Truth = Joy = Power: Spinoza's Galaxy Brain

We live in a bourgeois culture where people hate intellectuals, the truth is. So, yes, of course there are stupid people on the internet who are really pretentious and think they're really smart. However, there are also really smart people on the internet who are very interesting and independent, and I think real intellectuals actually know this type of exploding galaxy brain moment, and it's one of the things that we live for as thinkers, I think. And I think the fact that the galaxy brain meme was a thing, and that it's generally a kind of resentful, negative meme — it's usually used to make fun of someone else or to object to them or to belittle them — is really just a representation or an emblem of bourgeois anti-intellectualism really, and a kind of resentful nay-saying... A univocal ontology prohibits us from false distinctions, and it forces us to rely on these qualitative differences, which I think Spinoza and Deleuze want to say are the real differences. And they are real in part because they are immanent. When I encounter someone and I feel joy, I feel my power is increasing, right? (Puissance, not pouvoir.) Remember the galaxy brain meme. This is why I introduced that. You feel like a galaxy brain when you're talking with someone that you really get along well with. You can just feel immanently, intuitively, that this person is somehow increasing your power. It's increasing your capacities and that is associated with the emotion known as joy. That's all happening immanently, automatically. It's happening from within what is already going on. You're not calculating, you're not strategizing, you're not creating a model. It's an automatic kind of pre-conscious process. And I think Deleuze wants to say that that is what's real. Those differences are real. We're all one substance, but those differences are real. Univocity: Lecture 3 on Based Deleuze