I’ve been repeatedly advertising Walker Percy’s 1971 ‘Love in the Ruins’ as the precise dystopian prediction of 2020. In his strange mystical way he managed to predict all relevant points. Smartphones intentionally crazifying us, Neuralink, “merciful” eugenics aimed especially at the elderly (KILL GRANNY!) and even electric Toyotas and Barack Obama.
While advertising Percy in a comment on Substack, I happened to find this literary essay on Percy’s concept of ‘angelism-bestialism’. Percy was also predicting the Effective Altruist monsters with their burning drive to obliterate all physical reality and escape into pure abstraction.
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Percy offers a “semiotic primer of the self” which takes as one of its chief concerns the problem of alienation and re-entry: experiences that throw us out of our familiar patterns, in ways both good and bad, and thereby generate the challenge of finding our way back into our lifeworld.
More [Percy’s antagonist] comes to believe that humans who are so orbiting their own lives may eventually decide that theirs is a superior way, a higher calling — that they are somehow meant to live in orbit (like the “citizens” of Egan’s Diaspora who shake their digital heads at “bacteria with spaceships”). This is, More thinks, an understandable but catastrophic affliction.
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A superior way, a higher calling. Zuck and Altman and Xlon and MacAskill. 200 years of accelerating abstraction in the Endarkenment / Euro culture reaches orbital velocity.
Polistra's Mill 