tanadrin:

argumate:

I guess the real question is whether a fairytale can ever make the good guys the industrial civilisation and the bad guys the agricultural civilisation.

We’re close enough to industrialism to understand its discontents: pollution, totalitarianism, the reduction of a human being to a cog in the machine. But most people in industrialized countries are pretty far from agricultural life (and this agricultural life maybe isn’t the same as truly agrarian life in the post-Industrial-Revolution world) to easily remember what the discontents of that existence are. We write stories for the civilization we have, and even if we have the fairy tales of the older civilization, we often forget what they really mean.

Like, wasn’t this just turn-of-the-20th century pulp? “Lost World"s (that got displaced to Mars as the Earth map was fully revealed), oriental mystics, jungle cults, all that, opposed by heroes from the metropole with the power of bourgeois civilization?

Like the tropes of "oh, the evil bloodthirsty/lazy sybaritic priests, who so drain the common people”, “oh, the wicked mystic who rules tyrannically with magic powers/who rules undeservedly by claiming magic powers”, aren’t those fundamentally critiques of precapitalist temple economies?