Does cosmic horror still have a place in the modern world?

>>>/lit/

>>51453343
There is no more harrowing existential dread than the cold certainty that OP is a flaming faggot.

>>51453343
>Does cosmic horror still have a place in the modern world?
short answer?
yes

>>51453343
Look at the sky. There is a infinity out there and it may come to us. This will be the end of human race.
Imagine the possibility of your death and the death of all. Something has arrived to be the end of us all.
I look at the sky and imagine: There maybe something and it may arrive here and then we will all die. No escape, no mercy just oblivion.

"I can't describe it but trust me it's really scary" never really had teeth to begin with.

>>51453343
Sort of, things like roko's basilisk are almost cosmic horror

>>51454486
>What is the Mutually Assured Destruction doctrine

We survived the Cold War with little long term San Loss. We regularly survive documentaries about the inhuman scale of space.

>>51453343
>As a society we seem to have become more accepting on a certain level of our insignificance in the universe and more aware of how much we don't know.
>we seem to have become

Really?
How?

Cosmic horror was a product of a time when man had to start adjusting to changes and the fact that changes in one's time would be obsolete in his living memory.

I feel I can produce a similar feeling of dread by showing my pc's that things are going to be regimented, a society turned into a panoptikon, not by some evil idealist but by the banality of evil.

>>51453343
I think on some level, it could actually work better now, because in the modern world, we think we know and can explain everything. So while it would take more work and creativity to establish a cosmic horror that can't be explained by science, it would have a much greater impact.

>>51457905
I agree with this. Greater scientific literacy means you can be more subtle and specific with your cosmic horror than just "they're made of matter but not really".

>>51453343
There's still a certain cosmic horror in the sense that the fears and major events of today are just blips on the radar when compared to the vast spans of time that encompasses the history of the cosmos. There's a certain dread in realizing that we as a species are not only insignificant, but also inferior to many things that are out there, forces both living and not living that we will never be able to overcome because we are simply lesser in comparison. What we consider difficult these entities can do with ease, and setting that in stone as simply the limitations of the human body and spirit makes us out as a species to be rather pathetic in comparison.

>>51454486
We'll die anyway. So what?

>>51453343
There are all kinds of cosmic horror types of things created by the fringes of modern science. Things like the "simulated reality" theory or the "holographic universe" theory can be every bit as sanity destroying as the Necronomicon.

>>51458471
Sort of like whatever the fuck this guy was actually talking about in this video before the jojoke faggots got their hands on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33kAMeHVzBA

Or not. He uses a lot philosophical terms instead of scientific ones. I'm not sure if he's talking about anything of substance.

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382KB, 700x1577px

>>51454692
>We survived the Cold War with little long term San Loss.
Only by our own modern standards, but by the standards of Lovecraft's day our society is suicidal and insane, we're only touching the threshold of transhumanism and it's having significant reverb on our value systems and culture.

I'm afraid there's no real way to go a lot deeper without going /pol/ (and not even in a racist/ethnicist way), but this is probably inevitable when discussing Lovecraft.


Consider this, secret cult societies and alien races like the Mi-Go, Deep Ones, or Elder Things count as being 'insane' by our standards, but in their own societies they are presumably functional, rational individuals or they wouldn't be able to preserve a conspiracy, reproduce, or function as a group.

Even realizing this 'theory of relative sanity' is itself a sort of sanity loss for a human because it may encourage them to experiment with inhuman systems of ethics and behavior which often prove harmful to the human creature or culture. "It's okay for a them to do this, let us see if I can benefit by their practice of ______ (cannibalism, infanticide, incest, gender swapping, memory reallocation, cult sacrifice, nuclear power, time travel, ect.) "