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Pill Pod 136 - Myth of the Dialectic (Exclusive)
🕑 Added 2023-08-23 03:39:00 +0000 UTCThis week Victor and Pills read the Adventures of the Dialectic by Merleau-Ponty. It was planned hastily because Erik had an emergency, but it was an interesting read to see how little we have progressed in 70 years of leftism :'(
Stay tuned for your regularly scheduled programming as we cover some more myth.
Found a free link here if you'd like to read along: https://monoskop.org/images/7/79/Merleau_Ponty_Maurice_Adventures_of_the_Dialectic_1973.pdf
Comments
Alyn
43:26 Current Berkeley student here. It's so god damn establishment you have no idea. The new chancellor is a professor from the business school. People's Park was swept by riot cops and has a fortress built of shipping containers around it guarded by private security 24/7 now. The university plans to develop it with their partner, Blackrock. Most of the students are firmly establishment tech evangelists and if they believe in anything it's market fundamentalism. When Fox News talks about this place like it's some bastion of communism I want to laugh and cry at the same time. It's disappointing as heck.
Zachary Manenti
i agree w Victor’s hypothesis about coming of age rebellion and the marketing of rebellion to produce both a youth consumer of rebellion signs and a cultural norm as an explanation in part of the revolutionary malaise, however that is a sociological pov… if we take this coming of age rebellion in its primary historical context that must be personal history & oedipal psychoanalytic, we can expect to see disenchanted youth turning on their Trumpian parents and fathers…perhaps making them much less conservative. it’s all about the PR but one can’t discount personal history….however, it goes back to the same questions: if there’s no movement that proposes a hope of freedom ( from bondage of parents and the grind of their values) but to become rich…then that energy of rebellion just goes into that.
Qoheleth
Somewhat related, my late brother was really interested in taoism and we tried to find a way to connect with that. That is even though I wasn’t too interested in it myself. But I did notice something… that it’s philosophy holds an ancient mythic version of “dialectics”. There are differences from Marxist or materialist dialectics, but I ended up finding an article about Mao for example being influenced by that ancient version (as much as by the Marxist version) and how he used it in battle tactics.
Alex B
End points cannot be seen beyond a very short distance and radically change with context, opposition generally comes from networks of diffuse pockets of resistance, reality is process (although often influenced by imposed binaries). But dialectics have proven to be extremely productive, sometimes myths and representation can connect ideas to really interesting starting points when they'd otherwise gravitate to a flat surface of status quo.
