Saturday 20 April 2024

Dystopias reinforce double-negative values


One reason that we are fed a relentless diet of dystopian books, movies and TV - i.e. why this theme is so lavishly funded by The Establishment; is that consuming dystopian fiction demonstrably has zero benefit in terms of prevention (but instead facilitates actual dystopias by psychological and spiritual means); while portrayal of dystopias reinforces the bottom-line double-negative value system that is destroying modern Man. 


By the depiction of horror and misery is inculcated the (mostly-unconscious) idea that if-only these horrors and miseries were removed (or, at least, greatly reduced) then everything would be fine

The news reports and analyses of ongoing wars have a similar role and effect: indirectly pushing the idea that if-only there was peace; then everything would be fine...

(It should be noted that the same people who believe this kind of pacifism, are in-real-life nearly-always active in support of whoever is the worst side in those foreign wars that have been promoted and escalated by The West.)


Of course this idea that everything would be fine without war is not made explicit, because it is obviously absurd; but it is implied; often in a disguised form where the double-negative is presented as a positive. 

For instance "peace" - which is really the mere absence of war - is talked-about (written and sung-about) as if it was a positive concept, a positive value, an end rather than a means. 

This should be tediously familiar to anyone who has sampled the late 1960s-early 1970s pop and academic culture - ranging from ubiquitous "Peace" signs and symbols, through songs about peace phrased as if it were a positive thing, to academics working in "peace studies"...


Because, in a society without positive values, it is not just a safe-bet - but the only possible stance - to oppose some or another form of suffering as-if this was the was self-evidently the best possible belief and activity; the highest human value, the reason for our being, the purpose of life...

(And it can easily be inferred, and observed, that when the prevention of suffering becomes the highest value, we have an ethic of unbirth, death and suicide.) 

Indeed; it can be hazardous nowadays to espouse any positive goal for one's own life - such as a religion, or nationalism. This is increasingly regarded as dangerous, and a form of terrorism; unless it is religion or nationalism for someone-else, in some other-place. 

That's allowable, because it is conceptualized either as just-another double-negation, such as freedom-from-oppression; and is "altruistic" hence conforms to the supreme modern Western values of self-hatred and -destruction. 


If one takes a step back and considers; it really is inevitable that our culture is so fixated upon dystopias, exactly because that we have no motivating utopias; in other words, we fixate upon hoping to avoid dystopia, exactly because the double-negation of avoiding-dystopia is the highest value we can conceive as real. 

Genuine utopias have become (literally) incredible to modern consciousness, and rightly so; because modern Men acknowledge only this-world and mortal-life, and this-world is characterized by evil and entropy such that no genuine and positive utopia can ever happen.

This-worldly pessimism about the possibility of u-topia, then turns into this-world fear of dys-topia - and here we are. 


The sequence is almost inescapable, unless there is a profound reorientation of metaphysics. Unless (that is) we personally, and then culturally, acknowledge and believe-in the reality of post-death personal existence; then we cannot even begin to escape from the futile paradoxes of double-negative values. And we will continue to obsess over dystopias and wars.  


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