/edu/ - Education

The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker

The premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls “heroism”: a “defiant creation of meaning” expressing “the myth of the significance of human life” as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.

Such symbolic self-focus takes the form of an individual's "causa sui project," (sometimes called an “immortality project,” or a “heroism project”). A person’s "causa sui project” acts as their immortality vessel, whereby they suscribe to a particular set of culturally-created meanings and through them gain personal significance beyond that afforded to other mortal animals. This enables the individual to imagine at least some vestige of those meanings continuing beyond their own life-span; thus avoiding the complete “self-negation” we perceive when other biological creatures die in nature. [4] By being part of symbolic constructs with more significance and longevity than one’s body—cultural activities and beliefs—one can gain a sense of legacy or (in the case of religion) an afterlife. In other words, by living up to (or especially exceeding) cultural standards, people feel they can become part of something eternal: something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and significance in the grand scheme of things i.e. that they are “heroic contributors to world life” and thus that their contributions last beyond their biological lifespan is what’s referred to as an “immortality project.”

How exactly would you define Trotskyism? How exactly would you summerise it's key differences from other Left wing political positions?

From my understanding most people here are Marxist-Leninsts, and even those who aren't certainly don't seem to look favourably at Trotsky.
So in your view what was wrong with Trotsky's ideas, and with the modern Trotskyists?

I couldn't find any left-com threads in the catalogue so I decided to make my own.

Also, can we get some flags to differentiate between the only 3 left-com internationals? The current left-com flag is that of the PCInt and Bordigism.
I suggest for Damenites use the ICT logo and for the whatever ideology the ICC is use the guy with the hammer.
I know the council coms have a pancake flag but I think the logo on the council-communist reader goes hard. Just a thought.

Leftypol, what do you think it means to be a man worthy of death? I don’t mean in a way that they deserved to die, I suppose I applaud them for having died on noble conditions . Its a topic im still thinking about it, what about you? What does death mean to you?

I know this sounds like a bizarre request, but does anyone have all 3 volumes of das kapital as a single unformatted .txt file? I want to be able to ctrl+f all 3 volumes.

you're just a GNOSTIC!!!1! - Eric Voegelin

It's important to examine the the thought of reactionary thinkers. So here I present Eric Voegelin, buddy of Hayek, and conservative thinker.

Essentially his whole thesis is that Marx, Nietschze, and Scientific Positivists are "gnostics". and that Marx was a "speculative gnostic".

>Voegelin understood "gnosis" as a purported direct, immediate apprehension or vision of truth without the need for critical reflection; the special gift of a spiritual and cognitive elite and 'Gnosticism' as a type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. Relying as it does on a claim to gnosis, gnosticism considers its knowledge not subject to criticism. Gnosticism may take transcendentalizing (as in the case of the Gnostic movement of late antiquity) or immanentizing forms (as in the case of Marxism).

And basically that modern thinkers, by rejecting metaphysics and the origins of things (God) were unconsciously self deceptive but what sets apart Nietschze and Marx is that they were self aware of the self deception and therefore consciously "demonic" or "demono-maniacal".

>Voegelin's work does not lay out a program of reform or offer a doctrine of recovery from what he termed the "demono-maniacal" in modern politics. However, interspersed in his writings is the idea of a spiritual recovery of the primary experiences of divine order. He was not interested so much in what religious dogmas might result in personal salvation but rather a recovery of the human in the classical sense of the daimonios aner (Plato's term for "the spiritual man"). He did not speculate on the institutional forms in which a spiritual recovery might take place but expressed confidence that the current 500-year cycle of secularism would come to an end because he stated that "you cannot deny the human forever."

vidrel is a catholic workers/left wing catholic's take on Voegelin.

According to his critics:
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Was reading Camatte and came across this quote by Kautsky. The point being that workers unionizing is no real threat to capitalism as it can always reduce any negating power of the movement by incorporating it and reducing it to reformist cuckoldry.

So is it true? Are workers unions easily incorporated by capitalism and reduced to mild reformism which just keeps capitalism alive? Why then is there such a large support from radlibs here for unions when they do not have any real revolutionary potential by themselves? What's a better alternative, or actual revolutionary unions?

I was reading a double print of Communism & Terrorism (by Kautsky and Trotsky) and got to this part
>"The bourgeoisie…appears in the Soviet Republic as a special human species, whose characteristics are ineradicable. Just as a uyghur remains a uyghur, a Mongolian a Mongolian, whatever his appearance and however he may dress; so a bourgeois remains a bourgeois, even if he becomes a beggar, or lives by his work….
Just WHAT the fuck did he mean with this?

I am searching the dw for onions that have information/knowledge you wouldn't find on clearnet. For example sites with tutorials about practical hacking, carding or database onions. Anything that could be classified as "information" or "knowledge"

This feels like a thread that needs to be made because the left in general has a lot of difficulty wrapping their heads around what a caste is and why it isn't the same as class. Caste oftentimes looks like it's the same as class but it is not.
Caste follows these criteria;
>it is assigned at birth, and oftentimes impossible to change unless certain circumstances like biracialism or inter-caste marriage occur
>marriages and relationships are often not seen as valid unless certain criteria are met, such as the marriage being between people of the same caste, or the lower caste is the marriage-property of a higher-caste person, such as being a member of a harem or being a woman in a patriarchical caste system where only heterosexual marriages are recognized as valid
>upper caste people usually get their legitimacy from the social perception that their rule is ordained by god and that they are destined to rule over the lower castes because they are naturally superior beings
>lower castes are said to be spiritually unclean, and this unclean nature is difficult to describe besides that they are subhumans who live in filth. this reflects in their social roles, which usually involves working in industries and professions considered too disgusting or spiritually destructive for the higher caste to perform, or in the case of gender, these roles manifest as strict gender roles (e.g. "barefoot and pregnant")
>caste is socially constructed whereas class is economically constructed and usually more fluid
There is a lot to be said about castes, but the main thing is that the left often conflates race and gender minorities as being "lower class". We increasingly are seeing that this is not always true, yet the stigmas surrounding race and gender remain. Why? Liberalism insists that racism and gender discrimination are determined only by individual attitudes, and that attitude adjustments and language policing are the highest priority in eliminating racial or gender discrimination. However what we have seen is that the bourgeoisie has a tendency that counteracts these efforts by utilizing caste discrimination to keep people divided, even when the upper echelons of businesses now put a lot of effort into DEI, ESG and HR to counterbalance previous forms of discrimination, usually by just reversing tPost too long. Click here to view the full text.