Curating Content To Support Learning About Humanity's Transition

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This content was posted on  10 Apr 22  by   Metamoderna  on  Facebook Page
So once you’ve learned to question the world and to pick it apart you begin, …

So once you’ve learned to question the world and to pick it apart you begin, with sincere irony, to reconstruct it playfully. You begin learning the art of mastering the many placebo effects around us, for the benefit of our own happiness and sanity, and for the benefit of others. Another quote would be in order, one by the American novelist, David Foster Wallace:

“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the ‘Oh how banal.’ To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.”

Exactly. This is sincere irony expressed better than I could have caught it. It’s from his A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments, published in 1998. This was a voice ahead of its time. By making ourselves intentionally gullible, for just a moment, we get all the real (even biochemically observable) advantages of a stronger placebo effect. One such placebo effect is happiness, optimism, a sense of direction, a sense of agency, and even free will, a higher “subjective state” in everyday life.

We meet Morpheus trying to peddle us a red pill (the grim truth), and sure, what the hell, we’ll take it. But! Then we swiftly snatch the blue one (happy illusion) out of his other hand and gobble it down, too, before he can stop us. If Neo would have done that, he would have beaten the Matrix much more easily, and he would have had more fun along the way, too. Too bad nobody told him about that third option, the ironically sincere one.

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The Protopian Mind Must Function From A Radical Stance of Sincere Irony

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