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Isn’t wrecking luxury cars for funsies and treating women like a sort of livestock that you can beat and leave to raise your kids really super-consumerist under
by silveroriole 7y ago
Isn’t wrecking luxury cars for funsies and treating women like a sort of livestock that you can beat and leave to raise your kids really super-consumerist underneath the shock factor? There’ll always be more stuff and more women (and bonus, you can get other people to do the work to make the stuff!), just consume and destroy them, move onto another part of the country where there’s still more stuff, keep on doing it cause the abundance will never end... sounds exactly like the ‘consumerist’ global economy.
- keiferski 7y agoI think analyzing Kerouac and his books as a series of actions is to somewhat miss the point, and to bring a contemporary consumeristic / experience-focused attitude to the work. He doesn't really do anything important. The insightful part is the mentality, the thought process, the philosophy. Kerouac was pretty big into religion (not organized religion, mind you) particularly Catholicism and Buddhism, and to describe his works as "bad people travel around nowhere for no reason and do bad things" is to completely misunderstand the context and purpose of them. Most of Kerouac's other works deal with this pretty extensively (see The Dharma Bums), but since the Slate Star Codex guy (and most middle-class technocratic people like him) often have a real aversion to anything that isn't strictly scientistic, they end up missing the forest for the trees. Finally, I should add that reading literature from the past and dismissing it because it doesn't fit your contemporary moral worldview is both deeply ignorant and just plain unfulfilling. You don't need to think Kerouac was a good person to think he had something important to say.
- saiya-jin 7y agoYeah but you might still disagree with what he is saying, for numerous reasons. Acting like an a-hole just for the sake of 'fuck it' mentality ain't something to admire for many, doesn't matter if 70 years ago or tomorrow. To wrap everybody who doesn't blindly admire his discussed actions as 'middle-class technocratic people' doesn't add much to the discussion apart from certain snobbishness of 'I am better than you are if you don't agree with me'. We did / are doing some pretty crazy shit in our lives that Kerouac never even dreamed about, we just don't need to be a-holes while doing it. A bit of respect goes much longer way.
- keiferski 7y agoI'm not arguing that you should agree with Kerouac, but that the Slate Star Codex review is deeply misinformed in a way typical of people with a certain mindset.
- throwaway_tech 7y ago>Kerouac stood for things that made (and still make) the consumer bourgeois middle class tremble. That also seems terribly misinformed...Kerouac if nothing else was a self-loathing member of the consumer bourgeois middle class. He was a college educated author who "got his kicks" hanging out with people the middle class traditionally looked down on, and he went on road trips by bumming money from his aunt. Yet, Kerouac is shown to have no conviction in his own beliefs as he continually abandons these very people at the first sign of threatening his good times.
- ulisesrmzroche 7y agoHe wasn’t acting like an asshole just for fun. This is a naive interpretation. Have y’all even tried reading the wiki, at least?