Just out of curiosity which works from Soviet dissidents would you recommend I read?
Varlam Shalamov. Bleak, great and terrible. Also fairly apolitical, beyond a confirmation that tyranny is tyranny and it fucks people bad. He’s certainly beyond the notions of individualism and collectivism that a “civilized” life allows; it’s all about mere survival in an order of pure hatred and malice.
This is unfair to him no? While Moldbug clearly dislikes universalism, his brain is far less black-and-white than that of the regular modern intellectual.
Yes, but I meant a different thing by “black-and-white”. “Grayscale” would be a better word, and it’s more epistemic rather than directly about sacredness/purity. One might say that he doesn’t quite appreciate in which ways and on how many levels people might value things, although of course he has a better understanding of the simple breadth of possible values than the “regular modern intellectual” (wanted to say how those might not be evidence that society is more conformist, but damn I need a rest).
Varlam Shalamov. Bleak, great and terrible. Also fairly apolitical, beyond a confirmation that tyranny is tyranny and it fucks people bad. He’s certainly beyond the notions of individualism and collectivism that a “civilized” life allows; it’s all about mere survival in an order of pure hatred and malice.
Yes, but I meant a different thing by “black-and-white”. “Grayscale” would be a better word, and it’s more epistemic rather than directly about sacredness/purity. One might say that he doesn’t quite appreciate in which ways and on how many levels people might value things, although of course he has a better understanding of the simple breadth of possible values than the “regular modern intellectual” (wanted to say how those might not be evidence that society is more conformist, but damn I need a rest).