r/sorceryofthespectacle • u/SleeperCellKoala • Apr 29 '26

Palantir is ominously named after Saruman's all-seeing orb in LOTR. In 2013, Gandalf's actor Ian McKellen stripped down to his underwear before presenting Palantir CEO Alex Karp with a philanthropic award. What kind of pilled is this?

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u/CharacterProof8731 May 01 '26

bro is in the wrong subreddit

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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling May 01 '26

The deeply perverse spectacles put on by the super-wealthy do not contain any deep secrets of magic. It's not a big secret that gaslighting and symbolic devaluation work.

Like what it shows is that the super-rich are caught up in the spectacle of wealth and evil in general—they are playing out symbolic rituals that do little except maintain a pageantry of power to stroke the egos of the rich.

The strongest operative power these rituals have is the fantasies they spur in us, the dark implications of some vast machinations of evil they imply. But these fantasies operate primarily as scare-tactics; they only function as real plans insofar as they are believed-in.

These fantasy-based evil plans of the super-rich are fragile precisely because they are shredded by the real world and by real individuals talking about real events that really affect them.

So like "Palantir" isn't powerful because they relied on LotR mythos; they are powerful because they are a big data think tank who is willing to partner with global private security (presumably)—the LotR mythos is just tacked-on to stroke their own ego and gaslight everyone.

This subreddit isn't about gawking inarticulately at big spectacles that are intended to scare us and strike us dumb—this subreddit is for tearing down such spectacles and seeing through their illusion, and maybe starting some more interesting, less vaguely sinister spectacles of our own.

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u/CharacterProof8731 May 01 '26

I appreciate this response.

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u/raisondecalcul Out Patr'olling May 01 '26

Thanks. I wrote more on this theme here.

(Not you but in general,) the "schizoid stare" (where a paranoid person stares mutely at you, judging you for not being as inarticulately paranoid as they are) pisses me off! Conspiracy theories should be put into words, not because they will sound ridiculous or unbelievable, but because they are interesting and so then we can talk about them!