illegale said:I hear you. I think I just used some poor examples. My point was this: in all this open chaos, truth is the only thing that survives. This whole process is steadily and relentlessly stripping away every imposed lie.
Unfortunately, you are the only one here talking about truth versus lies, while the rest of society gets sucked into the endless rhetoric of supposed ideological camps.
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Is this perhaps a different topic? 😁
Not necessarily. Is the subject of postmodern deregulation perhaps conditioned by that social imbalance where the individual is stripped of choice and becomes nothing more than an object?
Because what you are describing isn't philosophy; it’s the history of philosophy. 🙂.
People who call themselves philosophers are actually just historians of philosophy. Real philosophers have never sought anything other than the truth itself.
I agree. I advocate for a philosophy of restraint—not autarchy, but an attempt to slow down processes that clearly lead to ruin. I believe the solution lies in halting the acceleration of what we now call "progress."
[/b] Without faith, there is no sense in even starting the journey.
I am trying to strengthen my own faith.
My reductionist view of time focuses on temporality only through what matters to me as a human being. That is the future acting as a guide. The present moment, however, is eternal.
Viewing the future as a way to push aside the past is a necessity. But what if there is a system in place designed specifically to prevent us from recognizing evil?
If the narrator is freed from the obsession of seeking identity, sailing instead through a sea of detached self-irony and cynicism toward the truth, then where is the recognition of the fundamental human need for the distinction between good and evil—for ethics itself? If expressionism is dead and personal character is reduced to mere antinomies and their rhetorical rationalization, where can we find true selfhood in the ocean of mediocrity generated by today's literature? It all seems to boil down to searching for a lost foundation of anthropological definition. What I mean is that postmodernism offers no exit. The manipulation and imposition of various ideologies that people accept without question is merely a symptom of this state of modern philosophy. Its weakness is more apparent than ever. That is all from my library. 👋
I didn't mean to react, but I wanted to apologize for bringing up politics here—that wasn't my intention for this thread. When I asked about the active subject, I was actually exploring a theoretical framework to navigate this web of postmodernist meanings. I wasn't trying to redefine "will" or critique it as a necessary social evil, which is a concept famously explored in Foucault's work; that's already baked into the topic itself. Niche.no, you know I fully support your open-source approach and would never want to see it monitored or penalized.😉
Someone might bring up Lyotard or several other theorists, though I doubt it.😢 Another question worth asking is this: Is the ancient Greek ideal of the *politeia* subject—that sense of substantiality used to define the Western individual—now a total illusion and a permanently abandoned project?
Why, and at what point, does a person lose their conviction that they are in control of their own destiny?
And why does philosophy abandon its claim to truly grasp the face of truth?
What defines truth today, when skepticism regarding knowledge surpasses all previous centuries of projects centered on emancipation and self-discovery?
Is philosophy dead if it abandons ontology to make room for poetry and science?
Please, take a moment to revisit my first post and consider the words of Jaspers. A person simply cannot integrate their biological or developmental stages into one cohesive whole. Even experience itself is fragmented by time. We can't take it for granted; instead, we view it as an illusion. As Baudrillard puts it: "Childhood does not exist..."
Where does the postmodern undermining of a teleological reality actually begin? It starts with the critique of metaphysics, specifically by demonstrating how impossible it is to stabilize meaning within a single semantic center. In turn-of-the-millennium literature, this shift is a direct result of doubting any form of empirical knowledge or firsthand testimony. We aren't dealing with an omniscient narrator who possesses insights equal to the author's imagination and creative will anymore. Instead, we see the legitimization of knowledge through the investigation of documents—essentially exploring other people's texts that all point toward one another in a massive, intertextual library. This temporal relationship between tradition and modernity was defined back in the early 17th century by Francis Bacon in his *Novum Organum*, where he corrected the paradox of the modern perspective. According to Francis Bacon, we shouldn't view the past from our own vantage point. We should measure it against the beginning of the world. In that framework, the "old" isn't just the past; it is our current era because it follows later, granting it the advantage of greater experience and maturity.
During the technological revolution, Karl Jaspers wrote back in the 1930s: "Where a person exists only as a function, they must remain young; if they are no longer that, they will merely create an illusion of youth. Furthermore, biological years hold no inherent value; an individual's life is perceived only in the moment. Their temporal extension is merely accidental duration, leaving no lasting impression nor staying preserved as a collection of irrevocable decisions based on biological stages. If a person truly no longer has a lifespan, then they are constantly starting over and constantly reaching the end. They can do this or that, once this way and another time that way; it seems everything is possible every time, yet nothing is actually real." Essentially, time and the illusions that alter its essence abolish the irrevocability of reality. For someone reduced to a mere function, reality becomes an illusion. The moment a person finds themselves caught in the illusion of the surrounding modernity, they have already stepped into the postmodern era. This state of knowledge, which identifies reality as an illusion, serves as the foundation for the postmodern movement of the spirit.
Postmodernism in philosophy begins with a reinterpretation of Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought. With the death of God and the arrival of prophetic nihilism, we enter a state of total vulnerability for the subject, both socially and metaphysically. The individual is fragmented in their very form due to widespread deconstruction, a process bolstered by the Heideggerian thesis regarding the end of metaphysics and the task of future thought. Being remains undefined in its temporality, causing philosophy to splinter into several major directions: Foucault’s redefinition of social power and the necessity of moving away from Greece as a pretentious demand for the universality and comprehensiveness of systemic philosophy; the Derridean semantic games aimed at casting new light on the resonance of settled ontological questions; and the Baudrillardian thesis regarding humanity's post-historical abandonment of reality, where the subject is transformed into an object, unable to redefine itself.
Is it possible to find an element of cohesion within postmodern thought—perhaps as a differently articulated version of modernity, driven by that same desire for rebirth? The idea of a collective body of knowledge within a global library and the presence of an encyclopedic, random spirit are two factors that claim to be common denominators for escaping this state.
How can a dethroned subject—one who constantly re-examines themselves and adopts a Cartesian stance as the sole object of their own research, albeit in a twisted sense of being incapable of true knowledge—reclaim the role of an active agent who builds the real world and their own external reality? This must happen in an age where all the world's historical knowledge is readily available (take the internet democracy as an example). Paradoxically, this accessibility is not a sufficient prerequisite for overcoming alienation. Instead, using Protagorean language to relativize everything, it introduces total chaos into the possibility of a unified humanity—a unity that is so desperately desired as a condition for survival in a world marching steadily toward its own destruction.
Are you referring to Socrates and the material discussed in the Phaedo? There isn't any hypocrisy involved; that is quite simply the only way true dialogue and learning can happen.
Exactly, mistyfox812. Jung's philosophical framework is defined by paranoia, though I suppose that applies to almost any system. But what would it even mean to actually live in reality—or rather, in the mundane? To me, given how we are shaped by discipline and social conditioning during our youth (think modern social stratification and deregulation), it all comes down to pragmatism. People do whatever it takes to climb the corporate ladder or secure a comfortable life. It’s high-level middle-class mentality. They don't see leisure as a necessary prerequisite for deep thought; they see it as something to be optimized for their own benefit. After all, isn't the psychoanalytic definition of intelligence basically just "solving a problem as quickly and easily as possible"? We really ought to question this. We should look at the repercussions of such a definition. Is it driven by a total nihilism of self-affirmation and constant activism, completely ignoring core values or the darker side of the human psyche?
Viviana, that doubt you expressed is, for me, the fundamental metric for judging intelligence.
I would argue that schizophrenia offers a genuine opportunity for genius. To possess an entire universe that is self-contained and intricately woven is, in itself, an act of creation. Whether that vision evolves into true art depends entirely on the individual and their environment. Simply weaving together archetypes is merely universal; it is the transformation of symptoms into a broader human experience. A person struggling with schizophrenia often acts as a stigmatized collector of the Id from those around them. Genetic psychosis certainly exists, but life circumstances always play a role. Actually, my focus was on Joyce’s method of structuring sentences as a way to liberate oneself from illness while testing the limits of the ego. The real question is whether facing one's own impulses—something inherently Thanatological and nihilistic—is the only way to make a true impact on the world through authentic creation. The defining trait of psychosis is a detachment from reality. Since there is such a thing as induced madness shared between two people, couldn't these ideas be applied to society at large? Can a society exist outside its own perception of reality? Not really. Most of the time, society is trapped within stereotypes and projections, clinging to a sort of mythological resentment. It uses its own symbols—which don't necessarily need to hold any inherent meaning—as a survival mechanism throughout history.
Can every autobiographical statement—this proliferation of identity within a narrative method—be understood as a technique that owes its existence to Descartes' logical maxim? We could actually argue that rationalism begins with a confessional turn, an account of the self. In his work, Samuel Beckett portrays a man wandering through a forest, stripped of his limbs, using the persona of a police inspector as a field to re-examine thought and language itself. Beckett is essentially a Cartesian who pushes Cartesianism to its absolute limit, reducing the rigid structure of rationalism to the very impossibility of thinking. In this search for truth, which takes the form of a police investigation, we see a spirit performing an inspection of itself. But Beckett ultimately suggests, "I invent, therefore I am not," which is effectively a play on the futility of language and the disintegration of the *cogito*—the very structure of the narrator. Identity, at its core, is the structure of an obsessive. We are always chasing ourselves, and we are always slipping away. Joyce shattered this logical structure of coherent language in Finogenov's vigil. He showed that language might be rational, yet it remains fundamentally uncommunicative—standing at the edge of an abyss where vocabulary dissolves into a spray of verbs and a private linguistic sphere. But the game stops there, because games require rules. It is similar to the central paradox found in Alice Carroll’s work: when meaning is pushed to its extreme intensity, it breaks apart, and nonsense emerges on the surface. The counter-effect, of course, is the production of meaning. Is meaning something we cannot escape, or are we simply condemned to it? Is the gaze behind the mirror a chance in the game of individualization? Is psychosis a choice made by genius, or merely a coincidence—a fate from which virtue might be forged, if nothing else can be made from illness?
In I. Fichte's aesthetics, the following is noted: "Those who suffered from overt clinical schizophrenia included: Tasso, Newton, Hölderlin, Swedenborg, van Gogh, Gogol, and Strindberg; those with paranoia: Russians and Pascal; those with ideas that poisoned them: Mozart; hysterics: Flaubert and Molière; those who died of paralysis: Schumann, Nietzsche, Maupassant, and Baudelaire; from arteriosclerosis: Kant, Keller, and Stendhal; from Faraday: Wagner; suicides: van Gogh; and those who lived asexual lives: Kant, Spinoza, and Newton." And so on. This isn't a list intended for comfort or to establish a necessary link between mental illness and the act of creation; rather, it serves as an example of the tautological nature of the human being as a vessel for creativity. Ultimately, the fact that one weaves autobiography into the interpretation of an artwork is not an aesthetic moment worthy of admiration. But what is this nihilism within a person if not a struggle on unknown terrain, an investigation of all the limits of experience that is the duty of any thinking person?
There is another factor in the interplay between madness and genius: social context and personality, as witnessed by Lang and the anti-psychiatry movement. Or more pointedly, Konstantinovic in his Philosophy of the Barracks: "Madness is the world because the world is chaos. A genius is always a genius of madness, because a genius is the genius of a world like this chaos. Therefore, mocking a genius as a madman in the practical world of the barracks always mixes with awe—the same awe felt by tribal societies, which look at the madman as an embodiment of a non-world, or perhaps a different world entirely, one that is unreachable to their consciousness and which their experience will never know."
Or elsewhere: "In the world of the barracks, it is more important to stick to established custom than to be an individual. Anything too personal or individualistic is undesirable, primarily because it represents the promise of the world—as a pure negation of the barracks. It promises stylistic polyvalence, which, to the spirit of the barracks, is nothing more than the embodiment of cacophony, the music of hell itself."
Where does pain settle? It marks the onset of aging, the process of maturing—which is really just the dulling of our senses and an emotional fading, or essentially, death itself. As long as you feel pain, you know you’re still alive. Pain is one of the vital indicators of life's intensity and the restless energy of being.
I’m completely on your side this time, hollowpilot9. I never intended to deny the technological revolution itself. My point was more about how little digital literacy exists here in America, let alone anything else. That’s really what I meant when I brought up third-world nations. We are merely objects caught up in global events—that was a brilliant way to put it. I don't have much else to add. Honestly, we’re still living in a primordial, tribal state. We need to settle our own local disputes and neighborhood issues first before we can even dream of participating in modern global trends. It seems like nobody here truly grasps that yet.
Today, just one-third of the global population holds the reins of capital, technology, and specialized knowledge. Capital has evolved into a force that transcends traditional cultural structures, functioning as a symbiosis between organized crime and a global oligarchy. In this landscape, the individual’s reality is merely calibrated to serve someone else's interests. Within this framework, the revolution in the natural sciences acts as a powerful pillar for the status quo. It forces a merger between scientific and humanistic discourse, effectively eliminating the need for new social definitions or even sociology itself. The passivity of our political community risks turning democracy into a mere facade. Behind this screen lies a relentless drive for financial dominance, which manifests through the creation of new technologies and communication tools. These innovations are mythologized until they become modern totems, while public opinion is pushed to the fringes. We are left with isolated, powerless voices trying to question the messy blend of representative democracy, concentrated wealth, and modern infrastructure. Even the moral foundation of our system—suspended somewhere between a republic and an empire—is becoming unstable. We are approaching a stage where human self-production via biogenetics and the fine-tuning of physical and mental traits is no longer science fiction. This push to mold humanity into an anthropomorphic information system through genetic manipulation and psychopharmacology is being rebranded as contemporary "humanism." Free will is being eroded by cognitive neurology and implants, while evolutionary psychology is used to justify a tiered version of progress. This brand of "humanism" is essentially a law designed to lift certain individuals above the principles of natural selection. By seizing control of evolutionary currents, proponents claim to ensure equality by expanding survival to more people. However, this massive expansion of the natural sciences—aimed at "emancipating" as many people in the West as possible—calls into question the relevance of the social sciences. What purpose do sociology, anthropology, or metaphysical thought serve for an individual living in a post-consumerist, informational, and neo-biological era? Where is the conversation about character when human nature is predetermined by a new kind of hedonistic ecology? Furthermore, who will address the gaping chasm between the realized utopia of the Western world and the marginalized nations that now constitute the "fourth world"? In the pursuit of neoliberal prosperity, fused with a Protestant work ethic, the individual becomes a mere cell in a larger organism. In this setup, the concept of equality is highly suspect. With the manipulation of science, we face the genuine threat of creating a ruling class that functions as a new race altogether. The implications of promised longevity for the improved "human-robot" are vast. Those living in the world's discard zones will have no choice in their personal immortality, and all signs suggest that the lower classes in developed nations will follow suit. Critiquing this is almost futile. We cannot stop the logistical momentum of a scientific model that has secured its theoretical footing in an anthropocentric paradise. In this new world, no one will ask what the conditions were for this phenomenological reset of post-history, nor will anyone ask where justice is buried—justice as the right of the most vulnerable, those freed from the ambition of wealth and the cult of personal branding and "happiness."
Sorry, I just caught that post. Basically, we are looking at negative critiques drawn from the works of Baudrillard. I haven't actually read Fukuyama myself, though; I've mostly encountered him through news commentary. I've also heard he leans into some rather gimmicky historical takes and belongs to those neoconservative circles here in the US. Forgive me, but when it comes to astrology and mass culture, I feel entitled to add my own little spin regarding the end of history.😉 It all stems from Baudrillard—specifically his ideas on stimulation, the second stage of his theories, and the concept of the perfect crime. That’s the core of it. My goal was simply to encourage others to weigh in too. Perhaps someone well-versed in Foucault or Lyotard could join the conversation. Or even Deleuze. Since I can't exactly drop a fortune on new books right now, I’m counting on your collegiality. As for astrology and television, I don't think they should be underestimated. To me, postmodernism isn't trying to offer a new way to view history; it's an attempt to exit history altogether. It reminds me of Foucault’s call to "exit Greece," which, if I recall correctly from your recent posts, seems to be a recurring theme for you. One wing of this new postmodern philosophy embraces that revisionist approach. Baudrillard, however, doesn't quite fit into that specific group. But we shouldn't limit his books strictly to social critique either. According to him, modern society disrupts reality itself and the subject-object relationship. In this discourse, everything becomes reversible because the human being ends up functioning as an object or serving one. Public opinion is merely a byproduct of this inverted relationship. It fills the void left by the disappearance of thought as a universal concept, complete with all its ethical and aesthetic values. It is the end of axiology, as I mentioned before. Society essentially observes itself through the search for a lost ontological claim. There are certainly hints of the historical moment there too—questions about how we suppress the past, such as during World War II, and that distorted humanism found in false discourses regarding victims. These are just a few open themes in Baudrillard's work, and honestly, there are plenty more. So, please, pick one and write back. You have plenty of options. And thank you for pulling this topic out of the mud.👋
Not really. If we’re talking about something Baudrillardian, I unfortunately don't have access to his entire body of work, especially those early post-structuralist pieces. I’d love to get my hands on everything, but... well, that's just a personal hurdle of mine.
Here is my thought: I wanted to tell Baudrillard that if modern humanism is defined by the idea that nothing holds more value than life itself, then logically, life isn't worth sacrificing for any cause. If we accept this peak nihilism, a philosopher ought to maintain an ethical distance through reflection—assuming such ethics even exist in a post-historical era. Additionally, I wonder if it's possible to reconcile Socrates, Heidegger, and Baudrillard—the victim of the beginning, the apologist for the end of history, and the deeply rooted theorist of the post-historical. Furthermore, where is the commentary on the Enlightenment's fate regarding desacralization in Baudrillard's work? Could someone please write something about this?
The term "mass culture" is essentially defined by its qualitative opposition to what we might call "elite culture." However, finding true elite culture is becoming increasingly difficult in an era defined by rapid population growth, massive urbanization, sweeping technological breakthroughs, rising living standards, and expanded leisure time. In another sense, this term captures the consumerist mindset of the audience and the mass media used to spread it. Even as cultural values become more commercialized and cosmopolitan, they don't escape the sense of profanity brought on by these shifts. Ultimately, "mass culture" imposes itself as a subject of debate through its tendency toward simplification and homogenization. If we want to truly deconstruct the facets of globalization, we must avoid using its "crutch terms." These terms might seem helpful for explaining dominant processes, but they actually hinder any deep reflection on modern society. My intention was to speak in light of Baudrillardian communicative ecstasy, where the language of information technology can effectively become the language of the masses. Isn't this essentially the speech of objects? It finds a parallel in magical thinking. Instead of fire cults, we now live in a state of desacralization where transparent objects—just another projection of the subject, or perhaps a step down from it—create a network where only the interface matters, even if that interface is entirely fabricated. From this perspective, we can look at Derrida’s reflections in his essay "Of Spoken Tone in Philosophy," where he looks back at a similar Kantian text. This was a time when a technological revolution wasn't even on the horizon, yet mathematical mysticism was already emerging through Cartesian or Leibnizian rationalism. Kant criticizes this idolatry of figures and numbers, linking it to phenomena like sects, crypto-politics, and superstitious theophanies that stand in contrast to rational theology. Numerology, mystical illumination, and theophanic visions all belong to an apocalyptic world that, according to Derrida, saw a resurgence in the 19th century. Now, in my humble opinion, we reach the vital question: how did this aristocratic esotericism transform into the expansive form we recognize today as "mass culture"? We see news and public opinion treated purely as mediated information, alongside an infinite sea of virtual content, all accompanied by a vision of the end times. Or will we steer this entire discussion toward a Heideggerian prophetic push of technology into the interference of the "Enframing"? If we ask where the *bonum*—the good—lies, are we merely asking in vain?
These are some old essays, so here is a fresh one. It is a massive misconception to think that the beginning of history is something primitive, outdated, clumsy, or weak. In reality, the exact opposite is true. The beginning is something incredibly intense and powerful. Everything that follows isn't actual development; it is merely leveling—a simple dilution. It is the impossibility of maintaining that initial spark, an attempt to distort and inflate the origin into a bloated monstrosity of sheer numerical scale and dimension (think Martin Heidegger interpreting a stanza from Sophocles' Antigone). Or, put another way: how did the birth of logocentrism in Greek substance evolve into the rationalist subjectivity of the modern era, with its most significant accident being the very idea of "progress"? Perhaps, following the postmodern demand to "exit Greece," the elitist morality of the polis—with its insistence on universality—was actually the seed of the Marxist-National Socialist corruption of Western progress? This pretension, this demand, displays a certain audacity of simplification against the tide of compression. There is a clear paradox in "future thought," where the "numerical magnitude" of modern eclecticism and historicism creates a leap toward a singular vision of the end of history, establishing a deconstructive mode of thought. After all, where is that perspective of Carol's Alice, which, through the lens of existentialism and psychoanalysis, marks the entire temporal insight of humanity's highest spiritual peaks with a negative eschatology, echoing with the boundless cries of a faded century? Even the underground tragedy of the Christian stands before the mirror in that profane display of the will to power, where the meaning of an individual accident is reflected through the mediation of historical utopias. The defaced transcendence of the Holy Spirit draws all its benefits from the alienated concept of capitalism within modern hedonism, finding refuge in the emptiness of plutocracy and mediated public opinion as the sole shield against projected neo-barbarism (perhaps a Castilian Neoplatonism?), where fear serves as the final tangible proof of objective reality. The potential for eliminating the masses feels less like a featureless truth and more like a fractal, dispersed subject behind a mirror—a gnoseological disintegration of what remains of auto-irony. A radical critique of political correctness, acting as an oversized panic over a virtual figure and a simulated sign, grants itself an absolute cultural code. In doing so, it reversibly completes a semiotically harmonious performance of amnesty for the totalitarian, which has always fueled the real conflict between the individual and the collective. The vital play of a measured principle of evil is not nullified by questions as the only escape from theory; because in the vicious conformism of small compromises, there is no order. Longing does not choose its victims once the worn-out nostalgia for the past is lost and one believes in the Beckon turn. The skeptical aura surrounding the logistics of numbers, used in service of theory to dismantle it, inevitably leads to a longing for a new minimalism in the darkness of the end-time mysticism. An aristocratic, gentlemanly tone used to illuminate the simulacrum acts as a confirmation of an egalitarian plunge into a flight from loneliness—understanding becomes masochism, a hyperbole of today's meager moment. For who will ask about the dubious ontological now, when there is no Robespierre of the provinces to descend upon the altar of chance or a revolutionary kitsch? The "humanist" icon is crowded with the faces of sympathy in a symbolic civil war of interests and passions—a struggle to which everything must be subordinated. The only certainty is tautological: common sense is not so common... No, the source is ended by murder. Who overcame the ordinary?
Once time reaches its saturation point, things begin to emerge—man-made objects serving as desperate technical extensions of existence itself. Metaphysics acts as a numerical placeholder for the void in our future, primarily because the human vision of it has failed. History is being regressed into a machine-driven magic, returning us to primitive cults and totems shaped by external nature, though this time the "little gods" are manufactured. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, this mathematical mythology lacks any inherent dynamism. It can exist as a separate entity, but it cannot usurp its designated role to replace God. What humans create can never surpass them; at most, it can only become a mirror of themselves. This fear of alienated technology is fundamentally a fear of nature, yet there is a massive difference in who holds the reins: Homo sapiens, in their characteristic arrogance, have chosen the very tools that will facilitate their own extinction. It seems people have voluntarily—or perhaps subconsciously—stifled their own freedom, surrendering it to something residing purely in the realm of potentiality. We have handed control to simple, logical categories that mediate and translate reality. Given the average consumer's IQ, this mediation must be profane and obscene; it simulates transcendence through an overwhelming abundance of simplicity, effectively negating all ethical and aesthetic value. The fear of technology is caused by the death of axiology, not the other way around. There is no evidence to suggest otherwise. Perhaps the individual in this chaotic, godless world—and thus a world devoid of conscience—is only possible as a persona threatened by a "Big Brother." But today, that threat is absolute, and there is no significant adversary left to turn the individual's will toward a revolution. The world has dissolved like late-stage Rome, making it impossible for any subcultural or social movement to achieve planetary scale. Everyone is already globally synchronized, broadcasting on secondary channels. No collective project can sway a population that is already fully supplied with basic necessities and information. However, this chromatic, cathode-ray madness—this frantic attempt to forget the heavy burden of hatred—isn't something we who seek transformation should focus on. We simply want to clear away the mud, charging blindly toward the plaza.
The abyss of aggressive advertising—a world of colors, faces, sounds, and attitudes—cannot be critiqued from any external vantage point. It is an exclusively political manifestation of "being-here," a coexistence where even cryptophilia becomes meaningless. Within these familiar forms, endless layers of "exclusive existence" are imposed, offering highly questionable versions of intimate acts and feelings. The problem arises when the will attempts to step out of the mud of this modern pseudo-polis. People suffocating within these personas never trigger true conflict. In our case, radical negation is often mistaken for reflection, but it leads nowhere. All that remains is mere recognition and protest—a resistance against a fake hyper-diversity running on the same conveyor belt, powered by the petty interests of massive egos and the charisma of mediocre daredevils. It is a manipulation of every species that escaped control, where interests serve merely as the impulse driving the remnants of a Gulag. These forces produce consequences far more lasting than their intended motives. Even when masked by the "sacred" economy, these narrow interests require massive amounts of mechanical-populist labor to function. This generates a mindless surge of "public opinion," which in turn dethrones the consciousness of every actor involved. It turns the participants into simple psychotics, mere reflections clinging to a single illusion of control. The "I" becomes the "you," so that together, on a zero-sum ground, they become the "it"—a thing, a nothingness. They become a fabricated adverb acting as a fingerprint of the self, while everything is crushed by an unknown "id." We will be lost on the way. And who would bother to remember that the beginning was once a powerful will to find the timeless? This is clearly the end; why would a starting strategy matter now? It is like being at the source, where character is destiny—a thousand different meanings standing in the foyer of a two-millennium-long solipsistic culture. Here, the subject’s self-awareness, the definition of morality against one's stances, and the absolute freedom within the necessity of rational perception are all that remain. Fate isn't some cosmic script written in the stars. It can't be unmasked by prophets peering through the veil of the physical world via divine will. The masters of the dreamscape—that other realm—are simply searching for a straight line along a crooked path of revelation. This path is inherently unstable because it is rooted in character. Character is something deeply immanent and volatile; it is predetermined yet free enough to shatter any necessity. It constantly collapses back into lower forms of existence, undoing the tension between the individual and the object, the self and the possession. It is purely, excessively human. The answer to this existential riddle lies in character. Everything else is just a lowered curtain. Adding the burden of freedom is merely a virus infecting an already weakened immune system—the fractured character of the new millennium. In the cheap slang of our era, people strip away the meaning of absolute ethical ideals. These ideals are the true reality of a whole, 100% individual, far removed from the external image, the view from above, or those rare moments of self-sacrifice. They are lost in the flashes of "lies" within the "truth" of a world blurred by cryptometaphysics. However, this sentence is merely an answer. It doesn't hint at a sequel; rather, it is the product of profound disappointment. It stems from an inability to weigh oneself, the world, history, freedom, or survival. Character, as a collection of traits, isn't fate itself. It isn't a choice leading to optimistic growth. Instead, character is fate *to* a person, or fate *for* a person. To emphasize: if we detect a diseased state in a famous character, it is essentially a punishment. Beyond that, nothing else is needed to muddy fate or amplify the tragedy of existence. Here, man is a finished meaning—a total nothingness. He is a hollow concept with a single possible outcome: hopelessness and loss. Like the world and everything derived from it, he is a degraded concept. Man has no fate. Character is his only sufficient fate.
The Perils of Confession
Thoughts exist in three forms: spoken (in marketplaces), written (in libraries), and sold—atemporalized and tucked into the drawers of the subconscious. Sometimes they seem lost forever, only to return uninvited as altered fragments of the same eternal questions. Spoken thoughts are rare; they are hard to shield from oblivion. Some claim they don't even exist. There are fewer and fewer people who truly speak, and more and more who certainly write. Writing provides a sanctuary. Once a question is posed, it serves as enough resolution for a person. What else is there to do when countless thoughts are sold off through a simulated flow of time? A single sentence, even if it doesn't live alongside others, creates finality. Though it cannot speak, it stands guard against wandering minds. Yet, it creates a rift, forming its own lost world. Small epigons of papyrus desperately chase this eschatology. Let it be fragmented, jumbled, prolonged, or unwritten, until it finally structures itself into something non-dead. Do not read it aloud, lest it dissipate, and do not seek meaning between the lines. The structure is the letters themselves. Something imagined far away, vast, perhaps within me? Always within you. What is new here?
New Babylon
Regarding the etymology of the word *glossa*: 1) Originally: a dark, obscure word requiring interpretation; implying uncertainty, where language begins as wonder, leading to 2) Subsequently: interpretation or explanation—the removal of the uncertainty inherent in wonder, which is the most general way of presenting the *glossa* (the interpretation) itself. The socio-semantic framework of speech does not allow for lingering uncertainty. Instead, that initial, incomprehensible wonder is radically transformed (not in a temporal sense) into the mere interpretation of the word's origin, thereby filling it with content. Here, however, the word (whether a *glossa* or otherwise) is speech transposed into a transparent form of a specific language, dialect, or slang; this allows the involution we are discussing to emerge from this darkness of meaning as 3) In everyday life, an acerbic or malicious remark. Within this fractal range, the word has gained its written history. Since the world is determined by history (and vice versa), this history takes the shape of speech, pointing toward 3) malicious remarks regarding all forms of 2) interpretation and explanation, especially regarding 1) the ambiguity of every wonder. I found myself in this position while reading a semantic sketch that I intended to 2) interpret as an involution in the case of the word *glossa*.😛
A stray thought, tossed out carelessly in a room, eventually finds its way to someone else. As it spreads, it reaches a primal semantic state—returning to the simplest possible pattern of human communication. Social language is always dead serious. News lacks irony; instead, it’s been demonized. That’s why you can’t explain anything to anyone. Everything is explainable, which means speech itself doesn't struggle with the "objectivity" of a narrative. Only living speech is real. It’s a world where nothing moves, a world that exists nowhere. Listen to me: schizophrenia isn't a thing anymore. What used to be called madness can actually be powerful. It isn't a disease. It’s a constant. Or perhaps, the whole world is just sick.