Dude, you got my anxiety so high I couldn't even breathe! I'm already disabled, poor, and not allowed to escape my poverty. I'm literally not allowed BY LAW to have more than $2000 or I lose my Section 8 AND Disability payments, so forget ever getting enough for a down payment for a house or a car that mitigates my disabilities and lifts a wheelchair. It doesn't matter how many pb&j sandwiches I have or what I sacrifice, I'm not allowed to crawl out of poverty. It's a bullshit system. There is no way I can go to work again even if I found an employer with a flexible schedule because any extra money I get, my rent goes up and goes right into my slumlord's pocket. No thank you. Poverty is inescapable!!! When I was in high school, I took several political tests to see where I lay, and it was right down the center, not one point more towards one or the other. Then I gained life experience and moved ALLLLL the way to the left.
This is a big, fat fuckin mood for me too man. I'm in pretty much the same boat, and as a cherry on top of this disaster, my mom died this year, and left me alone with all our cats to take care of. I still get food stamps for her, and that's technically illegal, but the funny thing is? I need every single god damn cent to fucking survive. Inflation is so god damn terrible that it's squeezing me, and a lotta people I know dry. I spend so much time and mental energy trying to think my way out of this disgusting poverty trap, and I just can't. I slip further and further into insanity just trying to wrap my head around all the different ways that this system is fucking me. I want to find a job, work at a co-op somewhere, at a place that's willing to work around my disabilities, and where I can make a living and not sell my soul or break my body and mind to do it, but that simple desire seems like an unreachable, unknowable dream, let alone the dream of a full on revolution to happen in my lifetime. I retreat further into the echos of a disjointed past because I can no longer conceptualize my present, and my future no longer exists.. I hope everyone in the pit of the abyss can claw they're way back out, but a lot of days, I already feel dead.
Good to know what you both say here confirms my understanding so far. Homrless living in van...i must keep on thru another winter up north in MN/WI. If I took the "program" trap route now, how could I pay traffic fines to get DL back + fix van? I need housing but how?! ... better to keep freezing & try to just not die yet. Knee surgery will have to wait. What a catch 22 it all is.
I used to have wonderful, hope filled dreams decades ago. I would fly and save people, go on adventures. Now, there's only one theme every. Single. Night. And that is to establish shelter and survive. I've been homeless before and I can't go back, I literally won't survive with my litany of health problems. In my waking life, I dream an impossible dream of establishing a tiny house co-op community. Self sufficient, off grid, far away from society. I've never spent a single moment of my life unobserved by other people, and that's an issue for me. I need some peace and quiet with some animals and a garden, land and home I own, a social safety net, decent internet, and I feel I can really get my life in order for the first time a la Hierarchy of Needs.
@@AlexiasShado God, I'd love to live like that too. But i'm terrified I'm gonna be just another nameless nobody swallowed up by the meat grinder.. I aint really religious, but god help us all..
1) It's nice to have disabled people actually recognized as one of the many groups most royally fucked up by capitalism. I hate that it's something I even feel the urge to remark, but abled leftists so often seem not even to not make an effort to remember we exist, but actually do everything in their power to forget our plight at all costs that it's refreshing when any as much as mentions us in any way, so thank you. 2) I want to hold hope but I'm Chilean and I'm still not recovered from the shit show that was our last referendum. Like, only reason I didn't cry is that I kinda saw it coming but God it hurts. I don't know what it'll take for change to happen without an actual bloody revolution that the US and rest of the imperial core will not let succeed anyway.
@@DerekSpeareDSD I'm afraid that precisely due to my multiple disabilities I barely have the bodily and cognitive capacity to bathe regularly and then go right back to bed to stay bedridden, let alone make in depth political videos that are bound to get me immense backlash that I'll then have to deal with alone as a non-binary crippled and autistic lesbian who dresses like a weirdo on purpose at 30.
I'm a disabled person too, and feel exactly the same. The obsession with "The Worker" leaves a good number of people blind to the fact that not all of the working class can actually work. The Soviet Union's approach to disability was still to remove agency from those unable to be productive and to simply impose management and a lack of social mobility upon them. Another youtuber called "John the Duncan" has a good video about disability within capitalism and as seen by the broad left that you may be interested in.
@@VenusMacabre go live your best life no matter what! You can always make videos about whatever you want, or not...everyone should live their best life and define it the way the choose!!! 😃
This hits me really hard, as I feel despair all the time after eating the “forbidden fruit” of knowledge… and the more I learn, the more paralyzed I feel. But thankfully I have loved ones around me that keep me from staring at the abyss for too long. Give you an example (and apologies for the length of this story) - this past weekend me, my wife and another good friend of ours went out restaurant/bar hopping at a nearby town, and while we were sitting, our friend noticed a woman wearing a red dress, so she complimented her on “rocking it!”. The woman blushed, thanked her for saying so, and proceeded to tell us it was her birthday. One conversation leads to another and the birthday woman began to say “I don’t know how you feel politically”, but I quickly said to her without hesitation of what she would think, I said “well, I don’t believe in capitalism and it’s literally killing us…” My wife and friend braced for a strong response, as the area we were in is not exactly left leaning… but I got a strong reaction alright.. she smiled warmly and said “yes! Exactly!!!” At first I thought she was being sarcastic. She then launched into dialogue on how messed up our nation is how she no longer views people the same way after the rise of Trump, how corporations continue to consolidate and gain more power/influence…. Etc. She began to tear up… sure some booze in her system was taking but she was very REAL with us. She told us “I’m now 49 years old, and I feel absolutely hopeless…” I nodded along in agreement as I feel the same most days, but our friend jumps in and emphatically tells her (and by extension myself as well) that “We cannot lose hope. We must not let despair win, it’s the only way we can fight the systems that are in place. Even if it’s small victories locally, embrace those wins as it has an impact.” The whole exchange that night had an impact on all of us at that table. It was a raw conversation between people, raw conversations that probably need to happen more often. I digress…. Point being, I’m on a pendulum…. Swaying back and forth of being hopeless and hopeful.
To quote the contemporary cosmic horror author, avowed socialist and very depressed person Thomas Ligotti's novella "The Bungalow House": "I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement-anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know." It is this, I think, which specifically draws me to nihilist anarchism: That whether or not I have hope as such is irrelevant, only that I am willing to start a task regardless of whether I finish it, that I comfort and am comforted by my fellow sufferers and strivers against this world-as-it-is however I can.
I would say that in the movie Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind by Studio Ghibli, you do see themes of cosmic horror from a left-wing environmentalist perspective. The kicker is, you see it from "both sides" of the conflict, but by looking more carefully at each side, it still becomes clear that one of these sides is outright bad and the other is, while not easy to pin down outright as "good" due to its ineffable nature and strange ways, clearly beneficial in ways the other "side" is not. And the protagonist, Nausicäa, can recognize which of the two types of "eldritch horror" is the one that would benefit humanity and turns away from the type of horror that would yield nothing but destruction (though not without a crisis of conscience and some bad trauma-based decisions along the way).
Tbh, I really do find Cosmic Horror to be very soothing. I've been very badly treated by life (lots of DV at home, abused at school, ableism, IPV, being forced to keep up with abled people in work, which ruined my body and brain, and much more), and having these giant, terrifying, L O O M I N G concepts, full of dread, is really just a great, thinly veiled allegory for my anxiety. Like, my fears are truly the opposite of Lovecraft's intentions from when he was a popular author (he did regret his awfulness later, so I give him some very small props for that), but the Outer Gods are a great vessel for how I feel about living in the current society. And seeing everyone here reacting similarly, it feels very "So you can see it too?"
The mind attempts to fill the spaces, mental and emotional craters left by the systems at play around us, with data, facts, problems and solutions, until it is overwhelmed by the whole of it. It’s the heart that, like water, finds its way into every crevice and begins to pool. Cave walls and ceilings made of nightmarish stone, no light to be seen at the end of the tunnel, still drip and grow wet with the waters of compassion and kindness-the waters of belief that a better world is possible.
crazy how a video can be so bleak and yet so comforting to see these issues acknowledged and spoken about. i guess that's one difference between horror stories and reality.
If we really care as much as we claim to, we need to stop looking down our noses at those who've never been (un)fortunate to encounter these realizations on *their* own. Scorn & judgement will lead us right into the abyss - pushing our brothers and sisters into that cult that aids/unleashes the true horrifying potential of our real oppressors. Even those of us with that "forbidden knowledge" can still be manipulated, & the best way to do so is via starting from some abstraction & ignoring inconvenient context surrounding that abstraction. Most act like the Cult created Cthulhu rather than the cult being victims of manipulation from an entity that's existed for centuries. Be kind to your neighbor. We won't see 2030 if ideology & international relations are continually treated like a team sport & we're just fans. *=Edited/typo.
this, so much this. Being liberal is ignorant, being right wing for the vast majority of poeple isnt being evil because your evil, its cuz your in what amounts to an abusive relationship/death cult. As long as the left keeps acting like we cant comprimise and come to the table with people who arent facists and offer former right wingers redemption and help, we will be doomed to failure. Like, as long as you havent gone out and lynched someone or are an oil baron or whatever, they are still redeemable.
Its not really about “team sports” so much as the realizing that those who have no empathy must not receive any. Sorry, Fascists are not sentient humans to me and no amount of torture inflicted on them would phase me in the slightest.
@@marshallsweatherhiking1820 Well, fascism is a phenomenon that comes from "Capital in decay", meaning, it's a phenomenon the capitalist ruling class uses for several reasons - most being economic. One is to stop growing class consciousness among workers, & it is used beat back gains by rising organized labor - among many other things. The capitalist ruling class, regardless of claimed ideology - are absolutely our enemy & are the progenitors of what's called fascism, so if that's who you mean by fascists, I'm with you - because I like to get to the core of issues - not just their symptoms. Oh, plus their Petit-Bourgeois lackeys I'd group in there too.
EXACTLY. one of the things that made it difficult for me to learn why so many of the things i was taught growing up were very very wrong was how snarky people can be. yelling at people who don't know never helps. *teaching* each other is how we can make progress. name calling and fighting only makes people double down
@@marnenotmarnie259 I absolutely agree! Very well said too btw! The ideological bigotries people hold today can all be traced back to some sort justifying ideology created by the "exploiting class" for why they're in the dominant position in relation to economic production - today we call them the capitalist class or Bourgeoisie. Until the exploitative class is abolished, these ideological bigotries will continue to exist. Our job should be to educate in a kind, empathetic way as material conditions drive people seek alternatives to capitalism. The current competition between capitalist cultivated identity groups as politics - gives the illusion of democracy & allows the capitalist class a pass to do whatever they want. It's gross & I'm soo glad there are others who feel similarly!
I'm not very good at literary analysis and have never been able to fully examine why I like the C'thulhu Mythos so much but this connection you draw to the existential dread I also feel every day really helped.
I actually had the same sentiment in reverse; having picked up Lovecraft at age 14 and fallen in love, I feel like it prepared me to both embrace and pace myself when learning about patriarchy, capitalism, WS, Climate Change, etc. In both cases, I feel like I’ve looked dread and despair in the eye, and rejected it.
"When the stars are right, the proletariat will arise." As a left leaning person, I've often made comparisons of the various systems of oppression to eldritch abominations. Though in a weird way, I consider my personal philosophy be kind of the reverse of Lovecraft's cosmicism.
The cold indifference of the universe is no match for the indominable human spirit! The problem with being an inconcievable cosmic god is it makes ya lazy, complacent, a luxory that us short lived, frantic creatures dont have to slow us down
OOH I'm excited, will edit this comment when I've finished the video! Edit: Holy, was this a great video. I'm a huge Lovecraft nerd, so I was really appreciative of that side of the video. Your comments about how the abyss of late-stage capitalism is growing closer and closer to even generally upper-middle-class people really hit home with me. Great video as always Phil, respect the hell out of you!
When you first start reading theory, using dialectics, it can be despair inducing, because you can see the gulf between where we are and where we could be. You can see the inherent harms waved away in the current systems, because "the alternative is worse". This can lead to people stopping there and reverting to the status quo, or even becoming reactionary because of how uncomfortable the knowledge makes them. But if you push through, you can realize seeing the gulf means you know it can be crossed. Seeing the "gaping maw" of harms in the system means you know they can be changed. You can see the inherent threat that unionization, mutual aid, and intersectional cooperation pose to the current system.
@Acceleration Quanta Carb-stacking a week beforehand? That was obviously meant to be some kind of insult but I assume you're just trolling at this point honestly. You could probably take your own advice on "cease wasting your own time with decadent nonsense".
I think the biggest impediment is getting people to agree on any specific courses of action. To use the language of the video, it's like getting people to agree to sacrifice their blood and sanity to call forth a new Old One to supplant the one that exists. If it's hard to agree on what to get on your pizza, it's damn near impossible to get agreement on what Great Unknown to sacrifice yourself for.
Oh, yes, absolutely! Start with: "We need a better system than capitalism..." and the next you'll hear is: "And what? Socialism? That has never worked!" And then the discussion is over. I think too many people where I live are still too well off and cannot empathize with the ones who have been ground underneath the wheels of the machine for ages. To the German middle class, the poor are just somebody they have to pay for. And when you suggest changing they system, they think they will have to pay even more. And if you try to convince them that there are concepts that would work well, they will draw argument after argument out of their butts as to why change is impossible. Because their brains have already been infested by capitalist brain eaters from a higher dimension and now they cannot think in anything else but capitalist concepts.
Yes. Just…so much yes. I can’t remember when I started pulling on the yarn that radicalized me, but I think it was somewhere between Sesame Street in the 70s and attending a secular university in the 90s. And then LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE that’s happened since. And once that yarn’s been pulled, that big old pile of disintegrated cardigan becomes a crushing existential weight. Thank you for verbalizing it so eloquently. You are my favorite of all the Dang Dads. ❤
I love this video. Thank you so much. As someone coincidentally getting into cosmic horror as a genre, this legitimately felt emotionally uplifting and encouraging. I appreciate you sharing this sentiment.
I love this. Call me toxically optimistic, but if I had one counter argument, it's similar to the christian belief, "if you believe in a heaven, then there must be a hell also". I believe the reverse applies here. If we are mere mortals facing against old gods of unfathomable horror and malice bent on our eternal suffering, then there must also be gods of benevolence that work in our favor. But I know the question that comes after is "Where are they then? If they cared, they would have done something by now." And idk what to say to that. Of course, "gods" being a metaphor for the constructs of man and our effect on the environment with this whole thing (though I am a hedonist and polytheist and do believe in gods and spirits), I believe if these "evil gods" are our destructive manmade constructs, then we can and are obviously building our own constructs for not just destroying these, but building a society that serves everyone and heals the planet. I personally believe we need to fight harder than ever and see if gods of love peace and benevolence start revealing themselves to us. I would rather do that and die than go on living in a world where I know the dreams of the many will never be fulfilled. It can't all be eternal darkness and despair, or how did we as people and the concept of a leftist worldview ever come to be? The biggest obstacle to me is isolation. I haven't told my family my views yet. I've hinted at them, and have come in danger of being exposed once or twice, so I fell silent. I don't want to go full socialist in front of them until I know I have a means of carrying myself, so that if they don't want me around anymore, I can leave and never return. I think there are a lot of closeted allies in the same boat. They opened their eyes, possibly long ago, saw how bad things are, but have remained silent because they live with zealous agents of the very evils eating mankind alive, that would either destroy or excommunicate them into homelessness, if they sense anything is amyss. I have a friend across the country from me that lives on their grandmother's back porch. She won't let them have a room or even sleep on her couch because "she's a good christian woman" and my friend is trans non-binary. She sees letting them live on her property as sufficient enough. I've helped in ways that I can, I tried looking into if my friend can get help or if there are any programs that can give them housing, but there's little I can do to change their situation. As with being able to change my own, I want to give them the power (money) they need to get out of their situation, one day. Thankfully they've met someone that may be able to help them. But this is what I mean. My friend prefers to stay a-political, but they're being punished just for being themselves and wanting to be free to live their own life. It is the isolation and lack of knowledge of where to find people that can be a support that is the biggest issue. I'm trying to express my views more through my own work, the very work I want to make a living with, in the hopes that I can build something meaningful to the cause and raise spirits, but even that is time consuming and takes a lot out of me, and my personal life doesn't pull any punches with ruining my schedule right now. Because I am dependent on my conservative family, because my only other option is living in a box under a bridge, I have to play along and be patient.
My mind always wanders towards food production when I get too overwhelmed. Its a calming thing to engage in because it's mostly just learning about nature, but it doubles as something very important for community. I think a large barrier towards having an active community is the unavailability of fresh, nourishing, seasoned meals in a shared space. Maybe u think I'm joking but fr, I know if I could tell my friends "ay, I got ur meals for 2 months right here" they'd have more energy and funds to do good things. Gorilla farming is a real thing you can invest time into that actively strikes against this system. The greater your community's food stability, the stronger and more able to strike.
I wish I had some comrades who would turn the produce I grow into meals. After working in the community garden, I just don't have the energy to do it. And that totally sucks. Plus: No rain. The drought has us by the balls. If climate change continues, I won't be able to grow anything here and will become a climate refugee.
Hey that dang dad, please make more cosmic horror leftist videos. With my ptsd, it’s very hard to sleep at night and these videos scratch a psychological itch. Or make a playlist of video essays and leave it as a link. The darkness is so emotionally soothing
The thing that horrifies me the most, is how possible organizing and building community is. I'm thinking about my time in the Christian church, back when I was giving religion the ol' college try. I went to a megachurch in huge city, my state's capital city. The sanctuary (Whatever you want to call it, the place where the preacher preaches) was massive, must have sat a couple hundred, maybe even a thousand or two people, and it was often full. It was pretty diverse too, you had your typical middle/upper class white people, but its a very black city, so there was a huge population of non-white people too. College kids, your regular blue collar worker, all types of people. The music was great (for worship music anyway), there was free coffee, 3 different services at different times, multiple services in a week. There was a daycare thing, pretty sure there was some transportation system they worked out, and the church wasn't far from the city's busline. I'm not exactly a biblical scholar, but I can hold my own, I have more than the average church goer's understanding of the Bible, and I had few complaints (though definitely some) on the sermons, they were usually accurate, they weren't outright homophobic. This was obviously a multimillion mega-corporation, they had money. They really pushed community building too, they had these small groups they'd get people in the church to host, specifically just for hanging out and building community. I went to the ones specializing in the 20-30 age range, but there were others for parents, ones specifically for guys and girls exclusively, etc. My point being, on every level I can think of, it was an attractive place of community. The barrier of entry for everything was miniscule, in comparison to what we're up against. And even still, based on what I saw, maybe somewhere between 1-10% showed up to a small group once, much less continually showed up. We're talking young adults, the horny ones looking for a date, the ones without kids, people who'd shank someone for a slice of free pizza- they're still (actually if I'm holding myself accountable, WE'RE still) hesitant to show up to a group of 15-20 people. We also did a yearly city wide thing, where we did something approximating activism, my group built a treehouse for a "struggling" family (They definitely looked well off, but whatever, we can do nice things for well off people too). Other groups picked up litter, held cookouts, cleaned some debris from a storm, things to help the city out. Obviously, a lot less people showed up to that, I couldnt give you a number, but definitely significantly less. I think a culture of individualism has fucked our brains bad, we're so terrified of emotional vulnerability and community The thing that keeps me up at night terrified, is we won't be able to grow enough community to truly fix everything that needs fixing. That we won't be able to get enough money and people that love/care enough together, to create a strong enough movement(s) to fight who and what we need to fight. Human beings are so terrifically powerful and intelligent, technology has become advanced enough that if we as humans wanted to create a literal utopia, a literal fucking garden of Eden, we could feasibly do it! Difficult yes, but possible absolutely But we don't, because it's hard. And I'm scared. I know it's the doomer in me talking right now, but fuck she's got a point
In our present state of things, it feels less like banding together to defeat Lovecraftian Old Gods and more like hunkering down to survive Ragnarok. The war of the gods to kill them all. We just have to live through it and rebuild from the dust.
This metaphor of cosmic horror is great. I was having a convo recently about looking back on professors and realizing they were in fact, very based. Once you understand things differently, some seemingly innocuous details come back.
I see you weaving in that clever word choice; the imagery of a doomed investigator falling deeper into darkness. This is the smartest spooky-season video essay there's been. - Neil
I can honestly say, I loved this channel when (an unremembered number of months back) I first stumbled across it , but it just gets better and better. This spoke to me. Witches and warlocks, excommunicants from cults of dark power, priests who have absconded from deceitful deities and death cults, veterans of bygone drubbings, detritus and discards marred by the maws of the machine, those so terrifying to the masters that their true names must be unspoken in 'polite' polities, scum and dregs, wasted and unwanted: Earthlings all, and bearers of the burden of beating the Beast.
I remember some time, around 7 maybe, where I was swinging on my swingset in my backyard of my mom and dad's suburban home and just sitting with my thoughts by myself. I pictured the world that surrounded me. I thought of all the houses of as much of the neighborhood as I had seen, and created some filler for the rest based on what I had seen immediately around the rest. I imagined all the people who went to various places, because my entire block's houses were filled with people of varying numbers and I figured everywhere must be like that at the time (this was like, 2002 maybe?). I pictured all the gas that must go into their cars (cause I knew that cars burned gas and I knew what a gallon jug looked like so I could rough estimate what 15 of those looked like, tho I still thought gasoline was a black sludge that I would learn later was actually crude oil). And based on all of this I came to my first major issue: See, I knew what homeless people were. And I knew that if you didn't have a job as an adult you'd eventually be homeless unless you are one of those weird rich people, because school and TV and even my parents made sure I did in all sorts of ways. And I tried to think "How many jobs are there?" and that's when I realized "The reason there are homeless people are because there are not enough jobs where they live". I called it The Meat Grinder, because to me that's what it was: This machine made out of society that turned people into metaphorical liquid until they died or couldn't work anymore and did the dying later. It was why everyone I knew was always stressed to the point that they seemed like they'd break. And the worst part? All that's changed in the 20 years since is that I know now that no human being nor animal made the meat grinder, its just the nature of entropy, exerting itself over all systems it can influence, causing rise to new terrors on the regular.
@@Lincoln_Bio No, people continue the meat grinder. The Meat Grinder however would be there if we had a society to enforce it or not. Its entropy. Its the difficulty of making sure a required thing is in its required location. We didn't make it so food decays even when stored, we didn't make it so we had to travel long distances to make sure the surplus of one community would make it to another. We didn't decide that only some small fraction of the world's space would be capable of growing food, or that certain metals could only be found in small and rare deposits. But we do continue to have a system that doesn't want to deal with those issues, and thus the meat grinder continues to exist, and if our society falls it will continue to exist without us, grinding up whatever wildlife or emerging intelligence is left into a fine, red paste with which to lubricate its gears.
@@ShadaOfAllThings Ah so this is a more general existential life/death cycle cruelty-of-nature thing, gotcha. I'd suggest choosing another name for it to save confusion, as the meat grinder is already a well established analogy for the capitalist machine.
Hey Phil, father of Lil. As a fellow father myself, thank you for your deep and thoughtful videos. Double thanks because you are an ally and a voice for the voiceless. Keep fighting the good fight!
... okay now make me feel like I'm a character written in a happier genre now... No but really. To see the world is to have chronic existential horror.
I never really thought about how horrific life is as a multiply marginalized person. For me it's just my daily reality. But this video really just puts into perspective how true it is when we say that we live in the worst timeline.
very relatable. Ive found that my journey to becoming "woke" has been more like falling into a nightmare. I've never felt more hopeless than realizing that the American Dream is pointless and unattainable, and no amount of voting is going to fix America.
I had to come back this video and make another comment because I've been thinking about it all weekend. The reason so many of Lovecraft's protagonists fail is because they think they are alone. They think they are the only one with forbidden knowledge and that the knowledge is dangerous, almost shameful. None of them had The Internet or Reddit or any other way to easily and anonymously seek out others who had glimpsed the truth. I am reminded of when I was first navigating the idea that I might be transgender. I didn't even know that word at the time. I just knew that my body, my pronouns, the expectations placed on me by society all felt profoundly wrong. It was terrifying and isolating. It was only through the magic of The Internet and a great therapist that I learned the words to describe who I was. It is only through the Internet (and BreadTube) that I have learned how to talk about how our capitalistic, fascist-leaning society really works. But, exposing myself online makes me and my family vulnerable to those who hate me for what I am and what I know. Again, this is a fantastic video and it will take me some time to fully process it.
I've had the conception of capitalism, white supremacy, and other exploitative ideologies as akin to Lovecraftian gods for a few years without being able to articulate it much at all, so I'm damn glad for this video
You've put into words so eloquently what I've been struggling to articulate for years. But I'm still despairing. Even if we manage to band together and put bezos or praeger or koch back in their tombs, there are and always will be other entities waiting for the opportunity to feast on us all
I’ve used cosmic horror for a while to reckon with my own marginalization as a queer and neurodivergent person trying to navigate the world. Whether or not he meant it to be one, Lovecraft created an insanely good analogy for what we go through daily. Something is out there, influencing things in our world. It’s big, and it’s not corporeal. But it *can* be destroyed, or at least sent away. And that’s what makes Lovecraft worth reading to me. That fact that, even though the Old Ones are incredibly fearsome and hard to comprehend, they can eventually be taken down.
Not sure what Lovecraft you're reading but the message was quite the opposite. Humanity is nothing in the face of the vast cosmos that lay beyond. You cannot kill Cthulhu, only send him away for later. That is why so many of Lovecraftian protagonists off themselves.
Alright, imagine you're in a room full of thousands of rats. The rats are fed well enough to be subdued, even though they are trapped in whatever cage you have them in. They probably wouldn't think to come near you, out of fear of your shear size. But imagine... If the rats were starving. If they were already at each other's throats just to eke out a meager, cannibalistic existence... And a person steps in. A big, towering hulk... Of fresh meat. No one would wish themselves in this position. Let's realize we are the rats. Let's realize that we have the rich in that very room. Let us feed the starving of our own flesh and bone and gather strength to our weakest, so that all may support the ultimate goal... ...of bringing down that hoard of sustenance. There is even a key on that giant's hip. Let us climb, my beautiful rodent siblings. Climb and face the maw and clawing fists of the giant and realize... WE OUTWEIGH IT TOGETHER!!!!!!! No gods no masters, comrades!!!!
Individualism and cooptation. I can't even get my coworkers, who all complain constantly about pay and working conditions, to fathom a collective response like unionization or striking or threatening either together, they're convinced individually begging for raises no one gets or looking for a better job elsewhere or promotion within are the only ways forward. And the last one is the real rub, anyone truly useful enough to make a threat that can't be easily replaced gets a 70 cent raise and or a tiny title promotion and becomes a company (wo)man instead of having any solidarity with the mass of "unskilled" labor that is asked to work harder and eat the lost wages to inflation daily. Idk wtf it would take to regrow union and collective action in this country but it seems impossible in the face of the astroturfed but deep rooted worship of individualism and self over all else
This connection has been on my mind since playing Night In The Woods back in 2020, towards the start of the pandemic. The global scale of the problem and the clear inability for even the most developed societies to be human enough to handle it had already brought the feeling of cosmic horror foremost in my thoughts, and that game really develops the connection between that feeling and the agonizing decay of capitalism.
From a piece I wrote about it not long after finishing: Everywhere this struggle plays out, there is a choice that must be made: the choice between the grueling, exhausting, often unfulfilling work of holding everything together as best as you can, or allowing the darkness that pervades the world to swallow you up and make you into something just as monstrous, or worse. Mae, her parents, Beatrice, Gregg, Angus, Selmers, Lori, the Reverend, and dozens of other characters whose stories we only get the slightest glimpse of, hold together in the face of encroaching chaos, for no immediate reward other than to get to do it again the next day. That’s a rotten deal, and the temptation can easily arise to resort to drastic, even violent measures, if it seems as though they could end the sadistic game once and for all. Mae, especially, is vulnerable to this temptation; it is no coincidence that when the cult speaks of the song of Black Goat, they say to Mae “He’s been singing to you too, hasn’t he?” Black Goat is the impulse to burn it all down, to be done with having nothing and bloodily tear something from someone else’s arms, and bloody yourself yet further to keep it. It is, bluntly, the call of fascism; to see the lives of others, people you deem to be undesirable or degenerate, as the sacrifice that must be offered in exchange for the paradise you yearn for. It is just as natural a consequence of the collapse of capitalism as anything else. Not everyone can be confronted with the true horror of their circumstances and maintain any semblance of humanity while carrying the burden of that knowledge. This is where the game’s socialist themes overlap with its Lovecraftian storytelling: the reality of America in the 21st century is exactly the kind of mind-splintering horror that Lovecraft wrote about, and most of the people in his stories who confronted those horrors descended into madness or pushed that knowledge out of their heads. To truly understand one’s position within all of this is tantamount to recognizing that one exists within a vast, chaotic, uncaring universe.
Great analogy, and fantastic wave visuals. I don't have as much forbidden reading under my belt, but I've also felt and thought exactly the same about the growing abyss. I'm comfortable too, but I can see not-comfortable from my porch, getting closer.
I feel like the biggest obstacle when it comes to uniting against the ruling class is resources and getting people to come together and do things. I also honestly don't know where you'd even start considering the system favors the ruling class. It seems like breaking some laws would be inevitable tbh
Great video. Not an interpretation of Lovecraft I've seen before and even if the dude himself was trash, his work can be salvaged. Also, the music captioning was incredible. Kudos to whoever is doing that, the descriptions were amazing
Rare early comment: the content warning is most of my Venn diagram. This is entirely my jam, ready and braced for it. Will hopefully be back after if I’m able to make words…
I think that often the biggest thing blocking us is that we are forced into using the tools of our oppressors in much of our efforts to organize, something which cannot be functionally solved while the systems remain in place but will also perpetually hamstring us. I do think that education is often our best tool against this, and bringing receipts when they do use this power to silence and divide us is going to be key, and has already been shown to be effective sometimes, while decidedly not being a silver bullet. Doomerism is another of our biggest obstacles, but unfortunately the only real salve is wins and wins are increasingly difficult as more people fall into it, so I push myself to find and follow hope without blinders.
This is awesome Brother thank you I could not have said it better myself, and I think you have inspired me to finally start my own channel and finally start making my own content
Ooooft. That nearly gave me a panic attack, only because it's 100% the truth. I also try not to actively think about all this all the time, because... self preservation. BUT what this should make us feel is angry and energised to fight back as much as we can. We fight back by protesting, by trying to save as much beauty and love in our lives, creating collectives and preserving community and camaraderie. We can only try to survive together.
I know this is only tangently related to HP but I feel you get him better than most especially those that identify as leftwing. I always find it amusing for those that read him and cry out for how he depicts more "savage" people. But he also makes note that such people have come face to face with what destroys the sanity of his protagonist and yet those people continue to function. They have the knowledge, they work and live knowing what is real to be real. If anything this shows these people as stronger and far from lesser beings. They adapted to ultimate horror and continue to push on. I think this is what we need to become and not some shell-shocked professor who can't live with the idea that he is not the pinnacle of life in the universe.
Love this. I specifically started getting into Lovecraft right at the beginning of the pandemic when I was quarantined in Rhode Island for a month with my wife. I think your framing is 100% correct and I do think that tying billionaire individuals or multinational corporations to conceptions of death cults and great old ones is really, well just spot on. I've been very curious to see where you would take your content since I found you a couple of months ago and I'm glad I did with this particular video. I do think that people who work together can overcome the great old ones themselves, but the cosmic horrors will always find purchase connected to our individual traumas and pains. I believe that this is the most important component of facing horror. that ultimately, it is our own journey toward finding the light within ourselves which allows us to transcend the limitations which the Cthonic powers can and will weaponize against ourselves and those we seek to work in solidarity with. for this reason and many others, I continue to hold out hope for mass movements of individual and collective healing.
I struggled to understand Lovecraftian horror for a long time, because how could knowing something be dangerous to your mental health? Then I read a lot of the SCP wiki, and the writers there use the term cognitohazard. I still didn’t buy it. Nowadays, I am realizing that knowing certain truths can lead to a feeling of despair, but only if you let it.
i think the part where i messed up in my personal journey is that i found allies to despair with instead of allies to oppose and defend. hiding together doesn't push back, it just lets them carpet over you.
How dare you perfectly and poetically vocalize the deep dread and dispare I feel every day smh 😭Damn I wish my anarchist rants were this good. But seriously as a young, queer, neurodivergent single mom with a very young neurodivergent child, stuck in poverty, knowing that the world awaiting my daughter will probably be worse, I'm in a constant state of anxiety and exhaustion and hopelessness and heart break for others (especially the kids) that are being vilified, neglected and abused by politicians. It makes my fucking head spin. Needless to say this video sent me spiraling yet was weirdly comforting. It's validating to hear someone express the same feelings especially so artfully, and your voice definitely helps lol
Horrifyingly beautiful and hopeful. When I try to organise in my workplace, apathy is the worst enemy to the working class. Most people don’t seem to care that they’re being exploited, they’re either too busy or just happy to be working
Thank you for articulating so clearly a connection that's been rolling around in my brain for a long time now. I think that the "madness" that conservatives and centrists will ascribe to you as you begin to grapple with the truly monstrous scope of the problems in our society is another parallel that's always stuck out to me. Only through working together can we hope to beat back that evil.
Someone else said this I think here but I can't even count the amount of times I'd had pretty productive political conversations with all sorts of people only to understand almost at the very end that "vote? ah not really, what's the point you know? I guess this stuff is important to me but what's it gonna change?" talk about a bummer. Conservatives can only barely scrape up any wins because they cheat and because so many people with progressive ideas just don't get themselves to make that super important step. please go vote people, any hope for any amount of change is literally depending on it. Anyway love your vidz papa.
This video perfectly describes the absolute devastation and despair I feel the more I learn about all the ways the systems in our world are truly, intentionally, built to exploit us. The more I learn, the smaller I feel, the more I realize I cannot do anything to affect change in these systems tearing our lives apart. Welcome to the depression train. Really well done video, it almost gave me a panic attack. Keep up the good work.
My heart turns into a stuffed pretzel just even thinking about this stuff especially with this fantastic video hitting the nail on the head on so many things compounding the cosmic horror even further until I remember the opening manifesto in Huey Newton's Revolutionary Suicide where he defines what revolutionary suicide is and as I write this comment recollecting the details of the book my beyond tight pretzel heart unwinds. Revolutionary Suicide is when you go along the road for revolution but know that when you die you know someone will be right behind you to carry on from where you've left off and make it to the end. Ending the tyranny the previous system has forged and forging for a better world towards communism. However to even complete such a road you're going to need a lot of people, a lot of hope, knowledge and a strong banner to carry through it all and get to the end where revolution has been achieved and a better world can finally be forged. It's so anxiety inducing, crippling even thinking about the road for revolution, the most hopeful suicide mission there is and yet regardless of the odds together we can make it and make the world of our dreams tangible. My heart doesn't feel like a pretzel anymore just thinking about this. Please if you haven't read revolutionary suicide I implore you to read it, it has left me with more hope than I could ever ask for and is just a great book and should be considered required leftist reading check it out.
I saw the title of this video and was sure this was some sort of right wing hit piece because the title was so extreme. But here we are, a very deep contemplation on the existential reality of being aware of systemic issues. Nice Subscribed.
As a fellow HP Lovecraft fan, I love the analogy between like reading The King in Yellow and experiencing class consciousness. For me, at least, I just can't go back to how I was before. Even if I'd been offered dump trucks full of money to be the next Candace Owens, I feel like my body would reject the words I'd have to say.
LOL, just as I was thinking, "Knocking a god on it's ass sounds a lot like some games I know of..." the Final Fantasy music kicks in. Anyway great video!
I needed this video today. I spent a good chunk of today contemplating the inescapability of capitalism, and how many times in recent history both reform and revolution have been crushed by the devastating violence of the imperial oppressors. But there's hope. The system is powerful but fragile. Perturbations to just a few variables in its brutal dynamics can destabilize the entire machine. It feels inescapable like a black cloud smothering the entire sky, but the death blow could be dealt in our lifetimes. One day, we might see the sun.
It's funny.... I've stared into the abyss... Seen the darkness... I know the world is cruel, uncaring, hateful, dangerous and destructive, I'm welll aware of the evils of existence... My Empathy bubble is global... Yet it doesn't destroy me... I don't crush me... It doesn't even make me sad... It makes me enjoy any moment of happiness I enjoy all that much more... and try to put a bit of good into the world in any way I can everyday... I am happy be I refuse to be any other way... Yes I have stared into the abyss... I shined my light into it... For... True heroes require neither honor nor praise... Nor do they seek it... Their only wish is to grant a Glimmer of Light During troubled times to those that find Themselves lost in the Dark...
17:51 - the biggest obstacle? In my opinion (and/or for me personally), I'd say it's fear of personal consequences, when we haven't already build sufficient solidarity to feel shielded from that -- to feel safe doing radical things, etc.
Oh, so true! Sure, if we all work together, we can maybe vanquish the eldritch abomination, but some of us will get killed and not everybody is cut out for laying down their lives for the revolution. I know I'm a bit of a coward. :(
Phil, Keeper of Arcane Lore, the cosmic horrors pale in comparison to the individuals of the human species whose lust for power over others trumps the most basic acts of decency. Knowing this can only be tolerated by embracing stoicism, not by admitting the lack of control, but accepting there is no control and only chaos can counteract orderly mass compliance, ignorance and apathy. The saddest part is that most people are afraid to open their eyes and even more terrified to question what they see. You’re doing great work here, and you would definitely be a great GM.
As a middle aged, college educated, straight, white dude whose retirement plan amounts to "walk into the sea" I feel the dread and vulnerability you describe on a visceral level.
Great video :) Biggest obstacles: 1. the members of the lower (and "middle") classes being pitted against one another--culture war shenanigans keeping ppl from looking UP and seeing the common enemy and 2. those still trying to play "team sports" in American politics, refusing to recognize we now have two right wing parties: centrists/neo-liberals/DNC types who not only will not challenge the status quo or truly challenge the right (except maybe the most extreme situations and policies thereof--but even then, these types seem to believe that voting, and arguing on Twitter or just making fun of the right, are actually effective tools as they stand, and worse, are the only tools available to us), but will also turn against those to the left of them when push comes to shove, swearing that it is our challenging of the status quo that is the real problem. . .
My core philosophy is existentialism and it gets a bit complicated but the conclusion is that the best way to prevent extinction and to maximise useful bioinformation is cooperation. Of course, many don’t see the necessity of completely changing the economic system in which we live and fool themselves into thinking its ok as it is. How likely is that we get ourselves extinct ? Idk, quite likely it seems, but I won’t think much about that because it’s not something me alone can change. I just try to tell others about it and hope to organise a large enough group to help our cause. It’s a careful balance between fighting those in power and not getting yourself crushed, at least not until enough people share your ideas. That’s pretty much my objective in life, not a family, not anything else, just work and advocate against the current system for a better one.
That was briliant, I was actualy thinking about how the eldrich is not a great anacdote for this political horror throughout the piece, fell right into that litle rethorical trap XD
There's really an endless list of things you can point to as barriers in the fight against capitalism, to the point that the biggest barrier ends up being the sheer size and complexity of these barriers taken together. This creates a very solid block of despair, as it seems like the fight paradoxically can't start in earnest until it's basically over already. Isolation, apathy, lack of time, fear of change, misplaced loyalty, misplaced anger, etc aren't just barriers between us and capitalism, but rooted in it, and they keep us ensnared. So we cannot break down these barriers to "get at" capitalism, but must somehow "jump over" them, which the vast majority of people simply can't or won't do.
'The working class defeats cthulu,' easily my favorite interpretation of the story.
Dude, you got my anxiety so high I couldn't even breathe! I'm already disabled, poor, and not allowed to escape my poverty. I'm literally not allowed BY LAW to have more than $2000 or I lose my Section 8 AND Disability payments, so forget ever getting enough for a down payment for a house or a car that mitigates my disabilities and lifts a wheelchair. It doesn't matter how many pb&j sandwiches I have or what I sacrifice, I'm not allowed to crawl out of poverty. It's a bullshit system. There is no way I can go to work again even if I found an employer with a flexible schedule because any extra money I get, my rent goes up and goes right into my slumlord's pocket. No thank you. Poverty is inescapable!!!
When I was in high school, I took several political tests to see where I lay, and it was right down the center, not one point more towards one or the other. Then I gained life experience and moved ALLLLL the way to the left.
This is a big, fat fuckin mood for me too man. I'm in pretty much the same boat, and as a cherry on top of this disaster, my mom died this year, and left me alone with all our cats to take care of. I still get food stamps for her, and that's technically illegal, but the funny thing is? I need every single god damn cent to fucking survive. Inflation is so god damn terrible that it's squeezing me, and a lotta people I know dry. I spend so much time and mental energy trying to think my way out of this disgusting poverty trap, and I just can't. I slip further and further into insanity just trying to wrap my head around all the different ways that this system is fucking me. I want to find a job, work at a co-op somewhere, at a place that's willing to work around my disabilities, and where I can make a living and not sell my soul or break my body and mind to do it, but that simple desire seems like an unreachable, unknowable dream, let alone the dream of a full on revolution to happen in my lifetime.
I retreat further into the echos of a disjointed past because I can no longer conceptualize my present, and my future no longer exists..
I hope everyone in the pit of the abyss can claw they're way back out, but a lot of days, I already feel dead.
Good to know what you both say here confirms my understanding so far. Homrless living in van...i must keep on thru another winter up north in MN/WI.
If I took the "program" trap route now, how could I pay traffic fines to get DL back + fix van?
I need housing but how?! ... better to keep freezing & try to just not die yet.
Knee surgery will have to wait. What a catch 22 it all is.
I used to have wonderful, hope filled dreams decades ago. I would fly and save people, go on adventures. Now, there's only one theme every. Single. Night. And that is to establish shelter and survive. I've been homeless before and I can't go back, I literally won't survive with my litany of health problems.
In my waking life, I dream an impossible dream of establishing a tiny house co-op community. Self sufficient, off grid, far away from society. I've never spent a single moment of my life unobserved by other people, and that's an issue for me. I need some peace and quiet with some animals and a garden, land and home I own, a social safety net, decent internet, and I feel I can really get my life in order for the first time a la Hierarchy of Needs.
@@AlexiasShado God, I'd love to live like that too.
But i'm terrified I'm gonna be just another nameless nobody swallowed up by the meat grinder..
I aint really religious, but god help us all..
@@AlexiasShado lmfao you kids are completely lost
1) It's nice to have disabled people actually recognized as one of the many groups most royally fucked up by capitalism. I hate that it's something I even feel the urge to remark, but abled leftists so often seem not even to not make an effort to remember we exist, but actually do everything in their power to forget our plight at all costs that it's refreshing when any as much as mentions us in any way, so thank you.
2) I want to hold hope but I'm Chilean and I'm still not recovered from the shit show that was our last referendum. Like, only reason I didn't cry is that I kinda saw it coming but God it hurts. I don't know what it'll take for change to happen without an actual bloody revolution that the US and rest of the imperial core will not let succeed anyway.
I encourage you to make your own videos and make your voice and heart be heard! You cannot hear the lioness if she doesn't roar!
@@DerekSpeareDSD I'm afraid that precisely due to my multiple disabilities I barely have the bodily and cognitive capacity to bathe regularly and then go right back to bed to stay bedridden, let alone make in depth political videos that are bound to get me immense backlash that I'll then have to deal with alone as a non-binary crippled and autistic lesbian who dresses like a weirdo on purpose at 30.
I'm a disabled person too, and feel exactly the same. The obsession with "The Worker" leaves a good number of people blind to the fact that not all of the working class can actually work. The Soviet Union's approach to disability was still to remove agency from those unable to be productive and to simply impose management and a lack of social mobility upon them. Another youtuber called "John the Duncan" has a good video about disability within capitalism and as seen by the broad left that you may be interested in.
@@PhillipLoughney I'll check it out, thank you so much!
@@VenusMacabre go live your best life no matter what! You can always make videos about whatever you want, or not...everyone should live their best life and define it the way the choose!!! 😃
This hits me really hard, as I feel despair all the time after eating the “forbidden fruit” of knowledge… and the more I learn, the more paralyzed I feel. But thankfully I have loved ones around me that keep me from staring at the abyss for too long.
Give you an example (and apologies for the length of this story) - this past weekend me, my wife and another good friend of ours went out restaurant/bar hopping at a nearby town, and while we were sitting, our friend noticed a woman wearing a red dress, so she complimented her on “rocking it!”. The woman blushed, thanked her for saying so, and proceeded to tell us it was her birthday. One conversation leads to another and the birthday woman began to say “I don’t know how you feel politically”, but I quickly said to her without hesitation of what she would think, I said “well, I don’t believe in capitalism and it’s literally killing us…”
My wife and friend braced for a strong response, as the area we were in is not exactly left leaning… but I got a strong reaction alright.. she smiled warmly and said “yes! Exactly!!!” At first I thought she was being sarcastic. She then launched into dialogue on how messed up our nation is how she no longer views people the same way after the rise of Trump, how corporations continue to consolidate and gain more power/influence…. Etc.
She began to tear up… sure some booze in her system was taking but she was very REAL with us. She told us “I’m now 49 years old, and I feel absolutely hopeless…”
I nodded along in agreement as I feel the same most days, but our friend jumps in and emphatically tells her (and by extension myself as well) that “We cannot lose hope. We must not let despair win, it’s the only way we can fight the systems that are in place. Even if it’s small victories locally, embrace those wins as it has an impact.”
The whole exchange that night had an impact on all of us at that table. It was a raw conversation between people, raw conversations that probably need to happen more often.
I digress…. Point being, I’m on a pendulum…. Swaying back and forth of being hopeless and hopeful.
You people have gone completely insane
Same here...knowledge is a curse. I don't know any happy leftists.
To quote the contemporary cosmic horror author, avowed socialist and very depressed person Thomas Ligotti's novella "The Bungalow House": "I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no one for me to know. The voice in my head keeps reciting these old principles of mine. The voice is his voice, and the voice is also my voice. And there are other voices, voices I have never heard before, voices that seem to be either dead or dying in a great moonlit darkness. More than ever, some sort of new arrangement seems in order, some dramatic and unknown arrangement-anything to find release from this heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know."
It is this, I think, which specifically draws me to nihilist anarchism: That whether or not I have hope as such is irrelevant, only that I am willing to start a task regardless of whether I finish it, that I comfort and am comforted by my fellow sufferers and strivers against this world-as-it-is however I can.
“Killing several humans, and some cops.”
😂
That, good sir, did not slip by. Your writing and delivery just get better with every video.
_Mr. Pink:_ Tagged a couple of cops. You kill anybody?
_Mr. White:_ A few cops.
_Mr. Pink:_ No real people?
_Mr. White:_ Just cops.
I was like “lol based.”😂🤣
Lmao I’m ded 😂
I would say that in the movie Nausicäa of the Valley of the Wind by Studio Ghibli, you do see themes of cosmic horror from a left-wing environmentalist perspective. The kicker is, you see it from "both sides" of the conflict, but by looking more carefully at each side, it still becomes clear that one of these sides is outright bad and the other is, while not easy to pin down outright as "good" due to its ineffable nature and strange ways, clearly beneficial in ways the other "side" is not. And the protagonist, Nausicäa, can recognize which of the two types of "eldritch horror" is the one that would benefit humanity and turns away from the type of horror that would yield nothing but destruction (though not without a crisis of conscience and some bad trauma-based decisions along the way).
Tbh, I really do find Cosmic Horror to be very soothing.
I've been very badly treated by life (lots of DV at home, abused at school, ableism, IPV, being forced to keep up with abled people in work, which ruined my body and brain, and much more), and having these giant, terrifying, L O O M I N G concepts, full of dread, is really just a great, thinly veiled allegory for my anxiety. Like, my fears are truly the opposite of Lovecraft's intentions from when he was a popular author (he did regret his awfulness later, so I give him some very small props for that), but the Outer Gods are a great vessel for how I feel about living in the current society.
And seeing everyone here reacting similarly, it feels very "So you can see it too?"
The mind attempts to fill the spaces, mental and emotional craters left by the systems at play around us, with data, facts, problems and solutions, until it is overwhelmed by the whole of it.
It’s the heart that, like water, finds its way into every crevice and begins to pool.
Cave walls and ceilings made of nightmarish stone, no light to be seen at the end of the tunnel, still drip and grow wet with the waters of compassion and kindness-the waters of belief that a better world is possible.
The Gods do not care enough about you to bully you. Literally nothing personal.
Make the best of this life luckily one day we all get to die. Some of us have lower ceilings but we can all try and reach it all the same.
crazy how a video can be so bleak and yet so comforting to see these issues acknowledged and spoken about. i guess that's one difference between horror stories and reality.
If we really care as much as we claim to, we need to stop looking down our noses at those who've never been (un)fortunate to encounter these realizations on *their* own. Scorn & judgement will lead us right into the abyss - pushing our brothers and sisters into that cult that aids/unleashes the true horrifying potential of our real oppressors.
Even those of us with that "forbidden knowledge" can still be manipulated, & the best way to do so is via starting from some abstraction & ignoring inconvenient context surrounding that abstraction. Most act like the Cult created Cthulhu rather than the cult being victims of manipulation from an entity that's existed for centuries.
Be kind to your neighbor. We won't see 2030 if ideology & international relations are continually treated like a team sport & we're just fans.
*=Edited/typo.
this, so much this. Being liberal is ignorant, being right wing for the vast majority of poeple isnt being evil because your evil, its cuz your in what amounts to an abusive relationship/death cult. As long as the left keeps acting like we cant comprimise and come to the table with people who arent facists and offer former right wingers redemption and help, we will be doomed to failure. Like, as long as you havent gone out and lynched someone or are an oil baron or whatever, they are still redeemable.
Its not really about “team sports” so much as the realizing that those who have no empathy must not receive any. Sorry, Fascists are not sentient humans to me and no amount of torture inflicted on them would phase me in the slightest.
@@marshallsweatherhiking1820 Well, fascism is a phenomenon that comes from "Capital in decay", meaning, it's a phenomenon the capitalist ruling class uses for several reasons - most being economic. One is to stop growing class consciousness among workers, & it is used beat back gains by rising organized labor - among many other things. The capitalist ruling class, regardless of claimed ideology - are absolutely our enemy & are the progenitors of what's called fascism, so if that's who you mean by fascists, I'm with you - because I like to get to the core of issues - not just their symptoms. Oh, plus their Petit-Bourgeois lackeys I'd group in there too.
EXACTLY. one of the things that made it difficult for me to learn why so many of the things i was taught growing up were very very wrong was how snarky people can be. yelling at people who don't know never helps. *teaching* each other is how we can make progress. name calling and fighting only makes people double down
@@marnenotmarnie259 I absolutely agree! Very well said too btw!
The ideological bigotries people hold today can all be traced back to some sort justifying ideology created by the "exploiting class" for why they're in the dominant position in relation to economic production - today we call them the capitalist class or Bourgeoisie.
Until the exploitative class is abolished, these ideological bigotries will continue to exist. Our job should be to educate in a kind, empathetic way as material conditions drive people seek alternatives to capitalism.
The current competition between capitalist cultivated identity groups as politics - gives the illusion of democracy & allows the capitalist class a pass to do whatever they want. It's gross & I'm soo glad there are others who feel similarly!
I'm not very good at literary analysis and have never been able to fully examine why I like the C'thulhu Mythos so much but this connection you draw to the existential dread I also feel every day really helped.
On the off chance you haven't seen it, Hbomberguy's video on the movie Cthulhu and his evolving reaction to it might interest you
I actually had the same sentiment in reverse; having picked up Lovecraft at age 14 and fallen in love, I feel like it prepared me to both embrace and pace myself when learning about patriarchy, capitalism, WS, Climate Change, etc.
In both cases, I feel like I’ve looked dread and despair in the eye, and rejected it.
"When the stars are right, the proletariat will arise."
As a left leaning person, I've often made comparisons of the various systems of oppression to eldritch abominations. Though in a weird way, I consider my personal philosophy be kind of the reverse of Lovecraft's cosmicism.
The cold indifference of the universe is no match for the indominable human spirit! The problem with being an inconcievable cosmic god is it makes ya lazy, complacent, a luxory that us short lived, frantic creatures dont have to slow us down
Humanism then?
Cthulhu Fthagn, comrades! We have nothing to lose but our souls to the Elder Gods!
OOH I'm excited, will edit this comment when I've finished the video!
Edit: Holy, was this a great video. I'm a huge Lovecraft nerd, so I was really appreciative of that side of the video. Your comments about how the abyss of late-stage capitalism is growing closer and closer to even generally upper-middle-class people really hit home with me. Great video as always Phil, respect the hell out of you!
To think the 0.05 will be all that is left eventually
A very common barrier is the complacency and pearl clutching of the labor aristocracy among the working class of the imperial core nations.
When you first start reading theory, using dialectics, it can be despair inducing, because you can see the gulf between where we are and where we could be. You can see the inherent harms waved away in the current systems, because "the alternative is worse".
This can lead to people stopping there and reverting to the status quo, or even becoming reactionary because of how uncomfortable the knowledge makes them.
But if you push through, you can realize seeing the gulf means you know it can be crossed. Seeing the "gaping maw" of harms in the system means you know they can be changed. You can see the inherent threat that unionization, mutual aid, and intersectional cooperation pose to the current system.
@Acceleration Quanta read more than 8 words challenge
@Acceleration Quanta even capitalists read marx, know thy enemy :3c
@Acceleration Quanta Carb-stacking a week beforehand? That was obviously meant to be some kind of insult but I assume you're just trolling at this point honestly. You could probably take your own advice on "cease wasting your own time with decadent nonsense".
I think the biggest impediment is getting people to agree on any specific courses of action.
To use the language of the video, it's like getting people to agree to sacrifice their blood and sanity to call forth a new Old One to supplant the one that exists. If it's hard to agree on what to get on your pizza, it's damn near impossible to get agreement on what Great Unknown to sacrifice yourself for.
Oh, yes, absolutely!
Start with: "We need a better system than capitalism..." and the next you'll hear is: "And what? Socialism? That has never worked!" And then the discussion is over.
I think too many people where I live are still too well off and cannot empathize with the ones who have been ground underneath the wheels of the machine for ages. To the German middle class, the poor are just somebody they have to pay for. And when you suggest changing they system, they think they will have to pay even more. And if you try to convince them that there are concepts that would work well, they will draw argument after argument out of their butts as to why change is impossible. Because their brains have already been infested by capitalist brain eaters from a higher dimension and now they cannot think in anything else but capitalist concepts.
I think another big obstacle is that people who aren't seen as "radical enough" are almost immediately disregarded in many circles.
Yes. Just…so much yes. I can’t remember when I started pulling on the yarn that radicalized me, but I think it was somewhere between Sesame Street in the 70s and attending a secular university in the 90s. And then LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE that’s happened since. And once that yarn’s been pulled, that big old pile of disintegrated cardigan becomes a crushing existential weight. Thank you for verbalizing it so eloquently. You are my favorite of all the Dang Dads. ❤
I love this video. Thank you so much.
As someone coincidentally getting into cosmic horror as a genre, this legitimately felt emotionally uplifting and encouraging. I appreciate you sharing this sentiment.
I love this. Call me toxically optimistic, but if I had one counter argument, it's similar to the christian belief, "if you believe in a heaven, then there must be a hell also". I believe the reverse applies here. If we are mere mortals facing against old gods of unfathomable horror and malice bent on our eternal suffering, then there must also be gods of benevolence that work in our favor. But I know the question that comes after is "Where are they then? If they cared, they would have done something by now." And idk what to say to that.
Of course, "gods" being a metaphor for the constructs of man and our effect on the environment with this whole thing (though I am a hedonist and polytheist and do believe in gods and spirits), I believe if these "evil gods" are our destructive manmade constructs, then we can and are obviously building our own constructs for not just destroying these, but building a society that serves everyone and heals the planet. I personally believe we need to fight harder than ever and see if gods of love peace and benevolence start revealing themselves to us. I would rather do that and die than go on living in a world where I know the dreams of the many will never be fulfilled. It can't all be eternal darkness and despair, or how did we as people and the concept of a leftist worldview ever come to be?
The biggest obstacle to me is isolation. I haven't told my family my views yet. I've hinted at them, and have come in danger of being exposed once or twice, so I fell silent. I don't want to go full socialist in front of them until I know I have a means of carrying myself, so that if they don't want me around anymore, I can leave and never return. I think there are a lot of closeted allies in the same boat. They opened their eyes, possibly long ago, saw how bad things are, but have remained silent because they live with zealous agents of the very evils eating mankind alive, that would either destroy or excommunicate them into homelessness, if they sense anything is amyss. I have a friend across the country from me that lives on their grandmother's back porch. She won't let them have a room or even sleep on her couch because "she's a good christian woman" and my friend is trans non-binary. She sees letting them live on her property as sufficient enough. I've helped in ways that I can, I tried looking into if my friend can get help or if there are any programs that can give them housing, but there's little I can do to change their situation. As with being able to change my own, I want to give them the power (money) they need to get out of their situation, one day. Thankfully they've met someone that may be able to help them. But this is what I mean. My friend prefers to stay a-political, but they're being punished just for being themselves and wanting to be free to live their own life. It is the isolation and lack of knowledge of where to find people that can be a support that is the biggest issue. I'm trying to express my views more through my own work, the very work I want to make a living with, in the hopes that I can build something meaningful to the cause and raise spirits, but even that is time consuming and takes a lot out of me, and my personal life doesn't pull any punches with ruining my schedule right now. Because I am dependent on my conservative family, because my only other option is living in a box under a bridge, I have to play along and be patient.
...I think I need a splash of wine.
EDIT: I wrote without watching the end. Thank you for reminding me of the strength of the people!
i would never leave you hangin'!
My mind always wanders towards food production when I get too overwhelmed. Its a calming thing to engage in because it's mostly just learning about nature, but it doubles as something very important for community.
I think a large barrier towards having an active community is the unavailability of fresh, nourishing, seasoned meals in a shared space.
Maybe u think I'm joking but fr, I know if I could tell my friends "ay, I got ur meals for 2 months right here" they'd have more energy and funds to do good things.
Gorilla farming is a real thing you can invest time into that actively strikes against this system. The greater your community's food stability, the stronger and more able to strike.
I know you mean guerilla, but I quite like the idea of a big ape tending to some crops
I wish I had some comrades who would turn the produce I grow into meals.
After working in the community garden, I just don't have the energy to do it. And that totally sucks.
Plus: No rain. The drought has us by the balls. If climate change continues, I won't be able to grow anything here and will become a climate refugee.
your video essays are consistently excellent, both topically and in their eloquence. you are a superb writer, sir. please keep doing what you do.
Hey that dang dad, please make more cosmic horror leftist videos. With my ptsd, it’s very hard to sleep at night and these videos scratch a psychological itch. Or make a playlist of video essays and leave it as a link. The darkness is so emotionally soothing
The thing that horrifies me the most, is how possible organizing and building community is. I'm thinking about my time in the Christian church, back when I was giving religion the ol' college try. I went to a megachurch in huge city, my state's capital city. The sanctuary (Whatever you want to call it, the place where the preacher preaches) was massive, must have sat a couple hundred, maybe even a thousand or two people, and it was often full. It was pretty diverse too, you had your typical middle/upper class white people, but its a very black city, so there was a huge population of non-white people too. College kids, your regular blue collar worker, all types of people. The music was great (for worship music anyway), there was free coffee, 3 different services at different times, multiple services in a week. There was a daycare thing, pretty sure there was some transportation system they worked out, and the church wasn't far from the city's busline. I'm not exactly a biblical scholar, but I can hold my own, I have more than the average church goer's understanding of the Bible, and I had few complaints (though definitely some) on the sermons, they were usually accurate, they weren't outright homophobic. This was obviously a multimillion mega-corporation, they had money. They really pushed community building too, they had these small groups they'd get people in the church to host, specifically just for hanging out and building community. I went to the ones specializing in the 20-30 age range, but there were others for parents, ones specifically for guys and girls exclusively, etc.
My point being, on every level I can think of, it was an attractive place of community. The barrier of entry for everything was miniscule, in comparison to what we're up against. And even still, based on what I saw, maybe somewhere between 1-10% showed up to a small group once, much less continually showed up. We're talking young adults, the horny ones looking for a date, the ones without kids, people who'd shank someone for a slice of free pizza- they're still (actually if I'm holding myself accountable, WE'RE still) hesitant to show up to a group of 15-20 people. We also did a yearly city wide thing, where we did something approximating activism, my group built a treehouse for a "struggling" family (They definitely looked well off, but whatever, we can do nice things for well off people too). Other groups picked up litter, held cookouts, cleaned some debris from a storm, things to help the city out. Obviously, a lot less people showed up to that, I couldnt give you a number, but definitely significantly less. I think a culture of individualism has fucked our brains bad, we're so terrified of emotional vulnerability and community
The thing that keeps me up at night terrified, is we won't be able to grow enough community to truly fix everything that needs fixing. That we won't be able to get enough money and people that love/care enough together, to create a strong enough movement(s) to fight who and what we need to fight. Human beings are so terrifically powerful and intelligent, technology has become advanced enough that if we as humans wanted to create a literal utopia, a literal fucking garden of Eden, we could feasibly do it! Difficult yes, but possible absolutely
But we don't, because it's hard. And I'm scared. I know it's the doomer in me talking right now, but fuck she's got a point
In our present state of things, it feels less like banding together to defeat Lovecraftian Old Gods and more like hunkering down to survive Ragnarok. The war of the gods to kill them all. We just have to live through it and rebuild from the dust.
This metaphor of cosmic horror is great. I was having a convo recently about looking back on professors and realizing they were in fact, very based. Once you understand things differently, some seemingly innocuous details come back.
I see you weaving in that clever word choice; the imagery of a doomed investigator falling deeper into darkness. This is the smartest spooky-season video essay there's been.
- Neil
aw
I can honestly say, I loved this channel when (an unremembered number of months back) I first stumbled across it , but it just gets better and better. This spoke to me.
Witches and warlocks, excommunicants from cults of dark power, priests who have absconded from deceitful deities and death cults, veterans of bygone drubbings, detritus and discards marred by the maws of the machine, those so terrifying to the masters that their true names must be unspoken in 'polite' polities, scum and dregs, wasted and unwanted: Earthlings all, and bearers of the burden of beating the Beast.
I remember some time, around 7 maybe, where I was swinging on my swingset in my backyard of my mom and dad's suburban home and just sitting with my thoughts by myself. I pictured the world that surrounded me. I thought of all the houses of as much of the neighborhood as I had seen, and created some filler for the rest based on what I had seen immediately around the rest. I imagined all the people who went to various places, because my entire block's houses were filled with people of varying numbers and I figured everywhere must be like that at the time (this was like, 2002 maybe?). I pictured all the gas that must go into their cars (cause I knew that cars burned gas and I knew what a gallon jug looked like so I could rough estimate what 15 of those looked like, tho I still thought gasoline was a black sludge that I would learn later was actually crude oil). And based on all of this I came to my first major issue: See, I knew what homeless people were. And I knew that if you didn't have a job as an adult you'd eventually be homeless unless you are one of those weird rich people, because school and TV and even my parents made sure I did in all sorts of ways. And I tried to think "How many jobs are there?" and that's when I realized "The reason there are homeless people are because there are not enough jobs where they live". I called it The Meat Grinder, because to me that's what it was: This machine made out of society that turned people into metaphorical liquid until they died or couldn't work anymore and did the dying later. It was why everyone I knew was always stressed to the point that they seemed like they'd break. And the worst part? All that's changed in the 20 years since is that I know now that no human being nor animal made the meat grinder, its just the nature of entropy, exerting itself over all systems it can influence, causing rise to new terrors on the regular.
Nah, people totally made the meat grinder
@@Lincoln_Bio No, people continue the meat grinder. The Meat Grinder however would be there if we had a society to enforce it or not. Its entropy. Its the difficulty of making sure a required thing is in its required location. We didn't make it so food decays even when stored, we didn't make it so we had to travel long distances to make sure the surplus of one community would make it to another. We didn't decide that only some small fraction of the world's space would be capable of growing food, or that certain metals could only be found in small and rare deposits. But we do continue to have a system that doesn't want to deal with those issues, and thus the meat grinder continues to exist, and if our society falls it will continue to exist without us, grinding up whatever wildlife or emerging intelligence is left into a fine, red paste with which to lubricate its gears.
@@ShadaOfAllThings Ah so this is a more general existential life/death cycle cruelty-of-nature thing, gotcha. I'd suggest choosing another name for it to save confusion, as the meat grinder is already a well established analogy for the capitalist machine.
Hey Phil, father of Lil. As a fellow father myself, thank you for your deep and thoughtful videos. Double thanks because you are an ally and a voice for the voiceless. Keep fighting the good fight!
I was worried we were venturing into doomer territory for a while there, but I see how that was necessary for the (quite awesome) thesis. Great stuff!
... okay now make me feel like I'm a character written in a happier genre now...
No but really. To see the world is to have chronic existential horror.
I never really thought about how horrific life is as a multiply marginalized person. For me it's just my daily reality. But this video really just puts into perspective how true it is when we say that we live in the worst timeline.
very relatable. Ive found that my journey to becoming "woke" has been more like falling into a nightmare. I've never felt more hopeless than realizing that the American Dream is pointless and unattainable, and no amount of voting is going to fix America.
A brick can be a ballot, of a sort... :)
Amazing. You pulled it out in the end on a really high, positive note.
Leave it to Phil to take some weird, esoteric theme and craft a banger video.
I had to come back this video and make another comment because I've been thinking about it all weekend.
The reason so many of Lovecraft's protagonists fail is because they think they are alone. They think they are the only one with forbidden knowledge and that the knowledge is dangerous, almost shameful.
None of them had The Internet or Reddit or any other way to easily and anonymously seek out others who had glimpsed the truth.
I am reminded of when I was first navigating the idea that I might be transgender. I didn't even know that word at the time. I just knew that my body, my pronouns, the expectations placed on me by society all felt profoundly wrong. It was terrifying and isolating.
It was only through the magic of The Internet and a great therapist that I learned the words to describe who I was.
It is only through the Internet (and BreadTube) that I have learned how to talk about how our capitalistic, fascist-leaning society really works.
But, exposing myself online makes me and my family vulnerable to those who hate me for what I am and what I know.
Again, this is a fantastic video and it will take me some time to fully process it.
Great thoughts, wish I would've thought to include that notion of loneliness in the video!
I've had the conception of capitalism, white supremacy, and other exploitative ideologies as akin to Lovecraftian gods for a few years without being able to articulate it much at all, so I'm damn glad for this video
You've put into words so eloquently what I've been struggling to articulate for years. But I'm still despairing. Even if we manage to band together and put bezos or praeger or koch back in their tombs, there are and always will be other entities waiting for the opportunity to feast on us all
I’ve used cosmic horror for a while to reckon with my own marginalization as a queer and neurodivergent person trying to navigate the world. Whether or not he meant it to be one, Lovecraft created an insanely good analogy for what we go through daily.
Something is out there, influencing things in our world. It’s big, and it’s not corporeal. But it *can* be destroyed, or at least sent away. And that’s what makes Lovecraft worth reading to me. That fact that, even though the Old Ones are incredibly fearsome and hard to comprehend, they can eventually be taken down.
Not sure what Lovecraft you're reading but the message was quite the opposite. Humanity is nothing in the face of the vast cosmos that lay beyond. You cannot kill Cthulhu, only send him away for later. That is why so many of Lovecraftian protagonists off themselves.
The only lovecraft tale where humans "wins" is the dunwich horror
@@PickmansHiddenAtelier And only because he was "strongly requested" to make that so. Editors crushing artistic vision since forever.
Alright, imagine you're in a room full of thousands of rats.
The rats are fed well enough to be subdued, even though they are trapped in whatever cage you have them in. They probably wouldn't think to come near you, out of fear of your shear size.
But imagine... If the rats were starving. If they were already at each other's throats just to eke out a meager, cannibalistic existence... And a person steps in. A big, towering hulk... Of fresh meat. No one would wish themselves in this position.
Let's realize we are the rats. Let's realize that we have the rich in that very room. Let us feed the starving of our own flesh and bone and gather strength to our weakest, so that all may support the ultimate goal...
...of bringing down that hoard of sustenance.
There is even a key on that giant's hip.
Let us climb, my beautiful rodent siblings. Climb and face the maw and clawing fists of the giant and realize...
WE OUTWEIGH IT TOGETHER!!!!!!!
No gods no masters, comrades!!!!
"We are the rust upon your gears,
We are the insects in your ears,
We crawl, we crawl,
All over you"
@@agentzapdos4960 Damn good song
All landlords are bastards. When the times comes I am looking forward to musk stew
Defrenestration.
Individualism and cooptation. I can't even get my coworkers, who all complain constantly about pay and working conditions, to fathom a collective response like unionization or striking or threatening either together, they're convinced individually begging for raises no one gets or looking for a better job elsewhere or promotion within are the only ways forward. And the last one is the real rub, anyone truly useful enough to make a threat that can't be easily replaced gets a 70 cent raise and or a tiny title promotion and becomes a company (wo)man instead of having any solidarity with the mass of "unskilled" labor that is asked to work harder and eat the lost wages to inflation daily. Idk wtf it would take to regrow union and collective action in this country but it seems impossible in the face of the astroturfed but deep rooted worship of individualism and self over all else
I really really love that someone like you can still publish content like this. Let's band together for grimmer times to come...
This connection has been on my mind since playing Night In The Woods back in 2020, towards the start of the pandemic. The global scale of the problem and the clear inability for even the most developed societies to be human enough to handle it had already brought the feeling of cosmic horror foremost in my thoughts, and that game really develops the connection between that feeling and the agonizing decay of capitalism.
From a piece I wrote about it not long after finishing:
Everywhere this struggle plays out, there is a choice that must be made: the choice between the grueling, exhausting, often unfulfilling work of holding everything together as best as you can, or allowing the darkness that pervades the world to swallow you up and make you into something just as monstrous, or worse. Mae, her parents, Beatrice, Gregg, Angus, Selmers, Lori, the Reverend, and dozens of other characters whose stories we only get the slightest glimpse of, hold together in the face of encroaching chaos, for no immediate reward other than to get to do it again the next day. That’s a rotten deal, and the temptation can easily arise to resort to drastic, even violent measures, if it seems as though they could end the sadistic game once and for all. Mae, especially, is vulnerable to this temptation; it is no coincidence that when the cult speaks of the song of Black Goat, they say to Mae “He’s been singing to you too, hasn’t he?” Black Goat is the impulse to burn it all down, to be done with having nothing and bloodily tear something from someone else’s arms, and bloody yourself yet further to keep it. It is, bluntly, the call of fascism; to see the lives of others, people you deem to be undesirable or degenerate, as the sacrifice that must be offered in exchange for the paradise you yearn for. It is just as natural a consequence of the collapse of capitalism as anything else. Not everyone can be confronted with the true horror of their circumstances and maintain any semblance of humanity while carrying the burden of that knowledge. This is where the game’s socialist themes overlap with its Lovecraftian storytelling: the reality of America in the 21st century is exactly the kind of mind-splintering horror that Lovecraft wrote about, and most of the people in his stories who confronted those horrors descended into madness or pushed that knowledge out of their heads. To truly understand one’s position within all of this is tantamount to recognizing that one exists within a vast, chaotic, uncaring universe.
I just… love this video. Your description of what I see everywhere and soft vocal delivery was like a warm blanket after a cold winter day.
Great analogy, and fantastic wave visuals. I don't have as much forbidden reading under my belt, but I've also felt and thought exactly the same about the growing abyss. I'm comfortable too, but I can see not-comfortable from my porch, getting closer.
I feel like the biggest obstacle when it comes to uniting against the ruling class is resources and getting people to come together and do things. I also honestly don't know where you'd even start considering the system favors the ruling class. It seems like breaking some laws would be inevitable tbh
At first I was like ‘We live in a society’, but after watching this video I’m like ‘We🩸live🧟♂️in🌑a💀society🦑’
What a title!
Haven't seen a title that has made me want to watch a video this bad in years.
Great video. Not an interpretation of Lovecraft I've seen before and even if the dude himself was trash, his work can be salvaged. Also, the music captioning was incredible. Kudos to whoever is doing that, the descriptions were amazing
I do all my captions and I like to let people who use them know I'm thinkin' about em :)
Rare early comment: the content warning is most of my Venn diagram. This is entirely my jam, ready and braced for it. Will hopefully be back after if I’m able to make words…
I think that often the biggest thing blocking us is that we are forced into using the tools of our oppressors in much of our efforts to organize, something which cannot be functionally solved while the systems remain in place but will also perpetually hamstring us. I do think that education is often our best tool against this, and bringing receipts when they do use this power to silence and divide us is going to be key, and has already been shown to be effective sometimes, while decidedly not being a silver bullet.
Doomerism is another of our biggest obstacles, but unfortunately the only real salve is wins and wins are increasingly difficult as more people fall into it, so I push myself to find and follow hope without blinders.
been thinking about this for years. looking forward to this :)
I really enjoy the way you lay out your thoughts, and the arguments you construct by metaphor
This is awesome Brother thank you I could not have said it better myself, and I think you have inspired me to finally start my own channel and finally start making my own content
do it!!
Ooooft. That nearly gave me a panic attack, only because it's 100% the truth. I also try not to actively think about all this all the time, because... self preservation. BUT what this should make us feel is angry and energised to fight back as much as we can. We fight back by protesting, by trying to save as much beauty and love in our lives, creating collectives and preserving community and camaraderie. We can only try to survive together.
Really appreciated the writing in this video. Really did fill me with dread and dispair. Artfully done brother!
I know this is only tangently related to HP but I feel you get him better than most especially those that identify as leftwing. I always find it amusing for those that read him and cry out for how he depicts more "savage" people. But he also makes note that such people have come face to face with what destroys the sanity of his protagonist and yet those people continue to function. They have the knowledge, they work and live knowing what is real to be real. If anything this shows these people as stronger and far from lesser beings. They adapted to ultimate horror and continue to push on. I think this is what we need to become and not some shell-shocked professor who can't live with the idea that he is not the pinnacle of life in the universe.
LOVED this one. Perfectly creepy tone but also....
FUCK YEAH FUCK THE OLD GODS HARD GO TEAM HUMANITY
Love this. I specifically started getting into Lovecraft right at the beginning of the pandemic when I was quarantined in Rhode Island for a month with my wife.
I think your framing is 100% correct and I do think that tying billionaire individuals or multinational corporations to conceptions of death cults and great old ones is really, well just spot on. I've been very curious to see where you would take your content since I found you a couple of months ago and I'm glad I did with this particular video.
I do think that people who work together can overcome the great old ones themselves, but the cosmic horrors will always find purchase connected to our individual traumas and pains. I believe that this is the most important component of facing horror. that ultimately, it is our own journey toward finding the light within ourselves which allows us to transcend the limitations which the Cthonic powers can and will weaponize against ourselves and those we seek to work in solidarity with. for this reason and many others, I continue to hold out hope for mass movements of individual and collective healing.
God I relate to this to much! Scary Aaa 😨😱
That analogy with the Hand Sanitizer and Bacteria was too Good!
I struggled to understand Lovecraftian horror for a long time, because how could knowing something be dangerous to your mental health? Then I read a lot of the SCP wiki, and the writers there use the term cognitohazard. I still didn’t buy it. Nowadays, I am realizing that knowing certain truths can lead to a feeling of despair, but only if you let it.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
i think the part where i messed up in my personal journey is that i found allies to despair with instead of allies to oppose and defend. hiding together doesn't push back, it just lets them carpet over you.
Damn, I was expecting a RWNJ screed but no, I found a kindred spirit! Awesome video, thank you. Subscribed
only LWNJs here
That's what woke really means, though they bastardize terms as usual.
word play is a fantastic propaganda. have you heard about the "Maga Communists" smh.
@@Andre-qo5ek 😂
Thank you for this. It's very cathartic, reminds me I'm not going insane. Thank you so much, I needed this x
Speaking of cosmic horrors and malevolent gods from before time, here's a comment as sacrifice to Algorithm.
Did you mean _Azathoth_ ?
I love this video so much, I watch it again and again. Thank you for giving us some hope
Great video as always, thanks for that dose of hope
How dare you perfectly and poetically vocalize the deep dread and dispare I feel every day smh 😭Damn I wish my anarchist rants were this good.
But seriously as a young, queer, neurodivergent single mom with a very young neurodivergent child, stuck in poverty, knowing that the world awaiting my daughter will probably be worse, I'm in a constant state of anxiety and exhaustion and hopelessness and heart break for others (especially the kids) that are being vilified, neglected and abused by politicians. It makes my fucking head spin. Needless to say this video sent me spiraling yet was weirdly comforting. It's validating to hear someone express the same feelings especially so artfully, and your voice definitely helps lol
This is a really cool way to deliver analysis. Keep up the good work big dawg
Horrifyingly beautiful and hopeful.
When I try to organise in my workplace, apathy is the worst enemy to the working class. Most people don’t seem to care that they’re being exploited, they’re either too busy or just happy to be working
This gave me the shivers! Excellent content and narration.
Thank you for articulating so clearly a connection that's been rolling around in my brain for a long time now. I think that the "madness" that conservatives and centrists will ascribe to you as you begin to grapple with the truly monstrous scope of the problems in our society is another parallel that's always stuck out to me. Only through working together can we hope to beat back that evil.
I've only read the title and I'm so excited already
Someone else said this I think here but I can't even count the amount of times I'd had pretty productive political conversations with all sorts of people only to understand almost at the very end that "vote? ah not really, what's the point you know? I guess this stuff is important to me but what's it gonna change?" talk about a bummer. Conservatives can only barely scrape up any wins because they cheat and because so many people with progressive ideas just don't get themselves to make that super important step. please go vote people, any hope for any amount of change is literally depending on it. Anyway love your vidz papa.
This video perfectly describes the absolute devastation and despair I feel the more I learn about all the ways the systems in our world are truly, intentionally, built to exploit us. The more I learn, the smaller I feel, the more I realize I cannot do anything to affect change in these systems tearing our lives apart. Welcome to the depression train.
Really well done video, it almost gave me a panic attack. Keep up the good work.
My heart turns into a stuffed pretzel just even thinking about this stuff especially with this fantastic video hitting the nail on the head on so many things compounding the cosmic horror even further until I remember the opening manifesto in Huey Newton's Revolutionary Suicide where he defines what revolutionary suicide is and as I write this comment recollecting the details of the book my beyond tight pretzel heart unwinds.
Revolutionary Suicide is when you go along the road for revolution but know that when you die you know someone will be right behind you to carry on from where you've left off and make it to the end. Ending the tyranny the previous system has forged and forging for a better world towards communism.
However to even complete such a road you're going to need a lot of people, a lot of hope, knowledge and a strong banner to carry through it all and get to the end where revolution has been achieved and a better world can finally be forged. It's so anxiety inducing, crippling even thinking about the road for revolution, the most hopeful suicide mission there is and yet regardless of the odds together we can make it and make the world of our dreams tangible.
My heart doesn't feel like a pretzel anymore just thinking about this. Please if you haven't read revolutionary suicide I implore you to read it, it has left me with more hope than I could ever ask for and is just a great book and should be considered required leftist reading check it out.
I saw the title of this video and was sure this was some sort of right wing hit piece because the title was so extreme. But here we are, a very deep contemplation on the existential reality of being aware of systemic issues. Nice
Subscribed.
Been holding off watching this because I have been recording my Haunting in the Archives* vid, but I think I am ready for this!
Obstacle? Untreated adhd and the necessity of exhausting myself every day at a pointless job just to have some hope of being able to survive
As a fellow HP Lovecraft fan, I love the analogy between like reading The King in Yellow and experiencing class consciousness. For me, at least, I just can't go back to how I was before. Even if I'd been offered dump trucks full of money to be the next Candace Owens, I feel like my body would reject the words I'd have to say.
LOL, just as I was thinking, "Knocking a god on it's ass sounds a lot like some games I know of..." the Final Fantasy music kicks in.
Anyway great video!
I needed this video today. I spent a good chunk of today contemplating the inescapability of capitalism, and how many times in recent history both reform and revolution have been crushed by the devastating violence of the imperial oppressors. But there's hope. The system is powerful but fragile. Perturbations to just a few variables in its brutal dynamics can destabilize the entire machine. It feels inescapable like a black cloud smothering the entire sky, but the death blow could be dealt in our lifetimes. One day, we might see the sun.
It's funny.... I've stared into the abyss... Seen the darkness... I know the world is cruel, uncaring, hateful, dangerous and destructive, I'm welll aware of the evils of existence... My Empathy bubble is global... Yet it doesn't destroy me... I don't crush me... It doesn't even make me sad... It makes me enjoy any moment of happiness I enjoy all that much more... and try to put a bit of good into the world in any way I can everyday... I am happy be I refuse to be any other way... Yes I have stared into the abyss... I shined my light into it...
For...
True heroes require neither honor nor praise...
Nor do they seek it...
Their only wish is to grant
a Glimmer of Light
During troubled times
to those that find
Themselves lost in the Dark...
Hey shout out for that Dang Dad, always speaking truth and being real. Keep it up, always love your content
I was drunk as shit while writing this comment but I stick by it
Gosh, your content is awesome. Keep up the good stuff. Hugs from Brazil.
17:51 - the biggest obstacle? In my opinion (and/or for me personally), I'd say it's fear of personal consequences, when we haven't already build sufficient solidarity to feel shielded from that -- to feel safe doing radical things, etc.
Oh, so true!
Sure, if we all work together, we can maybe vanquish the eldritch abomination, but some of us will get killed and not everybody is cut out for laying down their lives for the revolution.
I know I'm a bit of a coward. :(
Phil, Keeper of Arcane Lore, the cosmic horrors pale in comparison to the individuals of the human species whose lust for power over others trumps the most basic acts of decency. Knowing this can only be tolerated by embracing stoicism, not by admitting the lack of control, but accepting there is no control and only chaos can counteract orderly mass compliance, ignorance and apathy. The saddest part is that most people are afraid to open their eyes and even more terrified to question what they see. You’re doing great work here, and you would definitely be a great GM.
As a middle aged, college educated, straight, white dude whose retirement plan amounts to "walk into the sea" I feel the dread and vulnerability you describe on a visceral level.
That was a dang good video essay. Liked and shared! Thanks, again
Great video :)
Biggest obstacles: 1. the members of the lower (and "middle") classes being pitted against one another--culture war shenanigans keeping ppl from looking UP and seeing the common enemy and 2. those still trying to play "team sports" in American politics, refusing to recognize we now have two right wing parties: centrists/neo-liberals/DNC types who not only will not challenge the status quo or truly challenge the right (except maybe the most extreme situations and policies thereof--but even then, these types seem to believe that voting, and arguing on Twitter or just making fun of the right, are actually effective tools as they stand, and worse, are the only tools available to us), but will also turn against those to the left of them when push comes to shove, swearing that it is our challenging of the status quo that is the real problem. . .
Bad idea to watch this before bed 😅💀 Really though, thanks for the video 💕
Edit: thank you for the optimistic ending lol
liking and commenting to appease the All-Encompassing, All-Seeing Algor I'thm, eldest of the Old Gods and Determiner of Fate
My core philosophy is existentialism and it gets a bit complicated but the conclusion is that the best way to prevent extinction and to maximise useful bioinformation is cooperation. Of course, many don’t see the necessity of completely changing the economic system in which we live and fool themselves into thinking its ok as it is.
How likely is that we get ourselves extinct ? Idk, quite likely it seems, but I won’t think much about that because it’s not something me alone can change. I just try to tell others about it and hope to organise a large enough group to help our cause. It’s a careful balance between fighting those in power and not getting yourself crushed, at least not until enough people share your ideas. That’s pretty much my objective in life, not a family, not anything else, just work and advocate against the current system for a better one.
Glad I found this channel. Great video!
That was briliant, I was actualy thinking about how the eldrich is not a great anacdote for this political horror throughout the piece, fell right into that litle rethorical trap XD
13:18 - I laughed out loud... ah, Phil. You silly human, you. :) (You're not a cop anymore, so you get to count as a human now. ;) ;) ;) )
There's really an endless list of things you can point to as barriers in the fight against capitalism, to the point that the biggest barrier ends up being the sheer size and complexity of these barriers taken together. This creates a very solid block of despair, as it seems like the fight paradoxically can't start in earnest until it's basically over already. Isolation, apathy, lack of time, fear of change, misplaced loyalty, misplaced anger, etc aren't just barriers between us and capitalism, but rooted in it, and they keep us ensnared. So we cannot break down these barriers to "get at" capitalism, but must somehow "jump over" them, which the vast majority of people simply can't or won't do.