askchapo

I can't really wrap my head around the heaven and hell stuff.

I have my own theories around these phenomena too, about people have the ability to understand their own experiences but lack language to express or articulate them, so they get lumped in with other abstractions provided and promoted by the hegemon. In your case, you say something true, explain it in a way that is very abstract and symbolic, and then arrive at what appears to be a true conclusion. Like I feel like your last sentence is sort of a justification for the vanguard party, which is a pretty good theory with lots of historical references, both positive and negative.

And to be clear, I'm not opposed to being kind of inscrutable, or experimenting with meaning and symbol, esp on the individual level. The phenomenon ive described above, something like:

Strong theory -> questionable basis for establishing material fact -> strong conclusion or plan. I think it's a problem within our culture and discourse ourselves. Everything we know about the world is synthesized, our thinking is very very abstract. There was a time when most people couldn't think abstractly, and now virtually everyone thinks of everything, understands everything, by defining it in some sort of category. Your approach doesn't do this, probably because you are aware of the problem and making your own adjustments to compensate. But it appears to me to switch one form of mystification for another.

Lots of people do this, including people I have positive opinions of and working relationships with. You learn to trust the judgement of another person, maybe even speak their language a bit more.

But admittedly I can't understand the basis for your heaven/hell comparisons, nor is it clear what a 3rd path might be. Eternal struggle and eternal bliss are questionable definitions. Hell isnt struggle, it is torment and suffering. Struggle is the basis for change. But hell and heaven can only change as social relations, the material basis for them are cultural and social institutions. Their existence is more like currency or ideology than a naturally existing phenomenon. Some people don't have any relation to either, either they are religious in a way that doesn't acknowledge heaven and hell, or they are atheistic and don't acknowledge any mystification of a subject, excepting mystification that happens around categorizing and ontology, which I refer to at the beginning.

I can't really reckon with your 4d cube analogy either. Mathematicians and physicists have powerful ways of reckoning in higher dimensions. Arguably, the 4th dimension is temporal, so our analysis would have to reckon with how a cube changes over time (which may be a contradiction since "cube" is an abstraction itself). but I think if you are referencing 4 spacial dimensions, we can never experience that directly. So abstraction is all we can ever know about it.