Utopianism-Doomerism Spectrum

Reality is imperfect but the idea is to gradually address the imperfections. Through repairing imperfection we become unbounded.

True doomerism is thinking things can't be fixed. This seems to be the Oriental mindset. Let things be bounded like perfection, yet still distinctly imperfect. A nice worst of both worlds combination.

Utopianism is the idea that reality is perfect by default and only becomes imperfect through mortal sin. Utopianism is the idea that all imperfections must be fixed, yesterday if not sooner. You get alleged Progress™ but only because you're unfucking what once got fucked.

 

True doomerism seems to make it a moral imperative to let the imperfections remain. Japan and Denmark seem to be peak doomers. They will actively persecute not only anyone trying to fix stuff, but double down and blame problems on their victims. "Not liking the imperfections is your fault, heretic." You will get bullied for disliking the things you dislike, especially if they have solutions. Exception: you're always allowed to dislike someone disliking a thing; recursive dislike is permitted.

Utopianism's avatar is Rousseau. "Civilization is the problem, and socialization is the solution." If it wasn't contradictory and self-defeating, we wouldn't call it crazy. They also like to assume the socialization already succeeded, so they can retain the simplistic, childlike notion that the world is inherently perfect. All imperfection is witchcraft. Devious heretics who oppose the perfection of socialization out of sheer malice. Everything would be perfect if only there were not outgroup. Even outgroup would prefer if myside was in charge. 

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Is Fascism Fascist because it's utopian, or is Fascism utopian because it is childish primitivism? 

Speaking of worst-of-both-worlds varieties of insanity, Christianity doubled down. Doomer in practice but says that actually the world was perfect originally but you fucked it up, and, for OG Christianity, it's too late to fix it. Why not combine the worst of two possibilities and blame the victim? You can't do anything about it. The perfect thing made a mistake and created imperfection. You're not responsible, but it's your fault anyway. Genius. 

"Slavery is your fault." "But I don't own any slaves and can't re-write the past?" "Slavery was your fault."

Speaking of allowing recursion, Christianity allows (*encourages) you to bear false witness against yourself. In this way, you get to pretend that your neighbour calling you on your bullshit is a form of bearing false witness against their neighbour, you. "How do you know your beliefs don't scare me? Denying my lived experience!" 

Denying someone's lived experience is inegalitarian, because only those of higher status can get away with it; by attempting it you disavow egalitarianism. You can put them in a real bind by accusing them of the same right back, as long as you can do it without sounding like a child going [no u]. "Social status tells us which one should be allowed to suppress the other, but by allowing one to win we disavow egalitarianism ourselves! Fuck!" Their only hope is a distraction, and that's not exactly a loss for you.

Let's throw some shade at Shintoism as well.
So basically the mother goddess gave birth to a fire god and burned to death as a result. First, this makes no sense. Why didn't this coal-like god kill her while gestating? Even assuming her womb was a magical perfect insulator for no apparent reason, she could have taken steps to prevent or mitigate the risk of the birth. Regular-ass mortals give birth underwater sometimes. Apparently Shinto gods aren't that smart, though.
The father god blamed the newborn child and killed him. That'll teach him to be conceived. In other words, the severe displacement of blame shown by Oriental-style doomers shows up in their earliest known stories. 

Who cares about responsibility and long-term deterrence? It's all about kto kogo and momentary short-term convenience.

It gets better. The mother goddess wasn't dead dead, she was just hanging out in Yomi, an underworld. She knew she would be trapped forever if she did the Persephone thing and ate the fruit, so she ate the fruit. Then she got mad at the father god for missing her, then she got mad at him for trying to leave the underworld when she told him to leave. This part, admittedly, is a good portrayal of a woman having a series of woman moments. (Western myths seem to like to play along and pretend women don't do this for real. Pandora being the minor exception that proves the rule when everyone freaks out about her and nobody else.) Not very divine, though. It's wonderfully narcissistic, however. If you're into solipsistic navel-gazing, this is just the thing.

"It's an allegory," sure, and it's a shit allegory. The moral: bad things are good things. Yes it's realistic for a father to blame the child in the common and known case that the mother dies in childbirth, but you shouldn't validate this by saying even gods do it and the result of doing it is exuberant proliferation. Suggestion: letting your heavenly progenitors be portrayed as trailer trash is unwise. The Mikado is divine? Descended from gods? Shogun: "Yeah, it shows."

Weirdly, a culture made on this foundation has difficulty with economic development, especially research.

 

Alt: grow up and base your culture on physics or  Reality instead of children's tales.

You can do the doomer thing with Norse mythology too. Odin's shtick is that your options are Ragnarok, or suffering then Ragnarok sooner. You can have runes (knowledge) but only if you give up your eye (seeing). No upgrades, only sidegrades. From them we get blind seers too. You can know the future (epistemology) if you give up knowing the present (epistemology). Genius.