Are there any books that explain the lack of soul you can see in people of this country?

>Bolstering the OP's question by acting like a soulless moron

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lol just take out another loan goy. you aren't a commie are you?

shut up OP lmao

Modernity just sucks, in North America and in Europe and just about everywhere else.

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spbp

Yes. Yes there is.

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Freudian projection

Any particular reason for using the 48 star flag, OP?

Money is god.

the postmodern soul was created by americans, which americans live naturally. then you get outsiders scraping for fake glimpses just like OP. no im not talking about the postmodern neomarxists meme.
>postmodernism is shit
but we live in it, even beyond pomo now. you can only wrong generation cope for so long. the world is shit but somehow america nailed having a soul in pomo which contributes to people having a jealous lovehate freudian complex. cue wewuz arguments..

this

strongly relate user

I blame the weakness of europe. America stood as a frontier where capitalism and government could act recklessly because a stronger cultural force was distant and removed from the chaos. Europe grew enamored with the progress this recklessness created and was unable to justify maintenance of older cultural bonds and allowed America to stand at the forefront of cultural development. Now Europeans are stuck stewing in their failure as the American capitalists desperately fight to accelerate progress to stave off an inevitable crash. I'd recommend Brave New World, we're already at the point where many people today would regard John as an stupid figure from a backwards time and nothing more..

Name one(1)
protip: you can't

I like Lovecraft and Poe.

There use to be a soul. The 1920s, full of Americana and small government conservatism thanks to Coolidge. What a time.

You don't really need a book, it's unfortunately really simple. Every country, or land, has its golden age and this age is the paragon of the country and its descendants, for France it was the aristocracy, for England WW2, for Germany the enlightenment. These are the cultural touchstones that inform and compare how well a culture does, America was its founding and is a deeply democratic golden age. So, in our golden age, every American compares themselves as equal, and obviously this is dissatisfying because people want to be better than others (a la will to power), this fine and good in itself and makes a very decent, noble, hard working kin. The issue is when mass information merges this to a mass quantification and comparison of every facet of life. Americans obsess over money like their calories, foot steps, and heart rate, because they need to differentiate themselves against their spectral image of themselves and only quantification fills that void. So rather than beauty, grandeur, or whatever, it becomes a numbers game

Some additional examples:
>Sq footage
>GDP
>management culture
>All social media uses this concept with likes etc

goofy

they're basically britishmen born in the wrong place though

Lovecraft maybe, but Poe was too beaten down by America to be anything but American.

>Every country, or land, has its golden age
>for England WW2
What makes you think this?

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>Americans obsess over money like their calories, foot steps, and heart rate,

So are we fat or healthy? Make up your mind.

Is it true that americans can't truly become genuises?

They can, if they set their mind to it, accomplish great things, but they can never truly transcend the state of mental and spiritual sedentarism that is their default mode.

It's like dogs can be trained to do pretty amazing things, but they will still be dogs with all the shit eating and fire hydrant humping that comes with it.

Thoughts?

Taking an old question about the fundamental nature of man and switching "man" out for a group you don't like doesn't answer the old question.

You seem to be depressed user. There is always plenty to hate abot a country, particularly a country you live in. But remember millions of Americans actually live decent lives. Only they all live in the Midwest.

>evolutionary analysis
>of intellectual and political movements
>department of psychology
>cali state university
The only redeeming thing is, ironically, the critique of Jews.

Oh right that one

You forget that America's supremacy in the West is a result of WW2. And that a lot of the thing we blame America for originated in Europe and never left. See: banking invented in Italy, industrial capitalism invented in England and quickly spread to France, etc.

Interesting take. Any book in mind to expand on this? This vaguely ressembles Hegel.

There are some but they're rather obscure. VF Calverton was a genius, but unrecognized during his time. Patrick Roesle is a living American genius but will probably die in obscurity. There isn't so much a lack, as there is a stronger filter for their ideas entering the main, whereas france basically has the lowest threshold of rigour and highest allowance for expression of human thought, within the nonfiction realm.

Regarding art, not sure. I like to imagine I'd deny it, but that being said, it's most likely solipsism and myopia

Baudrillard's America speaks to the golden age. The quantification aspect is my own. It's VERY simple, it's actually a management trick, what gets measured becomes the performance. Obviously, the fidelty and severity to what someone follows a metric is cultural, so that's not all too interesting of a point, just that it becomes part of someone's metaphysical landscape.

Poe was a proud Southerner, even if he knew the flaws of Southerners inside and out. He was American to the core, and nothing supports the idea that he was funamentally British apart from his gentlemanly demeanor (again a feature of the ideal American South) and the theoretical nature of some of his writings (and in this day and age we should know better than presume no American can dwell in theories).

You're fat but obsessed about health. Or i you prefer, starkly divided into two classes, the fat underclass and the fitness-obsessed upper class.

Texas was horrible for this. Either obese or jacked.

Underrated redpill

It seems you're investing the word "genius" with some transcendant meaning that really has no basis in it.
If an American paints something worthy of the Sistine Chapel, are you gonna say it's not a "truly" worthy piece of art, even though it involves the same degree of skill, inspiration, boldness and devotion than the best Renaissance art?
Geniuses are recognized by their life and works. If you design a notion of genius that rests on some metaphysical unknown that is entirely disconnected from life and works, then you"ve given an entirely different meaning to the word or even voided it of meaning.
Let's stop with the nineteenth century faggotry please. It was bad enough when we were still in the nineteenth century.

>Patrick Roesle
>that Goodreads description
>those reviews
I'll pass thanks.

They hate us cuz they ain't us.

Very feelsbadman

John Steinbeck
Nabokov
Poe
Lovecraft
Melville
Ligotti
McCarthy
Faulkner
etc

There is genius in America, but genius won't be recognized as such unless it is atrophied into facile fodder palatable to the marketplace of ideas. The divine creativity of genius is subject to extreme rationalization in America.
Peirce, a genius among geniuses, died in poverty and obscurity because he refused to play the game.

>gentlemanly demeanor (again a feature of the ideal American South) a
In retrospect that is the ideal, but at the time you have people like Dickens commenting the only polite and mannered white people he met in the South are those children who learnt their manners off their black nanny, since the black nanny got shipped there from the civilised world.

De Tocqueville predicted it all.

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Steinbeck though. I'm the #1 anti anglo poster on this board yet Steinbeck managed to pull some of the greatest works of the 20th while being a degenerated american marxist.

>I'm the #1 anti anglo poster on this board

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>the postmodern soul was created by americans
Foucault was not American

That was the self-conscious ideal at the time, Southerners fancied themselves as "cavaliers", that is to say descendants of the last supporter of the Stuarts who fled England in Cormwell's time.

I hit "post" too early. I meant to add of course it's a mythology, and of course a lot of the Southerners who considered themselves "cavaliers" where wifebeating drunkard with half an acre of shitty terrain to their name.
But still the ideal was there and Poe did his best to embody it (with much success judging from what his acquainces report).

He did not create the post-modern soul, at best he exposed some of its inner reasoning. And Foucault was already working in an heavily-americanized France. Remember even Baudelaire already complained about the Americanization of France in his time (while oddly participating in it in his way).

Englands golden age was its final decline?
Geez

>nowhere worth living,
I was with you until this. The one thing America has going for it is incredible wilderness

>tfw my employer is supportive of me and paying for my masters and have great medical and retirement benefits
>tfw living on 5 acres in a nice house 30 minutes from work and have a nice /diy/ shop
>tfw I love my family and we all get along well, life is going smooth so far
>tfw I enjoy living in America and being American

Inflating medical and educational costs are getting pretty ridiculous though

>I work and I'm doing really well for myself
>If I did it everyone can! I'm living proof!
>Why isn't everyone?
>Must be because they are bad or lazy

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>tfw I have a nice master who let's me see doctor and stop making him money for the brief period before I die
>tfw I have a nice wage patch that my master let me have that is still 30 minutes away from my master's workshop
FTFY

EXACTLY. Americans are incredibly damaged people; great works of art, weary souls. And, of course, half the population being insufferable beyond the point of decency. Coming from a sad American from New Jersey of all places.

If someone’s experience is overwhelmingly negative like the post I responded to then they may want to reassess their life choices and path.

Cope. I have plenty of free time and enough financial security to enjoy it.
>tfw phoneposting from work

>cope. actually I'm more than happy with the time master gives me. Sometimes I can even sneak in some posting on my phone. Master gets mad if I use the computer though.
FTFY again

cope

nice b8. said it. the french play a huge part in this. for them its of the bitter losing scorn at the pageant but at the same time admiring how powerful of a cultural monster america created. not a coincidence that most critiques are french. its as if they were saying 'how better we couldve done it if we were the winning culture' like a total fashionable frenchie, trying to hide their glee.

Great response.

Everyone else lacks soul and they project that on the country that speaks louder than they can. I won't pretend that our philosophers aren't shit compared to Europe's, but we have produced great works of art over the last couple centuries and everyone who denies it is just resentful.

>America's supremacy in the West is a result of WW2
I agree with the rest of your post but this bit is wrong. It was already obvious by the late 19th century that the US was on the rise and Europe on the decline. Europe certainly had a deathwish; the killing off of its best and brightest in WWI still has a profoundly negative result on it now, 100 years later. WWII was merely the second act in Europe’s suicide.
>the bitter losing scorn at the pageant
This, too. The jealousy and resentment are quite apparent. They’re like the once-popular girl, now fat and ugly and standing forgotten in the corner of a party, whining and moaning and complaining about the in-group.

The society of the spectacle

America isn't all bad, but the malaise can be suffocating.

The united states is materially richer than the overwhelming majority of the world. The rot is spiritual

True, but malaise is hardly unique to the US.

Yeah, the west in general is pretty stagnant. Asia is where the weltgeist is

Damn.

Holy FUCKING shit nice post man. Almost fell out of my chair.

Says something when the only place worth living is the wilderness. I'd live in some comfy small town somewhere though.

There is no such thing as a soul.

Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Stuff by Adorno

It’s all mass-society. Everything is about the masses, not the individual.

>It's a place to make money and gtfo of as quickly as possible. If I won the lottery tomorrow I'd be the fuck out of here and burn my social security card on the way out.
>>no culture, nowhere worth living, no place worth defending, no roots, no cohesion, no sense of community, everyone is turned into a feral rat willing to kill someone over five dollars
hmmmmm

>Nabokov
>American

>Nabokov
>soul

The process to leave is complex enough you're going to be trapped here, just a rat who's aware he's in the sewers, you're not better than us.

>Says something when the only place worth living is the wilderness
This is really nonsense though. There are thousands and thousands of towns and cities in the US perfectly comfortable to live in, from a material viewpoint. The same is true in Europe and the rest of the West. If you’re instead bitching about spirituality, grow up — spirituality is entirely subjective and doesn’t at all depend on your living location if you have strength of mind, and thinking that your spiritual problems will be solved if you move to some other country is prime “grass is greener” daydreaming indulged by people all over the world.

Highly recommend Douglas Porpora's study "Landscapes of the Soul: The Loss of Meaning in American Life". He's a contemporary sociologist who decided to analyze the decline of religiosity in the US

Oh, to be 12 years old again. So much angst, so much edge.

/thread

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>tfw I love my family and we all get along well

This is what every delusional male boomer thinks. Takes them far too long to realize that their kids hate them and their wife is fucking half the city. The funniest part about it is how open the wives are about it all. Most of them will start openly shitting on their husband within a few seconds of talking to a complete stranger.

>youtube.com/watch?v=kAAlEoLRuTA
That is all I got to say.

Cuck fiction.

Sweeping generalization followed by projection followed by fantasy. Truly we have mental midgets in our midst.

>That is all I got to say
If all you do is link to a YouTube video, you really have nothing to say, do you?

Posting about my fulfilled American life on fourchannel

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So, technology and rationality replaced the “heroics” of dying in the petty political squabbles of some feeble “muh divine right” asshole. And that’s a bad thing. Got it.

pic related is the best breakdown of American society

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It has a lot to do with Neoliberal, particularly neoconservative politics (and for the record, I think Democrats are essentially neocons with a Human Face). The big problem about modern conservatism, neofascism, paleo-conservatism: the modern right in general. Old school conservatism, and Teddy Roosevelt is a great example of this, actually regularly admitted arbitrary inequalities and attacks on public space, means of building community, infrastructure, etc. Teddy's nationalization of the parks and monopoly busting would be unthinkable to the modern conservative, even though it's actually very in line with conservative values. Modern conservatism, for whatever reason (largely self-interested strategy for the now old guard to maintain power) is committed to not acknowledging that anything is wrong structurally--no criticism of the state's function unless it relates to gun ownership and funding, and a couple issues like abortion, which frankly rarely is talked about on the level of legality. Instead, everything is kept on the cultural/moral level without addressing day to day degradation.

Now the problem with this is that you can't really win with this over a long period of time. Say even in the long run the conservatives are able to keep winning elections (which I think is likely) and pass a lot of their policies and whatnot: the underlying discontent won't go away, since many of them are now associated with "progressive" thought: better infrastructure, smaller military, higher wages, accessible healthcare, more vacation, cheaper education, and so on. Of course, none of these things are at all inherently left-wing. I mean Nixon's administration actually ran on some of these, particularly the healthcare stuff, since FDR made the concept of an American welfare state nearly a centrist position for a couple decades until Reagan and Neoliberalism came around.

But it stays cultural, again mainly for the right at the moment, which is where all out fascism comes into play. Of course the basic idea of culture being corrupted is a total farce. There is no original, unmediated relationship to culture, certainly at least not since the advent of Capitalism. The pivot in fascist propaganda that blames these corruptions on the foreign Other is just a way to keep the underlying conditions stable (that is, a Capitalist economy) while channeling its discontents outward. You will never feel really "connected to" or "a part of" your culture so long as it can be commodified and essentially treated as property. Of course, fascist literature would have you believe that total and complete ownership of this culture, which means the elimination of the foreign Other, would solve any alienation: but it doesn't. It can't.

A system where culture is equated with product necessarily alienates you from that culture, as well as from others. Class, technology, capital, inherently mean the dissolution of the old "way of life." There is constant upheaval of old cultural modes.

>I think Democrats are essentially neocons with a Human Face
There's a leftist faction springing up in the Democratic party though. Hopefully Bernie wins.

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There is. It's crazy that Zizek was right about Trump sparking class war in the Democratic party. I know it's Huffpost and they're normally hot garbage, but this article really covers what's going on well:
huffpost.com/entry/nancy-pelosi-has-lost-control_n_5d2cb605e4b032ea741220ad
The only thing it does really poorly is situate Pelosi as somehow against or outside of machine politics.

this lmao get fucked op faggot

>dying in the petty political squabbles of some feeble asshole

technology and rationality did not replace violence, they just made it less human

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Thanks for a well thought-out post.
>better infrastructure
I think the majority of conservatives wouldn’t be opposed to this.
>smaller military
Again, quite a few conservatives — Pat Buchanan being a good example — would like to reign in the military-industrial complex. Unfortunately it won’t happen as the gentlemen and ladies who control the Republican and Democrat parties are deep in its pockets.
>higher wages, accessible healthcare, more vacation, cheaper education
As long as it’s sustainable, sure, but that means getting a handle on illegal immigration, which again is unlikely to happen as the owners of both parties benefit too much from it.

>technology and rationality did not replace violence, they just made it less human
Tell it to

>implying
I don’t have a wife or kids (I’m 25). I was referring to my parents and siblings and fiancé. So I guess not all kids hate their parents...

>The only thing it does really poorly is situate Pelosi as somehow against or outside of machine politics
More like, it doesn’t admit that the NY Democrat machine is merely an arm of the national Democrat party machine. The problem is nationwide/machinewide. Singling out NY, considering the source, is an attempt to deflect attention from the elephant in the room.

What if we turned America into a monarchy?

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based retard

Yeah I agree. Though it can't be denied that so much of machine politics, historically and today, is based in and around NYC. I mean it's Capital's capital

The soulfulness of Americans vs the rest of the world is exactly like the intelligence of males vs females. The extremes of both stupidity and intelligence belong to men. Women amass around the mean. The degeneration of philosophy where it is worst is at it's worst in America but we also possess the very best. Euros on the other hand are more of a gray meh.

We made an embarrassment of kings 300 years ago and they never recovered. Let it stay dead dumb crown larper.

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Then it wouldn't be America any more.
The United States of America is an experiment in liberal democracy. If it adopts a different system its a failed experiment

ITT:OBSESSED

Yeah it's called the talmud

Lovecraft just makes you feel small and plants seeds of nihilism in your heart. Poe had a dead girl fetish. Both are false yet also yes true

Hemmingway is the peak of soulful american machismo

>Lack of soul
>America
>Not pic related or almost any Asian country
Ask me how I know you've never left your Western country

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This. Though there is a bit of this The US really needs to get out of the terrible Plutocratic/Corporatist hole Reagan dug itself into. Middle class is dwindling, corporations growing and increasing, more retards think that Socialism is a good thing. Not helped by the shitty 'culture' that is shoveled out day after fucking day. Both a bit of spiritual and economic, really.

To be fair, the US dominates in Soft Power. We sorta shovel it into everyone's faces, but everyone just keeps giving us money so...

This is a good start for OP.

>treated worse than slaves
t. middle class chapomong

spot the American