[nootropicat]

I think this article is going to interest you: https://gist.github.com/jart/b73868081a5e1a1c5cf0

>Finally, our parasite will employ a strategy of politicization, insisting that everyone in a society be involved in the contest for political power. Since our memetic parasite is already bound to one or more political factions, politicization leaves no one with the option to ignore it, and simply live their lives. Neutrality is not acceptable. All those who are not actively infected, and who do not openly endorse the parasite, are by definition its enemies. And they will be crushed. The safest thing is to play along, and raise your children in the faith - even if you don't really believe, they will.

>At this point we've established, at least to my satisfaction, that

>(a) there is such a thing as Universalism;

>(b) Universalism is an educationally-transmitted tradition that works just like any theistic religion, and is best understood as a descendant of Christianity;

>Universalism, again, is a mystery cult of power. Its supreme being is the State. And all of the Universalist mysteries - humanity, democracy, equality, and so on - cluster around the philosophy of collective action. Christianity has been a state religion since Constantine, of course, but it always also included magical and metaphysical mysteries, which the advance of science has rendered superfluous at best, embarrassing at worst. So Universalism, unlike its ancestors, is not concerned with the Trinity or transubstantiation or predestination.

[Pils]

Obviously the solution to workplace politicization is...dissolving the federal government and appointing Eric Schmidt the CEO of a newly founded business-state?

> One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:

1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.

2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.

3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.

https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis

[kazoomonger]

TBH, that article doesn't really make any sense. Saying "because ideology A shares a few attributes with my favorite ideology, it's really just a subset of my ideology" doesn't really make sense. Also, I don't understand how he thinks that pacifism or communalism are unique to christianity. That's just a bizarre claim.

It's also weird how he's aware of the oversimplification involved in classifying birds and bats in the same category, and then he immediately goes off and says the equivalent of "both a birds and planes have wings and a tail, therefore planes are a subset of birds". While that statement can be true from a certain point of view for certain uses ("can this thing fly?"), in the end it's just a bad analogy and bad reasoning.

Which is all not to say that the point I think you're driving at from your selection in that article can't be correct. I would agree that post-religion, people will pick up causes to fight for and act in ways that are reminiscent of fundamentalist religions, but that doesn't mean the fundamental truth is that they're all variations of religion. The fundamental truth is some people just enjoy picking up causes that let them justify bad behavior. This used to include religion a lot more in the past, and now that humanity is moving beyond it, we're discovering new ways to justify the same old behavior that we've always had.