Notes on the Notion "Sonder" and its Repudiation

Some notes in response to an X content-creator’s denunciation of the neologistic notion “sonder” as a “delusion”:

Yes, I can see that there is something irritatingly facile about the idea and I have certainly strongly felt the contrary appeal of the stance you're adopting here. I don't know if you've ever read Sorokin's "Ice" trilogy, whose reworking into a modern-historical adventure story of the ancient Gnostic myth of a small handful of "pneumatic" beings lost among innumerable soulless "hyletics" is, in many passages, deeply moving and compelling.

For all the pleasure I've taken from this kind of fantasy, though, I've never really been shaken in my conviction that what is (badly) named "sonder" here - let's call it rather "the sense of the solipsism of the other" - is in fact the moral structure of the universe and that to deny and repudiate it is in fact to go morally insane.

The big RW accounts on here - many of them buddies of yours, I'm sure, Vyl - performatively display this moral insanity every day. I'm an old guy who can't really meme so I don't know whether I'm missing the irony and self-mockery in, say, Raw Egg Nationalist's positively John-Cage-ean repetition of the trope "I care more about this thousand-year-old oak tree / badger that's made its nest at the bottom of my garden / other random inanimate or barely animate entity than I do about the entire population of Africa". I fear I may not be. That is to say he is serious - and profoundly insane.

On a last point: am I the only one who sees the incredible ballooning, over the past fifty years, of "the zombie movie" from a class of film with just a dozen or so members into a "Western"- or "mafia-movie"-sized film and TV genre in its own right as an index of the pandemic status that this particular moral / mental malady has now acquired in our societies. Every zombie movie and TV show is a freeing of the viewer into the most savage and ruthless form of Gnosticism (there is a line in Sorokin about the two most convinced members of the "pneumatic" fraternity "treating the flesh-machines with no mercy at all"). It is a trampling of the "delusion" that "everybody has an inner life, an inner monologue" underfoot. Romero's "slow zombies" and Zach Snyder's "fast zombies" offer different versions or "flavours" of this delectable experience of a world where one doesn't have to worry about other people's even existing in the way you yourself do. And given the commercial necessity for novelty and variation in these products, there have to be many scenes of course of hokey ambivalence and "moral dilemmas", like when one of the tiny minority of "real people" has to put a spike through the head of what was once his wife, his mother etc. But the fundamental message, or rather the fundamental dopamine hit, offered by the by now surely millions of zombie flicks and TV shows and graphic novels is just the hit or message that you're bonding with your Frog Twitter buddies over here: "no one but you really exists; you can let the lowest beast and lizard in you loose with a perfect conscience".