Life and the Cindy Effect
#1
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The Lindy effect is the observation that the longer something has been around, the longer it should be predicted to stay around. It has proven its staying power/popularity and/or overcome obstacles, competitors, etc. This concept has been most notable proselytized by the Greek man Paul Skallas. The Lindy effect has gone out of favor among "our thing" for a few reasons. These reasons consist of Paul Skallas' personal flaws and his dilution of what Lindy means ("sex toys are Lindy" -Paul Skallas [paraphrased]), the use of the concept by Med supremacists, and its arguable "longhouse"ness evoking images of Nona's wholesome hearty cooking, stuffy extended family living etc.
The Cindy effect, coined by "Peter Schaller", is the Germanic/Nordic version of the Lindy effect (thoughever it seems to have some Italian futurist influence). It evokes speed and intensity as opposed to longevity. Faustian as opposed to sustainable. Aesthetically it is organized, clean, technologically advanced.
Here's a description of Greeks and Germans by "Greek Kamaki" with commentary by Icycalm which I believe depicts an aspect of the distinction:
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One could describe the contrast as that of a "default", older, "traditional" lifestyle clashing with a different type of civilization. If this civilization began with the Greeks, then the last comment makes sense.
In this thread I'd like to discuss and refine the concept of Cindy, its desirability or lack thereof, and how to be more Cindy in ones everyday life. Or just post Cindy images.
#2
Atlantropa - German Architect Herman Sörgel in the 1920s proposed the idea of draining the Mediterranean to lower the sea level uncovering new land the european man could settle and colonize. Utilizing Hydroelectric dams at various points to generate electricity, taking over Africa and using Lake Chad to provide fresh water to the Sahara.

"Sörgel was convinced that to remain competitive with the Americas and an emerging Oriental "Pan-Asia", Europe needed to become self-sufficient, which meant possessing territories in all climate zones. Asia would forever remain a mystery to Europeans, and the British would not be able to maintain their global empire in the long run, and so a common European effort to colonize Africa was necessary." 



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Cindy. 
#3
Praxis City is the single most "Cindy" project that has ever been thought of by man.
#4
The concept of standing desks seems incredibly cindy to me. While the J2 man would rather sit and lean to the left after his high carb pasta meal (body and posture rotting away) the R1B man prefers to stand up and gaze upwards and across. Adapting and overcoming the discomfort of standing whilst avoiding the longhouse sloth of sitting. Standing desks have a sleek, minimalist design without pointless flare weighing it down (Ikea design -> Sweden -> Aryan)

When the scions of the Yamnaya would go on a murder-fuck spree theres a reason why the design of the chariot involved standing instead of focusing on a nice padded seat. 


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#5
(02-15-2022, 11:53 AM)(´• ω •`)ノ Wrote: Every German subject worth of mention was a graecophile, explicit or not, like Goethe, Mies van der Rohe and Adolf Hitler.
Would you say this is true of post-Renaissance Europeans generally or do you think it's something particular to Germans?

@FruitVendor Standing desks definitely strike me as Cindy. Also, I like being in Ikea stores, very cozy places (but in a Cindy way, kind of like airports).
#6
Quote:Disowning the Greeks
October 10th, 2018 [Aidan Maclear]
I feel like this is an entirely quixotic mission, but it’s something that ought to be put out there nonetheless: The ancient Greeks and Romans are not part of Western culture. Homer is no more a part of the Western canon than the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching. When I see something like Identity Evropa and their posters covered with Greek sculpture, it makes me cringe internally.
The Greek culture was the culture of the body, and their society was the society of the present, the tangible, the material, and the sensuous. The Western culture is the culture of the intangible, the distant, the esoteric, of moral law and expansionary force. As an example, when Plato introduced idealism to the Greek, he did so using a telling metaphor; the ideal was not an essence, or an abstract, but a perfect body that existed in a parallel world. His idea of liberation was liberation to a more vivid sensuousness, a more ‘real’ materialism- from the Cave to the world of light. The Greeks imagined the world after death to be universally a drear misery, for saint and sinner alike- it was life, the carpe diem, that was of real significance. Look at the way they depicted the soul- as a butterfly. An insect which flew from the mouth after the death of the body, the only important part of man!
Greek art is popular because it is shallow. The statuary of Lysippos has no hidden depth, it suggests no higher meaning than the perfection of material form and proportion. In perfect mimesis of life, in undying stone, was where Greek spirituality exhausted itself. Working in stone does not represent care for the future; rather, to the Greek it symbolized the eternal present.
The Renaissance was merely an adoption of outward form rather than the revival of real “Greek” art. Consider La Pieta, and realize that this one sculpture contains more emotion, signifies a deeper world of meaning, than the entire history of Greek and Roman sculpture combined. The Greek sculpture had no individuality, no suggestion of internal depth and personality. It wore a mask, even when it was meant to designate a specific god or personage, a mask that was drawn from a mere handful of stock character types. Even the portraiture-in-stone that developed through Hellenistic into Roman times, even when it strove for mimesis of the actual person, contained no hint of the internality of the man depicted.
And realize that the high arts of Europe bore almost no relation to those of Classical times; of orchestral music compared to the near-nonexistent and to our ear absurdly primitive Greek music, of oil-painting to the wall-fresco, of the opera to the masked, robotically-intoned Greek theater. And the mere single generation of “Renaissance” sculpture actually produced is a historical footnote compared to the likes of a Bach or Beethoven. The architecture that the Renaissance thought it was borrowing from classical times was actually the architecture of the Muslim kingdoms, which they in turn had borrowed and modified from the Romans. Oops!
In other cases, the European attachment to the Classical was detrimental to the expression of the Western world-feeling. Aside from a scattered few geniuses like Shakespeare who chose or were chosen to work in the form, it was a long time before theater liberated itself from Greek pretensions and became the opera. It should be considered a blessing that the Greek arts of painting and music were lost to the medieval European, unlike their work in stone and writing, because the full actualization of Western art comes indeed in these media and not those which were trammeled in by classical conventions. The great epic poetry of the West as well was written in verse, whether lyric or alliterative, that was entirely alien to that which the Romans and Greeks utilized. In any case, the utility of Classical influence on Western art was in the best case an incidental choice of form or subject matter that had no effect on the inner spirit of the work, and in the worst a restrictive form which stifled Western tendencies. Never do we see a case in which Classical influence improves a Western art form.
The pediment of the Ionic temple sat with a heavy finality upon its columns. The Parthenon is a beautiful building. But it is worldly and self-contained in its perfect proportions. Its interior is merely an afterthought; the main element of the classical temple is the entablature and its pediment, a single mass exalted, a body raised above the earth by columns. Compare to the Gothic cathedral, with its spires and vaulted arches: it aspires toward heaven, appears to strain against the limitations of gravity, to break free from the earth. Its stained-glass windows dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior; they suggest, to the worshiper inside, an infinite expanse of light. It becomes self-evident that the creators of these two architectures had entirely different spiritual physiognomies.
Nowhere is this difference more apparent than in our attitudes toward the Divine. The Greek felt the presence of his gods most keenly in the heart of his city, among the bustle of people and in sight of that god’s altar. Western man feels his God as infinity: infinite force and infinite energy, and as such feels his presence in places that suggest this infinity: on barren mountaintops, windswept moors and under the expanse of a heaven-reaching canopy of trees. And it was this feeling that he sought to inspire when he built his churches. Our monks and holy men would withdraw from the social world, so as to be alone and thus together with God. The Greek was never alone. Even in his theater, even in a moment of solemn reflection by the protagonist, he was attended to by the anonymous public body of the chorus. Achilles’ solitude was aberrant, and I suspect a great deal of the material that became Homer was left over from Mycenae, spun and edited to make it palatable to the Greek ear.
Don’t get me started on Homer. Achilles may well have been the first Western hero, but the Iliad is a repudiation of Achilles. Greeks didn’t name their kids after him back then, and they don’t do it now. Odysseus meets Achilles’ ghost in the Odyssey, and Achilles laments that he chose death and glory over a comfortable life of little renown. This is a passage that has given scholars an endless amount of headache, when Achilles claims that he would rather be the meanest slave alive than king over all the dead. It seems to contradict the entire Iliad, but it only does so when we read Achilles as a hero and not as an unworthy man who is not meant to be emulated. And we only read Achilles as a hero because of the makeup of our souls and our particular world-feeling, which are in fact inherently opposed to the Greek way of seeing the world.
The Greeks did not believe in the free will and had no conception of the man as playing an active role in destiny. Odysseus is buffeted about from island to island. He is not an intrepid explorer, not a hero projecting his indomitable will across space, but a toy of fate, an insect clinging to a leaf that the gods have seen fit to blow hither and thither at their pleasure. Another fact which perplexes scholars is that Odysseus took many years to cross the tiny Mediterranean sea in order to reach his homeland. But again, they impose a Western perspective which illustrates the vast spiritual distance between us. To the Greeks, the Mediterranean was a terrifyingly huge expanse of ocean, an intolerably hostile environment which dissolved the microcosm of the polis and its environs. And Odysseus, though a clever problem-solver, was not clever enough to set a course for Ithaca and stay it. He in fact possessed very little will in the matter; a far cry from a Columbus or a Magellan- or even the Mycenaeans, who colonized even the Atlantic coast of Spain, far earlier and far more distant than the Greeks ever dared sail.
The Greek colony was not a projection of the mother city’s political power, but a form of cellular mitosis in which an entirely new autonomous city was founded. In their colonization, the Greeks followed literally in the footsteps of the Phoenicians, and oftentimes founded their colonies within visible distance of an already extant Phoenician colony. In each and every case, the tendency of the Greek soul seems to shrink from the distant and the unknown. The Greek city- state’s territory comprised only the land from which the city’s acropolis could be seen, and anything distant from that was a hostile wilderness, the domain of Chaos. Whereas in the West, a state is the projection of a King’s rule, all the land under which his laws and his sovereign force can be applied. But to the Greek, Delphi was a definite, temporally defined body, a single thing. And the society of men that lived therein was simply a “body made up of bodies”.
The Greeks had no special concern for history or the future. No Greek ever thought to excavate Troy, which was exactly where Homer said it was, nor did they pay any attention to the ruins of Mycenae and its imposing fortress, which loomed over Delphi but bore no historic significance to its population. Rather, they simply dismissed it as impossible for man to have constructed, lending its architecture the moniker ‘cyclopean’, despite the man who became known as Agamemnon resting there! Thucydides was an exception; he himself was exiled and likely murdered, and we don’t see his like again until the West rose. And even his fairly meticulous history was only of the very recent past. After the sack and ruin of Athens by the Persians, the Athenians took their destroyed art and heaped it, along with the rubble of houses and other stones, pell-mell into a wall around the city. The Romans literally invented their pre-republic history out of thin air. All that needed to be known was the myth of the legendary founder, which itself occurred in an indeterminate past. Virgil’s Aenead was, rather than a definitive canon, simply an interpretation of a myth that every Roman had heard in a slightly different way. And we can contrast the Greco-Roman attitude towards history with that of the Egyptians and Chinese, both of whom were keeping exhaustively detailed annals before the Greeks had even learned to write.
Now, this is not to say that there are no lessons we can learn from the Greeks, but they are lessons that must be treated as if coming from an alien people and culture, the same way a reactionary can gain insight by reading Confucius. Their materialism led to a meticulous observation of rites and rituals, and they were not shy in considering certain behaviors as pathological to the body social. But on the other hand, they were just as meticulous in observing the rites of foreign gods, who they truly believed to be real entities in the lands of their worship. And only public behavior fell under the scrutiny of Greek moral law. The idea that one could be inwardly sinful, or even have ‘evil intent’ would be considered absurd. The Greek culture and the products of its political thinking and philosophy should not be swallowed hook, line, and sinker as part of the Western tradition.


Curious if you guys have any thoughts on this. I don't mind the characteristics of ancient Greek art that he describes, but his interpretation of the Iliad seems "big if true". Overall the implications to Cindy are obvious.
#7
The Fountainhead is a quintessential Cindy work. A story about a man who designs skyscrapers, a very new art form, while explicitly rejecting all aesthetic tradition, using only concrete, glass, and steel. The VILLAins insist that skyscrapers must have Greco-Roman style facades and not emphasize their tallness and modernity. It introduces a completely new philosophy, objectivism, and has an unprecedented combination of artistic and philosophical value. I can’t say it’s the most Cindy work of art of all time because novels are an old art form. The ultimate Cindy work of art would be a video game, but it couldn’t have a similar story to The Fountainhead or be Objectivist because that would not be Cindy. It would have to be a video game with a completely original story and philosophy. Maybe Alex Kierkegaard can pull it off.
#8
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#9

Curious if you guys have any thoughts on this. I don't mind the characteristics of ancient Greek art that he describes, but his interpretation of the Iliad seems "big if true". Overall the implications to Cindy are obvious.




This is a reiteration of Spengler. It’s definitely more true than the converse; we’re as distant from the Greeks as we are from any higher order civilization.
#10
(03-01-2022, 06:38 PM)Trep Wrote: Curious if you guys have any thoughts on this. I don't mind the characteristics of ancient Greek art that he describes, but his interpretation of the Iliad seems "big if true". Overall the implications to Cindy are obvious.

I agree, really. We are *not* the same.

There's two European cultures, let's call them old and new, or rather, Lindy and Cindy. Lindy lives on in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, Cindy is obvious which it is. It's not *very* clear-cut, it ebbs and flows, as cultures are fluid and changing, but it's roughly what it is.

Cultural orientation seems like a good indicator of which is which. Cindy cultures have guilt, Lindy ones have shame.
#11
(03-18-2022, 01:32 AM)Guest Wrote: This is a reiteration of Spengler. It’s definitely more true than the converse; we’re as distant from the Greeks as we are from any higher order civilization.

This seems like at the least an exaggeration.

(03-21-2022, 08:57 AM)Svevlad Wrote: There's two European cultures, let's call them old and new, or rather, Lindy and Cindy. Lindy lives on in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, Cindy is obvious which it is. It's not *very* clear-cut, it ebbs and flows, as cultures are fluid and changing, but it's roughly what it is.

Cultural orientation seems like a good indicator of which is which. Cindy cultures have guilt, Lindy ones have shame.

The guilt vs shame distinction is an interesting one to point out.

I have some more things to say on the categorization and characteristics of civilizations but I'm still organizing my thoughts.
#12
I agree that Classical Civ is inherently more Lindy while Faustian civ is more Cindy, but each time and place has elements of both. Fighter jets are Cindy, but 3000 years ago so were chariots. I also like the guilt vs shame mapping onto Cindy and Lindy. Cindy behaviour is directed by top-down abstract thought, deliberate, goal oriented, can override self-interested instincts, regulates itself. Lindy behaviour is directed by bottom up impulses, regulated by pain/pleasure or social coercion/incentives. This is also the hyperfrontal/hypofrontal distinction.

On this Maclear fellow, like others said he's just regurgitating Spergler, but that part about "Homer is no more a part of the Western canon than the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching." is profoundly stupid. We don't have millenia of Western art and thought directly inspired by the Bhagavad Gita or the Tao Te Ching. Classical Civ is not the same as the Faustian Civ, but the latter grew out of the former. I don't believe the Faustian historical conception could exist without Classical Antiquity as an eternal reference point.

That part about Achilles in the Underworld is accurate either. Achilles is unhappy to be dead, but chuffed to hear his son is a warrior too, and wishes he could return to life just for a short while to violently restore order to his father's house.
#13
Indeed, everything lindy was once cindy...
#14
Yes Guest I think you've hit the nail on the head here.

Collective 'intelligence' built and refined over time via selection processes vs individual intelligence independent of time. Guilt is a truly moral impulse, whereas shame is non-self-conscious simulation of a moral impulse. Neither of these can be strictly attributed to a single civilization.

"That part about Achilles in the Underworld is accurate either. Achilles is unhappy to be dead, but chuffed to hear his son is a warrior too, and wishes he could return to life just for a short while to violently restore order to his father's house"

I'm glad to hear that.

Could you explain what you mean by the hypofrontal/hyperfrontal distinction?
#15
@Trep Hypofrontal/hyperfrontal refers to extremes of activity and functionality of the pre-frontal cortex. Someone whose pre-frontal cortex is dysfunctional relative to other people -either because of decreased blood flow (hypofrontality) or because of innate underdevelopment- would have difficulty with impulse control and executive function. Assuming "Cindy" involves a self-overcoming of innate impulses which would otherwise keep one in "Lindy" patterns of behaviour and technology, no individuals or groups with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortices could be Cindy. 

"Top-down" processing is more frontal, depending on intelligible abstracted models of reality which can guide decision making, "bottom-up" is less frontal, depends on immediate sensory inputs and internal impulses. Ideally the two should complement each other.
#16
East Berlin 2083 - deep Cindy
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#17
excerpt by @capgras:

Quote:Me: "One could describe the contrast as that of a "default", older, "traditional" lifestyle clashing with a different type of civilization. If this civilization began with the Greeks, then the last comment makes sense."

This doesn't really make sense because Northern European civilization has existed since 1517. If you choose an older date, it's even older, if you choose a more recent date it's a result of modernity and therefore pozzed, and also separated from the culture of antiquity by thousands of years. But this world, in the mind of the author, is logically posterior to the conflict between Nords and Meds and thus isn't worth consideration.


I’d like to respond to this critique of timeline. The exact years and geographical locations of various civilizations are largely irrelevant to a theoretical investigation of tendencies/strategies. I don’t know where you got 1517 from, but in that quote I say it started with the Greeks (debatable, also I don't know why I didn't spell this out but the ancient Greek aristocracy was Aryan). Within one civilization/place/time many tendencies can exist, generally divided along class and ultimately racial lines (ultimately they exist in the individual).

Lindy is old because it’s literally defined as old. No matter how far back one goes, something is Lindy. It is what exists and has persisted. There is Lindy always unless society is totally and utterly turned upside down to an impossible degree. Lindy is not just Mediterranean, it is everywhere. And lindy is even good, or can be. It is tradition, and taken to the extreme is a totalitarian rule of custom that characterizes the vast majority of historical ‘civilizations’. Natural selection of people and ideas refined straight into mediocrity.

If this is tradition, then I am a modernist. ’Modernity’ is not pozzed. Niggers and communists are pozzed.

(04-01-2022, 02:38 AM)EricKashambuzi Wrote: @Trep Hypofrontal/hyperfrontal refers to extremes of activity and functionality of the pre-frontal cortex. Someone whose pre-frontal cortex is dysfunctional relative to other people -either because of decreased blood flow (hypofrontality) or because of innate underdevelopment- would have difficulty with impulse control and executive function. Assuming "Cindy" involves a self-overcoming of innate impulses which would otherwise keep one in "Lindy" patterns of behaviour and technology, no individuals or groups with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortices could be Cindy. 

"Top-down" processing is more frontal, depending on intelligible abstracted models of reality which can guide decision making, "bottom-up" is less frontal, depends on immediate sensory inputs and internal impulses. Ideally the two should complement each other.

I see, yes. I think Skallas or Taleb had an anecdote about a South American or African people who ate a toxic plant but cooked it in a specific way to neutralize the toxin. None of them knew why they cooked it that way, that was just what they did and they did it religiously. If they stopped they would get sick. They were basically stuck in this behavior, and it was actually good and necessary for them, with no understanding of it. Stupid people have to rely on ancestral wisdom.
#18
South American - when they introduced it to Africans they would only do the process partially, which wouldn't get rid of the toxins entirely, causing damage to accumulate over time.

What is strange is, there is basically no way to learn that without a modern knowledge of (bio)chemistry, because the long term damage takes years to show
#19
(04-04-2022, 02:00 AM)Trep Wrote: I’d like to respond to this critique of timeline. The exact years and geographical locations of various civilizations are largely irrelevant to a theoretical investigation of tendencies/strategies. I don’t know where you got 1517 from, but in that quote I say it started with the Greeks (debatable, also I don't know why I didn't spell this out but the ancient Greek aristocracy was Aryan). Within one civilization/place/time many tendencies can exist, generally divided along class and ultimately racial lines (ultimately they exist in the individual).

I think he's too caught up with the temporality/geographic part of your post about Cindy; he interpreted it as saying it was ONLY a Northern thing and thus since Northern society didn't emerge until 1517 it doesn't make sense to say Cindy and Lindy clashed in Ancient Greece. But it seems to me that the two Forces have always existed, but you're just saying that Cindy is (often) more prominent than Lindy in Northern/Germanic civilizations. But this is just reiterating what has already been said by better posters in better ways.

I'll just add that it's foolish to think Northern European Civilization didn't exist until 1517 (Luther's 95-Theses). Arguably it began in sometime in the 9th-10th Century with the height of the Carolingian Empire, or formation of the HRE under the Ottonian Dynasty. It's at this time we seen the 'balance of power' in what we come to know as the Western World shifts away from the Med. World and more towards Europe. I wouldn't say Europe becomes *the* Powerhouse of the World at this time, as both the Eastern Roman Empire and Islamic Caliphates are immensely powerful, centralized states. But this is really the first time a Northern (EUROPEAN) Power is a serious contender in world affairs, and is seen as an equal to the other powers around the world (eg Harun al-Rashid, the fifth Abbasid Caliph, gifted Charlemagne an elephant during his reign around 802).

Northern Europe also had a vibrant artistic and musical culture during the 15th century that was innovative and independent of what was going on in the Mediterranean World.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Neth...h_painting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghent_Altarpiece
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Flemish_School
#20
Lindy and Cindy are always present and balancing. Newer civilizations (like the northwest European one) are more Cindy, older ones more Lindy. There's a time and place for both, and preferably neither should massively overtake the other - too much Cindy results in a Daedalic civilization that is impressive but doesn't last long - too much Lindy is what caused East Asia to stagnate compared to Europe in history.

Everything Lindy was Cindy once...



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