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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

The original communist ideology wasn't original at all. The roots go back at least to the time of the Gracchi in Rome.

It's clear hardly anyone commenting here has any idea what appropriation really is. It's not just disrespecting existing cultures.

It's destroying them by removing the meaning from them. And then repackaging the symbols - usually with a vague implication of profundity and exoticism - as a marketable commodity.

The purpose isn't to spread the original culture but to use the trappings to promote the usual Western corporate neoliberal value system.

Corporate Buddhism is a perfect example. It's clearly a lot more corporate than Buddhist. The goal isn't enlightenment, detachment, or compassion, it's cultural conformity with the aim of increased productivity and a higher share price.

This shouldn't be controversial. All you need to do is look at how people behave to see what motivates them.

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> It's destroying them by removing the meaning from them. And then repackaging the symbols - usually with a vague implication of profundity and exoticism - as a marketable commodity.

Sort of like the monarchies of Europe have been turned into republics in all but name, the culture of “divine right of kings” destroyed but the trappings of monarchy are still used but devoid of meaning. And often used as marketing material.

But, surely you don’t yearn for the return of absolute monarchies ruled by gods appointed ruler, do you?

This is the path of humanity. Some things die off, some things survive and some are transformed beyond all recognition. There is nothing intrinsically good or bad in this. It simply is a phenomenon that happens.

A better analogy would be what Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. In fact, Disney is probably the poster child for this shit, given how much they lobbied to extend copyright law so that nobody could do to them what they did to Europe's fairy tales.

No, the point was to provide an example of a cultural artefact being stripped of meaning and most people not being particularly affected by it in a negative way.

In fact, in the example, I would think most people are in agreement destroying the cultural artefact of absolute monarchy and wearing it’s hollow trappings as marketing props to boost the tourism industry is a good thing.

I genuinely don’t understand this obsession with “preserving the original meaning”. As if it actually exists, it does not, everything is a perversion of everything else. Even assuming there was some “original meaning”, why would hollowing it out, or twisting it into the very opposite matter in any way? It’s just another mutated idea in the long line of mutated ideas that make up human thought.

How have original Buddhist cultures in Asia been destroyed by “corporate Buddhism” catching on in the West? They haven’t. They are still around.

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