

Degreebling is also a hope. Degreebling is what we fall back on when your particular meanings fail.

Proud creatures fall to repeating degreebled mantras in a hopeless situation. To cherish the degreebled dogmas is the condition of a slave.

Degreebling is also a cope.

Benvolio speaking to Romeo wants to change his tulpic-affectual configuration through the noumenal multiplicities.

BENVOLIO

Be ruled by me, forget to think of her.

ROMEO

O, teach me how I should forget to think.

BENVOLIO

By giving liberty unto thine eyes;
Examine other beauties.

aka

Bro, there's other girls

That is not far from Nirvana.
Realizing there are other girls out there is Enlightenment.

Not far from the ‘exitpill’.
Some men need a strong dose of redpills to realize this.
'Extinguishing' of the greebled flame of meaning.

Conclusion

We are creatures of quality and quantity both. But in us the ratio of quality is higher than in the world around us. Wow, a cool rock!
We see that greebledness is what happens when we have meaning. We fall back onto quantity to have meaning when our meanings fail (it's over). We grow attached again and are optimistic again (we're so back!).

By now you surely have high hopes for part 4, where I'll describe once and for all the perfect balance of the greebling and degreebling.
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Here I'm supposed to tell you of some benefit/lifehack you've had from reading this. Sorry, I'm tired, editing this was tiresome, I'll be relaxing, rearranging my starship collection, maybe painting some more detail to the bridge.