I'd stay subscribed even with a lower (or much lower) post ratio. I can't keep up as it is given the significant back-tracking necessary to keep a full handle on things. Eliezer, you have the core of what could be quite a wonderful ebook or paper book or popular book or some combination thereof with what you've got here, and whatever else might yet be coming.
I think I for one would quickly lose interest if this site were open to all comers, or even some comers; I read this blog for Eliezer, twacked out as he gets sometimes, and to a lesser extent, Robin. If there are other Eliezers out in the wings that'd be great but somehow I doubt they've just been waiting for OB to turn into a mob-rule forum to start posting here.
Peter,
Go on.
Eliezer,
I'd be interested to hear your comments on the election, also.
I was just going to chime in with Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom. There's a Utopia where there's striving, and existential pain.
But I shouldn't comment too much on it, because I got too bored to finish it. In the first page it is revealed that characters will survive until the "heat death of the universe." Given that premise, I quickly surmised that any dilemmas would be sort of, well, boring without the threat of imminent death. Based on that one small example I would say there is something necessary about the threat of death and lesser forms of tragedy, to maintain the needed literary tension to keep those pages turning.
Suggested reading:
Aristotle's Poetics for the ancient, and I think incorrect, theory for tragedy as catharsis.
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy for the view that tragedy gives meaning to our ultimately meaningless striving. Based on the pre-Platonic view of life under the thumb of despotic Greek gods, i.e., fate. (Or so Nietzsche says.)
A little off topic, but Cormac McCarthy said that he "doesn't understand" fiction that doesn't have death in it. Why write it? he's saying. Or, from our perspective, why read it?