Weird Studies/Garmonbozia

01 Mar 2022 12:13 - 17 Jun 2023 08:29
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    • Garmonbozia as existential fear, the kind brought about by the threat of nuclear apocalypse and the general meaninglessness of modern life. Quotes Norman Mailer's White Negro, whoah:
    • Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization—that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect—in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.
    • Ref Nihil Unbound, extinction not a possibility but an inevitability. Thus cosmic meaninglessness. The bomb as simply a reminder of our essential finitude, our ultimate death and disappearance.
    • Ref Machen's White People – Oppenheimer's "physicists have known sin" quote.
    • Some discussion of God as absolute ground of being vs. God as just one agent (being) among many. (see OGU vs MU). Ref to William James A Pluralistic Universe which sounds interesting.