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Going to drop another Samir Amin quote about that phrase in particular.
Nevertheless, another reading can be made of Marx. The often cited phrase--"religion is the opium of the people"--is truncated. What follows this remark lets it be understood that human beings need opium, because they are metaphysical animals who cannot avoid asking themselves questions about the meaning of life. They give what answers they can, either adopting those offered by religion or inventing new ones, or else they avoid worrying about them.
In any case, religions are part of the picture of reality and even constitute an important dimension of it. It is, therefore, important to analyze their social function, and in our modern world their articulation with what currendy constitutes modernity: capitalism, democracy, and secularism.
Techbros and bazinga defeatists are firmly in the "inventing new ones" category. Even in your example, they are acting as if the new technology is some all powerful, inevitable, unstoppable force
from aboveso they may as wellworship itcheer on this technological progress. They have essentially in a way, reinvented the concept of God.Permanently Deleted
I lost count of how many people I've met that saw "progress" as some Civ game style bar that only crawled upward toward specific goal milestones.
As much as I love the series, Civilization has done irreparable harm to the public's understanding of history and how technology develops. People seriously think you can just invent saddles for horseback riding even if you're in a place without horses. G*mers are going to need serious re-education after the revolution.
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The series is still stuck in the '90s. Belief in the End of History, Great Man, and so on. The least they could do is look into more systemic analysis and archeological discoveries involving our prehistoric ancestors.
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Whitoids can't help it. In the face of interstellar travel, all they can think about is new places to colonize and settle.
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Communism is OP in civ 6 because it is only system which focuses on production, and production is and always was OP in Civ.
Ahh the idealistic idea that change/adjustment/progress is both inevitable and always positive. You're going to hate me for this, but Samir Amin had something to say about that too.
The fact that these adjustments can be positive or negative argues in favor of an interpretation of historical materialism based on the concept of "under-determination." I mean by this that each of the various levels of reality (economic, political, ideological) contains its own internal logic, and because of this the complementary nature of their evolution, which is necessary to ensure the overall coherence of a system, does not define in advance a given direction for a particular evolution.
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and even a brief but fierce moment where dar le VR/AR was the revolutionary hotness.
The fact that we've gone through multiple phases of this in the last decade is extraordinary. First it was Oculus, then Google cardboard/daydream, then Oculus gain, then the Meta quest headsets, and finally Apple vision pro. Everytime it comes up, people are sure that this time VR will go mainstream! Maybe it's time to accept that as social creatures, humans do not want to live with a headset strapped to their face 24/7. Hell, even when we had to cover our faces for a good cause and public benefit, like masking for a pandemic, people invented the most juvenile of excuses to not wear a mask.
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