South Park
Article
South Park is a recurring film in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 12, 2021 and October 31, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “a weird 1990s moment that gave us South Park”; “The classic pop culture example of this is in that South Park episode when Cartman convinces himself he came up with a joke”. It most often appears alongside 1950s, 1950s American consensus, 1990s.
Metadata
- Category: Films
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 12, 2021
- Last seen: October 31, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 1950s (1 shared issues)
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- 1950s American consensus (1 shared issues)
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- 1990s (1 shared issues)
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- A Mind Without Craving (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Andres Emilsson (1 shared issues)
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- Andres Gomez Emilsson (1 shared issues)
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- anāgāmī (1 shared issues)
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- Argentus (1 shared issues)
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- Artist-Tyrant (1 shared issues)
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- atheism (1 shared issues)
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- barberpole model of fashion (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Instead of thinking of ourselves in the middle of a new Salem Witch Hunt, we should think of ourselves as just coming out of a rare period of unusually high freedom of thought - a weird 1990s moment that gave us South Park, the phrase "if you don't like it then don't watch it", and most of the early Internet. That period wasn't part of an inexorable trend toward rising freedom, it was a weird anomaly that has to be actively defended lest we sink back into the normal regime that typified the 1950s and pretty much every other time period ever.
I have been around people that self-report all these amazing experiences from spiritual practices all my life, and I am pretty sure most of it is bullshit. I have done a lot of meditation and know what is possible and how easily it is to fool yourself to think that you have had a much more profound experience than you actually did. There seems to be a certain percentage of people that are really comfortable with changing their own memory of what they perceived to fit their expectations. The classic pop culture example of this is in that South Park episode when Cartman convinces himself he came up with a joke and his memory becomes more elaborate with each retelling, until he is fighting off a dragon. I know people like this, that embellish stories in which I participated until they are unrecognizable to me and, often, these happen to be the same people that self-report amazing spiritual experiences.