Some days it's words that claim my attention, and this was one of those. We've been listening to Kate Atkinson's Life After Life, and yesterday brought a passage mentioning amor fati, which had caught my attention a year ago while reading The Glass Bead Game. To briefly review the background:
Amor fati WikipediaLearning To Love And Accept Everything That Happens from dailystoic.com
...As Epictetus put it: Do not seek to have events happen as you want them but instead want them to happen and your life will go well... The Stoics called that idea the Art of Acquiescence. Horace wrote feras non culpes quod vitari non potest (what can't be cured must be endured)...Love Fati from yourlastdesire.com
"Anxiety does not come from looking back into the past or looking forward into the future, but from trying to control them."The Truth About Human Nature Lee Perlman at thenewatlantis.com
...Nietzsche picked up as a kind of motto a mistranslated line from the Second Pythian Ode, a work by the Ancient Greek poet Pindar: "Become what you are." In Nietzsche's existentialist understanding (later appropriated in a similar fashion by Martin Heidegger), the phrase is an injunction to drop the delusion of an ideal you, along with any moral overlay it implies, and simply to identify fully with yourself as a bundle of drives. "Become what you are" [werde, der du bist] means for him "Become what you happen to be, not what you think you should be." That is, amor fati: love your fate!There is another way to interpret Pindar's injunction: the essentialist, or classical understanding. This better adheres to a more accurate translation of the poem, which would read something like, "Become such as you are, having learned what that is." Plato and Aristotle held that we have a telos — an end toward which we are pointed. This end is our true self, and the best life is spent trying to understand what that self is, and to become it. For an essentialist, "Become what you are" means "Become who you truly are, and stop being sidetracked by partial lower drives."
And then Heather Cox Richardson's post this morning invoked the marvelous concept of kayfabe
...For years, observers have noted that Trump's approach to politics is patterned on the "kayfabe" at the heart of professional wrestling. Kayfabe is the performance aspect of professional wrestling, in which the actors play out relationships and scenes in which there are good and evil, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal...'neokayfabe' "rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment."
Neokayfabe, Reisman wrote, "turns the world into a hall of mirrors from which it is nearly impossible to escape. It rots the mind and eats the soul."
Kayfabe refers to pro wrestling's central conceit: that everything the audience is seeing is real. As an adjective, it simply described something that was fake — for example, if two unrelated men were billed as brothers, that would make them kayfabe brothers. As an imperative verb, it meant staying in character: If you wrestled as a noble Native American character, you couldn't let the press find out you were actually a womanizing Swede, and so forth. As a noun, it referred to the entire system of manipulations that upheld the industry....Nothing was off-limits in neokayfabe. Mr. McMahon and the performers could say the unutterable, do the unthinkable — the more shocking, the better — and fans would give it their full attention because they couldn't always figure out if what they were seeing was real or not. The human mind is easily exploited when it's trying to swim the choppy waters between fact and fiction.
(Abraham Reisman, NY Times Feb 26, 2023)...Kayfabe Wikipedia
Kayfabe from tvtropes.com
"Kayfabe" is a carny term thought to have originated from the Pig Latin for "be fake", possibly originally by pronouncing it backward ("kay-feeb"). Professional Wrestling adopted the term as a reference to the standard Fourth Wall features of separating the audience from the action. It is meant to convey the idea that pro wrestling is a genuine sport, and this is how these people are really acting.In all cases of kayfabe being used, the fact that what's being shown isn't really what's going on is obvious to anyone who looks at it. But the Willing Suspension of Disbelief is understood by everyone involved for the sake of enjoying the media. Telling the average fan that wrestling is "fake", or that The Muppets aren't real actors, or that their favorite Virtual Youtuber is not a cute anime character but a person using motion-capture software, will just make you sound stupid — you're not the first person to say that, and everyone's well-aware by now. But no matter what you say, the fan still likes it. They're participating in the fiction because they want to enjoy it or believe in it.
In short: Kayfabe is when a work is presenting itself as real, and we all play along. Not because we think it's real, but because we know it's fake and we want to enjoy it regardless.
Kayfabe, Smartdom and Marking Out: Can Pro-Wrestling Help Us Understand Donald Trump? David S Moon Political Studies 2020
Donald Trump has enjoyed a nearly 30-year relationship with World Wrestling Entertainment as a business partner, fan, in-ring performer and 2013 Hall of Fame Inductee. Noting this long running involvement, it has become a widespread contention that Trump's style as a political campaigner owes a debt to his experiences within the world of professional wrestling......A Pig-Latin-esque word for 'fake', in pro-wrestling kayfabe refers to the performance of staged and 'faked' events as actual and spontaneous... the illusion that everything is utterly sincere and authentic when it is all just an act... the term kayfabe has taken on a different meaning. It now describes a new form of audience engagement that involves, in the first instance, a willing suspension of disbelief within which performers, promoters and the audience, all 'keep kayfabe' ...in the new kayfabe, everyone is invested and involved in the playing of the game itself.
on Kayfabe Eric R. Weinstein, Mathematician and Economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital
What makes Kayfabe remarkable is that it gives us potentially the most complete example of the general process by which a wide class of important endeavors transition from failed reality to successful fakery... Kayfabrication (the process of transition from reality towards Kayfabe) arises out of attempts to deliver a dependably engaging product for a mass audience while removing the unpredictable upheavals that imperil participants... Importantly, Kayfabe also seems to have discovered the limits of how much disbelief the human mind is capable of successfully suspending before fantasy and reality become fully conflated.Mark Liberman at Language Log, 2019
I've long thought that kayfabe — "the portrayal of staged events as 'real' or 'true', specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature" — is a term that needs to break out into the world of political reporting...
I'm not the first to wonder that the Trumpian malapropism of 'covfefe' (vintage 2017) has a strange resonance with the above. Orange Voldemort's original tweet:
is documented in Six Hours and Three Minutes of Internet Chaos: In the annals of revelatory Trump tweets, "covfefe" is the ultimate Adrienne LaFrance The Atlantic 2019
Covfefe remains the tweet that best illustrates Trump's most preternatural gift: He knows how to captivate people, how to command and divert the attention of the masses. And long after the president's tweets are stripped of meaning by the passage of time and the rotting of the internet, his severest critics will still have to grapple with the short distance between politics and entertainment in America, and the man who for years toyed so masterfully with a nation's attention.
I wonder if this is somehow relevant?
or perhaps
Cory Doctorow contributes another with his take on Eerieness
'Eeriness' here is defined as "when there is something present where there should be nothing" or if there is nothing present when there should be something.AI is eerie because it produces the seeming of intent, without any intender.