Commentaries

Shallow Equilibrium

31. XII 2023

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music. (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Why does every good idea turn out bad? The French Revolution and liberté/égalité/fraternité morphed in a relatively short time into the reign of terror, the October Revolution to Stalinist purges and its subsequent euthanasia, Cuban denial of capitalism to extreme poverty and isolation. Despite its progressive agenda and rebellion against the conformism of the 50s, the 1968 uprising produced the socioeconomic conditions that gave birth to neoliberalism and institutions which evolved into a radical antithesis of its fundamental premises. Capitalism’s global triumph of the 20^th century gave rise to extreme inequality, poverty, and production of human misery where, after a series of endogenous crises that eroded its capacity to underwrite a stable society, resulted in the chaotic epilogue of its unwind with the realistic possibility of its descent into Fascist dystopia.

Every initially positive social change inevitably turns into a nightmare as if evil always manages to find its way unobstructed and without resistance. Good (and honest) acts always catch us by surprise. They are unpredictable because every good act is committed impulsively; it is not natural and spontaneous. Evil, on the other hand, acts naturally — we never wonder about it, we are surprised only if it is not realized. Evil is transient, it divides — people do evil things in order to survive or get ahead. Good is the essence of sustainability, it unifies, but represents the denial of (human) biology.

It appears that, almost without an exception, there is an evil bias in every social change. This is more a play of the laws of probability than the consequence of deep social laws or divine forces.The universe (both physical and social) evolves from less to more probable configurations. Bad/disorderly outcomes are always more likely than the good/orderly ones — entropy (in aggregate) always increases. Disorder prevails, but on occasions when local order arises somewhere, it can only happen if its creation ejects enough disorder elsewhere so that the aggregate entropy ends up higher. Order is an oddity — an unlikely configuration; it has a lower probability than disorder.

This systematic drift which tends to push the system in the wrong direction is showing up in full bloom at the moment. It is amplified by an additional component linked to the current intersection of economic and social crises.

Downgraded metastability

Economics is a linear science defined around an equilibrium determined by the mode of social organization. However, in capitalism, economy and society interact in a particular way. Capitalist economy erodes the social landscape on which it operates; it makes long-term concessions in order to finance its short-term successes and in that way erodes stability and compromises its longevity and survival.

The best illustration of this interplay is offered by the Covid pandemic. Unlike previous episodes of recessions caused by financial and economic wrongdoings which had social consequences, the pandemic was a social crisis with economic consequences. In the past, the heaviest burden of recession was carried by the lower social strata – after the recovery, they emerged worse off while the top rebounded and continued roughly even relative to their pre-crisis standing. During the pandemic, however, there was a total devastation of the social bottom. At the same time, with a large chunk of the fiscal stimulus landing on the balance sheet of the 20% wealthiest individuals and corporations, the very narrow and selected top recorded a triumphant rebound with unprecedented multipliers. Tesla, Apple, and the bulk of the tech sector more than doubled in record time. This was a spectacular bifurcation of wealth and social stratification which outlined the contours of the predatory and zero-sum nature of the oligarchic top and underscored unambiguously that the massive concentration of wealth is the main source of production of poverty – a qualitative shift not seen before in capitalism’s turbulent history.

So, here we are. When all is said and done, after a long sequence of crises, we are facing a paradigm shift and social change that could give birth a new equilibrium. But what kind of equilibrium should we expect? Here is a short recap to the vocabulary needed to navigate this landscape.

Equilibrium is the site where forces of restoration of order compete with those of disorder. Depending on the relative strength of those two forces, there can be several types of equilibrium.

Stable: The original configuration is regained after a disturbance — forces of restoration overpower those that take the system away from equilibrium. (e.g. residing in a valley). Unstable: Even the tiniest deviation from equilibrium is fatal – forces of restoration are too weak for even the weakest shocks – this equilibrium is not viable and the system leaves it permanently (for example, a ball on the top of the hill: when it starts rolling down, it never returns).

Stable and unstable equilibria

Metastable: The system is locally stable, but can be destabilized by sufficiently strong shocks. A dimple on the top of the hill is a landscape with metastable equilibrium. Standing up is a state of metastability: If we are pushed slightly, we will remain standing. However, if the push is sufficiently forceful, we will fall.

Metastable equilibrium

In its late phase, capitalism has degenerated into a state of downgraded metastability. Normal conomic business cycles consist of booms and busts with cyclical crises. In general, recovery from each crisis is financed by social deficits. So, after a while, crises become deeper and social deficits bigger demanding a heavier hand in handling them. In that sense, the economy interacts with the society and in that process, it constantly erodes the social landscape which determines the equilibrium. In particular, when cumulative social erosion becomes so massive that it demands a social change, in the interregnum before the actual change takes place, the system is operating near the bifurcation point experiencing a contestation of multiple equilibria corresponding to possible final destinations representing the anticipated social changes. In that regime, forces that take the system away from a local equilibrium are comparable to or weaker than the restoring forces. At that point, all possible social configurations have similar probability of being realized — the system operates around the shallow equilibrium.

Bifurcation point and shallow equilibrium

Near the shallow equilibrium, the system loses its robustness – it becomes vulnerable to seemingly benign shocks, which can produce sizeable effects of long duration and consequences leading to positive feedback and endemic instability. In this configuration, social stability can be threatened further with (normally insignificant) low probability disturbances and trivial public communications maneuvers like conspiracy theories, abuses of free speech or a general arbitrariness in informational dissemination which can disrupt society’s normal functioning.

The four paths

The onset of capitalism’s gradual unwind started in the late 1980s as a loss of equilibrium after the collapse of communism. The more convincing signs of the immanent exit from capitalism began to show up at the beginning of this century with new monopolized modes of production and contraction of the reserved pool of labor amplified by the emerging new technologies leading eventually to increased precarity and further social deficits. These trends were further reinforced with the GFC in 2008, which further eroded the fragility of political legitimation of the system. What followed was the widening scope of the crisis of permanent exclusion and the prospect of the emergence of failed states in the developed world as the excess population – those who could no longer be reintegrated into the normal rhythms of society — began to approach the critical mass.

The tensions of the last decade were accelerated by the collapse of liberal democratic mythologies which underscored the active quest for new myths in the midst of that crisis. Everything that used to mobilize the libidinal forces of the developed West is now dissolving in light of the devaluations of these myths, while waiting for new ones creates a troubling disequilibrium.

The preview of the four paths into the future might very well be a prelude to the most radical and, at the same time, the most significant transformation of capitalism after the industrial revolution. It is an announcement of the socioeconomic blowback, the arrival of times where social deficits will have to be reconciled and managed.

The three paths that were identified by Immanuel Wallerstein[1] should be seen as the attraction centers which will define the dynamics of socio-economic developments in the next decades. Democratic fascism: A  semi-inclusive, cast-like division into two strata where 20% of the world keeps the remaining 80% in submission – an old wine in new bottles already tried out with different ratios that had failed because of the flawed math; Neo-feudalism: An exclusive, highly inegalitarian world of parcelized sovereignties (an equilibrated form of the current times of trouble), with consolidation of fractionalized structures into bigger entities with highly vertical structure, like multinational corporations, global crime syndicates…, but without endless capital accumulation as the mainspring. Egalitarian utopia: Decentralized, inclusive system achievable through political sophistication and technology; not necessarily socialization of poverty, but geared towards egalitarian distribution. Its legitimation is supported by evidence that short-termism leads to undesirable long-term outcomes.

The fourth path

According to Wolfgang Streeck, capitalism is collapsing under its own weight, dying from the overdose of itself, from being too successful, it is disintegrating, but not giving way to a better alternative. As an economic system, capitalism is showing an advanced decline in capacity to underwrite a stable society. What is likely to follow after such a disintegration of a system is a prolonged period of social entropy and disorder[2]. Out of all possible paths, this is the most radical outcome, one that is without a historical precedent and one we seem to be least prepared for. It corresponds to the Interregnum, disintegration of society as such — a perpetual anotherhood of undead capitalism, pregnancy without childbirth — a trajectory where the times of trouble continue indefinitely.

Rentism, oligarchic repositioning, and the crowning of the techno-feudalism

Democracy implies that people share common values and interests. But, in an economic system that fosters high concentration of wealth and greater inequality, there are fewer common interests. Neoliberal politics has managed these tensions by engineering a cultural divide and culture that no longer serves to shape consensus but to continue to polarize. In this way, democracy has become less viable as a political system. This program has created a positive feedback loop that has continued to reinforce divisiveness as a political management tool. In the end, the society has expressed the desire to change away from democracy because division has become unbearable.

There is a considerable will and capital aimed at steering the postcapitalist world towards a configuration of fractionalized sovereignties resulting in a neo feudal mode of social organization. The actors behind these efforts are driven largely by the opportunities that such reorganization offers/promises rather than any concrete ideological motives. Conservative think tanks and political fringe organizations have already worked out a rather detailed plan of how to dismantle and reorganize the remnants of the capitalist state in order to position for the transition to the new social configuration and are waiting on standby to place their candidates in positions from which they can represent their interests with maximum efficiency. They are following closely the template of dismantling of the state apparatuses in post-communist countries and their planned metamorphoses into failed states. Ironically, the most vocal opposition to this program have been not the Progressives, but the political Center, which has been driven into an uncomfortable coalition with the progressives. They are the defenders of the compromised and outdated neoliberal capitalism and believe in the possibility of its salvation. Blinded by capitalism’s great run and biased by the absence of a clear vision about alternatives, these addicts of the status quo see the current predicament not as the endpoint in capitalism’s evolution, but as yet another cyclical crisis.  

While on the surface it appears that the spectacle of the current Republican presidential candidacy is the main worry for the political Center, this is only a temporary distraction. The problem runs much deeper. The background forces of the far-Right supporting the neo feudal alternative would be ready to embrace any viable candidate for the occupancy of the highest office that would facilitate implementation of their plan of transformation. The 2024 elections are just the first round of that battle which is likely to continue in the years to come.

The demented ideas of the plan for the Right-wing takeover have been outlined in Project 2025. The specter of the autocratic visions of that project as a blueprint for a turbo charged MAGA agenda goes beyond the immediate electoral prospects of the current candidate. As Jeet Heer argues the recent The Nation article, Even if [Conservatives] lose in 2024, at some point another Republican president will reside in the White House. And, the hope is that, they will almost certainly enact the autocratic policy vision of Project 2025, with the help of the radicalized think-tankers who now staff GOP institutions. The Project 2025 agenda to undermine the civil service is already being echoed by other Republican presidential hopefuls[3].

But things are much more non-linear. For example, as the article points out, American Compass, a think tank that contributed heavily to Project 2025’s section on labor policy, is getting funding from some extremely wealthy progressive donors with an aim to blend current conservative vague rhetoric of economic populism with actual policies. These are liberal players aiming to defeat left leaning policies from the center primarily targeting the position of labor. This play from both sides strengthens the Right by giving it more respectability than they currently enjoy. It helps elevate Right-wing ideas as being normative by creating a false consensus backed by wealth and distracts attention from their manifest undermining of democracy[4].

What resides behind these initiatives is the rapid takeover of the new modes of production that are encountering resistance from the old and antiquated social structures. Effectively, we have already entered the technofeudal zone. This transition is a slightly distorted mirror image of the transition from feudalism to capitalism that took place in the late 18^th century, which was driven by the shift of power from the owners of land to the owners of machinery, steamships, and electrical grids, and the shift of wealth creation from a rent accumulation to profit making. Current, technologically spiked reversal of this process consists in replacement of the feudal lands with digital platforms and shifting corporate profits to platform-owners’ rent[5].

Companies like Amazon and Facebook have been operating away from the markets and they represent the new techno-feudal oligarchy. Their profits are not based on production, but on collecting rent from their platforms for selling other companies merchandize for which they charge a substantial margin, sometimes as much as 60%. At the same time, they distribute minimal amounts of their profit in terms of wages. Normally, for corporations of the Fordist economy these numbers reside near 90%. In contrast, for Amazon this is 1% and for Facebook 5%. This asymmetric accumulation of capital sucks money out of the system. The math is simple: If you get paid without working, then someone has to work without getting paid.Toxic concentration of wealth results in overproduction of poverty. But this is just one of the side effects of this transition. In addition to that, central banks have to print money to compensate for this secular decline in money supply, the action that becomes manifestly inflationary and inhibits saving, elevates uncertainty, and increases precarity further.

The fauna of Right-wing agitation: Lumpen billionaires and lumpen capitalists 

This transition to new modes of social organizing, and the underlying economic opportunities it could create, promises a huge return to early birds, the new emerging nobility of luck, which Sam Farber refers to as lumpen capitalists. They are the post-industrial version of original robber barons of the early America. They come from hinterland places like Grand Rapids, Wichita, Little Rock and Tulsa. Their fortunes derive from real estate, private equity, casinos and services ranging from private armies to chain usury. These lumpen billionaires are dependent on the domestic market, and indeed often on federal and state governments[6]. In the past decade, the far-Right wing of conservative politics gave national leadership, media attention, and political legitimacy to a plethora of far-right groupuscules, ranging from the “patriot” militias that started to emerge in the 1990s to the Q-Anon conspiracy theorists with their uprising culminating on Jan-6 2021 as the new Waco.

The vacuum caused by the ongoing collapse of neoliberalism and the shallow equilibrium that has emerged as a consequence, is the result of an inability to imagine the world without capitalism precisely by its most obvious victims, a Stockholm syndrome of a sort. Lumpen capitalists are seizing this moment to leverage on the buildup of pseudo-nostalgic sentiment to sway the conditions in their favor.

In this configuration, heterogeneous stages of social and economic development coexist simultaneously. As Alberto Toscano argued, desperate farmer, an unemployed worker or marginalized and/or bankrupt citizen are easily seduced by the ghost of history, which was suddenly released by the crisis, especially in a country with a substantial fraction of population with Fordist dependency[7] like manufacturing, mining, and other segments of disenfranchised subproletariat facing the prospect of permanent exclusion fostered by the new technological advancements and paradigmatic shifts in the modes of production.

This is the path to re-contextualization of the current American conservative utopia. In reality, Republicans are fighting for their bare life. Beyond concerns for their short-term survival, their only vision of the future is society as an atonal pseudo-totalitarian operetta without a key or meter, the kingdom of arbitrariness where words have no fixed meaning and actions no consequences. They are acutely aware of these changes and their long-term implications and have already begun their transformation process to reposition for the new modes of social organization and wealth distribution. The centrists are still in denial, fixated on status quo and beliefs that the old system of neoliberal capitalism can be salvaged with a face lift that could thrive in the new paradigm.

With the imminent unwind of neoliberalism on the horizon, power is back in vogue and the future looks increasingly more authoritarian.

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[1] Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, Verso (2011)

[2] Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System, Verso (2016)

[3] Jeet Heer, Why “Liberal” Donors Love Giving Money to the Extreme Right, The Nation (24 Nov 2023)

[4] Ibid.

[5] Yannis Varoufakis, Techno-feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Melville House (to appear in February 2024)

[6] Mark Davis and Adam Schatz, Catholics and Lumpen-billionaires, The London Review of Books podcast and https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Lumpen_Bourgeoisie

[7] Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Verso (2024)

Rise of the Primitive Society of the Future

24. X 2023

We invested reality with the whole of the imaginary, but it is this imaginary that is vanishing, since we no longer have energy to believe in it. (Jean Baudrillard)

The nature of the Hegelian flow of history is, in essence, the social version of the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. Societies/civilizations evolve from more ordered (less freedom) to less ordered configurations (more freedom). Entropy, in aggregate, always has to increase, but if it does not, if local order for some reason arises, it has to eject enough disorder elsewhere so that the total entropy of the universe increases[1]. As the system ages, order becomes less likely and maintaining forced order becomes costly and those costs increase with time.

From the very beginning, civilization and religion had been on the collision course. Religion and its adherence to a fixed structure, acted as a resistance to disorder and became the main entropy-reduction force. Its inner conflicts with the flows of history were not visible initially but became more pronounced with advancements of science, individualization, and the general emancipation process. Religion’s intrusion into everyday life, as a consequence of its excessive secularization and the loss of territory to science, had only amplified its conflict with society.

At the same time, the Freudian trick of the human psyche — prohibition of enjoinment always turns into enjoinment of prohibition — was in full play. Religious axioms became a major point of contestation. What will become cherished human rights had been in direct conflict with basic tenets of religion, as if, with every step of social progress, these religious axioms were asking to be broken. The religious ban of adultery collides with the entitlement to privacy; pursuit of happiness with the ban to steal; right to bear arms with thou shalt not kill; freedom of religious belief with the commandment against worshiping false gods[2].  As society moved to more permissive and tolerant modes, the conflicts only increased.

Modernity was a referendum on the desire to transcend the contradiction between religion and historical flows of civilization. Its arrival interrupted the turbulent millennium and, after centuries of religious dominance, put a temporary stop on humankind’s addiction to religion. In effect, modernity was a result of a buildup of discontent with and a rebellion against the tyranny of the divine order. At its core, modernity represents the first instance of the large-scale transfer of power and responsibility in history. Unhappy with how God managed the affairs of the world, man put himself in charge.

But, as much as modernity outlined the path of man’s distancing from religion, it also paved the way for its return. The disappearance of divine authority and the process of emancipation that was triggered, created problems of their own. The world was rendered transparent, demystified and, ultimately, hollowed and deprived of its richness.

The proliferation of cult-like authoritarian figures in the Age of Reason was a knee-jerk reaction to the disappearance of central authority which continued to reverberate for several centuries. The developed West had to wait till the mid-20^th century for a more systematic and coherent response to the underlying withdrawal symptoms when the market emerged as a surrogate, which temporarily filled the vacuum created by God’s exile. At the peak of the neoliberal post-industrial phase, the market attained the status of a separate entity that was worshiped like a pagan deity and to which society sacrifices social prey in order to appease it. This defined the contours of a new social structure: The primitive society of the future.

Angels in America

Today, the world stands divided facing the bankruptcy of its old narratives, largely as a consequence of an irreconcilable divergence of experiences, beliefs, and imagination. As divesting from reality in the form of parody, mockery, or masquerade has taken its toll, the growing fraction of the disillusioned population is eager to be mobilized by new narratives. However, as Jean Baudrillard observed, they are, at the same time, unable to receive them due to years of symbolic hollowing out, which deprived them of the capacity to surrender to any collective cause that transcends individual interests. Religion is returning, but in a perverse form, as a parody of itself and without its magic spell, as a grotesque reflection of reality and without any of its original substance[3].

The chart is the chronology of religious belief in 21^st century America, which tells the story of religion’s perverse return. There are three distinct patterns to note here.

1.     The trend and population growth

At first glance, there is an encouraging sign of collective downward trend suggestive of gradual emancipation (from the clutches of religion): Since the beginning of this century, the fraction of population that believes in God (in the most advanced economy in the world) has declined by about 15%, from the staggering 90% to the still mind-boggling 75%.

Although this emancipatory trajectory seems undeniable, when combined with the fact that each decade the population in America increases by about 10%, it turns out that, regarding religion, about the same number of Americans are still where they were 20 years ago, but the entire (positive) natality has been driven by non-believers. Believers are not disappearing, they are just being outnumbered.

This has created an uncomfortable sense of urgency among believers suggesting that they are gradually getting squeezed out, that their numbers are not being carried by the trend of population growth and that, in cultural terms, their breed is facing an existential threat. These sentiments are resonating heavily with the declining natality figures across the Western world facing a similar perceived threat and paranoid projections about their replacement with the above-trend growth of predominantly Islamic immigration and displaced populations there. In America, these trends are further amplified by the changes in racial mix across classes, together with various socio-economic developments, which have artificially inflated the sense of urgency among the white evangelicals and various religious fringe elements, which have been the major mobilizing forces of diverse nativist groups and their quick spiraling into proto-fascist authoritarian political movements.

2.     Basic biblical illiteracy gap

The 15% gap between those who believe in God but not in the Devil, can have several origins. That segment of the population could reflect just basic biblical illiteracy, like people who are simple religious for social reasons and don’t want to be bothered by the details of its implementation. For them, the existence of God creates a comfort zone, it decomplexifies a number of issues that would otherwise require a stock of knowledge and discipline of thought. It is a short-cut through the generally rising complexity of the world.  Inhabitants of this gap can also come from the folks who subscribe to alternative versions of religious interpretation that don’t require the Devil, only God. Either way, without the Devil, God is the origin of both good and evil – everything that happens in the universe, be it good or bad, is his will. These implications, when taken to their final consequences, tend to lean towards more fundamentalist interpretations which legitimize all evil deeds — if God exists, then everything is allowed. So, while the religious base has been in decline, their beliefs are drifting towards more fundamentalist interpretations, and their conviction grows deeper.

3.     Risk parity gap

The most intriguing pattern, however, is the 10% persistent gap between those who believe in heaven but not in hell. While the basic Biblical Illiteracy Gap concerns the divine hierarchy and stands removed from this world’s affairs, the Risk Parity Gap has a direct impact on how folks should conduct their lives. Its existence is an ultimate statement of conviction in unaccountability. In absolute terms, a steady 10% over two decades is a growing number of people. In 2000, this meant about 28mn, while in 2023, it was 34mn. This gap goes beyond basic biblical illiteracy. These are not religious-ignorant, but truly religious folks who agonize about the real state allocation in the afterlife. For them, this asymmetry means that there are only rewards and no accountability in the afterlife and so one can continue to sin with impunity. In other words, it is impossible to commit a sin for which one will have to atone, so why bother with guilt, morality, right, and wrong.

This gap is the ethics-free zone — religious suspension of the ethical at work, designed to inoculate against moral dilemmas – the lebensraum of hard-core libertarians who do as they please regardless of how it affects others, the ideological creed encoded as the unconditional pursuit of happiness.

The Risk Parity Gap captures the core of the basic flaw of the fundamental premises of the American experiment. Since its inception, America has stood as a symbol of impunity in the unilateral penetration of unexplored areas and a new frontier that embodies the spirit of globalization and risk taking. What in normal circumstances would be characterized as looters, were in fact pioneers and early settlers, which arrived before the land registers. The armed land-taker acted under rules more suitable to the definition of crime rather than noble participation in the exploration of the world[4].

After several centuries of plunder and destruction of indigenous life, this criminal conduct got a divine stamp of approval in the form of Manifest Destiny, which became the password for the disinhibition of action and the underlying code of optimism, which constitutes the true national language[5].

The perverse return of religion

If what we experience as reality is structured by fantasy, and if fantasy serves as the screen that protects us from being directly overwhelmed by the row Real, then reality itself can function as an escape from encountering the Real. (Slavoj Zizek)

Religion has always played a dual role. On the one side, it defines a point (in human evolution) that corresponds to the moment of self-awareness and introspection – by positing an imaginary observer (a divine entity) to whom we ascribe a number of attributes and continuously adjust our behavior so that it becomes more pleasing to Him. On the other (practical) side, religion acts as an anesthetic by creating an imaginary layer that manages the traumatic encounter with the realization of our mortality. In both cases, religion functioned through the channel of Real/imaginary/reality: We escape the raw Real by creating an imaginary layer, which in turn structures our reality in an essential way.

This has changed in a profound way in the last three decades. Religion in the West has returned in its degenerate form as a device for management of capitalism’s excesses. We are escaping the raw (traumatic) Real again, not the existential (biological) immanence of our mortality, but the inevitability of capitalist self-destructiveness.

By opening the doors for the return of God through vulgar materialistic interpretations, religion is no longer the imaginary layer that structures our reality, but a device that legitimizes the ongoing capitalist excesses, its trespassing and suspension of the ethical as salvation from our enslavement to capitalism.

In premodern times, religion acted as a source of friction in historical flows which has grown with time to become a significant, but nevertheless surmountable, obstacle able to be transcended by social change (e.g. modernity and enlightenment). In contrast, contemporary religion possesses neither ontological nor palliative function. Rather than operating as an anesthetic through an imaginary layer, it now serves to validate the existing reality and its underlying contradictions, and to compromise the possibility of change. In that process, it reverses historical flows — society turns away from freedom and embraces the authority and power.

This transformation of the role of religion is happening in a society with the most advanced levels of social atomization exhibiting, at the same time, the maximal disagreement with basic axioms of religion. While atheism in Europe has become a fully legitimate option and its most precious legacy, America no longer has that option and remains trapped in the vortex of its own unresolved past which continues to suffocate it, without offering any venue of escape[6]. In its perverted form, religion in 21^st century America has become an unsurmountable obstacle for the flows of history; it stands to normalize societal contradictions and prevent their resolution. This is the beginning of the end of the Hegelian historical continuum — achieving true freedom by reaching the end point of no resolution, by freely submitting to what has become necessary because true freedom is having no choice.

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[1] After three quarters of a century of peaceful and orderly life in the global north, there is a growing chaos everywhere else in the world.

[2] Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, W. W. Norton & Company (2007)

[3] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, Stanford University Press (1994)

[4] Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, Polity (2013)

[5] Ibid.

[6] This observation was made, I believe, by Slavoj Zizek

The Rebirth of the American Subject

30. XII 2022

We are not alcoholics because we drink; we drink because we are alcoholics (S. Basara)

Prologue: The touchdown

America rose from the Atlantic like an auxiliary universe in which God’s experiment with mankind could be started from scratch – a land in which arriving, seeing and taking seemed to become synonymous. While, in the feudalized and territorialized old Europe every strip of arable land had had an owner for thousand years, and every forest path, cobblestone or bridge was subject to age-old rights of way and restrictive privileges in favor of some princely exploiter, America offered countless arrivals the exciting contrasting experience of a virtually lordless land that, in its immeasurability, wanted only to be occupied and cultivated so as to belong to the occupier and cultivator. A world in which the settlers arrive before the land registers — a paradise for new beginners and strong takers[1].

Introspection: Risk-taking and chance nobility

Since its inception, America stood as a symbol of impunity in the unilateral penetration of unexplored areas[2] and a new frontier that embodies the spirit of globalization and risk taking. It was the land of escapism and new beginnings with no baggage of history and tradition, and few rules; an unstructured community of risk-takers where everyone had the same initial conditions. What in normal circumstances would be characterized as looters, were in fact pioneers and early settlers. The armed land-taker, a farmer under God, acted under rules more suitable to the definition of crime rather than noble participation in the exploration of the world. After several centuries of plunder and destruction of indigenous life, this criminal conduct got a divine stamp of approval in the form of Manifest Destiny.

America lacked its hereditary and institutional nobilities. But, as luck was the only metric of distinction, it defined one of its own, the nobility of chance: individuals who had become rich, famous and favored in their sleep, and who never quite understood what had carried them upwards[3].

On the clean slate of new beginnings everything was subject to change, an anomaly that went against the grain of the mores of the stability-obsessed Middle Ages. Until the late 20^th century, America retained its status as a site of pure potentiality. It had no past, only future and was whatever it imagined itself to be, that unique place where anyone who wants to do something new can do something new and where the code of optimism constituted the true national language[4]. But the most unique (and the most troubling) aspect of American subjectivity, which defines the essence of its antisocial core, was the Chosenness, the American password for the disinhibition[5] of action and appearance on the world stage.  

This motif has created a stage where exception to the moral law could be taken. In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment this argument is summarized in Raskolnikov’s statement to the prosecutor:

In short, I argued that all people – not only the great, but even those who deviate only marginally from the common rut, that’s to say who are only marginally capable of saying something new, are bounded, by their very nature, to be criminals – to a greater or lesser degree, of course. Otherwise they would find it hard to get out of the rut, and it goes without saying that, again because of their nature, they could not possible agree to remain in it.

Belonging to the chosen people empowers one to commit crimes as a way of performing his duty of removing the obstacles to the new posed by the ordinary people, the destruction of the existing reality in the name of one that is better.

This is the logic that had defined the spirit of the New Continent from its discovery. In his letter to Doña Juana de Torres, Christopher Columbus wrote: Our Lord made me the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth, of which he spoke in the Book of Revelation by St John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah.

Self-deception: The great accounting fraud

Some memories have to be buried and forgotten because they contradict the optimism of the big picture and some other will be used to build the official version of the “good history”.  And so the history began.

Things could never fully add up in the land of new beginnings. Luck is a zero sum game – it has both winners and losers. This (simple) fact collided with the puritanical code — there are no losers, only people who wallow in self-pity – and its existence had to be kept out of the public sight and political discourse. By deliberately manufacturing a mythical image of America and its past, the power of the past can be used to transform those that are governed and shape their subjectivity.

The great American accounting fraud — hiding the losers in the gambling hall of pursuit of happiness[6] – has been an ideological maneuver intended as depression concealment, which covers the abyss beneath every failed fortune-seeker. But, with time, the accumulated deficit of luck grew so big that it could no longer remain hidden and its burden became unbearable in the early 21^st century. Its resurfacing defined the wounded subject of postmodernity.

With time, America has become a country with vanishingly few paths out of poverty (or even out of the working class) and after several centuries of the American dream, the direct lineage from the early settlers and risk-takes – the committed aficionados of luck – found themselves at the bottom of the social ladder which gave birth to the culture of victimhood.

The accidentally wounded white American male subject, an ousted member of dominant and privileged majority, has become a collateral damage of capitalism’s global triumph. Beaten in just about any game that matters, even the ones they invented, they have joined the ranks of excess population on the way to irreversible social displacement and marginalization.  

The emergence of the American wounded subject in the new century was immersed in nostalgia for the times of new beginnings, a demand for another chance to those who found themselves lost in the game of luck, competition, and meritocracy.

At the center of their uprising resides Ressentiment /rə,säntə’män/,  a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon,  a dormant emotional sediment caused by the loss of privileged position. Not sufficient to mobilize political action, it remains inactive and intoxicating.

This condition resulted in armies of disillusioned individuals who have committed themselves to chemical escape from American reality.

Intermission: The rebirth of the subject

Subjects are distinguished by their capacity to act – formation of a subject requires diffusing the inhibitory mechanisms in order to eliminate the regression of endless doubt instrumental for converting “theory” into actions. The easiest way to create disinhibiting mechanisms is to subject oneself to the command of a higher authority.

The modern right-wing populist uprising is modeled on the Jesuit mode of subjectivity, which consists of absolute surrender to supreme authority (the pope), cultural manifestations of the ability to suffer, and conversion of suffering into passion.

Contemporary victims of neoliberal capitalism retroactively see their newly found world in support of interpreting their history as a repressed memory of systematic abuse. Their version of American reality is a hysterical reaction to failure with subjectivity defined by their coming out, no longer needing to hide and admitting to the abuse[7].  

Their impassioned rage is mobilized through flood or arbitrariness with an aim of manufacturing reality from improbable possibilities through a populist cacophony of God, victimhood, entitlement, male privilege, ressentiment, and sovereign citizenry. The underlying discontent is contextualized through conspiracy theories and fusion paranoia. What used to be the terrain of fringe movements has become so deeply ingrained in the mainstream politics that the paranoid style has become the cohering idea of a broad coalition plurality that draws adherents from every point on the political spectrum. 

With their recent leader out of the picture, defenestrated, embarrassed, and discredited, the march of victimhood of angry citizens not only did not slow down, but it continued with new intensity and higher granularity. They offer impassioned conversion of their suffering and, like modern-day Jesuits, stand as passive followers offering their unconditional obedience to the highest bidder, a prospective new “pope”, who would elevate their victimhood, pledge their votes, and monetize their rage capital.

Epilogue: Reverse flows from the netherworld

2022 confirmed what previous years already outlined. In the last 12 months, the number of mass shootings in America exceeded 600 again, only marginally lower than the previous year’s record 692, and two times as high as in 2015 when the identitarian orgy got a new dose of legitimacy. These killings have become the micro representation of the rebellion of unreason that illustrate the final phase of transformation of the game of competition into a competition of cruelty.

For the chosen, failure and mediocrity is forbidden. But when the number of those who fell through the cracks grows so big that they become a community of like minds unified by shared victimhood and their new sense of belonging, the power of collective self-pity becomes a force of its own. The community is generally inclusive, which reflects a fear of small numbers — it likes size because it reinforces cohesion and identity robustness. It absorbs everyone willing to join in but expresses hostility to outsiders – burning bridges reinforces commitment to the identity.

The stealth approach of stochastic terror is the beginning of an uprising from the inside – a blowback of the American dream, its nightmare version — an autoimmune reaction of the system driven by the extrapolated logic that human life is worthless if it stands in the way of the pursuit of happiness.

Tired of self-abuse, anesthetized by drugs and alcohol, disillusioned white males have taken permanent residence in a conflicting configuration between life as they wanted it and life as it has been. They have been lost in their desperate search for a savior who will restore their (perception of) lost dignity and self-respect, and reclaim, on their behalf, what they always considered rightfully theirs, the privilege of luck.

Angry and armed with guns, but feeling powerless, they are taking a short cut in externalizing their depression through a simulated ritual of frontier justice and revenge for their predicament by denying the future to the innocence the way it had been denied to them.

This is the baggage of the American dream, which reinforces the late-Shakespearian perception of humans as competition-infected, jealousy-blinded, failure-scared risk-takers, which appear on the world stage as balls with which illusory powers, malign genies, money spirits and greed demons play their games[8].

In imperial Rome, Fortuna, the goddess of luck, was primarily the protector of slaves and destitute plebeians who depended entirely on chance and the generosity of the rich. In America, she had found another constituency as a protector of the new nobility of chance and turned its back on the poor.

The nebulous reality of the American dream has become the story of divine betrayal and its latest chapter represents an uprising against the new divine order. And this meaningless rebellion will not stop until the actual victims finally begin to speak and reflect about their history in honest and clear terms. Not when they tell themselves fairy tails about themselves, but when they start connecting the dots and drawing the lines.

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[1] Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital, Polity (2013)

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] The disinhibiting value of confession is another Jesuit motif of subjectivity – in its modern version, survivor transcends his trauma completely only when he can make it public as a testimony.

[8] ibid.

The Economics of Repulsion

7. XI 2021

In traditional capitalism, the supply of commodities is finite and their exploitation leads to depletion of the supply. By mining coal, diamonds or drilling oil, access to these commodities becomes increasingly more difficult, which requires deeper mines, oil drills, and more sophisticated technology, all of which increases production costs. For a fixed demand, this reduction in supply results in a rise of perceived value and higher price.

In cognitive capitalism, where information is the main commodity, the imbalance resides on the opposite side. Its economics is governed by diminishing demand. Human attention is biologically limited – there is a finite amount of information our brains can absorb and store at any given time. Supply of information, on the other hand, is unlimited and comes practically at no cost – ideas can come out of nowhere (or as a result of the general intellect) and, in principle, cannot be exhausted.

Since everyone is competing for the same fraction of our (limited) attention, sooner or later cognitive capitalism becomes a zero-sum game. For a brain already overloaded with information to pay attention to something new, it has to neglect something else. Every spec of information, every new idea, therefore, has an inherent ephemeral quality and carries a potential of becoming worthless.

In order to insert itself into the tight space of the already saturated attention space, new information has to be able to shock. It does not necessarily have to be relevant or carry semiotic value; it only needs to be sufficiently loud to overpower other voices. And, in competitive markets, such loud information wins and gradually dominates. Cognitive capitalism, thus, inevitably leads to semiotic inflation — more information buys less meaning – and ultimately to hyperinflation when information carries no meaning whatsoever.

Metabolic disorder and addiction to shocks

As an ideology that disseminates market values to every segment of life, neoliberalism has naturally aligned with the new logic of social media and the diminishing demand of the attention economy. Once one allows the market to impose its values and criteria, society becomes subordinated to it and has to be managed as its auxiliary. As an adaptive system, neoliberalism has adjusted to the new chapter of cognitive capitalism by transforming society and conditioning political subjects to its new laws.

Neoliberalism makes citizens into consumers. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in politics or in actively shaping the community; they react only passively to it. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to deliver. In that process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are their customers.

Society of the spectacle and the attention economy, when put together, result in new politics defined by the explosion of affects, revenge, and peddling in highly improbable. Through interaction between technology and politics, society gradually becomes addicted to shocks — they need to be administered continuously and without interruption.

Immunoreaction and informational fatigue syndrome

Shock is a kind of immunoreaction. A strong immune system stifles communication – it impairs its fluidity – the lower the level of immunity, the faster information circulates. A high level of immunity slows down the information flow. Immune-suppression, on the other hand, allows massive quantities of information to penetrate our souls without immune defense.[1]

Political foreplay, in the initial stage, consists of preparing its constituents for the new landscape by weakening their cognitive immune system. Once political subjects are properly conditioned, politics is administered through barraging them with a constant flow of nonsense in order to wear down their immune system and create a metabolic disorder[2] (akin to an eating disorder). Their minds are constantly stimulated – the underlying information becomes a semiotic equivalent of junk food — the less meaningful the information and the more toxic and addictive its effects are, the more marketable it is.

According to Walter Benjamin, the primary mode of a spectator’s response to cinema was one of a shock: Shock replaced contemplation that came as cinema replaced painting. However, we are no longer shocked by images. Even the most disturbing images have been made consumable[3].

Shocks now have to contain another quality that relies on different kind of imagery and the target audience needs to be conditioned to receive them.Media outlets are increasingly playing on repulsion rather than on seduction — response to pleasure is too diverse while response to repulsion is the same. Anxiety gradually replaces excitement while persistent exposure to the semiotic excess of informational barrage leads to what B.C. Han calls informational fatigue syndrome (IFS), which progressively weakens our analytic capacities and monopolizes our attention. 

In our reaction to ambiguously disturbing images emerges a new category representing the repulsion we cannot resist.

Repulsion as political leverage and emergence of the emotionalized electorate

In its essence, Right-wing populist politics in Europe is not dissimilar to its American counterpart – it revolves around conservative budget spending, pseudo-Christian values, certain types of cultural iconography, and self-centered xenophobia. However, their mode of articulation cannot be more different. European right-wingers and their politics, as much as one finds them disagreeable, their delivery is coherent – they speak in meaningful sentences, their thoughts have a logically consistent flow, and address the problems of shared reality, which one might agree with or contest and argue on rational premises.

In the USA, however, shared reality no longer supports the tenets of whatever the conservatism has become, which stand in trivial conflict with facts and is rendered demonstrably false and indefensible, invalidated by the long history of failure and bankruptcy. Defense of the right-wing narratives in the USA requires the creation of an alternative universe where not only are the shared reality and observable facts ignored, but the underlying laws of economics, sociology, biology, physics, the probability, and even mathematics have to be suspended. The end effect of this environment is removal of all systems of reference where the mental instability of a single person in power easily mutates into a large-scale collective affliction with defenders and advocates of that politics turning into performance artists in a state of simulated self-induced mental illness.

In cognitive markets, where shocks amplify informational impact, the more repulsive the messengers, the easier their message penetrates the barriers erected by the compromised public immune system. Self-debasement becomes the statement of authenticity and repulsion a desirable quality.

Two examples of this mechanism at work:

Right-wing broadcasters and political consultants, which have elevated their appearances to the level of performance art, tend to wear their shirts one size smaller and buttoned up all the way to the top, so that it causes an authentic discomfort and irritation giving them a slightly deranged and agitated look, an emotion which gets transmitted to their emotionalized audience.

And speaking of undersized garments, the infamous sighting of Christy’s camel toe represents a singular example. Once seen, never forgotten, this historic picture — a visual equivalent of eating durian — cannot be accidental, despite its spontaneous appearance. Such extreme deficit of self-awareness simply does not exist (not to mention the discomfort wearing of these pants must have caused). It is not a fortuitously captured moment of leisure of the former New Jersey Governor, but a product of meticulous calculation of the teams of specialized PR consultants.

These, and other similar, images are carefully crafted so that they continue to shock, irritate, and disgust because these are addictive emotions; they provide a lifeline to the outrage conglomerate. In this way, any possible resistance of the opposition is automatically thwarted and their collaboration ensured from the outset. They have been taken hostage by this vortex of addictive repulsion. Opposition media outlets are placed in a conflicting position where their bottom-line disincentivizes resistance. As much as they would like to oppose the new ideology of repulsion, they cannot afford to wound, let alone deal a defeating blow to it – nobody would pay attention to them anymore, which would ultimately wipe out their revenues and put them out of business. This mechanism sustains otherwise lifeless and non-sustainable narratives.

The objective of politics is to never break the chain of emotions set in motion by a shock. Their synchronization has become the new way of governing and the community of emotions replaces the community of interests resulting in communism of affects[4].

---

[1] B. C. Han, In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, The MIT Press (2017)

[2] B. C. Han, ibid.

[3] B. C. Han, _ibid.

[4] Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear, Semiotext(e) intervention series (2012)

Goebbels in America: The Microsolidarity of Identitarian Autohypnosis

19. IX 2021

Three quarters of a century after his death, Goebbels is back in vogue. After the 2020 shipwreck, Republicans are fighting for their lives. Desperate and pissed off, they are coming out as a full-blown Nazi party, taking Goebbels’ playbook as a gospel, pure and undiluted, as if no other books have ever been written. There are no more pretenses — anti-Semitism, racism, and misogyny are alive and well in America today with open support for white supremacy in all its modes and hasty legislation of outdated segregationist policies. MAGA-pride events, the culturally adjusted burlesque versions of Nazi conventions, have replaced country fairs and have become magnets for angry, aggressive, and comically stupid folks. New blood is being mobilized to carry out Brown-shirt activities and half-assed attempts to model their own martyrs (Ashli Babbitt as a modern day Horst Wessel) on Nazi folk heroes.

Without a program or agenda, and armed with strategy of fully randomized focus targeting, everything is in the mix (hoping that something will stick): The Constitution, first (and second) amendment, race (critical and uncritical), education, prayer in schools, American history (and anti-history), slavery, 1619, white replacement, immigration, misogyny, abortion, climate change, wealth distribution, student loans, taxes, recounts, voter suppression, insurrection, swastikas, sedition, civil war, Republican math, Florida man, flat earth, space travel, Taliban, Hunter Biden, media, influencers, Moonies, masks, vaccines, Fauci, Ivermectin, Jews with (and without) lasers, cousins in Trinidad, and, of course, Jesus.

By its design, the new, 21^st century gumbo of neo-Nazi propaganda has become the key identifier of growing masses of excluded, grotesquely ignorant folks whose anger and self-pity, caused by their precarity, trumps rationality, logic, science, and their own economic interests, safety and well-being. The high marketability of the Nazi-style response to populist rage is the new frontier for the transparently dishonest media outlets who, in search of attention, publicity, and ratings are willing to cross the boundaries of century-old social and political taboos and get on the other side in order to get ahead of the competition or just stay in the game.

A logical question emerges at this point: Why do we have to go back to these issues again? After all, these are outdated ideologies with a well-documented chronology of their inadequacy and chronic failure (social, economic, political, moral). Is fascism turning out to be the strange attractor of modernity and is its periodic recurrence unavoidable?

Despite its extreme nature and excesses, what happened in Germany in the 1930s was a logical inevitability of the Western civilization and its intellectual tradition. Evil is an intellectual need of the mind, which meditates about good. Intellectuals made evil logically necessary upon funding the idea about a better world. It is, therefore, no wonder that the origins of WWII reside in one of the most developed countries with the strongest cultural tradition in the Western world of that time.

After WWII was over, while the victors indulged in the narcissistic righteousness of its aftermath, Germany emerged richer with insights, which had remained unregistered by the allies. Through an unprecedented defeat, they [Germans] have been brought to the unwanted but valid insight that national identities and ethnic missions are in principle nothing more than violent and violence-producing collective autohypnosis. Consequently, they have developed a relationship to the missions of history that resembles that of a sober alcoholic to their former drug[1].

And while modern Germany has retreated from the manic historicity and forever abandoned the idea of being a chosen nation, the victors saw, and continue to see, WWII as just another round in a tournament for international supremacy in which one competitor (Germany) had been eliminated. They (the victors) never abandoned the dreams of their own supremacy — their individual or collective visions of the future have been nothing but projections and fantasies of their domination extending to their logical extremes[2].

America seems to have gone the furthest in that direction. Economically prosperous, but, at the same time, neck-deep in shit, largely due to its own self-neglect and gross mismanagement of its fortunes, it remains narcissistically in love with itself (for all the wrong reasons). Paradoxically, this is especially true for those segments of the American population that have been the victims of said neglect. In the last years these folks have been in a state of a post-coital narcissistic orgy and have become a petri dish for the same collective auto-hypnotic identity politics and self-discovery that Germany went through a century ago.

By the end of the first decade of the new century, the gap that separates every disgruntled member of the excluded white sub-proletariat in America from the clutches of white supremacist rage has shrunk so much that it takes only a moment of inattention for any member of that community to falsely interpret their personal misery, deserved defeat, and bitterness as the sad faith of America, which, if we are to be honest, with such whining, pitiful and comically ignorant constituents, never really deserved anything better.

They failed in the game, which they invented, maintained, and defended at all cost, and now, they want another shot at it, but with altered rules, ones that would guarantee their advantage. This is the core of the microsolidarity and fractal belonging of the current identity politics. It is also fascism at its purest.

And as the saying goes: All comedies of history happen twice; the first time they are bloody, and the second time ridiculous. When the final receipts were written, the 1900s turned out to be a bad century for Germany. It was also a turning point for America as the leading cultural and economic global force. Now that baton has been passed, it is America’s turn. So, here we are.

---

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Polity Press (2020)

[2] ibid.

Texas

5.IX 2021

Identity code has a generally excluding effect capable of mobilizing negative energies and social forces towards those who do not share the same origin, territory or culture. Fascism is the fundamental obsession with identity, origin and belonging. It is a knee-jerk reaction to physical and social displacement. Fascism is generally inclusive, which reflects a fear of small numbers — it likes size because identity robustness had been eroded by the defection and erosion of ranks. It absorbs everyone willing to join in and expresses hostility to outsiders.

While there are many varieties of fascism, they all have one thing in common: Misogyny resides at the origin of each and every one of them – there hasn’t been a fascist movement without it. It’s never been too difficult to mobilize enough male solidarity when it comes to organized misogyny. By questioning the external norms that relate to the position of men and women in society, man has and had nothing to gain and everything to lose: he would lose not only social and economic advantages, but something far more precious, a sense of his own superiority which bolsters his ego both in his public and private life[1].

The fundamental cohesive force of fascism always begins with a male bonding ritual of masculinization of cultural self-perception. In Italy, for example, early 20^th century fascism represented the turning point from feminine self-perception to masculine assertiveness: Erasing feminine quality of its Mediterranean sensitivity – everything that makes life there pleasant and seductive — and affirming a different self-image based on acceleration and male potency (national pride, military aggressivity, industrial growth, etc). German fascism, on the other hand, was not a programmatic cultural defeminization, but rather an establishment of systematic downgrade of femininity to reproductive function as a part of the new nation-serving hierarchization. Its essence was a utilitarian placement of women as birth factories, their subordination to the interests of the National Socialist political agenda (run by men), to serve the numbers.

When seen in the context of the most recent developments, the new intensity of the American misogyny appears less of an anachronistic anomaly and more as a logical consequence of the current political struggles. The debates (and the present escalation) of the Abortion law – the topic that had been put to rest in the remainder of the world a long time ago – is resurfacing now, at this particular moment, not in the light of its renewed relevance or urgency, but as an opening act for the new chapter of fascism. It is showing here in a more convoluted way than it had 100 years ago because the social and cultural displacement of the 21^st century Western man has triggered new modes of identity politics.

Modern day misogyny is the ultimate male fantasy of the Western conservatives structured around a nostalgia for the times of lower entropy, a return to the past as a site of coherence, and a relapse to the patriarchal setting when man held their “naturally deserved” upper hand and (a male) God ruled the world. Through misogyny this man articulates the desire to reclaim what he considers his “natural right” to control women and, in that way, take control of his own destiny.

Conservative man’s vision of woman is not objective, but an uneasy combination of what he wishes her to be and what he fears her to be[2]. The masculinization program and return to patriarchal values (the most coveted axiom of any right-wing politics) and assault on women’s rights and their position in society, if they are to be successful, would have to be deeper, gradual, and systematic. This means undoing the women’s emancipation. The tactical approach of conservative politics is that the masculinization program requires a proper framing and subtle maneuvering — women must not be antagonized; they are many and they vote. In their view, the most effective approach is to strike at the root of a woman’s influence.

No one has more influence on a person during their formative age than their mother. As such, she is a constant threat to both the state and to men in general. The decision of life and death has to be taken away from women. Their influence and importance in the life of their children have to be diminished, if not de facto, then, at least, symbolically. Right to life! This is ultimately the question about who has jurisdiction over the life of an individual, their mother/family or the state (ruled by men, of course). With the help of proper framing, this becomes the theme that defines the core of conservative identity politics, an issue slowly hijacked by (predominantly white) men who feel righteous and entitled, and present themselves as defenders of human life while women take a back seat.

---

[1] Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes, Persea Books (1986)

[2] ibid.

What More Needs to Happen before Something Happens?

22. VIII 2021

Our everyday life is peppered with illegal activities – its normal functioning would be practically impossible without discretionary transgressions of the law. We jaywalk every day, regularly drive above the speed limit, and use cellphones while driving. And who hasn’t littered at some point in their life? For a long time, smoking marijuana or taking drugs have been considered rights of passage for many, while sharing you password or downloading music, movies or books is done continuously without even an afterthought. In certain states in America, non-procreative sex is still illegal and in some countries like Iran it carries a death sentence. Nevertheless, people systematically, and sometimes exclusively, engage in those practices as a matter of sexual preferences or lifestyle choices.

This aspect of casual transgression is well understood by both the citizens and the authorities. However, actions of authorities are almost never aimed at their systematic suppression. Police functioning is most effective when everyone is breaking the law. The purpose of the law and law enforcement is to make you a potential criminal and for the police to have an option to declare you an actual criminal at any given time[1].

Once this is done, once you have been declared a criminal, the court does not initiate a trial and possible sentencing, but instead pressures you to plead guilty and accept your criminality. This is more effective in the long run – once you have confessed to your criminality (in order to serve a lesser sentence or go free with a slap on the wrist), there would be no way of complaining or objecting to the consequences. In this way, you move closer to an easily governable docile subject. This is governmentality at its purest.

However, the situation is markedly different when non-individual entities are concerned. When an entire congregation or political party breaks the law systematically, this becomes a sign of possible civil disobedience and unrest, which requires urgency of intervention, especially if their followings are of negligible size. In that case, any attempt to prosecute those people can be diverted into a political struggle and, as such, become a defense against abuses of power.

Genealogy of a Political Hysteria

The seeds of the Jan-6 clown coup, and with it, the radical reshaping of the Republican party, most likely started as a consequence of the previous Oval Office occupant’s failed attempts to extort some kind of blanket immunity from prosecution by his successor. The repeated failure to successfully ensure such a package led to escalation in the negotiations and threats, most likely never intended to be realized, but, as the new President elect called his predecessor’s bluff, things went beyond the point of no return. As matter got out of hand in this game of miscalculated leverage, and assumed an unintended dimension with grave legal implications, some key figures of the previous administration became implicated and compromised.

Clearly, the whole Jan-6 thing wasn’t conceived to be anything but a threat. No one in his right mind would think that a few hundred people breaking into the Capitol would amount to keeping the losing candidate in office. Keeping the Congressmen as hostages and asking that the Election results be reversed? Or what? The mob executes them? The noose? Only a total moron (and there were plenty of them in DC on that day) could believe that this could amount to anything. All of that was intended to be nothing more than a threat to push the Republicans in Congress to vote against certification in order to drag things further so that the new administration, in order to keep things under control and finish the whole charade, finally settles for a sweeping pardon. Nothing else.

Well, that didn’t work as planned, so here we are. For those involved, the consequences have become non-trivial. The latest transformation of the Republican Party into a pseudo-criminal collective is a result of dealing with those consequences.

Since almost every Republican still sees the support of Trump’s base as a must-have on their political path, the implicated leaders have compelled others, either by dirt or by promises of endorsement, to join in and create a shift from individual to collective criminality. With that maneuver, the underlying allegations of the Republican top would be converted into a collective liability of the entire party, which would transform the defense of the idiot-coup into a political struggle.

Clearly, this cannot be, in any possible context, a sustainable platform of a political organization. It is a losing proposition in an environment where political victory is won within 1% majority. It is really a desperate attempt to diffuse the culpability of their leadership and prevent consequences to take place.

The cold civil war

The democratic process was originally conceived as a way to peacefully resolve economic disputes between people who share common values, either cultural, religious, or in terms of lifestyles or visions of the future. As such, democracy requires commonality; inequality undermines it. When, however, inequality reaches the critical point, when interests diverge so much that consensus is no longer attainable, the bonding tissue that keeps society together begins to tear and democracy becomes compromised. In the absence of commonality, disputes can no longer have peaceful resolve. Instead, the resolution occurs through negotiation or war[2].

Despite being abundantly and unambiguously clear what happened on and after Jan-6, the response has been annoyingly gradual. The effect of subsequent diversion of blame from individual to collective was to increase the already existing division and elevate the tensions, which have been accumulating over the past years. The escalation caused by the Republicans’ coming out as the white supremacist party has transformed those tensions into a cold civil war.

The legal and political disputes related to the Jan-6 events are now happening against a highly combustive social background where the underlying social tensions have already crossed the point of no return. The most acute problem, therefore, is how to avoid the cold civil war from heating up.

The current situation has become explosive — it is configured like a booby trap. And, when facing the problem of its deactivation, one does not just come in and cut the wires — one wrong move and the device will explode. Deactivation must proceed slowly and sequentially, first by figuring out who is connected with whom and only then can the cutting really begin.

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[1] This argument, I believe, is due to Slavoj Zizek.

[2] Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy, Cambridge University Press (2011)

Death & Life in Utopia for the Stupid (a flashback)

19. VII 2021

The rational is always the rationality of an irrational (Fèlix Guattari)

If utopia represents the impossible [imaginary places where social relations are represented, contested, and inverted], and developed society has reached the point where (almost) everything is possible, then the problem of finding our way is no longer the problem of disappearing utopia, but the problem of vision and politics[1]. So, what is the neoliberal utopia really like? What is a logical extrapolation of the neoliberal experience and what could be the next frontier for its all-around permissiveness?

Of all the issues that have emerged in the last years, murder has been the most divisive. From police brutality, to vigilante killings, mass murders, shooting of cops or innocent bystanders and terror attacks. All these cases were really about who has the right to kill whom, and at what price. Black lives matter, terrorism, the OJ Simpson trial, the idiot coup … they have all been about the same theme: Is it ok for whites to kill blacks, for Muslims to kill Christians, for rich to kill poor, or even for the rich blacks to kill not-so-rich whites, etc.? There has always been some implicit hierarchy of rules in that space.

Issues that have played a similar divisive role in the past have been alcohol prohibition, teenage drinking, abortion (right to life), legality of drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, speed limits, etc. In many countries where these issues have been put to rest, tensions and problems associated with the issue have disappeared.

It is common sense to assume that removing an aura of taboo reduces the appeal of the vice. By legalizing something, one eliminates the challenge and reduces the abuse. For example, incidence of teenage drinking, drunken driving etc. are much lower in countries which have no minimum drinking age, and similarly in the case of car accidents vs. speed limit. In the same manner, one can argue, that the legalization of drugs could lead to lower incidence of drug abuse and a reduction in crimes associated with illegal drug trafficking. Same holds for prostitution. The upside of legalizing these activities is that society becomes less polarized – people get along better with each other – and, once divisive aspects are removed, politics becomes more constructive.

Utopia for the stupid

Stupidity does not understand context. It assumes knowledge and extrapolations of experiences to contexts where those do not belong and often cannot hold. This is the summary of neoliberalism’s essence and its destiny as an ideology premised on applying the laws of the markets to life as a whole. In the final days of the unraveling of the neoliberal reign, this has become the era of stupidity. Therefore, entertaining the counterfactual reality that reflects the future as a neoliberal utopia of permissiveness, by allowing for its virtual triumph and applying its patterns and rules to situations where they do not belong, should be done based on the same foundations of confused contexts and argued with the same logic as the ideology itself.

By analogy with the well-know cases of causal connection between bad habits and their status of social taboo, it is fair to ask the same question regarding murder. Following the logic of neoliberal reasoning, one can argue along the following lines:

First, in America, there is an insane number of murders every year. By now, we probably have more than one mass murder for each day in the year. Obviously, the fact that murder is a capital offense is no detractor for killers; the rate of killing (individual/random/mass) keeps increasing. The legitimate question to ask then is: Would the number of murders decrease if they were to become legal? Following the same line of reasoning as with drinking or drug abuse, one could argue that most likely, there would be an initial surge, but then the trend would gradually subside and a new lower equilibrium murder rate reached.

Death by shooting would gradually be accepted as a consequence of our freedoms, in the same way as death caused by traffic accidents, plane crashes, fire, or natural disasters have.

The benefits would be immediately visible. First, guns would get the status of a regular appliance, like car or TV — everyone would own (at least) one. This would be plain common sense. All debates about the second amendment would become obsolete and with them the polarizing effects would go away. There would be no justification for the existence of the gun lobby. The NRA would be rendered politically irrelevant and politics, free of its influences, would be able to focus on issues that matter. Without polarization around the second amendment, republicans and democrats could even merge into a single party.

Smart guns would become the new technological frontier. Apple would produce first iGun, synchronizable with iPhone and iWatch, and Teslas would come with special road rage software and appropriate smart guns usable in such situations.

Compulsive killing would be frowned upon. It would be deemed uncool, along the lines people treat compulsive eating and obesity. There would be awareness groups that provide counseling and talk shows where compulsive killers would be subjected to public shaming.

The US would enter its post-political phase. There would be less need for police; private protection would be the new area of economic expansion. There would be far fewer people in prisons, both private and state-run. No debates about the death penalty or life sentences? All these would free the federal budget for more constructive projects. People would be much more considerate and respectful of each other’s feelings. Conflicts would tend to be avoided. Everyone would be nice to each other (assholes would have a very low chance of survival). Generally, people would get along much better. Right?

At the end, it would be every man for himself, just as Margaret Thatcher said: There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. These thoughts represent the basic axiom of neoliberalism and its sociopathic core. It, therefore, doesn’t come as a surprise that, when stripped of the constraints of moral judgment, the utilitarian logic of neoliberalism, if applied consistently and carried to its final consequences, inevitable leads to over-optimized dystopian world of sociopathy. A sociopath truly practices the notion of morality developed by utilitarianism. He need not necessarily lack intelligence, but on a landscape of normal human interaction, he is lost – that is what defines his affliction. For him, morality designates a behavior one adopts by way of intelligently calculating one’s interests (in the long–run, it profits us all if we try to contribute to the pleasure of the greatest number of people). A sociopath sees morality as a theory one learns and follows and not something one identifies with: [in his universe] doing evil is a mistake in calculation, not a guilty act[2].

---

[1] Fredric Jameson, An American Utopia: Dual Power and the Universal Army, Verso (2016)

[2] Slavoj Zizek, How to Read Lacan, W. W. Norton & Company (2007)

Fatal Strategies and the Value of Human Life

20.VI 2021

Civilization’s potential for barbarism is growing; the everyday bestialization of man is on the increase. (Peter Sloterdijk)

In the autumn of 1914, a human life was infinitely more worthless than in the autumn of 1913. WWI was an abyss, a near-unfathomable crisis of civilization, and one of the most important issues that needed to be addressed in its wake was precisely the worth of the human being[1].

This question would set the tone and meter of the political discourse to come, its echo extending beyond the remainder of the 20^th century, without ever losing its relevance. It would only assume different forms and granularity as its context changed, its mutation continuously adapting to different modes of fascism and identity politics, which defined the metrics for the relative valuation of human life.

Before and during WWII, it was the value of Arian vs. non-Arian lives (fascism). In occupied territories in WWII, Germany had a simple algorithm, precise and unambiguous, displayed in public for everyone to know: For each German killed, they would execute 100 randomly picked locals. In the second part of the 20^th century, which Immanuel Wallerstein had coined as the realization of democratic fascism[2] whereby 20% of the global population exploits the remaining 80%, the debate shifted to the relative worth of American vs. non-American lives. In backlash to western hegemony, the Islamic dilemma was articulated through Islamo-fascism and terrorism with the discourse defined by a different valuation of Muslim and infidel lives. With the gradual normalization of neo-fascism and white supremacy in the new century, the debate shifted (back) to white vs. non-white and natives vs. migrants.

In today’s America, this problem is currently struck around quantifying the value of Black lives. It is not an entirely new debate, but the socio-political backdrop is. The narrative behind the current ritual of white supremacist coming out and their clownish uprising rests on the belief that, contrary to the overwhelming evidence, Black lives are valued fairly, if not even overvalued. Persistent and deliberate police brutality against Black people is but a particular way of transmitting this message, and so is the normalization of white supremacy with white replacement paranoia, the glorification of slavery, voter suppression, the exorcism of critical race theory from the school curriculum, and general revisionism.

Delirium

The embrace of a regressive revival of racial tensions defines the delirium of the current socio-political counterpoint. It is a moment that desperately demands collective introspection. Here, we have to be careful to avoid the trappings of conventional (Freudian) psychoanalysis defined relative to an Oedipal axis (which locates the roots of our problems in sex and family). What is currently at play requires a different perspective, defined by Deluze and Guatarri as the anti-Oedipal:

The real problem of delirium lies in the extraordinary transition from the pole of reactionary or fascist to a revolutionary pole. Statements like ‘I belong to a superior race’ appear in all paranoid deliriums. Similarly, ‘I belong to an utterly inferior race’ is a revolutionary pole of madness[3].

The excluded white precariat is torn between these two poles, unable to decide where they stand or belong, and where they want to be. They have managed to lose their way in the interstices of the anti-Oedipal perspective. The decades of erosive acrobatics of ideological maneuvering have made this point especially ambiguous in a way that, although neither one is correct, both appear equally plausible and seductive.

Trapped in what Wendy Brown considers the neoliberal trauma inflicted by neoliberalism’s accidental wounding of the white male supremacy[4], the white underclass remains transfixed between a self-pity of collective victimology and an unwavering sense of superiority and entitlement, all these emotions grossly misinterpreted, misdirected and manipulated, standing as a testament to their anachronism.

This ideological terrain had been already claimed and appropriated by the conservative Right, resurrected as the Right Wing populism, which has latched onto the underlying white discontent as their lifeline and the last point of rescue from their own obsolescence. In a bizarre symbiosis between the super-privileged and the super-marginalized segments of the white American population, conservative leaders have taken upon themselves the role of speaking on behalf of the poor so that the poor wouldn’t speak for themselves: We want to include you in the decision without letting you influence it. Through carefully structured narratives and divisive memes, their rhetorics are framed as a culture war, which insures that the underlying rage capital of the white precariat remains properly invested and its supply never stops growing.

Entropy

The current crisis of politics is unlike anything seen before. It hasn’t been brought about by chronic scarcity, economic devastation or depression. It has been driven by an undeniable realization that exploding wealth and prosperity has repeatedly failed to underwrite a decent, or even acceptable, life for a growing majority of people amidst the unrestrained accumulation of wealth of a shrinking minority.

Entropy cannot decline, it must rise – systems always evolve towards less orderly state. This means that order always comes at a price: Local order can happen so long as it ejects enough disorder to its surroundings that the total disorder raises. Peaceful social life means that one party, the ruling one, has already won. Interfering with that – taking over by another political faction – creates an upheaval and disruption of peace.

Exploding inequality, which comes about when extreme prosperity is financed by extreme exclusion, eventually tips the scale and leads to a buildup of latent systematic violence that does not know, and is incapable of acknowledging the existence of, any bounds. At some point, this latent violence begins to permeate every aspect of social and political life and along the way creates the state of the general exclusion principle: [Y]ou cannot calculate both the current [social] position of an individual and his or her velocity of exclusion, [e.g.] advancement of women and their virtual downgrading[5]. It is impossible to distinguish causes and effects or to isolate subject from object (are Republicans hostages of their base or is the base their victims). One can grasp either the appearance or the meaning, but not both at the same time (we cannot tell whether GOP politicians only act as morons or they are actual morons). Ultimately, we can no longer calculate the price of a human life and its statistical value at the same time[6].

Nihilism of value and the fight for human soul

How did we get here? What is the big loss and trauma humanity had experienced that has led to this nihilism of value, which the neoliberal mutation of capitalism only made intolerable?

In the past, the human being was not doomed to be merely what he is. God and Satan wrestled over him. In the past, we were important enough to have a battle fought over our soul. Today, our salvation is our own affair. Our lives are no longer marked by original sin but by the risk of failing to fulfill our ultimate potential. So we accumulate plans, ideas and programs; we constantly pass the buck and seek to outdo each other in a universal effort to perform[7].

By attempting to achieve local order in our lives we eject disorder elsewhere. And as everyone does the same thing, this creates entropy, which continues to grow unstoppably and, as much as we try to avoid it, entropy begins to seep into all pores of everyone’s life. But whom do we turn to when we fail (and an increasing fraction of American population is failing), or whom do we blame for our failure?

In the absence of transcendent powers watching over us, and in the perpetual effort to validate our existence, we are forced to become ‘fatal’ to ourselves[8]. We romanticize the past and revive its ghosts in order to create a context for the struggle about jurisdiction over the ancestral terrain, its location and boundaries, and the right to map the current reality onto it. This is the only way of bringing back the lost meaning of human life. We need to own the future in order to conquer the past, because this is the terrain on which the battle for our souls will be fought again.

In what becomes a parody of fate, a leader figure will emerge who will fill that empty place and fight for the excluded and forgotten. And when they find each other, the excluded and forgotten followers will ignore every and all of his shortcomings — no matter how flawed he might be, they will support him unconditionally. He might be the worst human being there is, but they don’t require goodness or humanity from him because he fights for their soul. Nothing else will matter anymore.

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[1] Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle Book 6, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2019)

[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, World Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Duke University Press (2004)

[3] Felix Guattari, Chaosophy, Semiotext(e), New edition (2008)

[4] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, Columbia University Press (2019)

[5] Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, Verso; Reprint edition (2012)

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid.

[8] ibid.

Bare life

29. V 2021

In Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, the party who emerges as master does not fear death. The desire for freedom, recognition, and sovereignty raises the master above concern for bare life. It is fear of dying that induces the future slave to subordinate himself to the Other. Preferring servitude to the threat of death, the slave clings to bare life. (B. C. Han)

What on the surface appears as a consolidation in the ranks of the post-Q-anon Republican Party, from Hawley’s clenched fist and Lyin’ Ted’s escapades, the psychotic trailer-park vitriol of Boebert and Taylor-Greene to the full immersion of Stefanik, the disoriented and stunningly myopic maneuver devoid of any logic and common sense, is not an ideological realignment, but the fight for bare life – a desperate attempt to secure a financial bloodline necessary for their short-term survival.

When seen in a broader context, the collective pledge of unconditional servitude to the rejected and discarded former leader represents the liminal stage in the forced transformation of the American conservatism, which has been following a well-defined and rigid pattern of ritual in its quest for structure, long lost after decades of its own cannibalization. This transformation process has reached the point where its inner contradiction have become so abundant that the party representing conservative ideology can no longer exist as a part of the democratic process.

For the Republican Party, this is the unconditional moment – a situation that requires the creation of a new set of values and standards, a new picture of the world and one’s sense of self in it. They are confronted with the restrictions and pathological narrowness of their existence, a condition that demands the Party to abandon the security of its limitedness, and enter a new realm of self-awareness. For them, there is no turning back; the whole system of values must change.

Republicans’ desperate gasp for air is an attempt to answer the existential question forced upon their party: How to respond to a confrontation with the reality of failure — an absolute failure, which one cannot fail to recognize? Answering this question requires entering terra incognita where they come to terms with their underlying incapacities, a transformation process that demands separation from the existing structure.

The power of ritual

Ritual is a social act of subjective transformation, which allows the transformed subject to see the context with different eyes and from a new perspective afforded by the experience of ritual. It usually takes place at an inflection point where the status quo approaches a dead end and functions as a mechanism that converts the obligatory into the desirable.

The essence of ritual is a play between structure and anti-structure. Irrespective of the context, it is always staged in three acts. The first act consists of separation – this is when the subject is taken out of their context. The second step is the transitional or liminal stage. During this phase, the work of the ritual takes place: The order of things is (temporarily) suspended — participants are in a structureless zone ready to accept new rules. In the final, integration, phase the subject is re-contextualized[1].

An example of this formal structure, with all three stages is the ritual of the American college experience. After a sheltered (and structured) childhood, where access and exposure to major sources of risk, like excessive time mismanagement, night clubs, drinking, drugs, etc. is restricted either legally or through parental supervision, college kids ceremonially leave their parents’ homes and move into student dorms (separation), the new communal centers where they cohabitate with their peers. Unsupervised and armed with newly acquired fake IDs, they step into the Devil’s playground (anti-structure) with access to alcohol, drugs, sexual experimentation, and a host of new experiences, becoming exposed to the risks and temptations of the adult world. No longer kids and not yet adults, betwixt and between, they enter the liminal stage, in which all rules of either life seem to be suspended. In most cases, the American college experience has a progressive (centrifugal) liminal period, which emerges as a source of potential alternative structures waiting to be embraced after which a successful integration into adult life can take place.

In the last 4 years, conservative politics has entered the liminal stage, its existence marked by the play between structure and anti-structure. Nothing is ordinary — everything is tremendous. Semiotic excess — lies, nonsense, conspiracy theories, and propaganda — has had the main purpose of perpetuating the ritual, sustaining liminality, and suspending the rules. Palpable falsehoods became new articles of faith, new social identity drew the boundary between us and them and became the main theme of political discourse. Acceptance includes tests of authenticity, which require participants to go through initiation rites in which they burn bridges by committing deep out-of-the-money unethical acts and physical or intellectual atrocities (sometimes all three). This is an ongoing ritual within a ritual consisting of competitive symbolic self-immolation in the arena of public spectacle, which irreversibly closes the doors for their return to pre-liminal life.

If 2016 was a moment of separation, and subsequent years were liminal, in the current context of political ritual, post-liminal right wing integration is evolving towards the Weberian everydayinization of the out-of-ordinary situations.

The road to re-contextualization

For all the good that it has created, money, in its omnipresence as the ultimate metric of value, has had a deleterious effect on society, culture and politics.

Democracies today are captured and dominated by big interest groups and their money. They still formally function as democracies — we are free to speak and free to struggle — but elections are competitive and their outcomes are not known in advance; they remain constrained by the boundaries set by financial interests of the wealthiest segments of the society. This has become more pronounced as the costs of running (for political office) are getting more and more expensive, further reinforcing the power of big money. It is practically impossible for a candidate to emerge without money – he/she must either be independently wealthy or have the people with money who back them. At the end, politics has become a game of seduction where everyone is funded by someone and they have to conform with the wishes and views of their potential and actual donors. 

Money has flattened everything – it has made every drama, every villain, and every existential or ethical dilemma linear and one-dimensional. Behind every act of evil, there is always a financial position. A madman who is plotting to nuke a large American metropolis in a doomsday suspense drama is no longer a deranged psychopath, driven by madness of revenge against humanity or dreams of establishing ex-nihilo a new world order, but a rational investor who has a short position in commodities, which would be driven in the money by the underlying catastrophe of his design.

The GOP’s current political ritual of collective lobotomy is not the result of a regressive uprising of autocratic mad villains, but a consequence of the flattening of politics by money. Their apparent suicidal tactics are in reality just posturing meant to serve as a surrogate for commitment. The ritualized loyalty oath to their rejected and defenestrated ex-leader is nothing else but a money-raising scheme. It is a plea of an increasingly marginalized ideology, deemed futureless, running out of the willing oligarchic support, transitioning from an actual political party to a suicide pact which embraces the TV-evangelist business model centered on monetizing on peoples’ misery and stripping the gullible bottom of disenfranchised rubes of their last penny.

This is the current American conservative utopia and the path to their re-contextualization. Republicans are fighting for their bare life. Beyond concerns for their short-term survival, their only vision of the future is a society as an atonal pseudo-totalitarian operetta without a key or meter, the kingdom of arbitrariness where words have no fixed meaning and actions no consequences, a fool’s paradise in which Ivy-league cohabitates happily with trailer-trash and everyone is allowed to dwell in his/her own stupidity.

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[1] This breakdown of the structure and the concept of liminality were first introduced by Arnold von Gennep in 1909, Rites of Passage, University of Chicago Press (1961)

 

The Wound That Never Heals: Lacan Meets Trump

22. XI 2020

 

 

There is an essential difference between natural laws and those governing social contexts like history or politics. The former have to be respected while the latter can be temporarily suspended and sometimes completely ignored. Denying gravity cannot be a long-lasting practice and could have dire consequences, but disobeying historical laws can often be done with impunity. During the epochs of paradigmatic social transitions there have been a number of instances when underlying political regimes would continue to function on borrowed time, even though everybody was aware that their time was over. Napoleon had to be defeated twice to get the point, the first time in 1813, in the battle of Leipzig, and the second time at Waterloo[1]. It is only through his repeated defeat that it became clear that his passing expressed a deeper historical necessity and not just an accident of history. In a similar way, although communism was effectively over even before the downfall of the Berlin wall, it continued to live on and is still alive and well, albeit in different forms, across parts of Eastern Europe and Asia. It will take another round of defeats before its self-destructiveness causes its final disappearance.

The last four years have felt like an attempt to subvert this hierarchy, through systematic efforts to downgrade the natural laws: Ignore mathematics, physics, biology, epidemiology, and common sense in general, and replace them with speech acts and palpable falsehoods. And although we knew all too well that this ridiculous effort could not last forever and would inevitably self-destruct, we were continuously surprised by how far it went on. Our perception of this project had been repeatedly revised as the boundaries of its validity continued to stretch, until they were finally torn apart. And, while this was not surprising, it is astonishing that the whole insane thing managed to survive for four years. How was this allowed to happen and how did we get to where we are now in 2020?

Comedy like sodomy is an unnatural act: Between partial objects and human omelets

There is an archetypal scene from a Looney Tunes cartoon that plays upon the contingency of the existing rules and which relies for its comical effect precisely on the confusion of the two levels of interpretation of the laws of physics. In each episode, the cunning, insidious and constantly hungry Coyote repeatedly attempts to catch and subsequently eat the Road Runner, a fast-running ground bird, but is never successful. In his pursuit he always goes one step too far – just when he thinks he has caught up with the bird, Wiley Coyote finds himself floating in the air above the precipice, and he falls only after he looks down and becomes aware that he has no support beneath his feet, as if he has momentarily forgotten the laws of gravity its body must obey, and has to be reminded of them.

This is humor at its purest. The laws of physics have been downgraded to the level of historical laws and temporarily suspended: Gravity is initially ignored and its inevitability faced only when the subject is forced to acknowledge it. If there is an ideological interpretation to be extracted from this cartoon, it is that self-deception is reinforcing. The magic stops when we stop believing. Looking down is a mistake.

This is the maneuver that permeates almost every cartoon: What would the world look like if nature were governed by the same types of laws as history and politics? This question has acquired a different perspective and significance in the last four years. By now we know the actual answer: If the laws of nature are downgraded and become optional, the world turns into a cartoonish nightmare. The core of Trumpism is a stupid man’s version of postmodernism: Science, facts, and truth is just another story we are telling ourselves about ourselves, a narrative whose apparent supremacy over other alternatives (like myths or arts or, as in Trump’s case, outright confabulations) is, according to Foucault, only grounded in the historically contingent Western “regime of truth”. Trump’s disrespect for facts and science is precisely what gives him and his presidency a cartoonish character.

However, this superficial comedic dimension is only setting the terrain to zoom in on the bigger theme of the Road Runner (and Trump’s presidency): Why does the Coyote keep chasing the Road Runner, repeatedly, episode after episode? This is the point where cartoon merges with real life.

The most surprising aspect of Trump and his presidency is really how predictably unpredictable he had become after a very short time. Without a single exception, he was always on the wrong side of every argument; every opportunity he had, he would invariably use to say things that made the least sense. There was no accountability, no corrective mechanism of learning, like if I make a mistake once, I will try to not repeat again, I will do things differently in order to change the outcome etc. However, Trump’s compulsion to repeat the same thing over and over again, his ability to survive — his obscene political immortality despite repeated and persistent efforts at self-sabotage — is the signature of the death drive. As if failure was a drug he was addicted to, and the more he failed, the harder he tried. His every effort at self-destruction was “rewarded” with a failure, and the lower he sank, the more self-destructive he became.

Over the course of the last four years, Trump has abandoned the body of conventional politics and has become like a weird organ, which is magically autonomized, surviving without a body. He has morphed into, what in Lacanian lingo is called, a Partial object as indivisible, indestructible, and immortal – more precisely, undead: Not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the “living dead” which, after every annihilation, re-composes itself and clumsily goes on. He does not exist, he insists. He is an entity of pure semblance, and a multiplicity of appearances, which seem to envelop a central void.[2]

You only die twice: The wound that does not heal

Trump’s presidency inscribes itself into politics in the guise of a wound that deprives the political body of the capacity to die: Only when this wound is healed, the body can die in peace. And for America, this wound carries the same traumatic overtones as it does for Wagner’s character Amfortas in his last opera Parsifal: The ultimate horror is the horrible and obscene eternal life of the undead. The wound is the object that penetrates the wounded person as a parasite. [3]

And four years later, when things have turned out as predicted, Trump has run over the precipice and is refusing to look down, because he knows it’s over. The sociopolitical balance sheet, which has grown in the last four years, in sync with other balance sheets of this era, consists now of 70 million of Trump’s orphan rubes (equal to the entire population of Germany) who will soon feel again unwanted, undesired, cheated, unable to integrate, and angry. What is now recognized as Trump’s America, is the undead partial object, the indestructible remainder, cut off from the living social body, caught and fossilized inside the gap of irreconcilable cultural differences. It represents the site where the Lacanian traumatic Real resides: The Thing we have been refusing to acknowledge about ourselves, the terrible truth we have to learn how to live with.

Over the past decades, the core of American politics was the idea that social division was an effective way to govern, that only a divided nation could continue to legitimize the current system, which thrives in the interregnum of perpetual metastability. The last four years represent an accelerated terminal phase of that project taken to the next level.

As the 45^th President is on his way out, the political wound created by his presidency will possibly begin to heal allowing the entire political body associated with his following to dissolve. If it happens, it will be the happy ending of a tragedy, as George Will put it, the format America loves the most. It will replace what until very recently looked like a dark comedy without an end.

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[1] Slavoj Zizek, How to read Lacan, W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (2007)

[2] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, Routledge (2004)

[3] Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology, Duke University Press, 1993.  p.176-82

 

Turmoil and Tinfoil

17.XI 2020

Woke up this morning, decided to kill my ego, it ain’t ever done me no good, no how. (Sturgill Simpson, opening verse of Just Let Go)

Triple negatives exist only in country music and in statistics. While their deployment in everyday language is considered excessive and, outside of the bible belt, rejected as stylistically undesirable, musical lyrics sometime require them for rhythm or rhyme. In statistics, on the other hand, triple negatives play a specific role and are encountered regularly. They are there to prevent us from overstating a statistically significant result as certainty.

Statistical inference is based on drawing probabilistic conclusions based on the analysis of a finite sample of data. The sample that we work with is our universe, but although it can be representative, it never contains all information. Because of that, there is always residual skepticism that we didn’t see it all and have not taken everything into account. As a consequence, based on statistical analysis, it is unacceptable to say that something is true, but instead we have to settle for a slightly weaker statement that something is not false. In statistics, one cannot simply accept, but can only fail to reject. And that can be done only with a certain confidence level without which the statistical results are incomplete.

When testing a hypothesis in a statistical context, statements like “This will happen with certainty” have no place; the strongest statement one can make is “This will happen almost surely”. For example, if all air in a room is evacuated and we release a small amount in one corner, after some time the air molecules will be evenly distributed throughout the entire room. Their distribution will stay uniform almost surely. This does not mean that the air molecules cannot find themselves all in one corner again – there is nothing in physical laws that prohibits that — it is just that probability of that happening is extraordinarily small.

Results of current Presidential elections, as they are an outcome of statistical measurements and inferences, thus, need to be expressed accurately. First the outcome needs to be framed properly. Although the bottom line is that after Jan-20-2021, there will be a new president in the White House, if one is to be precise, Democrats didn’t win – Trump failed in not losing.

And to be perfectly clear, despite all his maneuvers and PR stunts, Trump doesn’t really believe that he won – he just fails to reject that he didn’t lose. Of course, the subtlety of this difference completely eludes him. In his overdramatized “revolt”, which is really a money raising scam, he is being less delusional and more ignorant and confused.

While the claim of victory represents a statement of certainty and, as such, can be easily invalidated, the failure to reject is incomplete without giving the confidence interval about that statement and, in its incompleteness, it is deprived of its probabilistic context. The official results of the Elections reject the fact that Trump did not lose with probability greater than 99.999%; Trump’s failure to accept the results is the complement of that – it has a probability, which is less than 1/1000^th percent.

The consequence of the underlying incompleteness is that in the eyes of Trump’s innumerate followers, it opens an ill-conceived possibility of hope. The reality of the failure to reject is a very low confidence statement, one that has an infinitesimal probability of realization, at best less than a fraction of a 1/1000^th of a percent[1].

While this is a probability that has no value for any practical purposes, when put in the context of the general Republican narrative of the last four years, the core of which had been based largely on conspiracy theories, with roughly the same order of magnitude probability of realization, it could have equal merit as everything else they have stood for. After all, more than 40% of Trump supporters are evangelical Christians who believe in the magic of thoughts and prayers and reality of miracles, which have even a lower probability of realization than Trump’s chance of successfully contesting the Election’s outcome.

[1] On Friday, 6-Nov, one day before the Elections would be called by the media, it was down to three states that remained to be counted: AZ, PA, and GA. Trump had to win all three in order to win. The probabilities of Trump’s victory in each state, which were at the time still called by different outlets were as follows: PA 8%, AZ 23%, and GA 12.4%. The probability of winning all three states (= product of the three probabilities) is 0.2%. Since then, with more votes counted, increased margins, dismissed disputes and further verification, the probabilities for Trump’s victory in each of the three states have declined precipitously and the joint probability of winning all three, which he would still need if his “arguments” are to hold, has dropped by several orders of magnitude.

 

Declownification of sovereignty

1.XI 2020

When the number of those who have failed the rationality test is so large that they begin to present a significant political body whose voice can be heard in the ballot box, rationality will already exhaust itself. At that point, the excluded will seek to abandon reason &, with the help of nostalgia and identity politics, elect a new Prince. And this Prince will be unlike any other before him. He will govern with unwisdom & will have the courage to wear his unreason unabashedly as an ultimate virtue. He will create a new order of things, define new reality, & construct the world of unreason with rules that only he & his constituents understand.

In this kingdom of unreason, power will derive from a way of using language rather than from a system of ideas. But this, like any other detachment from reality, cannot be anything but short-lived. The Prince will sit in his big car, get on a highway & drive against the traffic. His car will have only one pedal: Gas. Like his constituents, he believes that everyone else is driving in the wrong direction. Many drivers will move to the shoulder to avoid the collision, but, as he continues to accelerate, there’ll be a slow-moving trailer truck that won’t be able to maneuver fast enough.

Kenosha

28. VIII 2020

In the next few years, social disorder in developed countries could take new dimension as demographic imbalances continue to weaken state structures further. This could be expressed through two different modes. 1) The discontent of ethnically excluded (e.g. Western Europe’s post-colonial minority populations) spreads to absorb and articulate the sentiments of other exclusions. 2) The discontent of the permanently excluded, like African Americans, provokes a reaction of the redundant natives, the white underclass, and triggers their uprising and backlash. Civil warfare, initially misdiagnosed as increase in crime, would escalate.

The scramble for protection (which has already begun) assumes new forms, as the states cannot provide it due to lack of funding and legitimation. The state’s monopoly on violence is breached and reorganized through the expansion of private protection armies, right-wing militias, and different privatized police structures. This process had already been accomplished in the post-socialist countries about 25 years ago and is likely to serve as a blueprint for a similar transformation in the western world.

Western democratic states where these transformations take place will gradually converge towards failed states. Contours of this program are already inscribed in the appointments for high public offices by the current administration. Combined with the other side-effects of globalization and the underlying social fragmentation, these developments will lead to further criminalization of societies and polarization of distribution with escalation of corruption and dismantling of the institutions of the democratic state as a natural consequence, implying further instabilities. Organized crime will blossom and reinforce its legitimacy, while developed countries will converge closer towards criminal oligarchies or other authoritarian structures.

As an economic system, capitalism (at this point) is showing an advanced decline in capacity to underwrite a stable society. What follows after such a disintegration of a system is a prolonged period of social entropy and disorder. For a significant length of time, a society would slip into less than a society – a society-lite — until it may or may not recover and again become a society in the full meaning of the term.

Out of all possible paths, this is the most radical outcome, one that is without a historical precedent and one we seem to be least prepared for. It corresponds to what Wolfgang Streeck calls the Interregnum: Disintegration of society as such, a perpetual anotherhood – pregnancy without childbirth — a trajectory where current times of trouble continue indefinitely.

The Most Fundamental Force

9. VIII 2020

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? (Jerzy Lec)

In a competitive environment, violence against the other is the most effective survival strategy. Murder as a (predominantly male) strategy of attaining the status position of dominant power has been adaptive. It is installed in the human brain because it worked. Violent humans are descendants of those who succeeded in evolution. They are wired in the same way as their ancestors as the dominant factors of success propagated.

From the perspective of evolution, it appears as if the secret fate of every individual is to destroy the other, not necessarily through deliberate intent to do harm, but because of the fact of their own existence, driven by some cosmic necessity for the general demise of life. This destructive impulse extends across all living organisms and binds them together. Baudrillard saw this as a true ontological principle: Existence as such is already violence.

Bacteria, viruses, parasites of all kinds, and bacilli in general, invade a living organism and exploit its hospitality until they kill it and in this way destroy the source that feeds them. With the death of their host, bacilli die as well. Their destructive drive is not intentional — they just don’t “know” better. The destruction process takes place because their existence and survival degenerates into blind excessive growth. Bacilli are blind to the higher entity to which they owe their life and nourishment. Despite superior survival abilities, adaptability, and mutation, the immanence of the fatal end simply transcends their capability to incorporate that crucial aspect of their existence into their behavior. From the first moment of its creation, every invasive microbe is on a suicide mission and the entire purpose of its existence is to execute that task. This is the ultimate irony of existence in general.

The striking parallelism between behavior of humans and microbes led to Arthur Schnitzler’s brilliant meditation[1] in which he imagined the human race as an illness of some higher organism, completely inconceivable to us, within which humanity was to be found a purpose, necessity and meaning of its existence but which it also sought to destroy, and indeed would ultimately have to destroy, the more highly developed it became, in the same way bacilli strive to annihilate the ailing human organism. Even if this were right, this configuration would be ungraspable to us. It resides in the hyperplane that is out of our cognitive reach.

Stripped of higher purposes and social context, and reduced to bare survival, violent self-destructive drive is the essence of human existence: Violence is the most fundamental force. Because of this, human life and interactions need to be heavily regulated on every level. The true (unconditional) human nature should never be allowed to take its course, not even approximately or temporarily. It should be intercepted and redirected at all costs! The 20^th century alone offers plenty of examples of what happens when human nature is let loose: Two world wars, Hiroshima, countless regional conflicts, Gulags, cultural revolutions, extermination camps, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and more than 120 million killed.

Topology of violence

The irony is that violence is unavoidable: Violence must be fought with violence. Subjective violence, inherent in human nature, should be controlled by the systematic violence of the collective. This is the regulatory and regulating force of the state. When human nature becomes unconstrained, we have death, wars, and extermination; there is blood everywhere. However, when we attempt to regulate our nature, when the state takes over, violence does not disappear, it merely changes the mode of its manifestation.

Human history is chronicle of the technology of violence. According to B. C. Han, social transformation across modernity represents its most dramatic structural transformation[2]. In premodernity, violence was ubiquitous and, above all, both mundane and visible. The staging of violence was an integral, even central component of societal communication. Rulers exhibited their power through deadly violence, through blood. The theatre of brutality that was staged in public spaces also demonstrated the ruler’s power and magnificence[3].

Emancipation and enlightenment announced a major departure in the use of violence. Modernity marks the onset of its internalization. Violence continues to be wielded but not publicly staged. The theater of bloody violence, which characterized the societies of sovereignty, yields to bloodless gas chambers withdrawn from public view. Rather than staging the magnificence of power, violence in modernity conceals itself in shame[4].

Without expressly drawing attention to itself, violence has withdrawn from the city center to its outskirts. Public executions were replaced with silent annihilations or by the hidden apparatus of institutional repression.

Han sees this as the essential and most sinister aspect of modernity: Violence in modernity takes place as a mute annihilation. It shifts from visible to invisible, from direct to discreet, from the physical to the psychic, from the frontal to the viral. Its mode of operation is no longer confrontation but contamination, not open assault, but concealed infection[5].

21^st Century: The return of the magnificence of power

By elevating competition and individualism to the level of ultimate universal criterion, politics, in its regressive (neoliberal) spiral of the last 50 years, ultimately became the tool of the systematic removal of inhibitory mechanisms, which allowed us to come out as we are. As a consequence, the modalities of resulting social structures developed a deep resonance with our real nature. Leading inevitably to the rise of systematic violence. This has become the core problem of capitalism, the main reason why it has emerged as an anti-social project and why ultimately it either has to self-destruct or society as such has to disintegrate.

By now, we are about to close the circle of violence. Our initial conditions were clear: We are violent creatures whose civilization starts only when an exogenous entity (sovereign or state) begins to regulate our natural impulses. However, emancipation and enlightenment, for all the intended good doings, ultimately resulted in the grand sabotage of the entire civilization project by allowing individuality and freedom to create the seeds of ideology that gradually aligned itself with true human nature and ultimately created the path for the return of violence in its primordial form.

Designing a system of social organization, which is in harmony with human nature, is not something we should aspire to. It is generally a bad idea. A very bad one, in fact. Without a considerable amount of inhibition, human nature is socially toxic. In order to become social, we have to abandon our true nature. The entire process of growing up, of becoming socially integrated – what is referred to as civility – is all about inhibiting our true impulses (e.g. toilette training, selfishness, lack of empathy, aggression, ability to engage in a dialogue,…). These inhibitory skills define us as social beings. We are born without those skills and we spend a considerable portion of our lives learning how to acquire and use them. Without them there is no society.

So, we are the real problem. Violence is inscribed in our genetic code and, sooner or later, becomes the essential component of social organization. The question is then, how close or how far are we from the grand convergence with our real selves when all barriers are removed and ideology becomes a true representation of human nature.

This dilemma has finally caught up with us in the 21^st century and we are beginning to get the first installments of the full answer. There is a clear trend of resurgence of violence in postmodernity. In this process, 2020 has played a singular role, not so much because it represents an eruption of violence per se, but because it is bringing it back to civic centers and confirming the sad, but unavoidable, truth that, no matter what we do and how much progress we make as a civilization, we can never fully emancipate ourselves from violence.

Rather than concealing itself in shame, violence is staging a return of magnificence of power through the regressive unwind of modernity. The new wave of fascination with power, with the emerging breed of populist autocrats seeing themselves as sovereigns of pre-modern times, are creating conditions for the recreation of the magnificence of sovereign power through a medieval fantasy of “law & order” by reviving the spectacle of violence and feeding the lower echelons of society, the modern day plebs, the regressive nostalgia by choreographing another reality show as a reenactment of the bloody violence of yesteryear in the contemporary centers of civility.

[1] Arthur Schnitzler, Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, S. Fischer Verlag (1967)

[2] B. C. Han, Topologie der Gewalt, Matthes & Seitz Berlin; Auflage: 1. (2011)

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

 

Portland

1. VIII 2020

There is a distinct feeling of déjà vu behind the government response to civil unrests across the country in the last month. Political demagoguery, heated emotions, faux patriotism, us & them, “law & order” BS, enemies of the people, antagonism of the press, gratuitous violence, racial supremacy, misogyny, secret police, and the entire spectacle of identitarian package, all of this comes from the same tired and worn out playbook — same type of theatre, same scriptwriter, and the same mindset seen so many times before.

The spurious similarity between the populism of segregated and fractured post-2016 America and single-voice Germany of the 1930s — the two countries a century apart with no socioeconomic overlap — can be traced to the fact that their respective leaders have been engaged in the same ritual practices. Their respective ideologies – unconditional subordination to either national or oligarchic interests — and representative parties, National Socialist German Workers’ Party and National Capitalist MAGA, run in parallel.

In both cases, social marginalization triggered and shaped the rituals that followed. The 1930s was an uprising against the marginalization of Germany as a cultural, industrial and military power of the time. The rise of Nazism was a result of discontent due to the loss of a privileged position in the global context and the rising precarity at home. As a consequence, the entire country spoke in a single voice.

In 21st century prosperous America, which has not had a war on its territory for more than 150 years, it was marginalization of an entire social class and a reaction to the loss of white male privilege of the old days. The consequence was an unprecedented polyvocality as an expression of the social divide along cultural, racial and ethnic lines — a class war in a displaced mode, with the entire marginalized class speaking in a single voice only they could understand.

Camouflaging ritual as an escape route from marginality in today’s America has the sole purpose of forcing the alignment of interests of billionaires with those of the marginalized sector of its population. It is an effort to compactify an otherwise fractured political landscape and, by ignoring facts, laws of physics, economic, logic and common sense, connect the two opposite, and logically opposing, ends of the social spectrum and forge political alliances along artificial cultural divides between victims and their executioners.

As systematic violence, which for decades enabled the smooth functioning of the system and its repressive apparatus, has been on the rise, so has subjective and random violence. Throughout those times, sales of weapons were breaking new highs. The number of mass shootings and the score of victims recorded an unprecedented rise that transcends any historical extrapolations.

For years we have been bombarded with excuses and narratives arguing that all the innocent victims of mass shootings — this uniquely American phenomenon, a product of country’s obsession with guns, and militant opposition to any semblance of their regulation — had to die in order to preserve the 2^nd amendment in its most insane form. While 90% of the American population has been unequivocally in favor of more stringent gun control, the NRA has persisted in their cynical and sadistic non-consensus stance against it, insisting, against all evidence, that such high concentration of unregulated gun ownership will keep us all safe and protected in case a rogue government turns on their citizens. According to them, even more guns are needed to make the society even safer. Leaving alone shear idiocy of that argument for a moment, the time to test the validity of that narrative and intentions of gun lobby has finally arrived.

This year, the rise of violence gained a new dimension. The failing and increasingly desperate and lonely president, who has practically abdicated his position and duties, who is already functioning as a lame duck, cleaning up his shop and trying to deliver in the next three months what was originally planned for him to do in the subsequent four years of his presidency (which by now is practically certain that will not happen), is bringing the vestiges of medieval spectacle of violence and power to the city center.

While unidentified paramilitary troops — the actual government secret police, the present-day incarnation of Gestapo — are terrorizing the citizens of Portland, including unarmed women, veterans, and elderly, and are preparing to spread their activity to other big cities, the NRA and their members and supporters are nowhere to be found; their silence has been deafening. In fact, if one were to wager where their sympathy would be, there is an unmistakable feeling that it is most likely to be on the side of the aggressor, rather than the people.

The uncovering of the falsity of the ideological mindfuck behind the 2nd amendment is the terminal bankruptcy of the old and persistent narrative, a fairy-tale for angry citizens, which, against any reason, continues to permeate and contaminate the American culture. Disguised as a rationalization of the faux “cultural” alignment between executioners and their victims, it never really had any other meaning and value beyond laundering blood money from arms sales.

 

Crowds and Power

4.VII 2020

The very time I thought I was lost

My dungeon shook and my chains fell off (James Baldwin)

Unlike other senses whose organs are localized (eyes, ears, nose, tongue), our sense of touch, our skin, is everywhere – it envelops our entire body. We feel touch no matter where it comes from. Touch frightens us much more than any other stimuli because of its immediacy. When felt, someone has already intruded into our personal space. We can sleep through a powerful thunderstorm, but are instantly awakened by even the gentlest touch when our personal space and sovereignty have been violated.

Because of this deep rooted fear, neighbor has always been perceived as an arcehetypal traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, whose proximity often gives rise to an aggressive reaction and an impulse of getting rid of, or at least getting isolated from[1]. All the distances, physical, social or intellectual, which men create around themselves, are dictated by this fear. They are perceptible in architecture through symmetry, which derives in part from man’s attempt to create uniform distances all around himself — safety is based on distances and is emblematically expressed by them.[2]

Crowds play a dual role in the context of their interaction with our fears. People avoid crowds because of the fear of being touched. However, it is only in crowds that man can become free of this fear — as soon as man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.[3] There is a singular point in crowd formation: when they swell to a certain size, they begin to attract people as they realize that the only way to overcome the anxiety of touch is to be totally immersed and allow touch to be everywhere.

That decision is triggered when those who belong to the crowd decide to abandon the comfort of their rank, status, and privilege – everything that defines ones social universe – and feel equal with others. Those distinctions are deeply embedded in their subconscious; they keep them firmly apart from one another. In every sphere of life, firmly established hierarchies prevent man from touching anyone more exalted than himself or descending, except in appearance, to anyone lower.[4] This moment of annihilation of differences and surrender to a single collective, which Canetti calls Discharge, is the tipping point in the process of creating the medium of power.

With discharge and the surrender to the crowd, the fear of alien intrusion into our personal space disappears – its sanctity no longer matters, our neighbors no longer frighten us. Through this symbolic gesture, the old power, which derived its strength through our division, loses its magic spell and is no longer capable of functioning as or impersonating power. It has lost its space and, exposed for what it has always been, is retreating into the bunker. In its place, a new space of different power is being created.

James Baldwin

To this day, the poetic take of James Baldwin offers the most eloquent and accurate summary of this moment of social and political inflection in American history[5]. For years, white Americans, even the most progressive – the alumni of the civil rights movement and the 1960s protests – despite having their hearts in the right place, have remained essentially bystanders, their well-meaning actions unable to change the course of things. They have been trapped in a history, which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. Throughout the 400-year history of America the Black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.[6]

Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. The danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.[7] That fear of the end of the (white) universe has defined the space of the masquerade of power that has been maintained through extraordinary violence, which in turn provided the lifeline to that fear. The fear and violence fed on each other until they were both exhausted and began to collapse under their own weight.

As we commemorate 244 years of unprecedented violence, the American white man finally appears to be ready to overcome his fear of the end, of removing the static barriers to change, the historical constants and the pillars of his universe. More than half of protestors in the Black Lives Matter Movement have been white[8] — not a victory, but definitely progress! The white man has overcome the anxiety of being touched by immersing himself into the crowd, by allowing each square inch of his political body to be touched. After being lost in it for 400 years, he is coming to terms with his history. The fixed star is beginning to move, the earth is shaking and the universe is changing. A new space of power is exploding. This is 1968 redux, only this time it is no longer a battle against the two alternative sources of political violence, but the showdown with the only remaining one.

Happy 4^th!

[1] Slavoj Zizek, Violence, Profile Books (2008)

[2] Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht, Claasen Verlag (1973)

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Vintage; Reissue edition (1992)

[6] ibid

[7] ibid.

[8] For example, in Atlanta, 75% of protesters were white, in LA 78%, in Minneapolis 85%, and in NYC 76%!

 

One Day the Day Will come when the Day Won’t Come

26. IV 2020

Madness is the only way of forgetting – it is the hawthorn stick of history. (Borislav Pekic)

Prologue: How modernity forgets

Civilizations are repositories of collective traumas. National sensibilities and neuroses have in common that they prefer to repeat their accidents, like the commemoration of defeats at cult sites, memorial pornography or reenactments of civil war battles[1].

According to Peter Sloterdijk, traumatized people are dislocated from the happy forgetful center to the margins of society from which there is no longer any simple return to normal life. For them, forgetting is an unaffordable luxury, and since consolation through forgetting is unreachable, it becomes unwanted and unacceptable. Incapable of digesting the poisons of memory, the traumatized subject embarks on conquering trauma through simulated grief, which begins when the victim decides to let him/herself fall into humiliation as if it were the product of choice. This condition awakens the emotion of self-pity which becomes a cause of resentment, and which in turn inspires rage. In order to deal with pain, victims exaggerate it to make it bearable: To transcend one’s depressed suffering, they extend the feeling of trauma or injustice to the size of the mountain in order to be able to stand on its peak full of bitter triumph[2].

The trauma of modernity

Modernity represents a large-scale civilizational coming of age – an awakening of reason and a shattering moment of self-realization driven by a collective expression of discontent with God and how he managed the affairs of the world. It is the most monumental transfer of power and responsibility in history, a tectonic cultural shock, an abandonment of millennia of old and tired narratives and organizing principles, and a collective trauma of epic proportions that continues to linger on.

With modernity, the blend of facts and fictions has changed. The whole world is upside down: Earth is no longer at the center of the universe; it has no beginning and no end; Man is no longer special, just an evolved monkey. However, contrary to initial expectations, enlightenment, rationality, and above all, emancipation from God, i.e. abandonment of the world of simplicity, determinism, coherence, and fairy tales, created their own problems.

In its essence, modernity is a process of disenchantment of the world — a seminal break point in modern culture and a radical departure in the way we experience reality. It connotes the removal of a magic spell and reflects a belief that humanity can control everything by means of calculation. And so, through the advent of scientific methods and the use of enlightened reason the world is rendered transparent, demystified and, ultimately, hollowed and deprived of its richness. It became disenchanted and disenchanting, predictable and intellectualized[3].

But to what end? Emancipation, progress, and enlightenment have ultimately failed in almost every respect. They only led to more unequal distributions and further accumulation of discontent — the number of people left behind has been growing unstoppably and persistent encounters with, or the looming threat of, the reality of exile to the margins of society has made modern man eminently traumatized.

After centuries of reason, modern man finds himself isolated, deprived of his ontological need to communicate, emotionally exhausted and socially disoriented, without a sense of territory, belonging, and identity.

The collective trauma of modernity is registering through an eruption of various modes of simulated grief as the ritualistic annulment of consensus, a revolt against what has become the conventional interpretative framework of reality. This is an expression of capitulation before the side-effects of enlightenment.

The uprising: Communitas

The world used to be simple when God was around and in charge. Details of “how and why” were left to Him to sort out and manage; man was left to deal with simple problems within his reach. Now, God’s things became man’s job and responsibility – he had to take care of everything and bear responsibility for his acts.

That was too much for man. Humans are unable to cope with too many things and this inability creates a state of chronic anxiety and libidinal disinvestment. Cults and fringe groups form in response to social and emotional dislocations caused by complexity fatigue and anxieties these conditions engender. These groups have always existed as an escape from conventional reality and as a pursuit of alternative self-serving fictions that soothe man’s injured soul. However, with advanced modernity and emancipation, their number has not only not declined, but it continues to grow at an ever faster pace and intensity. Never have we seen such a proliferation of cults and fringe groups as in the post WWII West. By joining those groups, members escape their social isolation and resurrect as social beings in communitas[4] – the communes of like-minded traumatized subjects.

A case study of regressive healing: Flatearthers

The Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe. (a tweet posted by The Flat Earth Society)

As the media space has become saturated with the ever more astonishing and ridiculous, and the audience, never tired of being shocked and entertained, was ready to absorb this new dose of reality entertainment, the Flat-Earth Movement, although not new, made its second entrance onto the scene, finding its place together with various denier groups, from holocaust to evolution and climate.

There is really not much about Flatearthers that is worth discussing in terms of their actual view of the world– their ideas are pure idiocy. The group is only interesting as a sociological phenomenon, as an expression of a saturated discontent with modernity, and a mode of simulated grief — a demand for a remix of facts and fictions. Their existence is the most resolute no-confidence vote on modernity.

In the excellent documentary, Behind the Curve, Daniel J. Clark takes his audience on a journey deep into the world of Flatearthers. Their community consists, practically without exception, of social misfits of some kind — people left behind socially, developmentally or both. Mark Sargent, their most prominent spokesman, an equivalent of a charismatic leader but completely devoid of any semblance of charisma, is a fifty-something guy who lives with his mother on Whidbey Island in Washington. He is a college dropout who sports an impressive resume with 20 years of video game activity as his most important achievement prior to becoming the Flatearthers’ main spokesman. Other members are not much different — they all live highly reduced social lives, most of them loners.

Their social demeanor is not aggressive or openly hostile. At first sight they are not anti-science. They engage with whoever wants to talk to them, including scientists. Physicists and astronomers, in whom they inspire missionary instincts, see Flatearthers as misguided, innocent, and ignorant victims worthy of redemption.

They come across as open-minded and willing, even inviting tests and scrutiny of their views by scientific method and reasoning, but fail when it comes to interpreting the results of those tests[5]. They invest considerable amounts of time and personal money to pseudo-scientific projects of their own design to expose what they call “the round earth hoax”. In that sense, they carry a certain dose of fanaticisms: They refuse to change their minds, but also don’t want to change the subject. As such, Flatearthers inspire both pity and ridicule.

The Flat-Earth Movement is not a religion and, having a rather egalitarian structure, they do not function as a cult in a traditional sense either. They believe that round earth is a result of the most incredible conspiracy — that is where the seed of their madness resides.

Flat-Earth delusion is the site where the traumatic symbolic annihilation of modern man resides: Their movement defines the journey of reverse pilgrimage to the place where the showdown with modernity takes place. Their existence represents a template for the regressive reaction of the growing traumatized population in the ritualistic healing mode.

Flatearthers represent traumatic subjects of modernity. They are simulated martyrs who carry public shame about their beliefs as a badge of honor and an article of faith, an essential element of the initiation ritual. Their emergence and functioning contains the core of rebellion against modernity. The unifying factor with other such movements is its ritualistic aspect – healing by climbing the mountain in order to conquer it in bitter triumph.

Returning to the site of “original defeat”, to the battlefield where the original dogma which maintained pre-modern coherence resides, the site where humanity’s innocence was lost, where the world was denied enchantment, religion and the God-centric world were dealt mortal blows, where God was dethroned and denounced and man put in his place and in charge.

When grief is ineffective: Rage transactions

In December, buttressed by his conviction and advances in homemade rocketry, “Mad” Mike Hughes flipped on a camera and fantasized about the moment when he shows mankind that it lives on a verdant disk. Hughes, a self-styled daredevil, Flat-Earth theorist and limousine-jumping stuntman, died Saturday when his crudely built contraption propelled him on a column of steam, spiraled through the air and cratered into the sagebrush outside Barstow, Calif. He was 64.[6]

For centuries, western civilization has been battling the trauma of enlightenment, progress and general intoxication with complexity. Flatearthers embody the essence of that battle. They transcend the oppression of reason by abandoning it altogether in a regressive mode of healing and collective grief. Their struggle underscores the power of madness as the only way to forget or erase traumatic experiences of the past.

The growing appeal of crackpots of various kind and magnitude has become so pervasive that these characters have infiltrated the American mainstream. They occupy positions of influence at universities, in media, think tanks, government, politics and the White House — especially there where, after more than three years of relentless adverse selection, they have become practically sole occupants. Their emergence and widespread acceptance are the result of a quest for simple certainty by people who find themselves lost and bewildered by the growing complexity of their life and the grim reality in general.

These crackpots have a special appeal to a growing population of what H. L. Mencken calls the inferior men. The inferior man hates knowledge because it is complex –it puts an unbearable burden upon his capacity for thinking. He has an insatiable need for trivial simplicity, always ready to trade probable truths for palpable falsehoods. The science of cosmology is complex; it’s understanding requires an immense stock of knowledge and a habit of thought. But cosmology of Genesis, although idiotic, is so simple that everyone can grasp it. It is set forth in a few phrases. It offers to an ignorant man the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical[7].

Abnormal and delusional are not cut from a different cloth than what counts as “normal” or mainstream. There is a fragile boundary between different shades of madness – between fringe groups and suicide clubs or doomsday cults. One thing is to deny the existence of gravity, and the other is to act on it. But, the gap that separates the two is very narrow. This is a different level of madness, a pure death drive and a desire for self-extinction. It is the point in depression when the traumatized subject finally hits the bottom.

The latest installment of madness, to some extent already outlined by Flatearthers, is the formation of movement around a premature disruption of the lockdown during the corona virus pandemics, a sort of MAGA suicide fraternity. “Liberate TX, WV, MI, GA…” is less outlandish than reinventing cosmology and is not exactly the same as denial of gravity, but doesn’t fall very far from them. The communitas of MAGA-liberators has the same DNA and bottom line as any suicide club – they are all “Mad” Mike Hughes, ready to hop into their home-made rockets and take off. There is not much difference between injecting disinfectants into your body and drinking poisoned cool-aid in Guyana or eating cyanide-laced candy in a Berlin bunker. All these practices are a logical consequence of certain beliefs and the anesthetic comfort of the irresistible reasonableness of the nonsensical. Like the Flat-Earth Movement, intravenous Clorox users and their ilk are ignorance and stupidity run amok, unleashed by conditions of simulated grief of the growing segment of the population traumatized by their systemic exclusion. Together with other deniers (evolution, holocaust, climate), anti-vaxxers, TV evangelists and the army of false prophets of doomsday, they are the loudest contributors to the great flood of arbitrariness.

This is a collective tragedy, staged as comedy. But the silver lining, if there is one, is that when we lose the reins on stupidity and let it run unrestrained, we allow evolution and natural selection to enter the scene and take its course.

[1] Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Columbia University Press; Reprint edition (2012)

[2] ibid.

[3] Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf, Zenodot Verlagsgesellscha (2016)

[4] Communitas are social surrogate, reduced communities, defined by specific identity politics. They are essentially opposed to structure. They fill the vacuum created by destruction of social bonds due to modernity’s individualization against the need for community. Suspension of rules is a primary condition for the generation of the feelings of oneness and flow that characterize communitas. During some ritualistic episodes of liminality, like pilgrimage, participants become equal as they distance themselves from mundane structures and their social identities, leading to homogenization of states, and a strong sense of communitas.

[5] They derive their strength and composure by seeing themselves as privileged. Their delusion functions as doubt in a displaced mode. In the same way scientists and normal people in general are condescending towards them, Flatearthers look down on non-believers and skeptics as naïve and gullible victims of an elaborate deception visible only by the privileged few — them.

[6] ‘Mad’ Mike Hughes, who wanted to prove the Flat-Earth Theory, dies in homemade-rocket disaster (The Washington Post, 23-Feb-2020)

[7] H. L. Mencken, Homo Neanderthalensis, Baltimore Sun (29 June 1925)

 

The Unconditional Moments as Portals of Social Change

29. III 2020

We generally like to surround ourselves with intelligent people, people with whom we can discuss a variety of topics and problems and whose intellect and judgments we value. However, in situations of extreme stress and acute collective anxieties, situations that require intellectual honesty and courage, unconventional thinking, and stepping out of one’s comfort zone, we invariably discover that the number of people whose intellect continues to function turns out to be disappointingly small.

A large segment of nominally intelligent people (with high IQ, sharp intellect and cognitive skills) can reason only within a limited space inside well-defined boundaries. These intellectual boundaries designate both the habitual forms and attitudes of their mental apparatus, and the experiences of the mind and recognize these attitudes as falsely objectivized. Crossing those boundaries shuts off their cognitive capabilities and ability to reason. Outside of the deep waters of their intellectual comfort zone they are like stranded whales.

What happens to our thinking process in situations that expose our cognitive and intellectual incapacities, when extrapolations of our knowledge and experiences fail to provide meaningful guidance? How do we respond to a confrontation with the reality of failure — an absolute failure, which we cannot fail to recognize? Setting foot on intellectual terra incognita can be only managed by coming to terms with those incapacities.

Karl Jaspers recognized the singularity of these inflection points of reason, the Limit situations (Grenzsituationen), as the moments when intelligence boundaries are crossed. During the times of acute anxiety triggered by death, guilt, war, pandemics, or uncertainty of the world, the human mind confronts the restrictions and pathological narrowness of its existing forms and allows itself to abandon the security of its limitedness, and enters a new realm of self-consciousness. These are situations that require creation of a new set of values and standards and a new picture of the world and one’s sense of self in it. There is no turning back; the whole system of values must change[1].

Limit situation are unconditional moments of human existence in which reason is drawn by intense impulses, which impel it to expose itself to the limits of its consciousness and seek higher, more reflexive modes of knowledge. The unconditional (das Unbedingte) is an inflection point of reason in which reason encounters itself as conditional or limited and desires to transcend the limits of this form[2].

The unconditional moment is now. What is happening at the moment is not a financial crisis or an economic downturn caused by the endogenous workings and self-sabotage of the capitalist system. Rather, the present crisis is a reaction to an exogenous shock to the system with a compromised immunity, which is now unable to defend itself due to decades of self-abuse. This is not an economic crisis with social consequences, but a social crisis with economic consequences. While all previous recoveries were engineered around economic measures and financed by social deficits, the response to the present crisis requires a genuine social change — an entirely new value system and a novel way of thinking.

For decades now, the intrinsic incompatibility of capitalism and democracy has been the key driver of social change in the developed West. The most significant consequence of this tension has been a gradual but systematic transition of politics from free choice to free selection as a way of maintaining the status quo. The American political system, defined by the selection between two dominant parties has not been a democracy and expression of free will, but the realization of a dilemma ahead of selection between two alternatives: Drowning in the flood of arbitrariness or getting on board of the Ark of fools. People subjected to this principle of choice (who still defend this mode of political functioning as a democracy that is worth preserving) resemble people who consider it an outstanding privilege to choose whether they will jump through the window from the third floor or wait for the fifth[3].

Persistence of this mode of political participation and its streamlining in the last decade has led to a reshaping of the social landscape and, when seen in a wider context, history. Hegelian interpretation, which is appropriate for this particular moment, sees history as the process of moving toward the realization of human freedom, brought to life by the interaction of subjective consciousness and an objective sequence of events and their mutual influence on each other. In this framework, history is directional – there is an improvement from a more primitive condition of humanity to amore advanced (not only materially, but culturally and morally)[4]. Contradictions generated at one level are overcome or transcended at the next, and incorporated in a radically new form in the subsequent social change. Human freedom is one of the main parameters which determines the direction of history. History is seen as the realization of freedom by means of a series of successive enslavements to different kinds of necessity.

There is a distinct point of culmination where a higher level of society is achieved. That is the point at which history stops: Society has reached its apex beyond which further improvement is not possible. This is not a static configuration – time does not stop here. This is a dynamic configuration, which requires consistent maintenance and rebalancing. For Hegel, this was German Protestant society, for Marx it was communism[5].

We are now witnessing the beginning of the end of the Hegelian historical continuum. Free selection is now being reduced down to one option and we are free to embrace it or reject it. Downward distribution, universal basic income, comprehensive healthcare for all, widespread social welfare programs, government subsidies, and empathy – all those things that have faced decades of coordinated resistance, and have been on the verge of extinction, are now being endorsed and about to be distributed in size by their most vocal opponents of yesterday. We have finally achieved true freedom because true freedom is having no choice. This is the highest act of freedom — freely assuming what is otherwise necessary.

This is a realization of the Unconditional in its purest — a true transideological moment when, faced with the absurdity and obsolescence of the existing ideology, political subjects transcend their ideological confines and abandon the safety of ideology as they realize its imminent demise due to self-destruction.

What we learned in the last five decades of neoliberalism is that no change can happen without making serious concessions to those whose wrongdoings that change is supposed to correct. Every change has been one step forward and two steps back. The system absorbs each change, mutates, and emerges stronger and more resistant. Change triggers a quicksand effect. So, as long as change occurs in small steps – as long as a quasi-stationary state is maintained — change becomes impossible.

However, a real change is possible, but it cannot happen without a crisis, it must be triggered by an exogenous shock of substantial magnitude. The shock creates an Unconditional moment, which forces a paradigm shift and allows the system to self-destruct and die from an overdose of itself.

You can negotiate with reality, but not with the Real. When you encounter the Real, you act.

[1] Karl Jaspers: Basic Philosophical Writings, E. Ehrlich, L. H. Ehrlich and G. B. Pepper (ed.), Humanity Press NJ (1986)

[2] ibid.

[3] Borislav Pekic, How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie, Northwestern University Press (2003)

[4] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Hegel’s philosophy of history, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/history/

[5] ibid.

 

Dark Enlightenment: Pregnant widow* gets the second sonogram

 8. III 2020

The truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions. Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. The ability to create imagined reality out of words enabled large numbers of strangers to cooperate effectively. Any large scale human cooperation hinges on the ability to create imagined reality out of words: A modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe, are all rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination (Noah Yuval Harari).

Appearance of legends, myths, gods and religions marks the beginning of the Cognitive Revolution — the point when history declared its independence from biology[2]. Out of this revolution emerged the ascent of man and the entire civilization. However, with every new stage of his rise, man’s arrogance grew bigger and so did his desire to free himself from the shackles of his own myths. This was the period of enlightenment and emancipation. Every new installment of emancipation pulled humanity closer towards reduced myths. As rationality became the main guiding principle, myths functioned more as pragmatic protocols and less as organizing principles, losing their magic spell to their pragmatic power and became increasingly aligned with advancing individualization and the underlying emancipatory momentum.

Capitalism in its last 50 years represents the accelerated phase of systematic symbolic annihilation. During this period, ceremonial demolition of old myths of togetherness has practically completed just in time as developed world is facing synchronized irruption of unsolvable problems: Disappearance of community, deterritorialization, loss of identity coordinates, global agoraphobia, criminalization of the globe, structural unemployment, rising poverty, endemic precarity, excess population, large-scale corruption, climate change, and general hopelessness. Their magnitude and nonlinearity have become a cause of growing collective anxieties registering through widespread desecularization, reaching out towards authoritarian figures and (over-) simplified, self-serving narratives aimed at providing a chance of relief, however transient and illusory it might be.

While this might not be an utterly new configuration of collective consciousness, never before has it gained such a systemic dimension and cataclysmic perspective. In the past, progress was synonymous with hope, opening new horizons and creating new frontiers that always delivered. Nowadays, with every new instalment of progress, the future looks dimmer and residual hope smaller. We have reached the limits of futurability. Individuality has run its course; disenchantment of the world has metastasized;. It has left everyone alone and abandoned, without a safety net and without hope. Hard work no longer leads to redemption — progress has become toxic and, suddenly, the old myths ring hollow and empty.

Society cannot function without myths

The tensions of the last decade are a consequence of the collapse of liberal democratic mythologies – they underscore the active quest for new myths in the midst of that crisis. Everything that used to mobilize the libidinal forces of the developed West is now dissolving in the light of devaluations of these myths. Myths are necessary for any collective action. Without them, large-scale social projects are not possible and societies cannot function. Disposing of the old myths while waiting for the new ones creates a troubling disequilibrium.

Today, the developed West stands divided facing the bankruptcy of the old narratives. This division is not only a consequence of diversity of life experiences, but a reflection of irreconcilable divergence of beliefs and imagination. As divesting from reality in the form of parody, mockery, or masquerade has taken its toll, the growing fraction of the disillusioned population is eager to be mobilized by new narratives. However, at the same time they are unable to receive them due to years of symbolic hollowing out, which has deprived them of the capacity to surrender to any collective cause that transcends individual interests. Religion is returning, but in a perverse form, as a parody of itself and without its magic spell, as a grotesque reflection of reality and without any of its original substance.

At the same time, we are now facing a novel type of revolt, in no way resembling anything we have seen before. While the past uprisings had always been, in one way or another, reactions to excessive exploitation, today, most of the things can be done without people. People are becoming increasingly more redundant — there is a growing number of those that are not needed and that are not counted for — the humanity can move ahead without them. Although they cannot be reintegrated into the normal process of social functioning, they also cannot be disposed of. Their size is growing unstoppably and is threatening to exceed the managerial capability of the planet. The excluded are now revolting not because they are being overly exploited, but because they are being denied the right to be exploited.

21^st century populism is a hasty political response to the historical inflection point of coincident cultural, economic and cognitive paradigm shifts, which left a void created by decay of the traditional mythology. It is an attempt at repackaging the old myths in a radicalized form disguised as novelty. In its core, the new populism is a celebration of the shock doctrine applied at home, after trying it out abroad for decades, a cruel and unethical experiment that has produced, at best, mixed result elsewhere.

30 years of disequilibrium

Since large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, the way people cooperate can be altered by changing the myths – by telling different stories. Under the right circumstances myths can change rapidly. In 1789 the French population switched almost overnight from believing in the myth of the divine right of kings to believing in the myth of the sovereignty of the people[3].

2019 marks three decades of grand political disequilibrium. In the same way 1989 announced a dissolution of communism, 2019 marks the beginning of neoliberalism’s symbolic unwind. It outlines the contours of neoliberal transformation along the same lines as the fall of Berlin wall in 1989 did for the former Soviet Union.

2016 demonstrated unambiguously that a growing number of people are in desperate need for new fairy tales, new myths and representations of eternal kingdom and new authority figures, prepared to accept any surrogate that would fill the unbearable vacuum. People no longer believe in the old American myth of progress, competition, individuality, protestant ethics and the link between hard work and success.

Establishment of new social hierarchies is always accompanied with a display of latent violence, breaking of the social norms and civilized behavior. Peaceful social life in general is the sign that one class, the ruling one, has already won. Populism, as a superficial mode of revolt, has become synonymous with the middle finger to the entire system of values; this includes criminalization of politics and government institutions and normalization of large-scale corruption. As an integral part of the ritualistic power grab, vestiges of the old system become subordinated to the will of the autocrat who personifies raw power and who masquerades his personal interests as patriotism and selflessness for the nation. The two processes, which have been in full swing in the last decade, have accelerated in the last three years: 1) criminalization of the state and dissolution of its legal barriers in order to eliminate residual obstacles against release of the libidinal energy and unrealized potential of crime on state level; 2) consolidation of that power.

Nevertheless the emergence of an unaccountable autocrat is not a sign of barbarization of America. 2016 is not a relapse into fascism, just a search for new myths to replace the old ones, which no longer have mobilizing power. Trump won less than 25% of voting age population votes in 2016. This is in sharp contrast with the 1920s-30s Germany when Nazi party membership rose from roughly 2% at inception to above 32% between 1928 and 1932. This is what a real movement looks like (kept alive by the myths of master race and supremacy of the German state). Trump’s base is a relative minority. There is only a semblance of fascist aesthetics, but no movement[4].

The underlying causality chain behind the recent political developments in America starts with centrists and their compromised narratives. They refuse to bow out and exit the political scene creating in this way a configuration of unacceptable alternatives and massive abstinence from the ballot box as a consequence. For them, as representatives of the oligarchic capital, authoritarianism is preferred to other mode of social organization that imply more egalitarian distribution. Their presence, their sabotage of alternatives, and resistance to their return is likely to be the main cause for continued large-scale withdrawal from the democratic process and reinforcement of authoritarianism as plan-B.

In its targeting only a narrow segment of population, while permanently excluding the rest without any chance of reconciliation, populism is deriving its temporary strength from the division of political subjects. This divisiveness is leading effectively into a perpetual conflict that has gradually morphed into a cold civil war. However, while divisiveness can provide access to power, it cannot sustain it. This is the fatal flaw of the right-wing populism. As such, populism is not sustainable – its failure is inscribed in its basic premises.

Coda

We are always surprised by good and honest acts. They are unpredictable. Every honest act is committed impulsively; it is not natural and spontaneous. Evil, on the other hand, acts naturally. We never wonder about evil. We are surprised only if it is not realized. Myths act in the interstices between good and evil. They represent the denial of biology. In order to survive in the long run, myths have to be socially effective, they must be centered on narratives that are sustainable. Good is the essence of that sustainability – it unifies. Evil is transient – it divides. Good goes against human biology, which is concentrated on individual survival. Myths are there to protect humanity against itself and the self-destructive forces of individuality. It is this denial of biology that marks the beginning of history and the opening of the path of man’s ascent. History is on no one’s side, but it is also not completely neutral.

*Pregnant widow is the point at which the old order has given way, but the new one not yet born (Alexander Herzen)

[2] Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens, Harper (2015)

[3] ibid.

[4] Enzo Traverso, Trump’s Savage Capitalism: The Nightmare Is Real, World Policy Journal, vol. 34, no. 1 (2017).

 

Recontextualization of crime

7. X 2019

No act by itself is a transgression. Circumstances make it a transgression. War, for example, is a circumstance that makes a mass murder a heroic feat. Peace is a circumstance that transposes mass killing of a heroic battle into a crime. On that premise is formulated the Nürnberg judgment. Something that was at its own time considered as patriotism was, with the help of circumstances (the allies won the war), declared as genocide. (Borislav Pekic)

There are multiple ways of defending the crime. Usually, the defense is structured around denials, obfuscations, questioning causal connections of events, exploitation of loopholes and technicalities, witness tempering, different contingencies, or blaming others. However, when crimes are committed on a large scale and in plain sight, the focus of defense inevitably turns towards creating a new context that allows a transformation of the crime into a neutral or even a heroic act. If that part is successful and the new context takes root, instead of denying the deed, the defendant continues to repeat it and, thus, implicitly reinforce and legitimize the new context instead of deflecting the accusations. As a result, after a long career of crime and transgressions, the defendant can emerge as a righteous winner.

At the same time as the current administration has crossed multiple boundaries of acceptable, ethical, and lawful behavior, it has been continuously creating a new context before our eyes: The unabashed corruption and ethical violations are coupled with relentless efforts to normalize the most extreme autocrats (Kim Jong Un, Duterte, Putin, Erdogan, MSB) in order to define a new normative framework of justice and different metrics for the next “Nürnberg trial”, whereby Trump’s actions would no longer be considered as transgressions, crime, or even found objectionable.

Without diverging too far from the obvious fact that the subject in question is clearly an aberrant person, ill-suited for the occupancy of the Oval Office, there is some method, albeit a shallow one, to his apparent madness. By perpetualy proliferating a multitude of ever deepening and unlikely conspiracy theories, he is extending the contextual horizon – there is always a “bigger picture” that justifies the previous transgression.

As a special bonus, while the contextual horizon is being extended, the cohesion of his base increases and reinforces its reshaping from political supporters to a special community. After all, it is not so much identification with the set of Rules which defines a community, but rather a specific form of the transgression of these Rules.

Searching for truth in the age of serial reproduction of self-deception

Truth is the opinion that has survived (Oscar Wilde)

Although authoritarianism has replaced democracy in the US, disguised as pseudo-democracy with elaborate layers of deceit, the voting populace hasn’t been eliminated completely. Their role has only been redesigned into the audience before which the performance of political theatre has been staged. They are the jury that gives thumbs up or down to each performance – they reward it with either applause or with rotten tomatoes. Right wing populists have always been acutely aware of the importance of the “audience’s” judgment (they are Populists after all) and the appearance of their approval as an essential component in providing the legitimacy for the extended political context.

Trump’s handlers have been avid students of all things Hitler — not only Mein Kampf, but also his rise to power as well as the aftermath of WWII and the Nürnberg trials. The echo of the Nazi dilemma continues to resonate deeply with them and with the current administration alike: Did we lose the war because we advocated an unjust cause or because we were unable, with a combined action of propaganda, tanks and police baton, to make it into a just one. Their unwavering commitment not to repeat these mistakes defines the core of their political strategy.

One of the main lessons from that chapter of history was the chronology of Hitler’s first major political defeat. Ironically, the seeds of his rise to power in the 1930s were sewn by the spectacular failure of his Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. His overnight celebrity status was achieved by his court defense where his gambit to structure his defense as an attack on the system and present himself as a patriotic idealist who selflessly cared for the interests of the German people garnered the standing ovations of the court audience (winning even the sympathy of the judge himself) and secured the transmission of that support to the public through the media which reported on the trial.

While the synchronization of the Beer Hall Putsch and Trump’s travails is not perfect, the strategy is not dissimilar. Trump is not waiting for the trial though, he is delivering bits and pieces of his speech as his “putsch” is still just developing. For him, the trial might as well have already begun (only in a bigger courtoom) and he is already preparing the terrain by defining the context for the acceptance of his narrative, heavily choreographed by Fox News, which has considerable stakes in Trump stock and is protecting their investment, but at the same time, not excluding the possibility of cutting their losses if he becomes an indefensible liability.

On the charismatic appeal of vulgarity: From fear of the state to the state of fear

We will never understand Trump’s victory until we grasp the charismatic appeal of his vulgarity. (Isaac Ariail Reed)

There have been many attempts to place Trump in context with other historical outliers, but only with partial success. The kernel of his political persona is made in the image of a fictional character, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi[1].

Paraphrasing the Isaac Ariail Reed’s description of the sequence of events, the infamous play opened in Paris on December 10, 1896. That was its only showing following the audience riots. After a two-year hiatus, it was shown again, but as a marionette play. At the center of the plot was the main character, Père Ubu, an inveterate coward who stages a putsch to become King of Poland and, in his new position, he enriches himself by getting rid of all the nobles etc. What arose the anger of the 19^th century Parisian bourgeoisie was both the vulgarity of the language, frequent references to gratuitous violence, unsavory sexual overtones, and incoherent plot (there are 19 different locations in a play that is quite short), all of it packaged in a low-level juvenile parody of Hamlet and Macbeth. (Indeed, the play had started in Jarry’s schoolboy years as a parody of his hated physics teacher)[2].

Like the world of Jarry’s King Ubu, Trump’s universe is the kingdom of speech acts — a creation of arbitrariness where the only rule is what he proclaims to be true. The multiverse of narratives, the barrage of conspiracy theories, of twists and turns, is creating a disorienting condition based on a confusion of the actual and the virtual on a larger scale. Once in that state, the audience becomes easy prey and it doesn’t take much to send them in any possible direction.

However, the key ingredient that eases the wider audience into the intractable maze of Trump’s low-brow paranoia and allows these otherwise meaningless and factually incorrect narratives to become operationally believable is his intrinsic and unabashed vulgarity.

His petulance and general child-like behavior frames his rhetoric and actions as naïve and harmless, and subliminally exonerates them ex-ante. It also identifies them as something that all humans are inclined to do[3]. The underlying disruptiveness gets a favorable response from the (growing mass of) victims of decades of centrism who, irritated by the perceived oppression of political correctness, tend to vote with their middle finger and the more his ability to scandalize grows, the more unwavering the support of his base will be.

And, as the saying goes, nothing is as vulgar as haste; the apparent GOP’s indifference (shrugging shoulders) to the latest news regarding the emergence of the second whistleblower is purely tactical. Their hasty self-delusion that in less then two weeks they have already managed to create the new context of deceit where the right and wrong are turned upside down and their transgressions a priori exonerated, is the most convincing confirmation of their intrinsic vulgarity.

[1] Isaac Ariail Reed, Trump as Ubu Roi, On the charismatic appeal of vulgarity, http://www.publicseminar.org/2017/06/trump-as-ubu-roi/

[2] ibid.

[3] Ibid.

 

Fourth World War and the rise of political infantilism (carousing with Baudrillard pt. 2)

30. VI 2019

WWI ended the supremacy of Europe and colonial era. WWII put an end to Nazism. Third world war took place in the form of cold war; it put an end to Communism. With each succeeding war, we have moved further towards a single world order. Today, that order, which has virtually reached its culmination, finds itself grappling with the antagonistic forces scattered throughout the very heartlands of the global. A fractal war of all cells, all singularities, revolting in the form of antibodies. A confrontation so impossible to pin down that the idea of war has to be rescued from time to time by spectacular pieces, such as Gulf War or the War in Afghanistan. But the Fourth World War is elsewhere. It is what haunts every world order all hegemonic dominations. It is the world, the globe itself, which resists globalization. (Jean Baudrillard)

It is a unique cultural experience to observe celebration of the Fourth of July in the heartland of the Bible belt. There are fireworks, shooting from combat weapons of all calibers — semiautomatic, automatic, bazookas, and even light cannons. To an outsider, or anyone who had experienced war personally, this fascination with weapons and general eroticization of war, must appear unmotivated, and over the top, or just outright bizarre. However, one has to wonder how these cheerleaders of the 2^nd amendment would react if it came to actual war. Most of them (like all other normal people) probably wouldn’t be that much into it. War is the most brutal realization of a survival game, where only the fittest make it. These war-loving bible-wielding self-proclaimed “patriots”, representatives of excess population, couldn’t find their way even in favorable and nurturing conditions. Despite all positive externalities that come with peace and prosperity, which could have worked in their favor, they fell through the cracks and stayed behind. How likely is it that they would fare better in conditions of extreme adversity? In all likelihood, war for them would be a defeating experience (as it is for most everyone else), with long lasting post-traumatic consequences, severe psychological conditions, and prolonged substance abuse. For most of them, war would be an extreme version of their current predicament.

Eros and Civilization, many years later

The concept of Eros, which in its original meaning represents the sum of all instincts for self-preservation and desire, underwent a significant transformation in the early works of Freud, who deliberately downplayed the importance of the rigid boundaries between Eros and sexuality. In his usage Eros signifies an aggrandizement of sexuality. This removal of the boundaries is one of the most important insights of the early psychoanalysis.

Fetishization of war in contemporary America is an illustration of this Freudian connection. It is a result of several factors. Above all, it is an astonishingly precise summary of the true male psychology – as Robin Williams put it: If you can’t fuck it, kill it. The portal opened by Freud frames the romantic attachment to war and weapons as an expression of social ineptitude, an infantile reaction of political voyeurs who know war only by observing it somewhere else without being able to grasp even its approximate meaning. War play is an emotional outlet of socially marginalized and politically impotent males expressed as a displaced sexualized fantasy.

As much as proximity of war is sobering, its prolonged absence, one that allows its abstraction, is intoxicating. Politically, engaging in a war (on your own territory) is like getting laid. Long stretches without war drive men crazy; during those times they lose their sense of purpose.

Absence of sexual experience leads to infantilism (and possibly other psychological problems) in an adult age. Those deprived of sexual experience (of any kind) do not develop properly, at least not in conventional social settings. Escaping personality erosion due to sexual deprivation generally requires creation of a rigorously defined and highly structured alternative life context. The causal connection between religion, in itself an infantile conceptualization of reality, and vow of celibacy, together with the sidetracks such deprivation creates, is probably the best example of this mechanism at work. A nation that has not experienced a war for several generations or ever cannot properly mature, or at least matures differently, in a political sense.

To be clear, civil wars do not count. They are the political equivalent of incest. Civil wars only complicate things and rarely offer any potential resolution in the long run. Conventional wars with foreign adversaries have much better prospects for healing than civil wars. The two warring parties in a civil war are forced to live together even after the war is over encouraging them to make numerous compromises that undermine their emotional recovery and reinforce resistance to healing. In the absence of physical separation, which sometimes, but not always, takes place after civil war, the ferment of latent animosities ultimately morphs into cold civil wars with culture generally losing its original mission as a consensus builder and becoming an instrument of permanent divide.

As a consequence of prolonged abstinence from war, American men have fallen prey to the tyranny of abstraction of war. The confused testosterone and libidinal entropy of the gun-loving constituents, which accumulated over many years of abstinence, gave birth to political voyeurism. War for them occupies a virtual sphere while at the same time retaining the symbolism of the past when wars had a different dose of reality. When it comes to war and armed conflicts elsewhere, they are spectators and cheerleaders who pleasure themselves while observing it at a distance. Nowadays, waging a war (elsewhere) is how one runs political campaigns; it is a sign of determination and leadership. However, when war becomes less abstract, when it intrudes on their turf, Americans do not differ from the rest. An eloquent example from the recent past is the transformation of the psyche of New Yorkers in the aftermath of 9/11. It was an outpour of solidarity, empathy, togetherness, and understanding — the most basic human emotions, just like everyone else.

War as a metaphor

Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations: It jumbles together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with psychological, the like with the unlike. (James Geary)

War is an entirely male creation. Its birth predates the times of hunters and gatherers. The essence of war is condensed in the transfer of violence from animal hunt for the purpose of immediate subsistence to the hunt for man – it is the invention of an enemy beyond prey, a transformation from interspecies to intraspecies competition. As a confrontation with an enemy much more formidable than wild animals, war brings new qualities of risk and strategic thinking[1]. The obscenity of this competition transcends traditional reproductive alpha malehood and redirects the focus of Eros from women to men. As Paul Virilio put it, warfare with other men represents the ultimate narcissistic (male) homosexual act. Testosterone, its main fuel, is an extremely combustible substance. It makes large-scale male bonding manifestations intrinsically unstable, threatening to escalate at any given point into either a physical conflict or an orgy.

Shooting ranges and gun shows, paintball parks, recreation of historical battles, boy scouts, Catholic church, corporate boot camps — every place where men try to impress other men — or the annual festival of salami in Slovenian town of Sevnica, the birth place of Melania Knavs, which only men are allowed to attend, they all share this uncomfortable vibe of a fragile equilibrium. It is not difficult to imagine what goes on in all-male Taliban compounds during starry nights at high altitude and rarified oxygen levels of the Afghan mountain range, or the narrow gap between a Nazi rally and a (male) homosexual bacchanalia. Similar undercurrents permeate contemporary populist rallies. Despite token female presence, they are saturated with testosterone and latent male aggression with the same uncomfortable vibe of instability characteristic for manifestations of large-scale male bonding.

There is an amusing (probably not accidental) congruence between attitudes towards war and sex in a particular cultural context. National histories can be told through sexual stereotypes and sexual stereotypes described in military terms. Using sex as a metaphor often gives an eloquent summary of a given culture with amazing precision.

If war were sex, this is how different cultures could be described. French: always keen to get involved. Sex (and war) never stops occupying their minds. They surrender to love and engage in sex with passion, although occasionally it can be purely physical. Brits are somewhat like French, just with passion dialed down. They are obsessed with being caught in an embarrassing situation, and love and sex are embarrassing. They do not surrender, but approach the whole thing rationally and perform it as a duty. For Swiss, sex is too messy and unhygienic. They do not engage, but they are not averse to masturbation. They like to watch and sometime get paid to watch others. Italians: premature ejaculators, like to talk about it, but find it painful and messy.

When it comes to war, Russians are archetypal masochists. For them, it has to hurt. Always. It is performed as a heavy S&M play, a cathartic ritual to which they willingly submit, aware of subsequent long-term injuries which take years and decades to heal. For Germans, sex is a vigorous physical exercise that requires discipline, precision, and commitment. They have had a complicated history of struggle with it. Deep down, they are masochists like Russians, but had been duped into playing the top in the S&M orgy of the 20^th century. A control loving culture, they failed to grasp the idea that in an S&M game, the masochist is always one who calls the shot and is in control. It was a betrayal of their character. It turned out bad for them and almost everyone else.

For Americans, war exists in virtual space, they engage only through action at a distance, prefer the virtual masturbatory routine to the real thing. Their imagination is captured by their numerous sexual toys – the larger, the better – and they indulge in their size and the fear it inspires.

To paraphrase Paul Virilio[2], copulation, which used to be a vital function, has now become optional, turning into the practice of remote-control masturbation. In the same way chemical psychotropic suppressants have been used to dampen down momentary madness, ideological anti-suppressants, with the help of technology, are whipping the madness up, driving it to a frenzy. And this frenzy is contagious and viral. With the technology shrinking the distances and compressing the time scale, war is everywhere and can be transmitted instantaneously, dialed in or out like a video game, and satiating infantile populist cravings for instant gratification. This is the dawning of the age of global teledildonics.

Happy 4^th. Enjoy the fireworks.

 

[1] Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon, Continuum (2005)

[2] Paul Virilio, Open Sky, Verso (2008)

 

 

The ecstasy and the agony of power (carousing with Baudrillard, pt. 1)

2. VI 2019

Without ever leaving, we are already no longer there (Nikolai Gogol)

More than two years have passed since the political septic shock of 2016, but its metastatic aftershocks continue with unrestrained intensity. I often wonder, if Jean Baudrillard were around to see the unfolding of his script, what would he think. And I can’t make up my mind whether he would be pleased, amused or just plain bored by how predictable everything turned out to be.

From collapse to prolapse: Capitalism in a coma

The past decade, falling somewhere between strange and outright bizarre, is best described as capitalism in a state of clinically induced coma (after its capitulation to the years of self-intoxication and the near-death experience in 2008). But instead of helping the system heal, this state of suspension only made things worse. The longer the protective coma remained in place, the bigger capitalism’s excesses grew and the more stress it put on its already compromised immune system. The most robust and, at the same time, the most troubling post-2008 realization has been the system’s inability to heal. Underneath this sobering conclusion resides the accumulation of profound social deficits of various kinds.

In the same way it creates conditions for its own demise, capitalism spontaneously creates demand for social change. This is a structural problem of capitalism, its second nature, best summarized by Robert Nisbet: Because of the easy convertibility of all qualitative values and status relationships into fluid relationships of contract, based on money, modern capitalism has had a leveling and fragmenting effect upon context of status and membership[1]. These erosive effects, while always present to a certain degree, have been pushed into overdrive over the last decades. Decay of established structures and persistent social stratification, when pushed too far, begin to distort social relations. When a population loses the sense of social and moral participation in society, and its disenfranchised segment reaches a critical size, these factors lead to spontaneous mutation of free capitalism into authoritarian rule. Democracy becomes a perversion of itself and this transformation so natural and seamless that it remains utterly unnoticed.

These are dynamics that had been identified as the stylized facts of capitalism more than a century ago. According to Hilaire Belloc, whose book Servile State appeared in 1912, Capitalism is either a system of social and moral allegiances, resting securely in institutions and voluntary associations, or it is a sand heap of disconnected particles of humanity. If it is, or is allowed to become, the latter, there is nothing that can prevent the rise of centralized omnicompetent political process. Lacking sense of participation in economic society, men will seek it. Today, the crisis of democracy and the search for authority is going strong in large part as a reaction to the vacuum of power that dominated last five decades.

The agony of power

Power itself is an embarrassment and there is no one to assume it truly. Power itself must be abolished and not solely because of a refusal to be dominated, but also in the refusal to dominate[2].

Neoliberalism appropriated democracy and denounced force as an inefficient way of governing. By outlining new ways of conducting individuals, which satisfies aspiration to freedom in every sphere of human activity, it introduced the idea of governing through, not against, freedom. While 1968 was a reaction to the acute crisis of dominant forms of power at the time, 2016 is the response to the second crisis of power, a quest for power in a powerless world — it is a return of the 1968 in reverse, its mirror image and its unwind.

In contrast to the neoliberal West, in the emerging post-socialist East, force has never been relinquished, its value and utility was recognized and cultivated instead. In the eyes of a large segment of the Western population, democracy was perceived as weak and flabby and the post-socialist (and generally authoritarian) East respected and admired for preserving the power. As neoliberalism is getting unwound, the omnipresent contempt for centrism’s all-out permissiveness has become synonymous with the embrace of power and (implicit) denouncement of freedom. The quick-sand landscape — “No one seems to be in charge”– is perceived to be at the root of the problem and the quest for the strong man, someone who will take the ownership of power, becomes an expression of the mode of change.

And that is exactly how it is being played out: We have now made the full circle and, as the saying goes, there is no circus without a circle: Half a century after 1968, the world is again fascinated with power. The announcement of social change has arrived, unsurprisingly, as the quest for authoritarian rule. 2016 — the big bang of the right wing populism — was a septic shock to the system with compromised immunity. And what started as a shock has quickly turned into a large-scale ritual where the order of things has been fully suspended.

However, unlike market crashes and economic downturns, social change itself doesn’t arrive with a bang. It is a gradual adaptation of the mind to persistence and normalization of systematic transgressions. Social change appears only when the results of such process are incorporated, however confusedly or reluctantly, in the life organizations of individuals and thus come to exert a demonstrable influence upon the purposive and meaningful nature of their consciousness[3].

While this process is well underway, it is not settling in without resistance; no victory hasn’t been declared yet. This is the most complicating aspect of the current political mutation. The autoimmune reaction is resisting its own correction – the attack of the immune system onto its host is rejecting the efforts to stop its own self-destruction, and the more it is resisting, the weaker the immune system is becoming.

The theatre of cruelty: The politics of social change

When the present and future are deep-frozen, all excrement rises from the past. As it functions now, history can only be an exercise in recycling and waste management. Failed ideologies, obsolescent utopias, out-moded concepts and fossilized ideas persist in our polluted mentality[4].

What kind of social change is ahead and what sets the template for change at the current political moment? Or, as Baudrillard would put it: Who will rid us of the sedimentation of centuries of stupidity? There are two distinct paths that lead to social change: emancipatory and regressive. The regressive road (currently very much in vogue) is the disappearance-by-proliferation approach – it consists in recycling of the historical waste and adding more stupidity until it becomes invisible. Thus, although the last decade is an utterly new chapter in our history, the political response is an all too familiar mish-mash of worn out, long ago tried and discarded ideas.

The society of the spectacle is turning into a soft version of the theatre of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. The system acts as the exterminator, yet no one is paying attention[5].

At some point history stopped being real. Today, it plays against a very different backdrop than ever before. It appears too immediate — the events that should constitute history have no time to develop outside of the media[6]. What now accounts for history is a result of careful staging of a play, rather than a spontaneous play of events.

Organizing political movements has become like producing a theater play, but no longer as an imitation of the actual reality, but the creation of a new one, with political leaders as puppet masters in (kind of) a ritualistic puppet theatre. This also is taken from the repository of historical excrement. Any documentary about NSDAP gatherings in 1930s Germany would confirm the validity of this parallel. Despite its improv appearance, the staging has a rigid backbone and follows strict rules. To paraphrase the musings of the SS Standardführer, Heinrich Steinbrecher[7], the first principle in this play is to make theater out of everything. This was the standard practice of the SS and it comes straight out of Hitler’s playbook — things he used to do so successfully, his rise to power based primarily, if not exclusively, on the theatrics of his speeches. Second: carefully choose the genre in which each particular piece will be played. Critique, investigations, attempts at oversight, or accusations of the leadership produce as an antique tragedy. Disputes with political opponents, competitors or dismissal of appointees who you disagree with – i.e. political skirmishes and assassinations, in general — as a marionette farce. Third: Occupy the center stage — insert yourself into political discourse at each point of time and into every issue, no matter how mundane, trivial, and insignificant. Fourth: Plan and supervise everything carefully.

When this play is staged against the backdrop of capitalist hardship and social marginalization of the populist constituents, political events and gatherings turn into performance of the theater of cruelty. The main objective of this early 20^th century theatrical form, pioneered by Antonin Artaud, is to unleash subconscious responses in audiences and performers that were normally inaccessible. Audiences find in it not an area for escape from the world, but the realization of their worst nightmares and deepest fears. The play aims to provoke conditions that would face the release of primitive instincts that are hidden beneath the civilized social veneer masking all human behavior. This is achieved by recreating strong and dark imagery and rejecting rational interpretations. Irrational impulses, stimulated by suffering and pain, are employed to increase a sense of danger, violence and disorientation in the audience. The concept of cruelty is not sadistic, but is an access to what is honest and true, and the cruelty required a rigor and determination that was necessary if performers and audiences were to confront and experience the dark terrifying corners that lay at the heart of each human being.

So, in this age of reproduction of self-deception, are we approaching the end of history when nothing new happens any more outside of the recycling of the old narratives from the historical waste bin? In all likelihood, no. At least not in a conventional sense. However, as we seek to find absolution in the past and history reduces to waste management, its flow will change. Irreversibly. The narrowing down of history to current events transforms history into the real time of the news. The event, which is measured neither by its own causes nor its consequences but creates its own stage and its own dramatic effect no longer exists[8].

There will be no end to anything, all these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously, recurrently, like nails and hair which continue to grow after death[9].

[1] Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, ICS Press (1990)

[2] Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power,

[3] Robert A. Nisbet, The Quest for Community, ICS Press (1990)

[4] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End, Stanford University Press (1994)

[5] Jean Baudrillard and Sylvère Lotringer (Editor), The conspiracy of Art, Semiotext(e) (2005)

[6] Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

[7] Borislav Pekic, How to Quiet a Vampire: A Sotie, Northwestern University Press (2003)

[8] Jean Baudrillard, ibid.

[9] Jean Baudrillard, ibid.

 

 

Liminality and Political Ritual

2. IV 2019

Ritual is one of the basic social acts. It is a journey, symbolic or literal, at the end of which the traveler returns to its starting point, but as a transformed subject capable of seeing the context with different eyes and a new perspective afforded by the experience of the journey. It is a cleansing of the social palate before commencing the new stage of life. Rituals are mechanisms that convert the obligatory into the desirable. They take place at inflection points where status quo approaches dead end. Rites of passage like entrance into adulthood or marriage are meant to diffuse the anxiety before, and catalyze acceptance of, disruptions of stasis that generally tend to be rejected or (sometime indefinitely) postponed.

Ritual is a play between structure and anti-structure, which resides between thought and action. It is an affair of the tremendum rather than a quite ordinary mode of human social labor[1]. Despite their multitude and diversity, a wide class of rituals follows the same basic structure. The first stage consists of separation – this is when the subject is taken out of context. The second step is transitional or liminal stage. During this phase, the work of the ritual takes place: The order of things is (temporarily) suspended — participants are in a structureless zone ready to accept new rules. In the final, integration, phase the subject is re-contextualized. This is the von Gennep – Turner model of ritual structure[2].

Two modes of betwixt and between

When they turn 16, Amish kids undergo the ritual of rumspringa[3]. They are released into the outside, the Devil’s playground, where they get a taste of the English world and confront its temptations. During that time, which can last several years, the rules of the Amish are suspended. Young Amish living like English teenagers are not fully or properly either of the two things – they are betwixt and between.

Despite all the pacifist bullshit and declarative distancing from various modes of violence associated with the English culture, the Amish actually function as an oppressive cult. However, they have a very non-English way of imposing their rule and a very Zen approach to oppression. They use smart power, which has been the key to their longevity and resilience[4]. To an individual programmatically unprepared for survival in the outside world, options opened by rumspringa do not get exercised through free will – rather, they amount to a free selection among a reduced subset of possibilities. A large majority of Amish kids return to the Amish community. In lieu of basic survival skills, the security of predictable and boring Amish life outweighs the excitement and challenges of the precarious Devil’s playground.

The ritual of rumspringa is essential for the stability of the Amish community. The ultimate goal of the ritual is to foster docility, which comes as a consequence of confusing the free selection for free will and, as such, results in the ownership of the decision to remain in the cult.

Rumspringa outlines the basic structure of ritualistic rites of passage with all three of its stages (separation, transition, and integration). Various rituals, although having the same basic structure, generally differ by the underlying backbone and directionality of purpose.

Another example of the same formal ritualistic structure, with all three stages, but different purpose and backbone, is the American college experience. After a sheltered childhood, where access and exposure to major sources of risk, like excessive time mismanagement, night clubs, drinking, drugs, etc. is restricted either legally or through parental supervision, college kids ceremonially leave their parents’ homes and move into student dorms, the new communal centers where they cohabitate with their peers. Unsupervised and armed with newly acquired fake IDs, they step into the Devil’s playground with access to alcohol, drugs, sexual experimentation, and the host of new experiences, becoming exposed to the risks and temptations of the adult world. No longer kids and not yet adults, betwixt and between, they enter the liminal stage, in which all rules of either life seem to be suspended.

Although Amish rumspringa and the American college experience have the same formal structure, they differ by directionality of their integration and re-contextualization. Rumspringa is a regressive (centripetal) ritual with forces that pull the participant back to the original social structure after spending the liminal period in, what by Amish standard is considered as, structureless environment. In contrast, the American college experience is progressive (centrifugal) with the liminal period emerging as a source of potential alternative structures waiting to be embraced. The progressive backbone of the college ritual is further reinforced by the stigma of failure associated associated with returning to the safety of the parental home. And this emancipatory process goes both ways — most of parents, subsequent to their kids’ departure, declare themselves as empty nesters, repurpose their kids’ rooms and generally adjust to their future life without them. In terms of the integration score, the success rate of the college experience is roughly the same as that of the Amish rumspringa – most college kids succeed by not returning back to live with their parents.

The initiates: Excess population

Capitalism has to be the strangest creation in the history of human civilization. At its core, capitalism has the metabolism of a pathologically self-destructive organism, the self-sabotage emanating from its every action, relentlessly looking for new ways to hurt and undermine itself, always narrowly escaping its own demise, only to continue to search for a new and more potent poison. Whatever is perceived as beneficial in the short-run, becomes fatal in the long run. No other system, living or dead, behaves like this.

An inevitable side effect of capitalist progress and its self-destructiveness is a growing number of those who fall through the cracks. They are the marginalized excess population, pushed to the margins of the social, political, economic, ecological, and biopolitical system, which prevents them from access to resources, assets, services, and restrains freedom of choice and the development of capabilities. They are socially undead, earmarked for recycling or rehabilitation.

When the excess population swells to such an extent that its drainage is blocked, the resulting social configuration becomes unstable. The longer the marginalized segment of the population stays inside the enclosure of prosperity and rubs shoulders with the useful, legitimate, and self-entitled rest, the less the lines separating normality and abnormality appear reassuringly unambiguous[5] — precarity becomes everyone’s potential destiny. The tensions created by this configuration acquire new quality. The system faces a legitimation crisis. The existing social structure is seen as oppressive and society desires to transcend it. This can be achieved only during the liminal stage of ritual.

The underlying social imbalances need to be addressed either by force or other forms of violence. However, outright physical oppression is an inefficient and expensive way of governing. Instead, power needs to be smart– it has to convince people to voluntarily submit to it. Ritual enters the scene as a form of smart power. Social transformation, thus, takes a ritualistic form where liminality functions as Nay to all positive structural assertions[6]. When applied as a remedy to diffuse the existing social tension and descent, the essence of ritual is to create conditions for the separation phase as a prelude to liminal stage where the existing social rules and hierarchies are suspended.

Social change as ritual: Between marginality & liminality

Liminality and marginality define coordinates of political action. They reside on the opposite sides of social structure. Marginality is an involuntary submission to the capitalist social structure. From the perspective of marginality, structure is oppressive, and ominous. Liminality, on the other hand, is liberation from structure. Even if it might be temporary, it is nevertheless a reprieve– in the liminal phase structure becomes invisible, and the underlying social rules suspended.

Right wing populism resides in the interstices between liminality and marginality. It offers to the excess population ritual instead of real solutions – a simulated Devil’s playground. The mindfuck of rebranding the social change necessary to escape marginalization with liminality — a permanent state with a temporary one — is a way of giving social transformation a regressive ritualistic spin, a political rumspringa of a sort. This is not specific for the current political moment — it has always been the case in history. For many people who have been marginalized, offering ritualistic rites of passage as a surrogate for their social redemption is the only hope of social redemption.

The spurious similarity between the populism of segregated and fractured post-2016 America and single-voice Germany of the 1930s — the two countries a century apart with no socioeconomic overlap — can be traced to the fact that their respective leaders have been engaged in the same ritual practices in different times. Their respective ideologies – unconditional subordination to either national or oligarchic interests — and representative parties, National Socialist German Workers’ Party and National Capitalist MAGA, run in parallel. In both political events, marginalization triggered and shaped rituals that followed. The 1930s was an uprising against the marginalization of Germany as a cultural, industrial and military power of the time. The rise of Nazism was a result of discontent due to loss of privileged position in the global context. As a consequence, the entire country spoke in a single voice. In 21^st century prosperous America, which has not had a war on its territory for more than 150 years, it was marginalization of an entire social class and reaction to the loss of the white male privilege of the old days. The consequence was an unprecedented polyvocality as an expression of social divide along cultural, racial and ethnic lines — a class war in a displaced mode, with the entire marginalized class speaking in a single voice only they could understand.

Camouflaging liminality as an escape route from marginality in today’s America has the sole purpose of reconciling the interests of billionaires with those of the marginalized sector of its population. It is an effort to compactify an otherwise fractured political landscape and, by ignoring facts, laws of physics, economic, logic and common sense, connect the two opposite ends of the political spectrum and forge alliances along artificial cultural divides between victims and their executioners.

The roadmap to re-contextualization

Democracy itself has been functioning as a ritual for quite some time. Actual authoritarian power works much better. Authoritarianism has been in place, but disguised as pseudo-democracy with elaborate layers of deceit. (Slavoj Zizek)

The inner space between marginality and liminality defines the politics of change in post-2016 America. This is the territory where two different directions of purpose are drawn – rumspringa vs. college. In the current context of political ritual, post-liminal integration can evolve along three different paths.

1) American rumspringa: Idiocracy crashes and self-destructs reverting to pre-ritual centrism as a lesser of two evils. Suspension of rules masquerading as change serves as an anesthetic for a more extreme status quo. This is the role of the simulated Devil’s playground. The ongoing ritual is an exact replica of the Amish rumspringa. People are compelled to accept the flawed centrism as a less bad alternative to the corrupt kleptocratic configuration of the present. The problem created by social marginality is dissolved through its acceptance and its victims are permanently defeated – their condition appears as an act of their own will as a result of free selection which substitutes for the free will.

2) Emancipatory path: Transformational/progressive integration is directed towards opening a way into new structure as a resolution of underlying tensions. The ideas and practices that have become established during the liminal phase take the quality of structure. After the trance of (political) ritual subsides, return to pre-separation becomes impossible. While liminality is unstructured — a lack of fixed points in a given moment — it becomes an origin of structure. It is the state of “cosmic foam” awaiting a big bang — formless reality out of which forms emerge — the beginning of everything.

While regressive populist offering is liminality without destination, a voluntary submission to the pre-ritualistic phase, the progressive alternative provides a true destination (with minimum ritual), distinct from the pre-separation phase.

3) American twilight: Idiocracy becomes a new paradigm. This is what Victor Turner calls the state of institutionalized liminality or, in Max Weber’s terminology, everydayinization of the out-of-ordinary situations.

Politics turns into a ritualistic orgy and political leadership assumes a shamanic mode of functioning with permanent campaigning (before, during, and after the elections) as the only way of governing. Nothing is ordinary — everything is tremendous. Semiotic excess — lies, deceit, nonsense, and propaganda — has the main purpose of perpetuating the ritual, sustaining liminality, and suspending the rules, while palpable falsehoods become articles of faith. New social identity draws the boundary between us and them and becomes the main theme of political discourse. Acceptance includes tests of authenticity which require participants to go through initiation rites in which they burn bridges by committing deep out-of-the-money unethical acts and physical or intellectual atrocities (sometimes all three), most often led by the political shamans themselves. This ritual within a ritual consists of competitive symbolic self-immolation in the arena of public spectacle that irreversibly closes the doors for their return to pre-liminal life. This is a state of atonal pseudo-totalitarian operetta without a key or meter, the kingdom of arbitrariness where words have no fixed meaning and actions no consequences.

[1] Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures (1966)

[2] This breakdown of the structure and the concept of liminality were first introduced by Arnold von Gennep in 1909, Rites of Passage, University of Chicago Press (1961) and later picked up and developed further by Victor Turner, ibid.

[3] Pennsylvania German version of herumspringen, to leap around

[4] Amish population in the US has almost tripled since 1990 and is likely to continue growing at the same rate, expecting to increase from 350K today to nearly 1 million by 2050. This is pretty amazing given the context of social Darwinism of modernity where any inefficiency becomes punitive and its cumulative effect ultimately lethal. The rationale for such growth is simple: Amish offer monotonous life with security against rapidly raising precarity on the outside. The ritual takes away the possibility of descent.

[5] Zigmunt Baumman, Wasted Lives – Modernity and its Outcasts, Polity (2004)

[6] Victor Turner, Betwix and Between: The liminal Period in Rites de Passage in The Forrest of Symbols, Cornell University Press (1967)

 

We need to learn to speak again: Linguistification of society as foreplay to social change

18. II 2019

One avoids a lie whenever one can get away with truth (Borislav Pekic)

Why does it appear impossible to dispute obvious lies and falsehoods with simple and self-evident truths? It’s been more than two years since lies were set free. They have flooded the public discourse, politics, media and everyday life. Lies and falsehoods are neither exonerated, nor are they getting flushed out. They continue to pile up on top of existing ones with no drainage mechanism in place. Their presence continues to agitate the public, but nothing seems to be on the horizon that would resolve the underlying tensions. The political entropy caused by this toxic ferment is gradually sucking out all the oxygen and beginning to intoxicate even its own creators.

There is something about the current political configuration that is conducive to this state of unresolved contradictions, which is embedded in our thinking and language. In capitalism, the significance of a concept is primarily measured in terms of its value in the marketplace. The market value system has penetrated all social relationships and governs our thinking and language as well. Under capitalist conditions, language functions as a commodity[1]. For example, we express an agreement by saying: I buy that, disagreement with: I don’t buy it. Winning an acceptance is articulated as selling (the President has to sell that idea to Congress).

As a consequence, any resistance to capitalist hegemony, either through critique or protest, is recognized as successful only it if sells well, and vice versa – fails if it sells poorly. In other words, language in capitalism is mute. Criticism of capitalism does not operate in the same medium as capitalism itself[2]. The two can never meet each other, and they cannot be allowed to. In that respect, capitalism is structured in a very Euclidean way. According to Boris Groys, society first must be altered by linguistification if it is to become subject to any meaningful critique[3] – before we contemplate any change, we need to learn how to speak; linguistification is a foreplay to any meaningful change.

Capitalism’s instinct for survival mobilizes any and all possible forces of defense, including its spontaneous mutation, in order to prevent its own transformation. The merger of politics and entertainment is one such mechanism at play. The logic behind this strange symbiosis is simple. Entertainment draws attention and boosts viewership and ratings — it takes attention away from the content and reinforces the message irrespective of its validity. This is the commodification of language at its purest.

How nonsense travels: Semantic excess and its transmission mechanisms

Current political protagonists have an unusual set of skills. They show up in various shapes and forms as a composite of entertainers, debate artists, and charismatic personalities with a penchant for scandal, something like a massively dumbed down version of sophists. They are, to paraphrase Boris Groys, entrepreneurs who offer the empty surfaces of coherently articulated speech to anyone who wishes to be concealed behind them. The real attraction of the linguistic commodities offered for sale by these characters is represented less by their logically valid surfaces than by the dark space behind those surfaces where customers can settle comfortably. The key transformation of political subjects into consumers has already taken place. Listeners are encouraged to appropriate the obscure core of populist speech in order to fill it with their own concerns[4]. In other words, speech that hides its paradoxical structure becomes a commodity that invites penetration into its paradoxical background or interior.

In the political environment where all social structures are suspended and things function like in professional wrestling, where only the loudest voices are heard, ratings are the ultimate metric. Everything is measured by its shock value. It doesn’t matter what kind of attention (good or bad) one gets, whatever cuts through the mix counts; the rest drowns out in the overall cacophony of semantic excess. And the more politics resemble a circus, the more people will tune in to see it. Everything else is of secondary importance. Viewers will dial in not to get a dose of sense or logic, but to be entertained, agitated or to activate any emotion that interrupts their boredom.

There is a concentrated effort to keep every public discourse trapped in the vortex of commodified language, where any new idea that could lead to a possibility of change receives a price tag and gets absorbed by the black background of the capitalist value system. The sole purpose of political talking heads, spokesmen and pundits – the political whirling dervishes – is to not allow this vortex of cognitive opacity to come to a halt and to stir each debate and discursive deviation towards its center. Media are caught in this play as unwitting accomplices. Like rats who carry the bubonic plague, they facilitate the transmission of the message; they cannot stop the dissemination of lies because they go wherever profits lead them.

Disappearance by proliferation: Between logic and truth

Is truth necessary at all? Can’t logic replace it? Logic is something permanent, whereas truth changes. (Borislav Pekic)

There is nothing new in the political platform of the right wing populism — its still-born ideas are outdated, compromised, and were disqualified long ago — its only innovation is linguistic. The grand program is to exonerate lies and integrate them into the mainstream capitalist system. Flooding the public discourse with lies and falsehoods is multi-purpose.

Lies have had an uncomfortable and disadvantaged position in capitalism. Those who lie, steal — they are thieves. And although they respect property, thieves want to redistribute it, and redistribution is the biggest sin in capitalism. So, liars are assholes. However, this logic (unjustly) denies lies, and those who are good at using them, their chance at limitless profit making. And the new populist breed is here to correct this historical injustice (this is America!). Their mission is to show that lies, when set free, could take us to places we could only have dreamed of. Lies can become monetary forward contracts, a promise of revenue, and no longer a challenge to the interpretation of reality. By maintaining the capitalist paradigm, profit exonerates the encounter of lies with facts.

When seen in retrospect, 2016 was a cognitive coup d’état. The subsequent two years have been a process of transcription of society into the medium of language, a linguistic counterrevolution and not a political or social and economic movement – nothing has really been accomplished, nothing sustainable achieved, except an overall social and political destabilization.

So, before anything can change, the last two years have to be undone — we first need to learn how to speak again. Learning the right language is a foreplay that needs to come before any political action. The progressive agenda, if it is to be effective at this stage, has to be centered on the linguistic part.

To begin to learn how to speak again, and to grasp the inadequacy of the existing language (the only one we know at the moment), one has to start speaking about the unspeakable, about the topics where the commodified language of capitalism is mute. We need to escape into the blind alleys of capitalism where its systemic disorders, the five horsemen of the apocalypse, reside[5]: Stagnation, Redistribution, Plundering of the public domain, Technology and commodification of labor, and Corruption.

These are the topics that define the discourse of change. They address the central points of self-intoxication, the Achilles heels of capitalism. The five systemic disorders expose the inner contradictions, the paradoxicality of the system; they are the portals of change. Any political figure whose platform is defined by these topics deserves our attention. All others are impostors.

[1] Boris Groys, Das komunistische Postskriptum, Suhrkamp Verlag (2006)

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?, Verso (2017)

 

 

The genesis of governmentality and the great flood of arbitrariness

(A homage to a great book)

28.XII 2018

Hieronymus Bosch: Last Judgment Triptych

Human freedom is a hell of alternatives, dilemmas and choices. True freedom is having no choices. Hell is nothing other than absolute freedom and the devil has been its champion since his rebellion against God… Just look at what kind of image we have of heaven. Whenever some painter attempts to reveal the Powers and Glory of God, we feel like we’re attending an SS parade at the Luipold Arena in Nuremberg… Phalanxes of identical, expressionless and blond angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim, surround the Throne as specified in most brutal visions of an authoritarian state… Take the Bosch’s Last Judgment as an example. Successive necessities, realizing paradisiacal freedom are transformed along the vertical axes of the composition into chaos and true freedom of hell. High up, in the golden nimbus, symmetry reigns as in the Wehrmacht barracks; there’s still a humble order and a system in the falling of the angels, but further down… my god! Further down and absolute oriental chaos reigns! Each abusing each as he pleases! Each does as he likes! Everything is in total confusion! An insane chaos attains the freedom and beauty of the ideal democratic state. (Borislav Pekic)

Collective free will is a paradoxical social configuration. It is a highly disruptive force that interrupts the normal run of things and creates conditions for its own demise — it shows up every once in a while, but it never stays. The last time free will made its brief appearance in 1968, it frightened everyone, sounding alarms and prompting the urgent response of governments across the entire western hemisphere. Ironically, it was in the West, the champion of freedom and emancipation, where panic registered the highest levels. The developments that led to 1968, and those that followed, represent the crossroads of political history at the moment of an acute crisis of governmentality. The tensions of 1968 are defined by two contradictory realizations: that force is an inefficient way of governing and that true freedom is not governable.

In a discursive ideological competition that followed as a consequence of the crisis, neoliberalism offered the most “successful” (not necessarily the best) resolution of the underlying contradictions. By outlining a new way of conducting individuals, which satisfies aspirations to freedom in every sphere of human activity, it set the new initial conditions of modern governmentality. Behind these abstract statements lies a simple and, at the same time profound, observation about our ambivalence regarding freedom. People are both attracted and frightened by it — they like to wear it as an ornament, but don’t know what to do with it. This was the major political and cognitive innovation shaped by the factual constraint of the times.

Begin from the middle: From free choice to free selection

However, there was a twist, a detail without which none of it would have worked out. It consisted in the displacement of free choice with free selection. As long as selection was abundant, this subtle, but profound, shift of perspective remained largely unnoticed and the essence of control consisted of dialing the selections. But, when free choice is replaced with free selection and when selection is reduced to only two options, things begin to get interesting. People are given an illusion that, at each point of their life, they stand at the crossroads where one path leads to destruction and the other to redemption, that their future depends on every decision they make along the way. The ideological core of this binary choice consists in packaging it as the principle of one’s own choice. One constantly has to choose. Left or Right. With time, this dilemma becomes an engine which drives a continuous cognitive process that never switches off; it dictates how people live, how they experience reality, and how their sub-consciousness functions. For something like this, people need to mobilize considerable intellectual energy — totally preoccupied with the fear of not making a mistake, they have no time to reflect on anything else. Surrender to this reality — the ubiquitous and perpetual dilemma, Left or Right, when it would be normal to resist either direction — is an expression of acceptance of one’s (inevitable) destiny, supported by the hope of redemption, although real redemption is not waiting for us in either direction.

Labor camps as the birthplace of modern governmentality

The principle of one’s own choice of destiny is not a neoliberal invention. So reassuring at first sight, it was a tried and perfected modus operandi in Jewish Ghettos during World War II. It was invented there with a particular purpose to squash any possibility of resistance. This is how SS Standardführer Heinrich Steinbrecher[1] described the logic of its functioning in the Vilna Ghetto (city of Vilnius, in the territory of Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland), where, within less than two years from its establishment in 1941, the Ghetto’s population was reduced from an estimated 40,000 to zero.

In the Ghetto, the principle of choice of your destiny was perfected by issuing various kinds of certificates. Those who worked for the German industry received them, the others did not. At first, raids would target only those without certificates, so everybody tried to get one. The thought was now exclusively occupied with this goal. There was no time for any kind of resistance. The main objective was to obtain a work certificate before the next raid. However, the raid did not happen. In the meantime, a change in the rules was announced. Now, there were two kinds of certificates being issued — with and without an identification photo. It was up to you to choose with which kind of certificate you would face the next “manhunt”. The principle Left or Right was active again. Raid now hits those with passport without a picture. Everyone tries to exchange them. Administration announces that it is introducing a third id: a blank card with a stamp mark from the labor bureau in Ponar. However, hardly anyone decides to get it. Miserable piece of paper does not present any reassurance in terms of security. Next night, they arrest many of those with old id’s, with or without photos, in proportion to those without any documents. Everyone rushes to get a blank id. In the meantime, administration arrives at a conclusion that this division/distinction is impractical. It replaces it with partition on qualified and non-qualified workers. They do not ask for any proof. Only personal statement/declaration. Right or Left? Majority decides for some qualification. They reason that one who is considered useful will be spared. In principle, that conclusion is correct. Soon, it is discovered that “qualified” documents were taken also by those who have no rights for that. As a punishment, raid hits everyone, without discrimination. Both, those with and without documents. Jews realize they can only blame themselves: “They (Germans) trusted us, and we deceived them”. When someone reaches this level of reasoning, you can do anything with them. Selections on the basis of identification papers were continued. Left of right was permanently in effect/play. And before the last Jew was liquidated, their i.d.’s changed all colors: from red to white. Thought was constantly occupied. One always had to choose. Left or right?

Do you understand the genius of this idea? It could come only from a speculative mind like German. Only people who gave the world Kant and Hegel. However, to be fair, one has to give credit to those Jews. Only their Talmudic intelligence could get fully and wholeheartedly immersed into this game. Primitive Anglo-Saxons, without imagination and intellectual combinatorics, as soon as they would notice that the rules of game are changing whenever they are on the way to winning, they would exit/abandon the game. Jews continued the play it. With ever growing passion, as the game selection would get more complicated, and their count continued to shrink[2].

In what must be one of the greatest moments of cultural introspection, Steinbrecher’s summary outlines the contours of future struggles of governmentality in a broader ideological context and, at the same time, reveals a disturbing natural link, a straight line, that connects the western cultural tradition with the Holocaust and the final solution. The logic of that strait path leads beyond mere physical; it penetrates deeply cognitive and intellectual horizons and ties them together. It identifies Evil as an intellectual need of the mind, which meditates about the good –a logical necessity of any effort that funds the idea about a better world[3].

Triumph of unfree will: New governmentality at work

The fundamental challenge of any capitalist ideology is how to convince people to voluntarily make stupid decisions, and how to do that systematically. This is a complicated problem of constrained optimization with multiple horizons to which neoliberalism offered the simplest solution. Instead of inventing a new ideology for the emerging socioeconomic system, neoliberalism concentrated on reshaping the political subjects and manufacturing docile bodies. It introduced a series of social apparatuses that gradually transformed society to conform to the old methods of control, using Ghettos as a blueprint.

For the labor camp model work outside of the context of extreme oppression, it was necessary to condition the modern political subjects and reduce their thinking process to that of the residents of the 1940s Ghettos. How? Neoliberalism adopted a simple approach. It disseminated market values into every sphere of human activity. Cooperation is replaced by competition, which is elevated to the level of a supreme principle and a criterion that trumps everything else. It inserts a war machine into each pore of human activity – a fascisization of everyday life. The continued cult of wage labor merely replaces Arbeit macht frei, and, as “fences” become narrower and the “voltage” approaches lethal levels, every mistake becomes potentially irreversible and the fatality of mistakes self-fulfilling.

To persuade the Westerners, and, in particular, Anglo-Saxons with their practical empiricism, to play this game, the rules have to be complicated to the point of becoming ungraspable. And, of course, to make sure people continue to make stupid decisions, efforts have to be made to keep them stupid: Critical (or any systematic) thinking is undermined and discouraged; ignorance is promoted and cultivating as a cultural virtue while access to education is continuously reduced.

As selection gets reduced to binary, the contours of the Ghetto gradually emerge. The Left or Right dilemma gets a cultural dimension. One path is more inclusive, it leads to more welfare, but less god and guns, while on the other end, one is lured by the promise of “greater coherence”, with all the regressive ornaments surrounding a neo-patriarchal, unenlightened society – a gay-free zone where everyone carries a bible and a gun. However, both paths lead to the same destination of social self-destruction defined by the systematic devastation of everything that doesn’t submit to the profit of the strongest.

So, at the end, it is down to a binary choice between two alternatives, neither one of which would have been found acceptable if they had been subjected to free (and/or intelligent) choice. This is the neoliberal parallax gap defined by the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives with no common ground. The free will has been taken out of the decision process altogether, ex ante! However, the cultural division, embedded in the two selections on offer, has an important stabilizing role: make the pain across different cultural divides mutually unintelligible and mutually exclusive. As the rules of the game become more complicated and the size of excess population grows, those who had been played – the game’s main victims – continue to play with ever growing passion. Everything looks perfect. But, reality refuses to be fooled by it.

2018: The great flood of arbitrariness

After decades of accumulated social deficit, neoliberalism came to a halt by the end of the first decade of the century. Although it became clear that the existing ideological framework had run its course, there was no alternative that could replace it. 2016 was a referendum on free will, the year when the West finally rejected freedom and the capital voiced an open quest for an authoritarian state. In many ways, 2016 was an anti-1968 — the triumph of unfree will — a directionless step forward and a stepping into political quicksand.

In the two subsequent years, the initial conditions of 2016 set the stage for the great flood of arbitrariness: A chaotic dissolution of all frames of reference, the established social structures, institutions and rules, and an all-out assault on truth. The new political narrative envisions the great deluge of arbitrariness as an act of “divine” retribution aimed at washing away the sins of the West: the sin of rationality, logic, restraint, mediocrity, and compromise — a systemic purge of the social body from the existing rules in preparation for its rebirth.

This is another round of discursive ideological competition where the modern-day transposition of the biblical narrative is served to the properly prepared segment of excess population, while the insane wing of the right populism is energizing their base – the unsuspected victims of their con jobs — and subcontracting their rage to build, on their behalf, the Ark on which they will secure the spot for a selected few.

The great flood of arbitrariness creates its own rules. It is an escalation of neoliberal maneuver of selection reduction extended to intellectual and cognitive horizons, beyond physical survival. Instead of the Left or Right dilemma, it is now between drowning in the flood of arbitrariness or getting on board of the Ark of fools. People subjected to this principle of choice resemble a person who considers an outstanding privilege and benefit a permission to choose whether he will jump through the window from the third floor or wait for the fifth[4].

2016 marks the beginning of the end of the Hegelian historical continuum where History is seen as the realization of freedom by means of a series of successive enslavements to different kinds of necessity. Free selection is now being reduced down to one option and we are free to embrace it or reject it. This is the highest act of freedom — freely assuming what is otherwise necessary. It is also the end of history. We have finally achieved true freedom because true freedom is having no choice. And so, history doesn’t end with a fairytale of global liberal democracy, but with an authoritarian state.

[1] Borislav Pekic, How to Quiet a Vampire, Northwestern University Press (2003)

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

 

The Gods must be crazy: The rise of the primitive society of the future

10. XI 2018

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. (Steven Weinberg)

If God exists, then everything is allowed because every act committed by man is an expression of God’s will. This includes even the most extreme acts; especially them. For most people, hurting others is deeply traumatic. A sacred Cause serves to anesthetize their elementary sensitivity to another’s suffering. Without this Cause we would have to feel all the burden of what we did – the Cause transposes the burden of guilt[1]. So, if there is God, we do not have to reflect on the consequences of our actions. Whatever we do — and, we know, we are prepared to do terrible things if the situation requires — it is a priori legitimized.

If there is no God, however, everything is prohibited. Well, not exactly everything, but a lot of things. This is the Lacanian inversion of Dostoyevsky. In the absence of God, we are the judges of good and evil; we censor ourselves and restrict our actions. We become Kantian subjects: every man has a conscience and finds himself observed, threatened and, in general, kept at awe by an internal judge[2]. The moral subject is simultaneously defendant and judge, a doubled self or dual personality. A Kantian subject is answerable to a superego far more severe than that of the traditional morality.

Man’s discontent with God in general, and how he managed the affairs of the world in particular marks the beginning of Modernity. It is the moment in history when man puts himself in charge. This is the first point of transfer of power and responsibility in modern history. However, enlightenment, rationality, and above all, emancipation from God created their own problems. In the final stages of enlightenment, this process led naturally to the disenchantment of the world[3] as the ultimate triumph of rationality — a seminal break point in modern culture and a radical departure in the way we experience reality. It connotes the removal of a magic spell and reflects a belief that humanity can control everything by means of calculation. And so, through the advent of scientific methods and the use of enlightened reason the world was rendered transparent, demystified and, ultimately, hollowed and deprived of its richness. It became disenchanted and disenchanting, predictable and intellectualized.

God as a secular entity: Primitive society of the future makes its first appearance

Nothing vanishes; of everything that disappears there remain traces. God disappeared, but he left behind his judgment, like a Cheshire Cat’s smile. And God’s judgment is terrifying in itself, but the judgment of God without God is even more terrifying[4].

The disenchantment of the world proved to be the alienating and undesirable flip side of scientific progress. Life got more complicated and unmanageable, and became too much of a burden and responsibility. The more man tried to liberate himself, the more trapped and enslaved he felt. Unhappy again, he started plotting his escape from freedom, by looking for a worthy replacement for God. Despite centuries of enlightenment, emancipation, education, and overwhelming accumulation of empirical evidence and insight, dictators and autocrats, as God’s surrogates, never went out of vogue. In fact, their appeal only grew stronger with time. We just seem to be unable to resist their seductive powers. Modernity in its later phase reads like mankind’s love affair with authority. There has never been a comparable concentration of dictators, of the most extreme kind, in history as in the 20^th century, the times marked with the most intense scientific progress and emancipation on all fronts.

Adorno and Horkheimer, and other Weber’s followers of Frankfurt School understood early on the dialectics of rationality and enlightenment and perceived the disenchantment as an altogether negative force. Science’s attempts to disenchant the world resulted only in a kind of return of the repressed: the irrationality that had been squelched by enlightened reason returned in the form of violence and barbarism[5]. Re-enchantment emerges as a response to an overdose of rationality, an attempt to establish new symbolism, or recycle the old one, and resurrect the supernatural qualities that were exorcised during centuries of symbolic asphyxiation.

In the mid-20^th century, the market emerged as a surrogate, which temporarily filled the vacuum created by God’s disappearance. During the peak of the neoliberal post-industrial phase, it attained a status of a separate entity, worshiped like a pagan deity to which society sacrifices social prey in order to appease it. This defined the contours of a new social structure: Primitive society of the future.

However, unrestrained personal hedonism gradually intruded and ultimately invaded other peoples’ pleasure horizons. Its consequences were social fragmentation, eradication of empathy, and a general breakdown of social bonds. Fueled by the machine of competition, asymmetrical distribution of wealth and misery, together with unprecedented corruption, found widespread acceptance and endorsement as a consequence of “natural” free-market forces, and was eventually normalized. It didn’t take long for the free market orgy to take the course of a full-scale autoimmune reaction.

Nothing can be more oppressive than ethical hedonism (the right to achieve the greatest amount of pleasure) – we have been enslaved by it for centuries. Religion serves to legitimize the hedonistic trespassing; the absence of religion constrains it. We look at religious suspension of the ethical[6] as our salvation from enslavement. And this opens the doors for the return of God through the vulgar materialistic interpretation of his will and judgment by the born-again Evangelical fundamentalists.

This is the answer to disenchantment with disenchantment, a barbaric eruption of discontent with the oppression of rationality and growing desire for submission. If there is one aspect that post-modernity brings in this historical moment of introspection and self-reflection, it is the realization of bottomless human capacity for submission to institutions, ideologies, or to personalities, regardless of how grotesque and destructive they may be. These are the initial conditions of the 21^st century.

Deresponsibilization and the second transfer of authority: Ideology of collective contempt of reason

The same logical framework provided by the religious suspension of the ethical in fundamentalist religious interpretations is also deeply embedded in the ideological foundations of neoliberalism — so long as we follow economic rationality, this ultimate metric of value, we are exonerated of any and all the consequences of (and free of responsibility for) what any of our actions may cause. The same mechanism sits at the core of both the fundamentalist call for crusade, religious exclusivity, and its propensity to annihilate infidels as in the economic Darwinism and hyper-libidinal capitalism of libertarian neoliberalism. This is where the religious and the free-market dogmas meet each other. Economic rationality and existence of God both maximize our freedom from responsibility. They are logical twins.

This is the second point of transfer of authority and responsibility in modern history. The need for authority comes from the same center of our mind and soul as the needs for freedom, order, and coherence. Reaching that destination goes hand in hand with unwind of responsibility; this is the gift of the authoritarian project. The singular attraction of the right-wing populism, the ideology of unreason, lies precisely in the fact that it represents a movement of deresponsibilization of epochal magnitude never seen in history, the main reason the world is making a sharp right turn at this point of history. This is the face of the new primitive society of the future.

The infantile refusal to accept responsibility together with the ontological need for (unconditional) absolution legitimizes all the regressive measures that come with the ideology of unreason, and defines the core of its malignancy. We no longer need to admit our mistakes or apologize for them; we disrespect the truth and refuse to step back in the face of facts, but instead, in a collective display of contempt of reason, interpret our delusional ramblings as the voice of God’s will. After all, if God exists, everything is allowed.

[1] Slavoj Zizek, “God is Dead, but He Doesn’t Know It” (Lacan plays with Bobok), Lacanian Ink (04.04.2009)

[2] Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Suhrkamp (1982)

[3] In its original usage, the term Entzauberung is attributed to Friedrich Schiller, crystallized through his poem The Gods of Greece, first published in 1788. The German word literally means de-magic-ation, but is meant to imply the breaking of a magic spell. Around 1913, Max Weber used it to describe the character of modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society.

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?, Seagull Books (2016)

[5]Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH (1989)

[6]Seren Kierkegard, Fear and Trembling, Cambridge Text in the History of Philosophy (2011)

 

A decade of counterfactual reality or how to quiet a vampire of history (15 September 2008, ten years later)

15. IX 2018

If history doesn’t manage to exhaust the possibilities of the direction it’s taken, if it’s forcibly prevented from unleashing everything, even its most monstrous forces, sooner or later it’ll return to seek out its curtailed right, its insane continuation. Had Adolf Hitler been killed, had the natural course of history been upset and halted in July 1944, we would have yet another national socialism today, or we’d at least have to defend ourselves from it. Hitler wouldn’t have been defeated, rather his certain victory would have been thwarted[1].

On this day, ten years ago, we witnessed an event in the true sense of its meaning: the event that changed the order of things and divided the time into before and after. With government intervention and bailouts, we had interrupted the flow of history and interfered with its course. By throwing a lifeline to the system, which had been spontaneously self-destructing, we had created conditions for alternative counterfactual history. $7 trillion was the price that had to be paid for suspending the crushing force of gravity that would have otherwise caused the collapse of the entire capitalist system and which has resulted in a downgrade of present reality to counterfactual.

We thwarted the system’s self-annihilation. Instead of allowing this process to complete, Lehman’s ritualistic collapse laid the foundation for system’s resurrection and reinforced the imperative of its ultimate triumph. The rescue package laid the ground for the narrative according to which we needed more of the same — what caused the system’s “temporary” collapse was interpreted as our unwillingness to set it free to blossom fully. The systems imminent demise was, thus, magically converted into its thwarted victory. Ten years later, it resurrected and came back to claim its curtailed right. Today, in its afterlife, we have to defend ourselves against its ugliest and most monstrous incarnation.

And the vampire in us now has an alibi; the American national pride has invented its scapegoats: Immigrants, atheists, pacifists, homosexuals, international trade agreements, NAFTA, regulations, Chinese, Mexicans, teachers, football players, Planned Parenthood, alternative energy sources, progressives, education, science, climate change, facts and truth and other elitist concepts. And, like bad students, we will have to repeat the entire tragedy from the beginning. This is the new counterfactual reality.

In its infinite unwisdom, the high priests of ideology knew that what is imminent, cannot be prevented, it could only be postponed. If in 2006, during the peak of the housing bubble and only two years before its collapse, we knew what we know now, we would have done exactly the same. So, Lehman was not saved – it was allowed to collapse; this was the ritualized assignment and acceptance of guilt aimed at diverting the blame– and this fact, precisely, is what exonerated the system as such.

Here is Konrad Rutkowski, one more time: It is senseless to attempt to crush an order that is based on a consistent ideology. To disappear, it must completely exhaust the last bit of its historical energy. It must die like an old man whose sinful life has extinguished his reproductive energy and even his instinct for the survival of the species[2].

 

[1] Fourth letter of Konrad Rutkowski, in How to Quiet a Vampire, B. Pekic Northwestern University Press (2003)

[2] ibid.

 

Erectile alchemy and bubble addiction

12. IX 2018

Priapism, named after Priapus, the Greek god of fertility who sported an oversized, eternally-erect penis (so large, in fact, he used it to frighten away anyone who tried to plunder his gardens), is a condition that causes persistent and sometimes painful erections, which last for four hours or more without sexual stimulation. Apart from ED pills, anomalous blood flows in and out of the penis can be caused by a range of disorders and diseases, like sickle cell anemia, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and penile cancers, or abuses of certain prescription medications, alcohol, and some illicit drugs. Priapism can cause serious complications. The blood trapped in the penis is deprived of oxygen and can damage the penile tissue. An erection that lasts longer than four hours is a medical emergency. Untreated priapism can result in damage or destruction of penile tissue and permanent erectile dysfunction.

Economic bubbles have had a special place in American culture for the last 50 years. They encapsulate the essence of the ultimate male obsession: Everything has to be pointing skywards, from male reproductive organs to luxury condo towers, to economic growth, stock market charts and the yield curve. Bubbles hold the key to understanding the essence of American political conservatism and its ongoing transformation.

Behind this fetishized fantasy is the troubling decline in productivity growth (and economic potency in general), together with desperate attempts to bring back good old days, with governments ready to deliver temporary libidinal surrogates of any sort irrespective of their long-term consequences.

During the post-war decades, America, at 3% productivity growth, was open and welcoming, promising (and delivering on that promise) to enlighten and enrich the lives of anyone who took part in the great American project. The economic potency in those days was palpable. Each generation was doubling its standard of living; libidinal forces were abundant, optimism unshakeable, and belief in a better future consistently gratified and rewarded.

After years of misguided interpretation of the theory of comparative advantages, the American locomotive jammed in 2007. The America of today, with 1% productivity growth, has become a get-rich-quick-if-you-can landscape, xenophobic, polarized and libidinally disinvested, with rampant inequality and the highest rate of incarceration on the planet, where every subsequent generation is practically guaranteed to be worse off than its predecessor, and where 96% of people that are born poor remain poor. In today’s America the future looks more like a threat and less like a promise.

The two bubbles of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which briefly interrupt the monotonic decline in productivity growth, announce the beginning of a new era. The Internet bubble is not without merit — it presents the arrival of a genuine technological innovation and a paradigm change — an entirely novel production process, and introduces cognitariat as a new social class. However, its biggest shortcomings are related to the creation of a new mindset: an overnight lottery winner as a new type of entrepreneur and a general change of direction in the political economy. The second, the housing bubble, is much closer to the traditional definition — overconsumption financed by debt. It bears direct responsibility for the utter impotence of the third, and the largest of all bubbles, the government debt bubble, and for the current predicament. Even after nearly a decade of unprecedented government subsidies and budget deficit spending, productivity growth has descended (and still remains) below 1% (the lowest post-war levels), just as it was declared that the economy was on the way to recovery in 2015. The effect of the entire $7tr bubble remains largely undetected by the basic barometers of economic wellbeing. It is precisely the extended duration of the housing bubble, mistakenly identified as a sign of economic potency, which has compromised the hopes of a robust recovery. The current flaccidness of productivity stands as a reminder of the fallacy of the underlying political economy.

Bubbles economy as an ideological core

However, despite their repeated failures, we still seem to be unable to shake off our bubble addiction. Bubbles sit at the core of the right wing populist delusion — no longer a political movement, but a state of mind. This pastoral fantasy has evolved into full-blown alchemy, which continues to insist without any base in reality and against common sense – and economic orthodoxy is reluctant to disagree — that in order to live happier and more meaningful lives and secure prosperity and a better future, all we need is a new magic pill.

Millions of angry gun-wielding Podunk residents, the excluded who represent the excess of the population and now live at or below the poverty line, have become the most vocal cheerleaders of the existing stock market bubble, disguised as the economic boom. They use it to rationalize the toxicity of their favorite ideology and see no reason to be concerned about the true source of their short- and long-term hardship and erosion of quality of life.

Their ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge, but an outcome of cultural and political struggle. The current political economy has morphed into agnotological[1] capitalism – the systematic production and maintenance of ignorance as a major feature that enables the economy to function by allowing the creation of bubbles. In its background there is a programmatic effort to eliminate the potential for dissent. This effort relies on the creation of systemic unknowns where any potential “fact” is always already countered by an alternative of apparently equal weight and value, which renders engagement with the conditions of reality contentious and a source of confusion. In this way, participants in bubbles remain unaware of the imminent collapse until after it has happened.

Erectile alchemy

Bubbles are economic erectile pills — false signals that something can happen out of nothing. They have a special allure, in the same way Ponzi schemes do – when easy money is readily available, we don’t need a rationale. Economic bubbles have become a juncture where erectile fantasy has become the main cultural dimension. The surge in transient virtual wealth they create is the extended erection we read about on ED pillboxes. The duration of extended bubbles is their most troubling aspect; the longer they last, the bigger the damage they create. So, why does the obsession with bubbles still persist?

According to medical statistics, priapism brought on by erectile dysfunction drugs is extremely rare — more than 100 million erectile pills are sold every year with fewer than 100 cases of priapism reported; that is less than one in a million. However, it is quite possible that there are many more cases of extended priapism caused by the ED pills than medical statistics show. They are just not being documented. If anything, the warning itself could be seen as a clever advertisement incentivizing the users to look for those “gold nuggets” that would trigger one such episode. Why not? Who would complain about having too much of a good thing? “If I get a four-hour erection, I’m not calling a doctor, I’m calling my friends”. Reporting protracted erections would be the most un-American thing to do.

And this is the actual point where the erectile fantasy of bubble economy will meet its maker. Do we not need libido first? Erection will come by itself after that. Or will it? This issue is, andwill remain, the central theme of the ongoing political struggle for decades to come. The future of our civilization depends on its outcome. Pills, no matter how different and potent, will never work in the long run, and they have consequences.

[1] The concept of agnotology was first introduced by Robert N. Proctor as the study of culturally induced ignorance, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. In his book, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, Verso (2013), and numerous interviews and essays, Philip Mirowski argues usefulness of agnotology for explaining the post-2008 socioeconomic transformation. This paragraph is largely a summary of his thoughts on the topic.

 

Complexity curse: From low productivity to social fragmentation

3. IX 2018

Sooner or later, everything turns into shit (2nd law of thermodynamics)

Economic productivity is one of the most important indicator of the wellbeing of a society and a fundamental determinant of its standard of living. It determines how prosperity is metabolized and how quality of life improves with time. Productivity is defined as the quantity of output produced by one unit of an input within one unit of time. An increase in physical productivity causes a corresponding increase in the value of labor, which raises wages. This is why having an education or on-the-job training is sought after by employers; it increases the productivity of workers and makes them more valuable assets to the firm.

Here is an example of how it works in practice. An employer offers you $15 to dig a 25 square-foot hole in his backyard. Suppose that you have insufficient capital goods (your bare hands or a spoon), and it takes you three hours to dig a hole to his specifications. Your labor output is worth $5 per hour. If you had a shovel instead, it may have only taken you 30 minutes to dig the hole; your labor output just rose to $30 per hour. With a big enough crane, you may have been able to dig it in five minutes with a labor productivity of $180 per hour. It is clear how the quality of life of a crane owner, which is a direct consequence of his high productivity, differs from the rest of the crowd.

Economic productivity is the source of libidinal forces, the alpha and omega of economic potency, and the ability to better the human conditions. It regulates social entropy, defines the arrow of time, shapes our expectations of the future, and provides mechanisms that sustain our capacity to desire. Abundant productivity enables future generations to live better than the previous ones. Low productivity, in contrast, means both short- and long-term hardship and erosion of the quality of life.

For almost half a century, productivity growth in developed world has been showing a troubling secular trend. In the last decade, developed economies all have entered a stagnation trap from which they seem to be unable to find a way out. This is illustrated in the chart, which shows the history of productivity growth in the US. The bold red lines indicate long-term averages across different regimes. Except for a relatively short period of two successive transient bubbles (internet and housing), there is a clear decline of the average from 3%, in the post-war decades, to 1% in the last ten years.

The decline in productivity growth has profound social implications. A 3% productivity growth, as seen in the two post-war decades, means that the standard of living doubles for every new generation[1]. In contrast, a productivity growth of 1% requires three generations to double the standard of living. However, if we take into account the rise of living costs, in an economy with 1% productivity growth each subsequent generation will have less of everything than its predecessor. It is particularly interesting that productivity growth has been descending to a near all-time low in the last five years, to below 1%, just as it was declared that the economy was recovering from the post-2008 recession. This point in itself deserves special attention.

The death spiral of productivity growth is an example of Tainter’s law, a general pattern whereby investing in complexity inevitably generates decreasing marginal returns for the systems that uses it. Insisting on the same methods, even when they have ceased to work, sets a civilization on track for collapse[2].

This is the essence of Tainter’s argument[3]. A civilization forms when some benefit accrues from greater complexity[4]. Benefits of complexity are realized through cooperation – the proverbial “whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. However, in the initial stage, although benefits of increasing complexity rise, during their evolution, complex systems spontaneously generate endogenous mechanisms of self-sabotage.

Tainter’s Law

The primary source of self-obstruction is the new protagonist that emerges on the scene: the coordinator[5]. He is the guardian of the new paradigm, which champions complexity as the main and, ultimately, only strategy. The marginal benefits of complexity eventually begin to decline. Beyond a certain point, their intensification produces less additional benefit, putting its beneficiaries to more and more stress. But, as the community/organization now only knows how to use a single strategy, a superstructure is in place that cannot be gracefully abandoned. In the last phase, as benefits of additional complexity taper off, vast resources need to be invested in entirely unproductive ways, such as desperate attempts at regime legitimization: The competitive monument building, or the lavish parades held for each new, short-lived emperor. Eventually, the burden of civilization becomes greater than any benefit it provides and the society collapses[6].

Destruction of cooperation and self-sabotage in corporate organizations

Yves Morieux, offers an illustration of how the last phase of complexity is realized in the current context of developed corporate structures[7]. Behind persistent declining trend in productivity are the three basic tenets of corporate management that act as the main pillars of self-sabotage: Performance, Transparency, and Accountability.

Transparency implies audits and compliance — where does my role start and end. Accountability creates conditions for failure (in a compliant way): Who is accountable? Instead of creating conditions to succeed, we obsess on knowing who is to blame in case of failure. Performance: People put energy and effort in what can be measured, i.e. their individual performance, but not in cooperation.

However, cooperation is how you allocate your effort. Cooperation means taking a risk by giving up the ultimate protection, your own performance, to enhance the performance of those to whom you are being compared, for the sake of cooperation, in order to achieve the optimal result[8]. People are continuously being discouraged and disincentivized to cooperate. If when they cooperate, people were worse off, why would they cooperate? The three basic tenets of corporate management are doing injustice to effectiveness. The more complex the system becomes, the more structures we add that emphasize the three tenets. They trigger a counterproductive multiplication of interfaces that not only add people (non-productive ones), but also create obstacles. The more complicated the system, the more difficult to see what is happening. So we need meetings, reports, conference calls, etc.: people spend 40-80% of time wasting their time[9]. This is the politics of deliberate sub-optimality.

MBA nation or cannibalization of the social landscape

The false premise, which has become the defining characteristics of American politics and, to some extent, the culture as well, has been that a society is essentially the same object as a corporation, just a bigger one, that skills you learn in an MBA program are the same skills you need to manage a society, and that successful corporate managers are, by default, also good national leaders. However, this is not the only social damage of this fallacy. When applying the lessons from corporate culture to society, one inevitably also imports the underlying mistakes of that culture. And so, in the same way a rising complexity creates its own mechanisms of self-sabotage, the essence of the neoliberal approach to social organization is inhibiting the mechanisms of social cooperation. Social atomization, the cult of individuality, the creation of homo economicus as a model citizen, competition as the only and ultimate criterion for everything, the obliteration of welfare, the destruction of empathy, and the entire conservative system of values, all of these structures are instruments of social fragmentation and annihilation of the tissue that makes society different from a collection of individuals. All this leads to barbarization of the social landscape with the degree of polarization that has reached the point where political consensus is no longer possible and democracy no longer works. Politics has become a problem instead of a solution. The net result? The quality of life is already deteriorating and this trend will be reinforced with each subsequent generation as the whole continues to shrink smaller than the sum of its parts.

Under the crush of social entropy, with its ever-increasing complexity as the only strategy, we are facing the same destiny as many civilizations have in the past. The future has already become impossible and without the clear picture of the future, the present cannot take off. Like the boy in Kafka’s story, A Country Doctor, our social and economic system already inhibits the world of undead. Rising complexity is the fatal wound depriving it from the capacity to die. Only when that wound heals, will the system be able to collapse.

[1] If one generation is about 20 years, then (1.03)²⁰ ≈ 2

[2] Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman: Smart Simplicity: Six règles pour gérer la complexité sans devenir compliqué, Manitoba (2016)

[3] Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press (1990)

[4] The term complexity is generally used to characterize something with many parts where those parts interact with each other in multiple ways, culminating in a higher order of emergence greater than the sum of its parts.

[5] Akshay Ahuja in Dark Mountain Project (19, March 2012)

[6] Akshay Ahuja, ibid.

[7] Yves Moreieux, ibid.

[8] Yves Moreieux, ibid.

[9] Yves Moreieux, ibid.

The age of unreason

25. VII 2018

The village of Hollywood was planned according to the notion

 people in these parts have of heaven. In these parts

 they have come to the conclusion that God

 requiring a heaven and a hell, didn’t need to

 plan two establishments but

 just the one: heaven. It

 serves the unprosperous, unsuccessful

 as hell.

(Bertolt Brecht, Hollywood Elegies)

According to Foucault, the basis for civil society is the idea of a redistribution/recentering of the governmental reason. In pre-modernity, the idea of regulating, measuring, and so limiting the indefinite exercise of power was sought in the wisdom of the person who would govern. Wisdom implied governing in accordance with the order of things, with the knowledge of human and divine laws. But, as modernity entered the historical scene, roughly from XVI century on, exercise of power was no longer adjusted in accordance with wisdom, but according to calculation of force, relations, wealth and factors of strength. The modern forms of government technology could be described as control of government by pegging it to rationality.[1] Modernity, since the nineteenth century, is marked by the emergence of four modes of governmental rationalities, which in subsequent two centuries overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other. They represent art of government according to: 1) truth, 2) rationality of the sovereign state, 3) rationality of economic agents and 4) rationality of the governed[2].

It is the fourth mode — the rationality of the governed as the regulating principle of the rationality of the government – that was responsible for the rise of neoliberalism and Homo Oeconomicus as the new political subject and, with it, the emergence of economics as the ideological metalanguage in the second half of the twentieth century.

The trap of rationality and the search for unwisdom

Neoliberalism disseminates market values into every sphere of human activity. People are seen as specs of human capital which needs to appreciate and get reinvested by making proper choices (mate, education, job,…). It provides direction without meaning in directionless environment of postmodernity. (Wendy Brown)

Rationality is a wonderful thing. However, when coupled with competition and when the two are elevated to the highest principle of human existence – when everything in life is reduced to rational decisions in a competitive environment – it becomes a spectacularly efficient mechanism of exclusion. Sooner or later, the symbiosis of the two create a winner-takes-all environment where every failure to make a right decision has dire consequences.

With competition, the number of right paths is shrinking and the number of wrong ones proliferates. Every wrong turn is punitive and potentially fatal. In the kingdom of rationality, bad decisions become self-reinforcing. One wrong turn reduces subsequent maneuvering space and forces another suboptimal choice until there are only wrong choices, all the good and rational ones had been taken by competitors.

The number of those who have failed rationality test grows exponentially with time. They are the excess of population. They hate rationality passionately and resent reality they have been served. The real problem is the unforgiving aspect of progress, the persistent depletion of the safety net and the ultimate absence of cushion. Yet, the excluded are lured into an ideological trap that supports the narrative of systematic removal of that very safety net and, in that process, they continuously undermine themselves. They prefer anything, any alternative to what they have now, not matter how elusive, dubious, and unpalatable the reasoning behind it.

This self-sabotage is at the base of the frustration of a large segment of the population. From the political side this is perceived as an irresistible source of rage capital that is begging to be deployed and reinvested. For the excluded, refusal to yield to the forces of reason is the ultimate act of resistance, a sign of desire to liberate themselves from the tyranny of rationality.

The great U-turn and the politics of performative speech acts

Performative utterances are sentences which not only describe a given reality, but also change the social reality once they are pronounced, like “I pronounce you husband and wife”, or “The court finds you guilty”.

When the number of those who have failed the rationality test is so large that there is no more place for them in the enclosure of prosperity and when they begin to present a significant political body whose voice can be heard in the ballot box, rationality, as a way of governing, has already exhausted itself – its toxic effects have taken over. At that point, the excluded will seek to abandon reason and, with a dash of nostalgia and a help of identity politics, elect a new prince. And this prince will be unlike any other before him. He will govern with unwisdom, and will have the courage to wear his unreason unabashedly as an ultimate virtue. He will create a new order of things, define new reality, and construct the world of unreason with rules that only he and his base will understand. The new fictions will become their articles of faith. Facts and truth will no longer have their old values and the wish for a coherent fictitious world will be satisfied.

In the kingdom of unreason, power will derive from a way of using language rather than from a system of ideas[3]. The first phase of the uprising will consist of a linguistic revolution. Performative speech acts — the pronouncements that change reality by their mere utterance — will enter the vernacular and shape political and social reality. This is where self-intoxication begins. By repeating and ritually solidifying lies, those who tell them and hear them may, after a while, embrace them as articles of faith. As soon as falsehood has become part of a group identity, it generates new obligations which can be neglected only at risk of showing weakness or, worse still, a treasonous attitude. [4]

Unwind of enlightenment and the great U-turn

In a strange twist of fate, emancipation, which marks transition from wisdom to rationality and gives rise to enlightenment as the public use of reason, in the late stage of neoliberalism, it creates conditions for its own demise that lead to its forced unwind and a historical U-turn. With the rise of unreason, populism takes over and becomes neoliberalism’s counterpart in its afterlife.

Unreasonable people cannot be governed by reason. They require a leader who appeals to their irrational side and who, therefore, has to display unreason himself. A different principle is required for governing such masses, a mirror image of neoliberalism’s “governing through freedom”. Unreasonable people are governed through unfreedom.

But this, like any other, detachment from reality cannot be anything but short-lived. The question is not if, but when. The leader will sit in his big car, get on a highway and drive against the traffic. His car will have only one pedal: gas. Like his followers, he believes that everyone else is driving in the wrong direction. Many drivers will move to the shoulders to avoid the collision, but, as he continues to accelerate, there will be a slow-moving trailer trucks that will not be able to maneuver fast enough and, at the end, the fanaticism and the speed will consume their creator. There ain’t no way around it.

[1] Michele Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979, Picador (2010)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Albrecht Koschorke, Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf”: Zur Poetik des Nationalsozialismus, Berlin (2016)

[4] Ibid.

 

9. VI 2018

Populism as space travel

Populism consists of the simultaneous embrace and denial of shit.

The history of populism is a repository of failed missions — a true destination of the populist journey is really a problem of imagination. For the most part of his literary opus, post-modern Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin has been trying to imagine social settings which represent life consistent with alternative and unconventional rules. One such example is offered in his novel “The Norm”, where the Soviet style populism, packed as the vulgar materialistic interpretation of “pseudo-egalitarian” dystopia has settled in and been allowed to blossom to its final consequences. The book was written in the 1980s, when the system’s imminent end was not palpable, and the writer described its long-term trajectory, the very journey of the Soviet “deep space mission”.

“The Norm” is the name for a piece of food that every Soviet citizen considers important, even prestigious to possess, taste, chew, and eat, notwithstanding the fact that it smells bad, almost like excrement. The book is a series of vignettes linked by a moment in each when a character unwraps his or her ration of a substance called “the norm.” It stinks and tastes awful. Children especially hate it, but they, like everyone else, swallow their daily dose. It’s shit, of course, actual human excrement—a pungent symbol of the requisite humiliations of the Soviet system and, perhaps, of life in any oppressive collectivity. Ours included. [1]

There is no rule that says rules cannot be broken

It remains one of the great ironies of the post-1968 West that massive waves of liberation on all fronts ultimately only paved the way for hegemony. This resulted in a drastic reshaping of the possible modes of contestation of different forms of power. How does one rebel against the all-permissive system that shows absolute hegemonic dominance where saying no is meaningless and inconsequential and where resistance is futile? Oppression can be overturned by revolution, but hegemony cannot – it has to be toppled from within. For a rapidly growing majority of those pushed outside of the (shrinking) enclosure of prosperity whose future is collapsing under the crunch of status quo, there is no hope for change. For them, life on this “planet” is no longer possible. The only mode of resistance is rebellion against the established rules.

The world has already seen this type of resistance on the global geopolitical scene as a total collective refusal to play by the rules of the neo-liberal world order. The regimes which have refused to follow the established conventions are not new, from Castro and Khomeini, to Iraq, North Africa, Afghanistan and North Korea. The novelty brought in by the rise of the right-wing populism in the West is that it comes from the part of the world that has been the staunchest defender of those rules and is now championing their dismantling.

The war on rules is a decision to exorcise oneself from the existing order of things – it is a declaration of war on oneself, a suicide mission of sorts. It is an exile to another “planet”. Any political or religious leader willing to undertake this mission on behalf of the excluded, is likely to forge a special pact between himself and his constituents. The implicit sacrificial obligation of this commitment, by its very nature, makes that person immune to any defection, or ideological or material corruption, and secures an unconditional, cult-like devotion and support from his following. Even if facts and reality point to his flaws, corruptibility or dishonesty, his commitment alone will ensure a practically unlimited political credit line.

Populism, like space travel, is sustained by the hope that life on another planet is possible. Populist leaders and their followers are faced with the same dilemmas as space travelers. They all carry the willingness to leave the world as we know it and embark on a potentially fatal journey, even if the probability of success is infinitesimal. And that willingness is the most radical act of rule breaking and an absolute weapon against the system that operates on the basis of the exclusion of death.

As long as the leaders stick to their promises, people will cut them slack. Populism’s main agenda is continuous breaking of the rules. The more politically damning their actions, the stronger their commitment appears. The more blatant disrespect for the established conventions and rules they show, no matter how futile and meaningless those empty gestures might be, the firmer the bond between populist leaders and their followers. What is normally perceived as a political suicide becomes the main engine of popularity.

Shit as a universal reference frame

The integrity of our lives, as we know them, is sustained by an extraordinarily fine-tuned set of rules and parameters. Disturbing the rules even slightly leads to qualitative changes. If our body’s temperature changes by one degree, we get sick, if it rises by more than four degrees, we are very likely to die. Inventing new rules means inventing new forms of life[2].

This link between rules and life is the aspect populist leaders, predominantly the right-wing kind, and their followers show no capacity for understanding – their most distinguishing trademark is a deafening cognitive dissonance. But what kind of life can we expect on the populist planet? On Mars, for example, the gravitational constant is three times lower than on Earth and water there boils at 10 degrees Celsius, so no coffee, and no hardboiled eggs for starters. Everyone is at least eight feet tall, their bone density different, blood flow probably seriously compromised, and who knows how that affects the brain.

Embracing new rules, like embarking on a deep space mission, requires a voluntary participation ritual. Sorokin’s book, The Norm, describes precisely such ritualized participation. However, as outlandish as it sounds, the book’s extrapolation is not far-removed from our reality. Rules that govern our lives also regulate the flow of shit, its path and direction, how it disappears and how it resurfaces in different forms[3]. We use shit to fertilize soil and grow plants; animals eat those plants and we eat both animals and plants. However, there is a clear protocol in these circular flows. They are important. Changing the rules even slightly profoundly affects our lives.

Like space travel[4], populism approaches shit rationally by throwing it (with everything else) into the big optimizer. The difference between Sorokin’s dystopia and our world is condensed in minor changes in the rules of shit-flow, by cutting the “middleman”. Such approach is hardly a surprise, given the decades of reign of the ideology where the requirement of economic optimization is elevated to a general political principle whereby the system of economic production is also a system of anthropological production[5] — an extension of market rationality to existence in its entirety. The recycling bin of this ideology is the actual birth place of the right-wing populism — a political maneuver championed by the mid-level segment of the oligarchic structure, posing as self-proclaimed defenders of the excluded and purveyors of ideological snake oil for the poor. Their platform is founded on the long ago rejected “free-market” dogmas, which nobody (including them) takes seriously anymore, alive only thanks to the life support provided by the new identity politics.

[1] Ben Ehrenreich, Vladimir Sorokin’s Absurdist Excess, The Nation (4-Feb-2016)

[2] Heterotopias are reminders of this link, as Michel Foucault outlined in his 1967 essay, Des espaces autres, Hétérotopies. They represent real sites that can be found within the culture where social rules and interactions are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted, e.g. boarding schools, in their nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men; heterotopias of deviation like rest homes, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons; brothels, puritan societies established by the English settlers in America, or Jesuit colonies founded in South America in which “human perfection” was effectively achieved. Life in these communities is significantly different from that on the outside, but the underlying rules governing them are only slight variations of ours.

[3] This is a deep ideological terrain – different cultures are distinguished by the way they dispose of their shit (the comparative architecture of German and French toilettes is probably the most eloquent summary of the differences between the two cultures).

[4] When it comes to manned deep space missions, bringing food supplies from Earth would take up valuable space aboard the spacecraft as well as increase fuel consumption, which is why scientists are searching for a more economical solution by growing or generating food en route. Astronauts on their way to Mars may be required to eat their own waste in the form of a recycled paste. The innovation is being touted as a possible nutritional solution for long-term manned space missions.

[5] P. Dardot and C. Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde, La Découverte (2010)

 

14. IV 2018

The poverty of technology and the technology of poverty

It was one of those rainy and damp days, I was finding my way out of the F-train subway on Bergen St. in Brooklyn. On the mezzanine level, in the corner of the stairwell, I noticed a young man, couldn’t have been much older than 30. Rain was slowly cascading into the subway, small puddles forming everywhere forcing him into an uncomfortable squat instead of a sitting position. His appearance was modest; he looked tired and lonely, but not destitute. There were none of the signs of physical neglect usually seen in homeless people – he looked like someone who had access to a bed and sanitary facilities. There was a money tray with a few coins in front of him indicating that he had been there for some time. The man seemed relaxed and disinterested in making eye contact with passersby. He appeared preoccupied with what was happening on his iPhone, most likely Instagram or the traffic on the social networks.

Panhandlers with smartphones are unusual sight – it is not just the price of the accessory that is at odds with their social status, but the entire protocol: the price of connectivity, how they pays their bills, which assumes a checking account; purchases of apps, which requires possession of a credit card suggesting some king of credit history… Things just don’t add up. However, as much as the two were an odd combination, it was difficult to dismiss the thought that, on some level, they shared the same causal connector, and they stand as two representations of the same underlying cause of social degradation. While poverty is a consequence of the system’s inherent urge to cannibalize itself, tech, on the other hand, has become the other face of resistance to change.

The panhandler and the smartphone together unify the worlds of thrift store shoppers and the high tech of Silicon Valley. The following chart brings us closer to the origin of this unstrange connection. It shows three price histories representing roughly three different social segments of the stock market. Dollar Tree is a chain of discount variety stores in the US. It sells an assortment of everyday general merchandise; it is a lower end version of Walmart, with most goods priced at or below $1. It is the place where poor folks buy their stuff. Since 2001 (the perception of) the value of Dollar Tree has increased by 11 times, while during the same time Apple, which needs no introduction, has had a 140-fold rise. For comparison, S&P or other benchmark stock indices have grown “only” 2 times.

The coordination between two histories is not a story of correlations in the sense normally used in statistics, but of a different type of commonality, the most interesting point being not their mutual causation, but the timing they share. Between 2008 and 2009, S&P index –the “social median” of the stock market– lost 50% of its value. It took four years for it to recover. In contrast, Dollar Tree, the poor man’s outlet, starts its big takeoff in 2008 with the stock price practically quadrupling during the subsequent four years. This timing and trend are in synch with all other measures of rise in poverty[1]. This is also the moment when Apple’s explosive rise begins.

The poverty of digital nations: Silicon Valley meets thrift shop

While the middle of the affluent sector of society (S&P world) advanced in “moderate” steps, the wings on both sides have outpaced it by a wide margin. Two seemingly different entities on opposite sides of the social spectrum – the beneficiaries of growing poverty and of the technological boom — register a common inflection point around the time of the deepest financial and social crises in modern history.

Dollar Tree’s success in the last ten years has been a function of demand created by an explosive supply of poverty; Apple’s rise has been an indirect beneficiary of its side effects. As social reality was disintegrating, the void it created was filled by its virtual surrogate with Apple acting as the main subcontractor in the process of digitalization of social relations. This ties the panhandler and the iPhone together as a result of centrifugal forces of social fragmentation and the disappearance of the middle into the extremes.

The poverty of technology: Rent economy cannibalizes itself

As the economy transitions from material to immaterial, innovations become its main focus. If one can come up with a technological innovation that enables him or her to manufacture a product for 10 cents and sell it for over $200 on a sustained basis, all subsequent profits will be reinvested in that direction. In markets with strict intellectual property laws prices are no longer commensurate with production costs, but contain a scarcity premium. In this way, innovation becomes a source of Rent.

Rent is the most irresistible source of income. At the same, time it is economically and socially intolerable. If someone somewhere is paid without doing any work, then someone somewhere works without getting paid. Rent economy is a voluntary slavery. Employment becomes the right to be exploited and unemployment is denial of that right. However, when there is no need for labor, and freedom is a constitutional right of every citizen, there are slaves without masters roaming around without anything to do. They become the excess of population.

Irresistible resistance to change

In the past, technology always generated new demand and forced people to reinvent their skills to accommodate for the new needs. This is no longer the case. Modern technology destroys more jobs than it creates. As such, it has become the main destabilizing force. Its basic commodity is immaterial – it costs nothing to produce an idea. If labor is the main cost of production, relocating the production centers to regions with the cheapest labor becomes the dominant mode of profit maximization. In this way, low production costs abroad create precariat at home.

Profit chasing leads to geographic displacement and social and cultural dislocations. Through their deterritorialization the elites lose their social footing. Their riches decouple from the well-being of society. The Keynesian bond, which used to tie the profits of the rich to the wages of the poor is severed, cutting the fate of economic elites loose from that of the masses. The possibility, provided by a global capital market, of rescuing themselves and their families by exiting together with their possessions offers the strongest possible temptation for the rich not to be interested in the social impact of their actions[2].

This is not sustainable in the long run. Once the exploitation becomes global and all alternatives are exhausted, the system has to collapse. The main question is: Who can act as an agent of change? Who represents the new social archetype of post-capitalism — a descendent of the medieval knight in feudalism or bourgeoisie in industrial capitalism?

Paul Mason has argued that a composite picture of that type would correspond to a Universal Educated Person. Their skill set is a fusion of managerial and intellectual abilities. Such a person needs to be a bearer of the new social relations inside the old, interested in engaging in political discourse with the intention of triggering change on the social level, and appear in large numbers. Currently, the “T-shirted bourgeoisie”, although fitting the description of a universal educated person with the right skills, does not want to reconfigure the system – rather, they favor a monopolistic structure and extraction of Rent[3], without much regard for the long-term consequences. Instead of being guardians of the future and sustainability, Silicon Valley billionaires prefer to invest in doomsday bunkers and property in New Zealand.

The technology of poverty and society of tiredness

When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production. This is the main difference with respect to industrial age when material production defined the tensions between capital and labor. In cognitive capitalism, we are talking about, what B. C. Han calls the Achievement society, where everyone is entrepreneur of themselves, the exploiter and the exploited, the master and the slave, at the same time. Everyone is trapped in the auto-exploitation out of which there is no escape through resistance or uprising, but through internalizing his or her discontent through withdrawal and depression[4]. Zygmunt Bauman sees this as a social death spiral: The uncertainty of the Achievement society is a powerful individualizing force. It divides instead of uniting, and since there is no telling who will wake up the next day in what division, the idea of ‘common interests’ grows ever more nebulous and loses all pragmatic value. Contemporary fears, anxieties and grievances are made to be suffered alone[5].

The society of achievement is generating tiredness and exhaustion. This is a solitary and divisive tiredness with separating effect[6]. Digitalization of social relations is a response to this state of affairs. It fills the vacuum created by achievement society by providing a virtual supplement that makes isolation bearable by satisfying our ontological resistance to isolation. Social digitalization creates contours of a community; it transposes, to use Peter Handke’s terminology, I-tiredness into We-tiredness[7] while, at the same time, reinforcing isolation by creating a phantasmatic layer and illusion of self-sufficiency. Infinite plasticity of the digital society – ability to be shaped at our will — is intrusive and invasive: One can be anything one desires by creating an avatar and digital persona of any shape, form, and ability. This is virtual doping: It makes possible to achieve without achieving[8].

Social digitalization makes it possible to conceive of a community that requires neither belonging nor relation. The existence of a community, albeit virtual, results in an immanent religion of tiredness, one that needs no kinship. This is where smartphones come in. Here is Frankfurt School and B. C. Han, one more time:

Every technology or technique of domination brings forth characteristic devotional objects that are employed in order to subjugate. Such objects naturalize and stabilize domination. Devotion means submission to obedience. Smartphones represent devotion – indeed, they are the devotional objects of the Digital. They work like a rosary, which, because of its ready availability, represents a handheld device too. Both (the smartphones and rosary) serve the purpose of self-monitoring and control. The smartphone is not just an effective surveillance apparatus; it is also a mobile confessional. Facebook is the church – the global synagogue of the Digital. “Like” is the digital “Amen”[9].

[1]Since 2008, the number of people on food stamps has almost doubled – there is currently around 50 million people on food stamps in the US. During the same period, the fraction of the population living below poverty level has increased from 12% to 15%. These are just continuation of the long term secular trends underscoring the social fragmentation of the late 20^th century. For the bottom 90% of Americans, living standards have not changed since 1970s. In contrast, for the top 1% they have risen 5 times and for the top 0.01% by 10 times in the last 50 years.

[2] Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System, Verso (2016)

[3] Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2016)

[4] B. C. Han, Psychopolitik: Müdigkeitsgesellschaft Burnoutgesellschaft Hoch-Zeit, Matthes & Seitz Berlin (2016)

[5] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity (2003)

[6] Peter Handke, Versuch über die Müdigkeit (in Die drei Versuche), Suhrkamp (1998)

[7] Peter Handke, ibid.

[8] B. C. Han, Psychopolitik: Neoliberalismus und die neuen Machttechniken, Fischer (2015)

[9] B. C. Han, ibid.

30. III 2018

Lost in a dream of electoral dictatorship: America as a failed state

They turn our brothers and sisters into mercenaries

They are turning the planet into a cemetery

The Military and the Monetary, use the media as intermediaries

They are determined to keep the citizens secondary

They make so many decisions that are arbitrary

We’re marching behind a commander in chief

Who is standing under a spotlight shaking like a leaf

But the ship of state had landed on an economic reef

So we knew he was going to bring us messages of grief

(Gil Scott Heron, Work for Peace)

American oligarchs have had an eye on post-Soviet Russia ever since the first days of communism’s collapse. Their fascination with its post-communist transformation continues to this date. In less than two decades, the country of chronic state-mismanaged scarcity, where everyone had to stand in line in order to maintain elementary standards of living, where the western middle-class lifestyle was just a pipe dream, and where getting rich was a crime, this very country became an oligarchic paradise producing practically overnight a stunning number of obscenely rich and disturbingly powerful individuals, who rose directly from the rubble of the dismembered Soviet state.

The DNA of a typical Russian oligarch reveals a hybrid of a communist apparatchik, a government bureaucrat, and a strictly small-time criminal – a sub-mediocrity in every aspect. Yet, these people became an embodiment of the ultimate American Dream. People who lived all their lives in isolation, who had no exposure to business know-how and had no place or opportunities to learn about it; people who lived close to what in America would be considered the poverty level, emerged as super-rich. These passive and utterly unremarkable recipients of the political lottery jackpot were graced with unimaginable fortunes just by sitting on the wrong side of the political crossroads at the right time. This realization has had to inspire both rage and jealousy, and at the same time corrupt the mind of every honest western constituent brought up on the protestant ethics of hard work.

The main message of the post-communist transformation of the Soviet Union has been that political circumstances, rather than demographics, are the key explanatory variables behind the resulting outcomes. State sponsored corruption, the residual of the old communist system, was the secret sauce, which added a special flavor.  Failed states create conditions of unimaginable business opportunities. This realization added a new dimension to the already existing American Right’s fetish of a smaller state. With the recent rise of right-wing populism, the idea of the failed state as a new paradigm of economic and social restructuring gained wider acceptance and stronger footing.

For quite some time, supporting or explicitly engineering a failed-states project, and creating a global disequilibrium that would force or accelerate a change, has been a signature strategy of American global politics in its late neoliberal phase. This project got new wind in the 1990s, capturing not only the post-communist Soviet bloc, but spreading also to the Balkans, Iraq, Middle East, North Africa, and beyond, while in the West it manifested itself through tensions between the global oligarchy and populist implementations of the neo-feudal visions of the world.

Oligarchic tromboning: Pimps, sultans and banana republicans. The anatomy of a political mancrush

The failed-state project abroad has been a special inspiration at home. A source of superlative profits for the American Military Industrial Complex, in Russia, in terms of the rise of riches of their new elites, the results have been nothing short of a miracle. So, why not try it at home? After all, over the last three decades, we have had enough practice with a number of controlled experiments that this would be a no brainer.

Current political developments in the US reflect precisely this logic. There is a concerted effort to preserve the wealth of a very small group of people or powerful institutions, while at the same time, introducing corruption as an integral part of political dealing and diffusing the obstacles to its normalization. This is the ultimate form of oligarchic refunctioning, where everything else — culture, politics, social well-being — becomes subordinated to the interests of an absolute minority. Plutocracy becomes indistinguishable from Kakocracy – a Faustian pact where the elites form a coalition with a criminal element, and together they establish the government of the worst.

Based on everything we’ve seen so far, the dismembering of the USSR has emerged as a blueprint for the restructuring of the American state. The Soviet Union, which after its breakup started as an essentially criminal enterprise and subsequently made a sharp turn towards an electoral dictatorship and sultanic oligarchy.  When seen from the perspective of plutocratic interests, the post-Soviet style social transformation is rationalized as a more efficient form of social organization than any emancipatory alternative.

This has been embraced as a preferred transformational path of the American right wing. The contours of Trump’s economy indicate a process of transition from the invisible hand to the invisible fist, where economic justice completely eliminates the last vestiges of social justice and takes it to the realm where economic interests of a few are the only ones in existence. While Trump has displayed an open disdain for the world’s leading democratic leaders, a mancrush on Putin notwithstanding, he has gone out of his way to show unreserved support and admiration for autocratic outliers such as Duterte (invited to the WH), Nursultan Nazarbayev, Xi Jingpin (inspiring praise for his lifetime presidency), (“Smart cookie” and a worthy adversary) Kim Jong Un, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi (the quiet general, aka The Pimp), and the Sultan himself, Recep Erdogan!

When viewed in the context of a general oligarchic framework, the two trajectories corresponding to the post-Soviet and current American political repositioning, outlined in the figure, both show convergence towards the same destination corresponding to a sultanic oligarchy.

Oligarchy represents different modes of wealth defense. The interplay between oligarchic coercive power and their organization defines the four corners assigned to underlying political systems within which all political structures reside. Variations across oligarchies are two-dimensional with main axes defined by how oligarchs impose their will (e.g. are they armed or disarmed) and their mode of rule (e.g. individualitstic, collective or institutionalized). This results in four possible structures. All historically known political structures reside within these four corners. Unlike electoral democracies which are characterized as civil oligarchies, in sultanic oligarchy (lower right corner), oligarchs surrender a major part of their power to a single individual. One oligarch is more powerful than the rest (e.g. Suharto’s Indonesia, the Philippines under Marcos, or post-Soviet Russia under Putin). This is an application of the framework defined in: J. A Winters, Oligarchy, Cambridge University Press (2011)

The fourth horseman and the (im)possibility of emancipation

Corruption, this fourth horseman of the apocalypse, which has long been in hiding, is now making itself fully visible. Together with the three main systemic disorders – Stagnation, Redistribution, and Plundering of the public domain – it outlines the contours of the terminal destination of the current social transformation in the developed world.

Trump’s ambition has never been to become just a president, but a sultan. The deliberate display of his own corruption with the intent to normalize it and pave the way for its widespread acceptance, together with an emphasis on being above the law as part of his privileged position are reflections of his sultanic aspirations.

Wolfgang Streeck gives the best summary of erosive effects of corruption on politics and society. Converting public trust into private cash has become routine. Greed is no longer magically converted into public virtue, depriving capitalism of its last consequentialist moral justification. Stylizing owners of capital as trustees of society is losing any remaining credibility. Corruption is considered a fact of life as well as the monopolization of political influence by the self-serving oligarchic minority. As a consequence, pervasive cynicism deeply ingrained in the collective common sense is changing the functioning of the system. A political career is seen as an institutionalized opportunity for the well-connected elites and it is irrational to say no to these opportunities. Populism no longer serves to recenter the center, but is becoming a major destabilizing force. The system is ultimately facing a looming legitimation crisis – the existing social order is being rendered morally defenseless in possible future contestation[1].

The silver lining, if one is to be found at all, is that chaos, if administered in the right way, instead of creating confusion, could serve as a political “eye-opener”. This could force a transformation of the political subjects’ psyche, triggering a transideological moment when the political body desires to transcend the political confines faced with absurdity and obsolescence of the existing ideological framework and embarks on a path of accidental emancipatory transformation.

[1] Wolfgang Streeck, How will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System, Verso (2017)

 

24. III 2018

American corrida and the reconstitution of the state

No one really ever liked the state, but the great majority permitted its powers to grow ever greater because they saw the state as the mediator of reform. But if it cannot play this function, then why suffer the state? But if we don’t have a strong state, who will provide daily security? (I. Wallerstein)

Social and economic cycles used to move together. This was many years ago. For over 40 years now, the two have fallen out of synch. After each recession, recovery had to be won by making social concessions — this was always considered acceptable expecting the economic advantages to feed back into society. With time, economic progress has decoupled from the well-being of society. Social deficits have grown so large that, unlike the economy, society can no longer recover. The last crisis has taken a form of an autoimmune reaction. We have reached the point of self-intoxication when inner contradictions of the system, which previously could be temporarily ignored, are taking over. The system has exhausted itself – it has collapsed under its own weight.

Overcoming the accumulated social deficit requires deeper social changes. At the root of this quest lies the breakdown of traditional social contract, which started more than four decades ago. In its original form it can no longer be used even as a rough outline.

As divergence between productivity and income has increased, so has the distributional asymmetry of profits resulting in growing inequality, which after decades have evolved into the main destabilizing force. The problem with inequality is not the skew in wealth distribution between those who have some and those who have more (or much more), but extreme fragmentation of society into a rapidly shrinking minority of those who have everything and an exploding majority of those who have nothing. Shrinking middle class in developed economies has grown increasingly vulnerable to poverty while, at the same time, poverty has become a risky and unstable state. This led to new forms of precarity, social marginality, and stratification at the expanding bottom.

As a consequence, cultural divide has reached such high levels that disputes can no longer be resolved through democratic process. Western societies are at the juncture where they need to develop alternative modes of social organizing and define new social contract.

Craig Calhoun gives possibly the best summary of the singularity of the present political configuration: Western societies are at the intersection of economic and political crises, which presents the most dangerous development that could emerge from this situation. Erosion of implicit bargain by which people accept damages to society or environment in the pursuit of progress results in recurrent political unrest. Faltering growth brings disappointment to those with rising expectation and elected leaders seek to diminish public freedoms and quash dissent.[1]

There is an urgent need to reconfigure the capitalist state in such a way that harmonizes with the needs of both the economy and the society. This is a painful and politically risky maneuver that requires undoing centuries of institutional baggage. Reconfiguration of the state is the main event of this political moment; everything else is just a distraction.

The main objective of current populist politics is to decouple the two crises by any means. In its current iteration the strategy consists of preventing the lethal mix to be realized, by creating a distraction (economic, social, media, political, as much controversy as necessary…), while the state is being rapidly dismantled. But this cannot be a stable solution, only a way of buying some time. It is just a beginning of a long process of social transformation likely to take the center stage in the next decades.

State and social insecurity: From welfare to penal pornography

The transformation that the state has undergone in the last 40-50 years can be characterized at best as inadequate or incomplete, lagging behind, and not adapting to, much deeper technological and economic changes.

The substance of capitalism is the meeting of capital and labor. Capital must be able to buy labor and labor must be attractive enough to be saleable. In that context, the main task (and legitimation) of the capitalist state is to broker this exchange — to see that both of these conditions are met. It must subsidize capital and ensure that labor is worth purchasing (it is healthy, properly trained in the skills and behavioral habits, and is able to ensure the strains of the factory floor). Legitimation crisis of capitalist state lies in transition from society of producers to society of consumers – the prime source of capital accumulation has moved from industry to consumer markets. State subsidies now render capital able to sell commodities and consumers able to buy them. Credit was perceived as a magic contraption in that context. Capitalist state now must assure the continuous availability of credit and the continuous ability of consumers to obtain it. The welfare state is now underfunded because the principal source of capital accumulation has been relocated from exploitation of labor to exploitation of consumer[2].

As the state was withdrawing from the welfare arena, the existing forces were pushing it to the punitive mode of its functioning. The poverty of the social state against the backdrop of deregulation elicits and necessitates the grandeur of the penal state[3]. This is neoliberalism in action: Subordinate all human activities to the laws of the market.

The unwanted byproduct of economic Neo-Darwinism, unwind of the welfare state, and the rising precarity has been the excess population — the surplus of humanity that is unwanted, inconvenient, and ultimately displaced[4]. There are more people who fall through the cracks than those who succeed — a growing segment of population that can no longer be reintegrated into a normal functioning of the society. These people are neither producers nor consumers.

The response of the state has been to segregate the nonproductive, non-consuming, social element either through their permanent exclusion (e.g. opioids, or other forms of social marginalization) or turn them into profit centers through incarceration (e.g. private prisons). The state has effectively switched from its welfare to the punitive mode of functioning signaling the emergence of carceral state as one of the defining characteristics of the late-stage neoliberalism.

However, no solution has emerged from these, essentially ideological, maneuvers, which have only exacerbated the problem of excess population: The volume of humans made redundant by capitalism’s global triumph grows unstoppably and comes close now to exceeding the managerial capacity of the planet; there is a plausible prospect of capitalist modernity choking on its own waste products which it can neither reassimilate or annihilate, nor detoxify[5]. This has resurfaced as the main problem of the neoliberalism that does not have a solution inside the existing paradigm.

Rising social antagonisms and tensions are rapidly becoming a cause of additional loss of social cohesion with precarity and hopelessness on one side against discomfort and entrenchment of the privileged on the other. Growing rage capital is being harvested by the right wing populism. Growing discontent is used as the lever arm to reconfigure the sate to a more radical form of carceral, militarized entity with enhanced punitive mandate and further dismantle the vestiges of the welfare state. At the same time, under the pretext of economic and fiscal reform, there is a concerted effort to shake up the constitution and push the system towards a more efficient structure that foster easier oligarchic repositioning.

The matador enters the rink

In the final stage of corrida, the tercio de muerte (part of death), the matador re-enters the ring alone with a small red cape (muleta) in one hand and a sword in the other. The faena (job) consists of the entire performance with the muleta, in which he uses his cape to attract the bull in a series of passes, both demonstrating his control over it and risking his life by getting especially close to it. Faena ends with a final series of passes in which the matador with a muleta attempts to maneuver the bull into a position to stab it between the shoulder blades and through the aorta or heart (estocada).

Inside the existing neoliberal paradigm, we have already reached the dead end when there is nothing else that could be done. The only thing that remains is to reinvent the status quo through distraction. This brings us to the present moment. Like traditional Spanish corrida, dismantling of the state has assumed a highly ritualized process. In the words of Sylvère Lotringer, it is ritual without the sacred, the tragic without the tragedy. While populist campaigns have masked themselves as de-oligarchification movements centered on their anti-global sentiment, the American version has acquired a distinct flavor. The most recent attempt at transformation is nothing else but an oligarchic repositioning, an attempt to avoid a change by diversion. Trump’s right-wing populism, in fact, is a rearrangement of the oligarchic modes of economic and social functioning.

This is precisely the transformation that took place in the post-communist world in the 1990s. Trump’s cabinet nominations, selection of his advisors and his appointees reflect a desire to engineer a collapse of the state institutions — create new initial conditions resembling a failed state – and rebuild new structures on its rubble. As such, 2016 represents a regressive move towards a more primitive oligarchic structure.

This is the final stage of the American corrida — after wearing the bull down, the matador has entered the arena in 2016. Presidential tweets, the penchant for scandal, controversies, pathological lies, being consistently on the wrong side of every dispute and argument, flirting with constitutional crisis, everything…. All this is the red cape (the matador’s muleta). His job, (the faena), is at the same time to distract the public attention, test the system’s resilience, wear down the public and bring the state institutions to their breaking point before delivering the final blow (estocada) to the constitution, democracy and the American state.

Contrary to the naïve and misguided belief that Good always triumphs over Evil, history is on no one’s side. The outcome is ultimately binary. Who will be taken out on a stretcher, the matador or the bull? And whom will be the crowd cheering for?

[1] Craig Calhoun, in Does Capitalism Have a Future? Ed. I Wallerstein et al., Oxford University Press (2013)

[2] Zygmund Bauman, Liquid Times, Living in the Age of Uncertainty, Polity (2007)

[3] Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor, Duke University Press (2009)

[4] Zygmund Bauman, Wasted Lives, Polity (2012)

21. III 2018

Perfect crimes & misdemeanors: The politics of inflated balloons

If I throw a ball to someone at the other end of the room, that person will be able to catch it by anticipating its approximate path. The key aspect of the underlying heuristics is that a small error in the catchers’ judgment will have a small impact on the point at which the ball lands, to which they will be able to adjust as the ball approaches.

This would be impossible if I were to replace the ball with a balloon, blow it up, hold it out, and release it. As the balloon sputters and darts around the room in a chaotic path, its trajectory will be impossible to anticipate. Although both objects, the ball and the balloon, follow Newton’s laws of motion, their behaviors are quite different.

In chaotic systems (inflated balloons), as time goes forward, everything is moving away from everything else. This ever-widening divide means that if you are trying to predict the future behavior of a chaotic system, errors in initial measurements become overwhelming as time progresses — if there is any error at all in our initial measurements, our long-term predictions will be absurdly wrong.

When one puts an inflated balloon in a presidential seat, and his political strategy boils down to using chaos as a catalyst to push the existing political and ideological systems to their breaking point, consequences of that misguided approach cannot be foreseen and, as such, cannot amount to a socially positive outcome.

This seemingly strange idea of forcing a change by destruction is neither new nor original. It was first outlined in the works of the 19^th century French thinkers — Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi offers a good example — and developed further by the post-modernists and finally crystallized by Jean Baudrillard: Total revolution is a strategy geared to escalate the system and push it to its breaking point. Then, giving up on every pretense of rationality, it starts revolving and achieves in the process a circularity of its own. The society of the spectacle is turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. Life is being exchanged for nothing, for a handful of glittering toys, work absorbs time like a sponge and leaves no traces. The system itself becomes the exterminator.

Chaos is destruction of the future — only what is simultaneous counts. Political chaos cannibalizes itself — it reflects a disregard for the long-term effects of the present actions — last week’s developments become irrelevant and inconsequential in light of yesterday’s headlines. Society loses sight of its future and, without a clear vision of the future, the present cannot take off.

The future is based on responsibility and responsibility presupposes obligation. As such, it reflects an act of making a promise or showing trust. Such acts hold and stabilize the future. In contrast, chaos promotes non-bindingness, arbitrariness and the short term[1]. The absolute precedence and priority of the present is the hallmark of the current political landscape. It is scattering time into mere sequence of disposable presents. The future is degrading into an optimized present.

Chaos is simultaneity and irresponsibility at the same time. It is the perfect crime perpetuated on time[2].

[1] B. C. Han, Im Schwarm: Ansichten des Digitalen, Matthes & Seitz Berlin (2013)

[2] Paul Virilio

 

31. XII 2017

Year of the moron: Making sense of 2017

Madness is the purest, most total form of misunderstanding; it takes the false for true. Madness needs no external element to reach true resolution. It is merely to carry its illusion to the point of truth. (Michel Foucault)

All other things aside, 2017 will be remembered as the year when madness gained acceptance in mainstream politics and everyday life. Last year raised one key question that begs for an answer: Why is there such a similarity between the mindset of right wing conservatives and the mentally ill? With the rise of new conservatism, madness has been embraced and promoted as a tool of political alchemy. The tide of madness has been rising, its secret intrusion spreading effortlessly, acquiring new substance and metric. Last year represents a giant leap in terms of general acceptance of madness – the beginning of its accelerated phase towards production of human bodies without human reason and a general abnormalization of the world. Since the extinction of leprosy in the middle ages, madness had been kept outside of the public life as a way of protecting the social body from its influences. We are witnessing a radical departure from a long tradition whose consequences are just beginning to be visible. This is a new chapter in the history of our civilization.

The alchemy and the substance of madness

Madness, like plague, is contagious, and everyone who gets close to a mad man seems to participate in his delirium. (Sylvère Lotringer)

Dutch masters had a thing about madness. According to a curious belief held by some in the middle ages the stone of madness represented the substance of madness and its primary cause. Bosch’s piece, The Extraction of the Stone of Madness, is the earliest in a group of paintings addressing the topic of its extraction, a procedure believed to be the cure of mental illness. Later notable works by Jan van Hemessen, Pieter Huys, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder tackle the same theme in various contexts.

Hieronymus Bosch (El Bosco): The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (Museo Nacional del Prado)

Stone of madness, a dialectical twin of the philosopher’s stone, was the child of alchemy, one of history’s blind alleys, which took root as an attempt to find what in medieval times was imagined to be the benchmark of perfection and purity in every aspect of human existence (not dissimilar to the quest current financial markets and politics are chasing in a modern setting).

The philosopher’s stone is a legendary alchemical substance, which epitomizes the quest for perfection. In contrast, the stone of madness represents a flawed dysfunctionality, an affliction on the opposite side of perfection, terminal imperfection, damage and dishonor, and fatal incompleteness. It is not necessarily something we look for, it finds us at the end of one of those blind alleys. The philosopher’s stone has the ability to transmute base metals into gold or silver, create perpetually burning lamps, transform common crystals into precious stones and diamonds, revive dead plants, and create flexible or malleable glass, heal all forms of illness and prolong the life of any person who consumes a small part of it. Anything touched by the stone of madness turns into shit.

Alchemy has always straddled the line between science, philosophy, and charlatanism, with the exact blend varying through history — the more science advanced, the closer alchemy moved towards charlatanism. With progress in science, alchemy was exhausted, but the underlying fantasy of alchemy did not disappear, it only got diverted into financial markets and politics. Modern alchemy sees science and reason as enemies. This is the most eloquent testimony of its charlatanism.

The medieval concept of madness has gotten a contemporary twist in light of recent political and economic developments. The contagious madness and charlatanism are alive and well, more vigorous than they have ever been. With very little imagination Bosch’s picture has a distinct contemporary vibe.

Political alchemy and the right wing agenda

The elite is not composed of ideologists; its members’ whole education is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their capacity immediately to resolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose. (Hannah Arendt)

This brings us to the present day and our original question: What is wrong with the right and why do they resemble the mentally ill so much? Although the two share a distinct antisocial backbone, one systematic, the other systemic, it is the same stone of madness that has touched both.

The most complete and elegant answer to this question was constructed by George Lakoff, one of the leading American cognitive linguist, best known for his thesis that peoples’ decision algorithms are shaped by the central metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena. His starting point is the same logical question everyone is asking: How is it possible to convince the underprivileged class that their interests are aligned with those of the American billionaires so they voluntarily express that belief in the ballot box time and again? The key to the resolution of that puzzle is Lakoff’s realization that people, in fact, rarely vote in their self-interests. They vote their values and identity. And if their identity fits their self-interest, they will vote for that[1].

How does the whole thing work in practice? Social evolution is largely defined by the tension between the state and family, and the modern state is a result of years of gradual emancipation from the confines of patriarchal family structures. Through a strange reversal of things, the Western conservative politics has followed a regressive path of convergence towards the very same patriarchal family roots from which it took centuries to escape. In that respect, American conservative politics has been the most radical example.

This is the starting point of Lakoff’s argument. Our intuition about the functioning of more complex social structures is most often based on family metaphors and different interpretations of the nation are linked to different understandings of family. In the United States, where politics is represented by two dominant parties, the two types of families corresponding to the underlying political worldviews define: a strict father family and a nurturant parent family.

The strict father model begins with a set of assumptions:

• The world is a dangerous place and it will always be (because there is evil out there)
• The world is also difficult because there is competition (there will always be winners and losers)
• There is an absolute right and an absolute wrong
• Children are born bad (or ignorant) and have to be made good.

What is needed in this kind of a world is a strong father who can:

• Protect the family in the dangerous world
• Support the family in the difficult world, and
• Teach children what’s right from wrong[2].

In these “axioms”, not only is there no mention of the mother, but they also make no room for her. Outside of her reproductive role, the mother’s role and influence has been minimized.

This is where the conservative hoax starts. The internal discipline that is learned from an early age is required in the difficult, competitive world. In the first iteration, the strict father model establishes equivalence between moralities and prosperity, and prepares terrain to draw a link between the strict father worldview and free market capitalism. This is the key step that converts the whole story into an ideology and policy rules. If everyone pursues their interests (and profit), then the profit of all will be maximized (by the “invisible hand”), another masterful example of political mindfuck. The flipside of that is another beauty: those trying to help someone else (rather than themselves) screw up the system. This is another point of exclusion of the mother. Mothers are nurturing — they always give. And, to make things worse, they are forgiving. In a word, mothers are a bad influence for children[3].

The second step follows naturally: A good person – a moral person – is obedient to legitimate authority (identified with the father). Of course! A good child grows up to be prosperous and self-reliant. A bad child cannot care of him/herself and thus becomes dependent. At this point one has to be a real moron to buy it, but there has never been a shortage of morons. In fact, they have become the most precious commodity for conservatives, something that has to be cultivated and preserved[4].

The next mindfuck follows almost automatically. When good children are mature, they learn discipline and the strict father is no longer needed to meddle in their lives. Political extension is loud and clear: there is no need for government meddling in the affairs of those who didn’t make it. The corollary is unambiguous: It is moral to pursue your self-interests and it is immoral to give people things they have not earned[5].

This implies that welfare programs are synonymous to “wasteful spending” and it is, therefore, a moral duty of the society to enforce policies that shut these programs down and create further positive externalities for businesses and deserving members of society by cutting taxes. This is the core of the conservative antisocial backbone[6].

However – and this is where madness makes its presence visible — although the right wing narrative revolves around the idea of a smaller state, they are really not against the government, especially when it comes to riot police, military spending, or subsidies for corporations, tax cut loopholes or a conservative Supreme Court[7]. They are only against nurturance and care, anything that represents the feminine side in the state-family metaphor.

When seen through the prism of this narrative, many developments of the last 50 years (and 2017, as their pinnacle), begin to make sense: Staggering inequality, criminalization of poverty, gun ownership, mass killings, high incarceration rate, opioid epidemics, right to life bullshit, misogyny, anti-scientific sentiment, religion, creationism … Everything. Without boundless stupidity, none of this would be possible. That is why stupidity has become the most precious commodity, one that needs to be cultivated and nurtured. With it, it is easy to see how an access Hollywood tape became a winning ticket in presidential elections; how birtherism and dismantling everything-Obama became implicit reparations for having to suffer the “humiliations” of eight years under a black president, and how a revival of white supremacy and other still-born ideologies entered mainstream politics.

Dark enlightenment

If everyone always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. (Hannah Arendt)

It was believed in the middle ages that the stone of madness could be removed by surgery; many quack healers roamed Europe performing sham operations on the mentally ill, removing the “stone”. Getting the madness out requires drilling a hole in the head and extracting the stone of madness. Who’s to perform the operation? Let’s not forget the charlatans of 2017, the doctors with funnel hats more insane than the patient they are attempting to cure. Their false knowledge reveals the worst excesses of madness immediately apparent to all but the chief Madman himself.

Victory is neither God’s nor the Devil’s: it belongs to Madness[8]. Madness has to be countered by madness, but of a different kind; the two have to annihilate each other. For this to happen madness has to be made contagious and it has to spread. The stone of madness will touch and enlighten us all. Everyone will have to go crazy before they can get better. Madness will be everywhere; it will disappear through its proliferation, and charlatan doctors will be the kings.

[1] George Lakoff, Don’t think of an elephant, Chelsea Green Publishing; 2nd Revised ed. (2014)

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid.

[8] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, (p.23) Vintage (1973)

 

25. XII 2017

The original accident: On masculine displacement & the masochism of speed

When god created man, she was joking.

The union between man and woman has to be one of the most disruptive developments in human history. A Stone Age equivalent of seduction was effectively an act of abduction and enslavement of woman. By joining a man as his “wife”, a woman redefined the economy of time: a man no longer had to hunt one deer at a time; with a woman carrying the catch, hunting became less frequent, and if a man went alone, a woman could stay behind, guard the dwelling, defend it against predators, work in the field, bring water etc. Apart from serving the reproductive function, the most dramatic effect of the forced symbiosis of man and woman was to free man’s time and open the door for his mobility. According to Paul Virilio: This allowed man to engage in the obscenity of the narcissistic homosexual activity of duel with other men[1].

During the hunters and gatherers era, when hunting provided the main access to protein, overpopulation presented the most acute risk, synonymous with self-destruction. The math was simple: the number of mouths to be fed is determined by the number of women — a population consisting of one man and ten women could produce as many as ten babies in one year, while the natality of a one woman and ten men community could not exceed one baby per year. The conclusion was rather unambiguous: Femicide was the only way to control population growth and prevent starvation of the entire community through the depletion of resources.

With time, the risk of overpopulation had been balanced with a possibility of territorial expansion where war played an essential part. Preference for raising (male) warriors further amplified the existing bias towards the neglect of females. Teaching women to use weapons or hunt large animals would have only complicated the “algorithm” and was therefore further inhibited. In the end, as Marvin King summarizes it, war and female infanticide are part of the price our Stone Age ancestors had to pay for regulating their populations in order to prevent lowering of standards to the bare subsistence level. However, warfare and infanticide did not cause each other. Both of them, together with a sexual hierarchy that developed along the way, were caused by the need to disperse population and control the risk its of growth[2]. As a residual of these dynamics, throughout the history, long after the control of population growth stopped being an issue, men continued to feel they had a natural right to control women. And so they did.

Travelers taken up by the violence of speed are displaced persons

Man is the passenger of woman. (Paul Virilio)

Woman is the first source of man’s transport and his mobility. She brings man to the world[3]. Where would human civilization be if women hadn’t tempered with man’s experience of time and space? If it were not for women, man would have never travelled. In all likelihood, he would have not strayed far away from his cave still hunting wild animals to survive.

The need to disperse the population shaped the quest for mobility and speed. This was the beginning of the mount – the man mounted horse and, as distances shrunk and the quest for speed intensified, he dismounted only to board ship, and follow up with train, car, and airplane. The acceleration of movement has been assimilated to progress as a curious blind alley in the history of movement[4]. As more speed bore more spectacular disasters, progress, as the articulation of the quest for acceleration of movement, became a flight from the inevitable, instead of the journey forward, with constant attempt not to be caught by the “end”.

Woman have shaped man’s destiny. But, as it happens with every innovation, there was a price to pay. The quest for mobility disturbed the initial harmony. To travel is to leave, and to leave is to leave behind, to abandon the comfort zone and one’s sense of calm[5]. Mobility is displacement, and displacement leads to loss of identity. The identity loss is an encounter with consequences of displacement – always after it is too late to do anything about it, a delayed reaction — articulated as the second stage of grief through anger and aggression. This is where misogyny enters the scene. Being the primary force behind man’s mobility, woman is causally connected with man’s identity loss, and misogyny intrinsically linked to man’s discontent with his displacement.

This has created institutions of discrimination and women’s repression through history and, as Eva Figes argued, solidified resistance to change. By questioning the external norms that relate to the position of men and women in society, man has and had nothing to gain and everything to lose: he would lose not only social and economic advantages, but something far more precious, a sense of his own superiority which bolsters his ego both in his public and private life. [6]

Modern day misogyny, as the ultimate male fantasy, is a nostalgia for the times of lower entropy, a return to the past as a site of coherence, and a relapse to the patriarchal setting when man held their “naturally deserved” upper hand and He (who is a male) ruled the world. Through misogyny man articulates the desire to reclaim what he considers his “natural right” to control women and, in that way, take control of his own destiny.

[1] Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, Bloomsbury Academic Continuum Impact Series (2008)

[2] Marvin King, Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, Vintage (2011)

[3] Paul Virilio, ibid.

[4] Paul Virilio , ibid.

[5] Paul Virilio , ibid.

[6] Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes, Persea Books (1986)

 

24. XII 2017

Identity crises and four modes of misogyny

When it came to political revolution against an autocracy only a privileged minority had something to gain by resisting the forces of change, but in changing the relationship of men to women every man, rich or poor, stands to lose by a change.[1]

Identity code has a generally excluding effect capable of mobilizing negative energies and social forces towards those who do not share the same origin, territory and/or cultural code. One of Franco Berardi’s persistent themes has been the idea that deterritorialization results in a disconnect of people from their identity code. Movements of reterritorialization are always manifested through rituals of aggressive re-identification (e.g. violence, racism, war,…). Fascism is the fundamental obsession with identity, origin and belonging (and recognizability). It is generally inclusive, which reflects a fear of small numbers — it likes size because identity robustness had been eroded by the defection and erosion of ranks. Fascism absorbs everyone willing to join in and expresses hostility to outsiders – burning bridges reinforces commitment to the identity[2].

Every response to identity crisis, every identitarian fantasy and obsession is accompanied with a distinct mode of misogyny. There are four main modes of misogyny that relate to the underlying types of identity loss: Traditional patriarchal, Italian fascist, National socialist, and American.

Patriarchal setting: Linear misogyny

There is a relatively narrow spectrum here. All patriarchal structures have a certain degree of hostility towards women; they only differ by mode and intensity. The hostility is particularly palpable in monotheistic religions, which carry strong overtones of repressed (male) homosexuality. In that particular aspect, radical Islam goes further than other religions which show more restraint and apparent tolerance. The quarrels between Islam and Western conservative Christian societies when it comes to the position of women is only about the mode and extent of repression: How much freedom should women have and how explicit the boundaries should be; should women not be allowed to work at all or should they only be paid less than men for their work[3].

This is the world where there is no place for a woman outside of her reproductive role. However, men are expected to couple with women – they must perform their reproductive community service – which they do, often against their desires. Muslim women are removed from men’s sight by being forced to cover their faces and bodies – men don’t want to be reminded of their existence. Hassidic Jewish communities, on the other hand, have a somewhat subtler approach. Their women are all forced to wear identical wigs and clothes, to have the same appearance. They become “invisible” by being indistinguishable. Any sign of distinction or sexuality is inhibited. Physical contact is purely for reproductive purpose, stripped of sexual connotation as much as possible and minimized direct contact. The hostility is supported by sustained subliminal narrative of their impurity, the fear of menstruation and need for special cleansing rituals in those days.

Defeminization of society: Italian fascism

Although women are intrinsically linked to man’s mobility, their deserving role in that department has been lost with time thanks to persistent development of elaborate institutions of women’s repression. Velocity and acceleration became synonymous with the modern tools of male potency. Franco Berardi gives an insider’s perspective on how this trend created fertile ground for both fascism and misogyny in Italy: One cannot understand Italian fascism if one does not start from the need for defeminization of cultural self-perception. Italians have always regarded themselves from a feminine perspective. The greatness of Italian culture is its femininity, Mediterranean sweetness, taste for life, tenderness, and slowness[4].

Towards mid-19^th century, Italian national culture became ashamed of its peaceful femininity and began inoculating itself with testosterone. Fascism in Italy represents the turning point from feminine self-perception to masculine assertiveness. It is defined by a need for erasing feminine self-perception together with its Mediterranean sensitivity, and affirming a different self-image based on acceleration. National pride, military aggressivity, industrial growth, etc. was all fake and artificial; this is why Italian fascism is often perceived as a farce. The result was a ridiculous display of machismo perfectly embodied by such clowns as Mussolini and Berlusconi[5].

Subordination to higher cause: National Socialism

Unlike Italian fascism (or Islamofascism for that matter), which is inclusive, National Socialism is based on the denial of humanity to the Other — it has clearly defined boundaries and highly restrictive admission rules, accessible only to the chosen. Like any other identitarian movement, it likes size (and large numbers), but it has a different plan for achieving those goals, by growing from within. This is where women come in.

German fascism was not a programmatic cultural defeminization, but rather an establishment of systematic downgrade of femininity to reproductive function as a part of the new nation serving hierarchization. Its essence was a utilitarian placement of women as birth factories, their subordination to the interests of the National Socialist political agenda, to serve the numbers.

This produced a nationwide program for the advancement of national health and racial purity, and general physical and mental fitness, the eroticization of masculinity personified by soldiers, and women’s subordinate role in that context. While these attributes had never gone out of vogue completely, their systematization had never reached the same proportions as in Germany during the 1930s.

Although this program was short lived and with tragic consequences, remnants of the institutions of women’s repression and exclusion lingered on for the remainder of the 20th century. Until well into the 1990’s all shops, including food, operated on stubbornly inflexible schedules incompatible with the idea of working mothers, all closing by 6pm on weekdays, and 2pm on Saturdays (closed on Sundays). All this in a Germany that was rebuilding at an accelerated pace and notoriously lacking a labor force, needing to import a large contingent of foreign workers to fill that gap. It took enormous effort and a long time to “modernize” and adapt it to contemporary standards where working women and fully functional families became compatible with each other.

Decomplexified femininity and nostalgia for idiot housewives: American misogyny

Man’s vision of woman is not objective, but an uneasy combination of what he wishes her to be and what he fears her to be. (Eva Figes)

American-style misogyny and the underlying identity crisis behind it is effectively a composite of the three previous examples, enhanced with additional layers of an ideological mindfuck, required to tackle complexities that developed during the late stages of neoliberalism. While 21^st century America has incorporated new advances in communications and media techniques into all aspects of social and political life, in many ways it is still struggling to shake off backwards-patriarchal attitudes and its inability to fully embrace the social emancipation consistent with modernity.

In the decades of all-inclusive and all-permissive (ethnic, racial, gender, and cultural) neoliberalism the masculine core of American culture, its male assertiveness, aggressivity, and impulsiveness, had been diluted. The essence of America was emasculated, its survival threatened.

White American males have always been in charge. They made the rules and they called the shots in the workplace, in the home and at the ballot box. They’ve owned the world for so long and have been getting increasingly uncomfortable as their grip on power had been eroding. Now the unthinkable is happening: They are becoming the minority. For the first time more minority babies were born than white babies (it is damn numbers again)! And a black president has served two terms, his Secretary of State was a woman, the most educated segment of the society are black women, and every other daytime talk show or news anchor is gay. This is what conservatives are really upset about. Suddenly this country is way off the main path; the whole system needs to be restored and some reset buttons need to be pushed.

The problem requires a systematic approach. Restoring order means the resolute masculinization of society (of course). This should start by arming men with weapons – the more lethal, the more masculine they are – establishing male supremacy values (this has worked since the Stone Age, and it should continue to work in the 21^st century as well) and establishing a fear of god — this helps the male cause because god is a dude (white, of course).

As a part of the masculinization program and return of patriarchal values, assault on women’s rights and their position in society must be thorough and systematic – women’s emancipation has to be undone. However, this part requires a subtle approach and proper framing — women must not be antagonized; they are many and they vote. The most effective way is to strike at the root of a woman’s influence.

No one has more influence on a person during his/her formative age than their mother. As such, she is a constant threat to both the state and to men in general. The decision of life and death has to be taken away from women. Their influence and importance in the life of their children have to be diminished, if not de facto, then at least symbolically. Right to life! This is ultimately the question about who has jurisdiction over the life of an individual, their mother/family or the state. With the help of proper framing, this becomes the theme that defines the core of the right wing identity, an issue slowly hijacked by (predominantly white) men. They have the view, they feel righteous and they present themselves as defenders of human life while women take a back seat.

Decomplexified femininity

Feminism is here to stay, so it has to be incorporated into the new model of woman. Femininity needs to be redefined and decomplexified. The latest right wing assault on women’s emancipation process was the introduction of the MILFs of the new rank[6] into political life. There are two essential groups. Sarah Palin, NRA women Dana Loesch, Michelle Buchman, Omarosa… are typical representatives of the first kind. These women impassion America, they bring a new Eros to politics. They embody “post-feminist” femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, teacher (glasses, hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, and, with a dash of their oversexed vulgarity, reinforce the existing cultural boundaries. The message is that they “have it all” — and that, to add insult to injury, these are Republican women who, in some metric, had realized the left-liberal dream.

The second kind, the lower echelon, like Jane Porter, Roy Moore’s wife, Sarah Hucka-San, Katrina Pearson, have a slightly different appeal: Their trailer park pedigree and manifest lack of interest for any semblance of intellectual integrity and sophistication are paraded and advertised as an integral part of the entire value system. These are the women who perfectly fit the backwards patriarchal model, with a dash of modernity. Their little secret is that their popularity comes predominantly from white men. All others – minorities, women, democrats, non-white men — hate them. Only white men like them. These women represent something those men miss dearly: The traditional idiot housewife.[7]

As the ranks of the successful and prosperous are shirking in the face of rampant inequality, the number of those that are left behind and can no longer be reintegrated into the society swells. The numbers are there, they just have to be bundled together under one umbrella. The two opposite sides, super rich and poor, have to be united despite conflicting interests. And so, the need for the eroticization of stupidity grows, as the existing ideology becomes increasingly more difficult to sell. Without a functioning liberal class, the anger among the working and the middle class is being expressed in ideologies that detest democratic institutions and the civilities of a liberal democracy. The right wing populist narrative gains traction and with new constituents gradually finds its way to the ballot box. White trash becomes fully engaged in their dual role as booth the victims and their own executioners.

Rage capital is ready for picking. It is harvest time.

[1] John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, Penguin Classics (2007)

[2] Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Verso (2015)

[3] A particularly sharp treatment of the subject dealing with proximity of the conservative Christian and radical Islamic worldviews can be found in Michel Houllebecq, Submission, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2015)

[4] Franco Berardi, After the Future, AK Press (2011)

[5] Franco Berardi, ibid.

[6] Jacques-Alain Miller, Sarah Palin: Operation “Castration”, in Lacan dot com (2008)

[7] Jacques-Alain Miller, ibid.

 

10. IX 2017

Weimar guitar gently weeps: Masochistic self-destruction of the right

Hitler plus power is gruesome, but Hitler minus power is a comedy. (Sedar Soumucu)

Despite its infamy and unprecedented negative press, almost one century after its first print, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf continues to play an important role in shaping the populist narrative (kind of like Uber’s influence on shared economy). Modern day right-wing populism just doesn’t seem to be able to distance itself from its main message. While most populist interpretations have been careful in staying clear of a direct endorsement or explicit references to the text, most of them have in this or that form emulated the three aspects of the mechanism behind Hitler’s rise to power outlined in Mein Kampf: Interplay between comedy, terror and power, Infiltration of ideological terrain, and Blending of speech acts, half-truths and conspiracy theories.

Perhaps the most important lesson of the post 1968, an actual birth of neoliberalism and governmentality, has been, what Jean Baudrillard has identified as The agony of power[1]: Power is a highly inefficient form of governing, not only because of its refusal to be dominated, but also in the refusal to dominate. Force is the most “expensive” way of maintaining power and conventional dictatorships have become unsustainable. This realization has defined a turn away from the oppressive rule and towards Groucho Marx authoritarianism — a depoliticization of politics — a mixing of “spontaneous” goofiness aimed at inspiring trust and anesthetizing the public, but with the most ruthless state manipulations. This started arguably with Ronald Reagan, continued with G. W. Bush, and became a template of governing in a wider context (Berlusconi, Ahmadinejad, and many others). This transformation coincided with escalation of conflicts between capitalism and democracy and in response to the challenges of implementing unpopular government programs in nominally democratic societies by using essentially autocratic methods. This is where comedy entered political scene.

Comedy, terror & power

Comedy and terror sit on the opposite sides of the emotional spectrum, but politics brings them close together into a symbiotic bond where they coexist in perfect (and logical) harmony as they serve the needs of power. Comedy and terror are the defining coordinates of power. 

That the two are closely related should not surprise anyone too much. Cruelty borders on comedy inasmuch as it, too, proves incomprehensible — how many times did we laugh at the sights of arbitrary acts of self-satisfied omnipotence (which refuses any explanation to their victims)[2]?

Comedy makes even the most ruthless tyrants palatable. Terror stabilizes their power, no matter how ridiculous they might appear – it is an antidote to their ridiculousness. Kim Jong Un’s chubby figure and his hairstyle have a completely different meaning with and without nuclear weapons; Donald Trump (any aspect of his persona, hair included) alone or in the context of the powers he commends. Terror provides a necessary means for aspiring or self-declared autocrats trying to compensate for their lack of legitimate power[3].

Infiltration of ideological terrain and the politics of speech acts

In the same way Hitler and his close followers appeared just as a small group of self-taught crackpots pushing their half-baked pseudo-intellectual ideas in the early 20^th century, during the 2016 US Presidential elections, after years of hibernation, with the backing by serious money of selected oligarchs, similar character types crawled out straight onto the political center stage, while their like-minded individuals and institutions like Fox “News”, who in the meantime became part of the establishment, struggled to find their place on the newly defined political scene.

To the segment of the nation traumatized by failure, poverty, social degradation, and general hopelessness, today’s populism, like its early 20^th century predecessor, promises to restore both honor (social and, to some who feel entitled to it, racial status) and the means to achieve greatness (again or for the first time, all the same). It gives to many of them a sense of direction; it turns ambivalence into clear-cut meaning to be worked out with unbridled hatred. All of this amounts to satisfying the wish for a coherent fictitious world, a straightforward extrapolation of the simple (predominantly male) fantasy of omnipotence and superheroes syndrome, which arises from accumulated frustration and general impotence.

In the same way this has played out in the 1930s Germany, populism nowadays communicates another desire (and pleasure) too, one that savors the power of empty words that make an impact – the fascination of power deriving strictly from its own ascent, which fashions itself out of nothing. This has been the major achievement of the grand populist demagogues, both then and now — to create the sensation of proximity of the void, the cognitive black hole effect, and arouse the wave of nihilism. Ultimately, power in this context, derives from a way of using language rather than from a system of ideas – a use of language that does not articulate form to anything preexisting, that takes joy by commanding being and nothingness, life and death[4].

Comparison with the 1930s Germany is interesting and relevant also because it defines a strategic choice of the present ideological terrain. Hitler’s program offered a synthesis supposed to lead to natural unity, a semantic solution whose double trademark of German and Worker connected the nationalism of the right with the internationalism of the left; thereby it stole the political contents of the other parties, in this case socialists. Rather than set the antagonist at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Hitler’s ideological maneuvering made his rival occupy the same terrain. The problem does not involve points of contradiction so much as areas of political overlap. The struggle to be the masses’ spokesman now amounts to combat at extremely close quarters. When rivalry is this close, demonization proves indispensable[5].

While in the early 20^th century Germany, National socialists had to persuade people (despite absence of any evidence) that they offered a better alternative to Marxists, in the 21^st century USA, people who would benefit from widespread state welfare programs and general wealth redistributive policies are being seduced into aligning their interests with the very people responsible for their social degradation and their existing condition. What in the 1930s was offered by phantasm of the Jewish world conspiracy (it helped that Karl Marx was a Jew) as a way of smoothing over any and all conceptual gaps in the populist narrative, in 2016 “universal blame” has been shared by the global oligarchy, Hollywood, liberal media, foreigners, and other disenfranchised people who see a different path to their social redemption. Both cases — demonization of Jews in 1930s and implication of global oligarchy today — represent examples of a class struggle in a displaced mode.

These conspiracy theories possess a built-in mechanism that makes them resistant to disproof: anyone seeking to refute the may be accused of having already fallen for the ruse of the Jewish press, or liberal media and “fake news” today, thereby proving the theory’s accuracy. In this manner, the underlying conspiracy theory seals itself off from the outside and achieves inner coherence. For the movement followers, its attractiveness lies in precisely this closedness, which ensues a strong group identity internally and projects a figure of enemy externally[6].

Fanaticism, half-truths, and rationality of irrational acts

This, naturally, creates a problem in the short run as reality does not support the entire narrative, but this has never been an obstacle for populism. The primary concern of the aspiring leader or dictator in power is to become the spokesman for what has been neglected until now or pursued only halfheartedly. Fanaticism does not necessarily arise from genuine conviction. Its beginnings lie in chance identification of the options afforded by the market of opinions[7].

For example, Breitbar guys, its founding members at least, were former employees of a liberal outlet, Huffington post, and departed in the opposite direction, not due to the change of heart and ideological flip, but in pursuit of superior opportunities elsewhere. Their position and rhetoric continue to escalate towards what appears to be irrational extremes. However, in the periods of sustained social tensions – this has been the lesson of the German experience — radicalization, no matter how unmotivated and self-destructive it might appear, can actually become strategic. In a calculated manner, the leader of his surrogates can even drift off into seeming absurdity insofar as the base puts a premium on flights of enthusiasm, which signal initiation to insiders and confirm that consensus of others does not matter (this sheds some light on the events of the last summer). This is where self-intoxication begins. By repeating and ritually solidifying lies, those who tell them and hear them may, after a while, embrace them as articles of faith – even though doing so is not necessary from inception[8].

Coda

No matter what color, shape or origin, modern-day right wing populism just cannot shake off its fascination with Mein Kampf. In their marvelous and persistent display of metaphysiological nonsense, they continue to show essential refusal to accept that Hitler’s rise to power was not unconditional. In that process, they create a man-made irrelaity – a construction of a human mind which becomes slave to its own fictions – a tactical manipulation aimed at deluding themselves and seducing the public into believing that literal transplant of political maneuvering, which transformed Weimar Germany, could define the path to and solidify their grip on power almost a century later in a completely different socioeconomic, political and technological context.

With appropriate reassignment of political variables, the three main political maneuvers — Comedy/terror/power, Infiltration of ideological terrain, and Reliance on half-trues and conspiracy theories — were taken and implemented literally by different populist fractions, perhaps most thoroughly in the US in the last year. However, in their infinite naïveté, dilettantism and political (and general) illiteracy, Trump’s handlers and self-proclaimed ideologues, as they were committing their imperfect plagiarism, they failed to grasp a very simple fact that Hitler’s populism struck resonance not because of his talents as a politician and orator, but because on the other side of his message was Weimar Germany ravished by poverty, unemployment, hyperinflation, humiliation after the lost war, and general hopelessness: The entire country spoke in one voice. The United States today has no resemblance to that in any of the outlined categories — although it could be many other things, the main point is that the country has never before been so divided: The polivocality in today’s America is deafening.

The dilemma is not whether Trump’s handlers and ideologues have read and emulated Mein Kampf and National Socialists’ message and the tricks and of their rise to power, but whether they have read any other books on politics and history.

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power, semiotext(e) 2010

[2] Albrecht Koschorke, Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf”: Zur Poetik des Nationalsozialismus, Berlin (2016)

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

[6] ibid.

[7] ibid.

[8] ibid.

 

27. VIII 2017

Summer of cognitive instability: From Hendrix to Trump

For the last sixty years, the seventh summer of each decade has treated us with special types of excitement delivering events that would sometime put a stamp on the entire decade:

1967 — summer of love (Jimi Hendrix sets his guitar on fire)

1977 — summer of Sam, disco, and Studio 54

1987 — Alan Greenspan becomes the Fed chairman (it takes exactly twenty summers to experience the full impact of his nomination)

1997 — Asian crisis

2007 — summer of subprime (conditionally insolvent become unconditionally illiquid and all hell breaks loose)

2017 — summer of hate (Donald Trump sets his “guitar” on fire)

Summer of 2017 highlights an acute case of cognitive instability — a cumulative erosion of traditional frames of reference, changes in interpretive frameworks and proliferation of intersecting narratives. At the core of current political developments lie the structural changes, which after years of brewing in the background, have hit the center stage and became dominant drivers of everyday politics and market functioning. But, as dramatic as these developments have been, market reaction remained restrained throughout — markets still appear to be complacent, but that complacency feels less uncomfortable than before. The verdict is not yet in regarding significance of the summer of 2017. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that it announces deeper political changes. Still in their formative stage, these changes, while not having significant short-term impact, could affect the society in a profound way.

Although the current political landscape appears highly volatile and unpredictable, it is neither new nor extreme by historical standards. It is merely a phase of a well-defined pattern of developments during periods of transition between two paradigms. These patterns capture how political bodies are damaged by ideas, which are invented to perpetuate this damage.

As this transition process has clear path dependence, in order to fully understand its underlying dynamics, one has to start from its trigger event, the 2008 financial crisis – the true event in the sense that it changed both the reality itself and the way we perceive it. No matter how hard we tried, the aftertaste of 2008 is not only not going away, but its echoes only seem to be growing louder with time. Last ten years or so have been like a persistent pneumonia that, despite all the treatment, just wouldn’t go away indicating deeper problems suggestive of a failure of the immune system or even a terminal disease. Unlike previous crises, its depth has been so severe that it has triggered a social change. As the existing modes of social organization alone (such as electoral democracy) can no longer safeguard the economic interests of a growing fraction of the population, economic initiatives are no longer effective and a quest for social change takes center stage. Social stability defines equilibrium and social transformations represent a change of equilibrium. When international trade agreements are under possible revision, interplay between technology, labor and capital is poorly understood, the role of welfare state is being reexamined, borders being closed – when everything that defines a social system is on the table – this is the most challenging environment where explanatory power of traditional macroeconomics is the weakest. These transformations are always disruptive and have the appearance of discontinuous processes. Unlike economics, which provides effective description of reality around a well-defined social equilibrium, a social change corresponds to a change in equilibrium – a paradigm shift to which economics needs time to adjust.

During these transition periods, old values, beliefs, concepts, institutions, and authorities as well as traditional frames of reference lose their power. This creates a state of cognitive instability. Nothing functions according to established (or any known) rules. Cognitive instability spontaneously creates the urgency for stabilization. There is too much new information, and not enough understanding. This “agitates” society. There is an open contest for a narrative — not necessarily the most accurate, but one capable of providing the best fit — that would restore stability. The challenge consists of constructing from amorphous mass of unintelligible information, tendencies, and speculations an acceptable narrative that restores equilibrium.

These transition situations bring to the surface a wide range of characters and organizations, which become new participants in the political discourse. Not all of them are serious contenders, but history reminds us that there exists a greater proximity between laughable and dreadful than calmer times would admit. The underlying narratives play an important role in the ability of the governments to shape consensus, which breaks with the tradition, the past, and sometime reinvents it to self-aggrandizing end. The fragility of the local equilibrium makes especially alarming and uncomfortable the fact that abnormal and delusional are not cut from a different cloth than what counts as “normal” or mainstream. Under special circumstances some of the fringe narratives infiltrate affective realm and interests of broader social circles and create intellectual ferment for a perceived mode of change. In the end, the most successful narrative will be the one that offers a description of reality, which helps articulate otherwise inarticulate experience by translating diffusive emotional states like fear, identity or cultural belonging into slogans that admit strong affective charges. As such, it will stamp a mode of description that seeks recognition in ever-greater circles until it is accepted as the “official” social self-image[1].

The political developments of this summer are suggestive of a transition process between two paradigms with the old one not completely dead, but without clear contours of the new one. Effectively, what is currently on the political table is an alternative between two undead modes of social organization: the old one (centrist democracy) is still too alive to be dead, and the “new” one (a Turkmenistan-style electoral dictatorship proposed by the current administration) too dead to be alive.

In the bidding stage for the new narrative the goal is not so much to post immediate victories, as it is to re-center the dialogue in such a way that it creates advantages in the mid- and long-run. Small gains now could convert into larger gains later. Consequently, in the near term things could remain “boring”, relatively speaking — a continuation of the status quo mostly due to diminished ability to produce political consensus. However, beyond 2017, things could get quite a bit more exciting. Political leaders, who bear dual burden of imperative of stability on one side, and the urge to change, on the other, are themselves running an enormous risk. They are tempted to counter the confusion of the present with will for order and, in that process, often increase the very chaos which they pretend to oppose, often risking to fall themselves victims to spiraling disorder of their own creation[2].

The key to our future (or its absence) lies in the very definition of chaos — when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future. Chaotic systems are hypersensitive to initial conditions – tiny disturbances have enormous consequences. We are not only heading in an unknown direction, but the path itself is unknown, and not only are these things not known, but they are also unknowable. Nothing what we know will be of use any more.

[1] A. Koschorke, The Poetics of National Socialism, MIT Press (2017)

[2] ibid.

 

3. VII 2017

Quantity theory of sanity

What if there is a limited amount of sanity in the world and the real reason people go mad is because somebody has to? (Will Self)

If you think about it, sanity is a rather delicate and improbable mental configuration. It is an unstable (more precisely, metastable) state of the human psyche. It requires an extraordinary amount of fine-tuning to remain sane. An incredible number of things has to work out in a coordinated way for a person not to flip out at some point in his life. And if one experiences a severe shock during his life, chances are he or she will go insane and never come back.

Insanity as a stable equilibrium and conditional stability of sanity

Sanity is a one-way street. There has never been a case of an insane person suddenly becoming normal, spontaneously or as a result of a shock or trauma, or that one is born insane and then suddenly, when he/she enters puberty, becomes normal. You see! It is like entropy: systems evolve from less to more probable configurations. So sooner or later everything turns into shit (2^nd law of thermodynamics): As we age, our sanity becomes questioned and at some point, if we live long enough, we start losing it. There ain’t no way around it.

Hallucinogenic drugs themselves do not carry any particular magic cocktail of chemicals that causes a state of controlled madness. No, that madness is always in us – there is a constant, albeit dormant, carnival in our heads; it is hibernating thanks to various inhibitors, which control that process. Hallucinogens merely deactivate the inhibitors and set the madness free. A similar effect can be observed without drugs when one is subjected to stress (e.g. hunger, sleep depravation, torture, or a marathon run), shock or some other factor that disturbs the existing order of things (e.g. fasting and a drop in blood sugar – this is how ascetics are getting their visions).

We are biologically wired through evolution to see the world the way “normal” people do. This maximizes our chances of survival. But, we were not meant to live this long and to endure these levels of persistent stress, or to be surrounded with so many people. So, the sanity dimple at the top of the hill is almost full and the shocks are continuous and even though they might not necessarily be always powerful, they are capable of causing persistent overflow.

Setting madness free: Social change as a mental disease

Superfluid information flows have transformed madness from idiosyncratic to systemic. Traditionally, elites and rulers (and people of influence, in general) used to define cultural parameters, set the trends and boundaries. But, their extreme idiosyncrasies remained always their own.

With the evolution of media and compression of timescales, their idiosyncrasies, no matter how odd and socially unpalatable, got a chance to catch up with the rest of the population. In particular, the democratic process has been gradually transformed into a referendum on the idiosyncrasies of the candidates. The madness is no longer individual, but collective and systemic. In a society where an increasing number of people feel like outsiders or outcasts, idiosyncrasies acquire special appeal and great mobilizing power. They cut through the mix and humanize politicians. Individual instabilities become destabilizing on a collective level and are used as leverage to erode the democratic process. The system becomes a center of production of social vulnerability.

The Dual Risk Model distinguishes between types of response to environment. Resilience plays a large part in distinguishing between “normal” and vulnerable individuals. In a positive social environment all is good: When there is growth, there is enough for everyone. But when there is no growth, everything is a zero-sum game – there is not enough for everyone. This brings out the worst in people and this is when social change begins.

The pinnacle of human evolution, the ultimate manifestation of civility, is the human ability to engage in a dialogue, to listen to and respond to the others. The structuralist deconstruction of mental illness consists of an unwinding of the evolutionary process. For them, mental illness is evolution in reverse. During mental illness, unwinding starts from the top by shutting down the ability to engage in a dialogue — the cacophony caused by the “voices” takes over; one is in constant dissensus with oneself, which incapacitates the ability to listen and respond. The regressive unwind proceeds step by step by shutting down other social and biological skills. Different mental diseases differ by the terminal points at which the unwind stops. This is why social changes, which follow closely the pattern of a mental disease, look like madness and the social degradation that accompanies them is defined by the level of destruction of democratic institutions and devastation of traditional forms of civility.

Emotional shocks can also cause disorder. With extreme psychoses like schizophrenia, one is often born with a tendency towards them, but it is only when certain traumatic life events happen that the actual symptoms are triggered (this is the nature-nurture argument). With other factors combined, psychoses can develop faster or not at all in certain individuals. But you have to have both: a tendency towards it + the stressful life factors. These stress thresholds are very relative. They are both biologically and culturally conditioned – people in the pre-Homerian period had a considerably lower threshold of stress than modern man. In fact, the distinction between madness and “normalcy” is more quantitative than qualitative. Everyone has a different breaking point, but practically everyone has it. So, it is only a matter of generating an appropriate level of stress to reach an individual or collective breaking point and everyone will go crazy.

Individuals with higher intelligence, money, supportive families, and a generally positive environment can deal with personal problems better and will, therefore, come out with a better outcome in the end. But when (in the words of an anonymous depression sufferer) we sink to our lowest depths – when everything seems dark and the light is nowhere to be seen – that is when we are the most receptive to change. And we are ready to accept any change, even the one that would hurt us in the long run, as long as it is a change.

At this point, the system operates with a sanity deficit – there isn’t enough sanity for everyone. The madness is set free. Everybody is crazy and everybody has a gun. The greatest show on earth can begin. Enjoy the fireworks. Happy 4^th.

 

20.VI 2017

Organs without bodies: Symbolic reattachment & hystericization of American politics

Phallus is not an organ that expresses the vital force of my being, but an insignia that I put on in the same way king puts on his crown. Phallus is an organ without body, which gets attached to my body, but never becomes its organic part, forever sticking out as its incoherent excessive prosthesis. [S. Žižek]

If a king holds a scepter in his hands (no matter how small they might be) and wears the crown, his words are taken as royal. Such insignia are external, not part of who he really is. He wears them to exercise power. As such, they define the gap between what he actually is and the function he exercises[1]. But, what remains of the real person if the symbolic title is taken away? This question becomes the center of the neurosis of power. Imagine a corrupt judge: I know very well that the person in front of me is a corrupted weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge — when he speaks, it is the law itself that speaks through him. However, when he takes off his toga and steps out of the courtroom, he is nobody.

Symbolic castration is the gap between a real/actual person and his symbolic title. The gap is irreducible — the symbolic persona always dominates the real one. This is the fundamental dichotomy of symbolic castration. It is synonymous with power as it gives power to the person who is castrated, but that transaction comes with castration as its price. The actual subject cannot ever fully identify with the symbolic mask or title (phallus never loses its autonomy) and his questioning of the symbolic title becomes the center of hysteria[2].

Donald Trump’s presidency is the hystericization of American politics. He represents a case of an attempted symbolic reattachment — a reverse of symbolic castration — a desire to reduce the irreducible, which gives his presidency an aura of a logical paradox. Trump’s determination to undermine his symbolic self has become especially clear in the last two months: The presidential tweets are screaming of self-sabotage, and the display of conflicts of interests is just too obvious and explicitly self-incriminating to be unintentional. The nonlinearity of his relationship with facts and his propensity to lie have reached alarming proportions; it is unlike anything we have seen in the public life of western democracies. The antagonism of the press and media, which seems to be continuing with unrestrained intensity, has created massive negative externalities for the entire administration. The absence of any foresight in his conduct is stunning: It does not take much thought to realize that this could have never produced any positive effects for his presidency. Same goes for his compulsive divisiveness of the populace, and deliberate undermining of his allies, his staff, and supporters, which has isolated him to the point that no one wants to work with or for him. There is no one who takes him seriously any more — he is the laughing stock of the entire world and a butt of every joke. He seems to take some pride in helping in the process of the collective ritual of public denigration of his presidency. One can sense something almost vindictive in his pursuit of the symbolic self.

Trump’s conduct is a suicide from the ambush. What in the one-dimensional space of his subjectivity appears as logically obscure suddenly becomes transparent once the real and the symbolic are identified and separated. His presidency represents a rebellion of the hysterical person against his symbolic persona, an attempt of Donald Trump the citizen to take out Donald Trump the president — an assassination of the symbolic self – a desire to re-attach phallus to the body.

Politics, economics, society, and collective reality are temporarily suspended as the public is caught in this spectacle of self-annihilation. No one knows how to react, because this play has never been played before. Such intrapersonal conflicts and battles normally take place in the privacy of the analyst’s office, away from the public eye. We are now watching its premier in real time.

As Immanuel Wallerstein remarked in his June commentary, Trump equates his presidential position with being the most powerful individual in the world. For him, the main priority is to stay in the office as long as possible (everything else is secondary). True. And, this will go on until real Donald Trump scores a victory by firing his symbolic self and when, at the end, there is only one of them standing — real Donald Trump.

Trump has converted our political and social reality into a reality show featuring his personal encounter with his symbolic persona as the main (and possibly the only) attraction. It is no wonder that people have felt violated from his first day in office. His presidency is a subversion of our experience of reality. His desire for self-annihilation will drag everyone into the vortex of the Vanishing Point. From there we will be able to imagine what the world looks like in our absence, and to see beyond the end and beyond the subject.

[1] S. Žižek, How to read Lacan, (2007) W. W. Norton & Co.

[2] ibid.

 

8.VI 2017

Event horizon and the physics of Donald Trump

Donald Trump is like a new celestial formation, a cognitive black hole, a strange attractor, and a quantum-mechanical paradox, all at the same time. He has a unique way of distorting the social space around him. Everyone who enters his event horizon begins to not make sense. There is something terminal about coming too close to Trump. The list of casualties who have crossed the point of no return, and became permanently trapped on the other side, is getting longer every day. Trump is a new phenomenon whose functioning falls into domains of exotic physical theories. Here are some theoretical requirements for understanding the strange cosmology of his universe.

Compared to classical physics which guides our intuition, the general theory of relativity is like playing billiards on a soft table (think: jello). Each stationary ball creates local distortions on the table’s surface (picture) – the area around each ball is curved due to the indentations it produces. When the white ball is kicked, it is the local curvature around each ball, which causes it to make a bend precisely when it wants to get directly at the stationary ball. From the point of view of the white ball, the curvature is primary and matter (stationary balls) serves only to herald its presence.

Nothing is where it appears to be: The curvature of the space is a source of an apparent displacement of objects; it causes moving bodies to make a bend precisely when they want to get directly at the object. caption

Imagine now that one of the stationary balls on the table becomes very heavy and shrinks in size. The dent around it becomes deeper and more pronounced, and the heavier and the more concentrated its mass, the deeper the dent. So, if the white ball passes slowly and comes closely, it will be “sucked” in. The fall into the singularity can be avoided only if the ball’s speed exceeds the escape velocity.

The presence of concentrated mass defines the event horizon. The event horizon of a black hole separates two permanently disconnected regions. It is the shell of “points of no return”, a boundary beyond which the gravitational pull becomes so great that it makes escape impossible. Nothing can escape the event horizon of the black hole – the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light – what happens inside cannot affect an outside observer.

Once something is inside the event horizon, collapse into the black hole is inevitable

Donald Trump is a political black hole. He is a cognitive singularity, an intellectual triviality with complex consequences — a source of curvature of the social space that makes everything look displaced.

The strange matter of Trump’s universe

Information entering a black hole is lost forever

Whoever comes within Trump’s event horizon becomes afflicted with the same cognitive incapacity as Trump himself. There is a long list of transient (and a shorter list of persistent) surrogates, all of them disposable victims of cognitive asphyxiation: Kellyanne, both Steves, Giuliani, Christie, Newt, Ben Carson, Jeffrey Lord, and a long list of anonymous spokespersons. Not that these people were ever beacons of rationality, but they have broken new boundaries and set new records after entering the domain of Donald Trump. These creatures thrive in the space between real news and reality TV. They roam different mediascapes, mostly to boost the ratings of the mainstream networks — people tune in only to see the spectacle of public humiliation. And the list does not stop there. Now, even former bankers, Cohn and Mnuchin, who, one can argue, may be ethically challenged, but are nominally still highly rational, they are not making any sense either, even when it comes to counting money.

One-child-left-behind

But no one has experienced the gravitational crush of Trump’s black hole like Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, the Sisyphus of morons who performs the same futile task day after day, repeatedly trying (and failing) to convince the public that verifiable lies are truths and that palpable truths are lies. His press briefings have become a spectacle no one wants to miss, and a guilty pleasure of liberals and Trump haters. People tune in to be entertained, not to get informed. Over the course of time, the public has developed a certain emotional attachment to him, bordering on empathy, but not exactly; something along the lines you would feel about the bulldog your girlfriend gave you: He is fun to play with and you want to love him, but he makes a point of shitting in your living room, not occasionally, but every day. As it is becoming clear that under the existing criteria of this administration his gross incompetence will never be grounds for dismissal, there are active debates about the mode of his exit from the scene.

Divided subject is inconsistent with itself

Trump is the embodiment of the divided subject of American politics. On one side, he suspends the gravity of the Real and sets in motion the weightless state of a facts-free universe, while on the other, the singularity of his cognitive incapacity crushes everything that comes within his event horizon. He is the sugardaddy of alternative reality. He attracts people as a political novelty by offering a taste of the other side. He tempts them with fruit from the tree of ignorance. And the more fruit they eat, the more they need.

Trump’s base, which pretty much has been functioning as a doomsday cult, constitutes the core of the strange matter of his universe. These people have entered Trump’s event horizon from which escape is impossible. They are passengers on a boat approaching the waterfall – they notice nothing at the time when the boat crosses the boundary of no return, but the boat is doomed to go over the waterfall.

Coda

Trump is an event in a true sense of the word – he divides the time into before and after. It is difficult to remember our lives before Trump announced his candidacy. What did newspapers write about? What did news media report on? What was tweeting like? What kind of jokes did comedians tell? And what did people disagree about before they were unified in their hatred of Trump? Crowds and media hate him, but they cannot resist him. Life without him is becoming impossible to imagine. The whole nation will be depressed if he ever goes away.

 

13.V 2017

The great redistribution and the biopolitical penetration of the American brain

Wealth is inherently empowering and motivating; poverty is neither [Jonathan A. Winters].

Rising inequality is not the result of economical rationality and neither is it only a function of erosion of empathy or moral fiber (although the latter is its sine qua non). It is rather a direct reflection of redistributive policies that have helped the richest get richer. On the other hand, poverty by itself neither motivates nor provides a core set of common interests for the poor the way wealth does for the rich. The presence of wealth focuses the political attention of the rich on wealth defense; its absence has no parallel effect on the poor[1].

Inequality has always been a topic in public discourse. However, after the 2008 financial crisis, the destruction of wealth on a massive scale awakened much larger segments of society to the reality that they were unable to finance the lifestyles they had previously enjoyed. Response to the crisis has been articulated through an unprecedented injection of “easy money”. But, this money was hoarded by capital and did not filter down to labor. Rather than serving the collective interest in financing general economic progress, “easy money” turned into the extraction of resources from increasingly impoverished societies. The case of airlines industry presents an illustrative example of this mechanism. Even as the price of fuel collapsed, little of that benefit was passed on to consumers or airlines’ employees: Air travel is as uncomfortable as ever, ticket prices have gone up and none of the profits resulted in higher wages of the airlines employees. Most of the “easy money” has been used to reinforce their monopolistic power.

Democracy requires commonality, inequality undermines it. The democratic process was originally conceived as a way to peacefully resolve economic disputes between people who share common values, either cultural, religious, or in terms of lifestyles or visions of the future. When inequality reaches the critical point, the bonding tissue that keeps society together begins to tear and democracy becomes compromised. In the absence of commonality disputes can no longer have peaceful resolve. Instead, the resolution occurs through negotiation or war. As electoral democracy alone can no longer safeguard the economic interests of the many people from American oligarchs, economic initiatives are no longer effective. A quest for social change takes center stage and a search for a new equilibrium is set in motion.

Social stability defines equilibrium. Social transformations, therefore, represent a change of equilibrium. They are always disruptive and have the appearance of discontinuous processes. Economic changes always take place against a particular social backdrop: When a social equilibrium is reached, society stabilizes allowing the economics to set in. The subsequent economic developments are typically linear – small departures always revert back to the equilibrium — restorative forces overpower those that destabilize the system.

2008 was a paradigm shift not only for economics but for the entire way of empirical approach to reality, which has laid the foundation of rationality and has dominated the Western thought. The crisis has set in motion a social change – the system has begun to search for a new equilibrium, announcing the end of 500 years of history. And, as history is getting unwound, the repositioning in the oligarchic space is taking the center stage. There is no left or right any more. The only meaningful distinction that reflect the type of oligarchic redistribution and its re-functioning is their emancipatory or regressive orientation.

The mindfuck

Where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power. (James Harrington)

Oligarchy rests on the concentration of material power, democracy on the dispersion of non-material power. The American political economy is both an oligarchy and a democracy — a distinctive fusion of equality and inequality. Civil oligarchies represent the most significant political innovation, never seen in history before the creation of the modern state. As a characterization of the Western (predominantly American) political system, civil oligarchy is the result of a shotgun marriage of two contradictory concepts, brokered by an interesting play of numbers: The vast majority of citizens exert very little concerted material power in politics, but a small number of individuals each have at their disposal the resources it would take tens of thousands of their fellow citizens acting in sustained coordination to match[2]. The two groups stand in constant opposition — their conflict never disappears, but defines the driving force behind the underlying sociopolitical dynamics. It pushes all other themes out and becomes the main axiom of the political economy. This disparity of numbers forces a continuation of underlying antagonisms until one side declares victory. As a result, the political process loses its connection with democracy.

The reconciliation of oligarchy and democracy requires a Hegelian Aufhebung, a non-linear logical maneuver whereby the resolution of the inner contradiction is suspended until the concept is completed during synthesis — abolition of the Real to realize the Idea.

Oligarchs represent individuals endowed with enormous wealth which both empowers and exposes them to threats. In America, they constitute only a fraction of one percent of the population and have at their disposal material “voting” power that is hundreds, and in some cases tens of thousands, of times that of the average citizen. To understand the power multiplier, which reflects the underlying wealth differential, one should think of wealth as an instrument that enhances the persuasive power and influence of an individual. For example, being able to convince poor people to vote against their direct interests and in favor of the oligarchs, and to convert these things into laws and tax codes – the essence of the Republican Southern Strategy program as outlined by Lee Atwater — requires considerable resources and access to media, religious and secular institutions, lobbyist and a variety of political consultants that only money can bring. Mind-fuck is an essential ingredient for the functioning of civil oligarchies; without it, they could not persist.

The Material Power Index (MPI) is a way of quantifying the disparity of democratic participation. MPI assigns a base value of one to the average material power position of Americans across the bottom 90 percent of the population. The weakest American oligarchs have between 125 and 200 times the material power of an average citizen. Oligarchs at the very top of American society have an MPI just over 10,000, which happen to approximate the MPI of Roman senators relative to their society of slaves and farmers[3]. This has gone even more extreme after the 2010 Citizens United ruling. In this way oligarchs can legitimate their position with all of their power and influence, without resorting to force – which time and again has proven to be an expensive and fragile tool of stability.

It is not very difficult to see haw a handful of super rich oligarchs can tip the scales of any election. According to 2007 data, the 400 richest Americans have an MPI in excess of 10,000; these 400 top oligarchs have the “voting power” of four million people. Outside of this group, the average MPI of the 1/100^th of a percent of the top earning taxpayers (who own about 2% of all American wealth), about 15,000 people, is around 1000. This means that 1/100^th percent of the population had the “voting power” of 20 million. This is a significant fraction of the voting population (about 130 million in the 2016 US elections). Normally, elections are most often won within 1-2 million margin. Therefore, a victory can be achieved by attracting 100-200 top oligarchs.

Synthesis: Oligarchies as new cognitive coordinates

The essence of oligarchy within democracy rests on the near-veto power oligarchs retain on threats to concentrated wealth. The wealth protection instinct has been one of the strongest sociopolitical forces in human history. Although the attitude towards all kinds of inequality like slavery, racial and gender exclusions had been revised in the past, the same cannot be said for wealth inequality. The resistance against radical redistribution of wealth has been remarkably robust and resilient across a variety of political systems, from dictatorships, monarchies, peasant societies, to post-industrial formations and democracies[4].

As an approach to the problematics of comparative politics, oligarchy as the politics of wealth defense emerges as a better candidate for a unifying framework than the traditional framework based on assumptions that the dominant dimension of a country’s political actions is geographically conditioned. The oligarchic landscape defines new cognitive coordinates necessary for understanding current geopolitical developments. A variety of complex socio-political configurations and their transformations gain instant clarity and simple intuitive interpretation when seen from the point of view of oligarchic redistribution and repositioning.

The mechanism and logic behind this is relatively simple. Oligarchy should be understood as the politics of wealth defense. Outside of the context of wealth defense, different oligarchs can, and generally do, have vastly different agendas (e.g. democrats vs. republicans in the USA, pro-choice vs. pro-life, Tesla vs. Uber, or Bill Gates vs. the Koch brothers). However, they are all united in one common goal – their wealth preservation. This explains why one single common driver alone captures such a wide diversity of developments that sometimes, on the surface, appear to have no logical or rational connections.

[1] Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy, Cambridge (2011)

[2] ibid.

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

 

8.III 2017

Trump in wonderland

In many areas of life, incompetent people cannot recognize just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack. What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge. (David Dunning)

Things got a little different in 2017. Within less than a month in the office, Trump’s cabinet managed to accumulate spectacular cognitive deficit never before seen in the White House. This deficit, accompanied with a commensurate loss of credibility, is threatening to become a permanent trademark of his troubled presidency.

The biggest change introduced by Trump’s arrival has been the reversal of information flows in the communications between the White House and the press. Until now, the White House had always been the center of political information and, through press briefings or other communication channels, shared a fraction of that information with the press. What the press knew was a subset of what was known to the White House. Because of this asymmetry (to avoid answering unpleasant questions or possible self-incrimination), the White House would engage in deception. There was a stable symbolic pact between the government and the press; the press got something to work with, while the White House was occasionally allowed to get out of an uncomfortable situation. No one’s intelligence was insulted.

All this underwent a 180 degree reversal with Trump. First of all, and this is the root of the problem, Trump’s administration seems to be reluctant to accept the fact that they won the election — as if that was never really a part of the plan. Instead of governing, they continue to behave like the opposition, always arguing from the position of the victims of establishment and raising objections and outrage at how the system functions. They have remained reactive instead of proactive, systematically behind the curve.

Trump’s White House is populated predominantly with political amateurs, dilettantes and professional yes-men who, themselves, do not produce any substantial informational content. They are by and large either misinformed and making things up or getting their facts from the low-tier media such as Fox News, Breitbar, tabloids or reality shows, who themselves are known to habitually make things up (their business model often based on fabricating “facts”). As a consequence, the mainstream press has been much better informed than the White House, both in terms of the area covered and the depth and quality of information. Trump’s White House operates with a subset of the information available to the press and the press can run circles around its staff. Because of that, current White House spokespersons have had a great difficulty engaging with the press. They are incapable of creating a deception when they need it – the conceptual difference between a deception and a lie seems to elude them — so they lie instead, and when they are called on a lie, they lie more and blame facts, which further undermines their credibility until there is none left. As a result, after less than a month in office, Trump had to declare war on facts and pronounce the press the enemy of the people.

Masochistic self-destruction

Power cannibalizes itself — it carries the seeds of its own destruction (Jean Baudrillard)

In their infinite political naïveté, Trump and his cabinet do not understand that by waging a war on facts, media and dissent in general, they are actually writing their own obituary.

The current administration is deluded by the idea that their rise to power and their program in general, have a strong historical, messianic mission of correcting the years of imbalances caused by neoliberalism, globalization, and cultural displacement. In their minds, weakening of their power, even temporarily, would be a betrayal of that mission, and so, any voice of opposition has to be inhibited and ultimately subdued.

The fatal flaw of this position is that by suppressing the opposition, and the information its existence and voice provide, the leadership is left essentially blind to whatever is happening in their back yard. Within a very short time, they will have no vocabulary to discuss socio-political conditions and develop an approximate description of social reality.

In the face of perpetual conflict with reality, Trump’s political machine will foster a continued state of cognitive dissonance and with the help of spectacle possibly provide a temporary life support for their existence through the suspension of disbelief. However, Trump’s administration’s non-linear relationship with facts and truths will gradually turn whatever remains of their constituents into a cult following. Like most other authoritarian ideologies, both Trump and his followers will remain non-adaptive not allowing any feedback to penetrate the boundaries of their fortress of ignorance, and when the end becomes inevitable, they will be unable to transform or adjust. The autopsy of the communist experience and other totalitarian forms of political rule offer numerous illustrations of this trajectory.

Aside from this, there is a practical question regarding the sanity of Trump’s approach: How does one get away with a lie as a policy tool in the world of total information? This might be easier to implement in a society like the old Soviet Union, which had never been given a chance to properly embrace modernity and where the population had been subdued by chronic scarcity, where bare necessities had been a luxury for decades, and where people were ready to make any compromise that would restore their dignity and bring their lives closer to normal. In the era of relative affluence and absolute information such a project cannot take root, even in the short run — it would require an extraordinary force to maintain its stability.

And this is where things begin to break down. Large-scale systemic oppression requires the mobilization of enormous resources to keep control of political subjects and effectively turns them into hostages. Attempts to oppress growing discontent require a heavy-handed rule which in turn reinforces the hostage syndrome and brings about further escalation of discontent with generally adverse economic side effects. At that point, legitimation becomes the system’s biggest problem and requires mobilization of all resources, primarily aimed at its glorification. But, by then the oppression is the only thing the system knows how to deliver. It is the only strategy, and a very expensive one. Finally, when existing resources are fully exhausted, the system has to collapse.

Send in the rubes: Technology and political snake oil

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth (Mike Tyson)

Although with the help of social media, artificial intelligence and technology in general, oppression can take on subtler forms, the standard of tolerance will change with it and oppression will always be recognized for what it is. The illusion that this battle can be won by “psychological operations”, a systematic form of mass propaganda that acts on peoples’ emotions — a half-baked idea of crowding out the info-highway with misinformation — is a reflection of both ultimate ignorance and arrogance that comes with it. It is an ill-conceived program initiated by data analytics companies and funded by the right wing plutocrats who specialize in election strategies, based on an erroneous assumption that, in the era of total information, the society outside the governing party’s sphere of influence and control will remain static and non-adaptive, and that the pattern-recognition models of their currently employed consulting companies, will remain only their (and nobody else’s) proprietary tool forever. The absurdity of such assumption is best illustrated by the fact that every major hedge fund has already caught up with this trend and either has a similar platform and capabilities or is in the process of getting one very soon. Words like artificial intelligence and machine learning are the most frequently used buzzwords during the incoming student orientations at all major American universities — these topics are the most rapidly developing areas of science and technology. It is not difficult to imagine what this landscape will look like in four years or beyond.

After all, when it comes to economics and social sciences, there is one thing we learned about our attempts to model their dynamics: All models are wrong; some of them are useful (at best). So, it is all about how we decide to use these models, what sample and assumptions we choose to calibrate them etc. And, sooner or later, we realize that all these models of social behavior do not offer any substantial new wisdom, but can make our tasks of data manipulation easier only if we give them correct instructions as an input. In other words, it is garbage-in-garbage-out at the end, no matter what (this is the best outcome). In that context, alternative facts, misinformation, alienation from reality, or other forms of self-indulgence (an emotional state Trump’s cabinet is particularly prone to) can only compromise effectiveness of any given technological platform.

Yes, these companies can help you win the elections, but they can never become an instrument that secures a smooth and peaceful governing — that erroneous extrapolation is the new political snake oil. People like Stephen Bannon are real rubes here. Their anti-elitist sentiment, combined with their messianic fantasy, which has been running in displaced mode as a war on facts and critical thinking in general, compromised their own resistance to nonsense – they start believing the nonsense they are peddling and ultimately become victims of the snake oil sale themselves.

The ultimate delusion, however, remains a belief that this battle can be won at all. Ignorance by design is the trap any hegemonic ideology faces. Monochromatic political systems are vulnerable to loss of robustness and long-term fragility. The authoritarian project is self-defeating — even a temporary victory on that front is a guarantee of a defeat in the long run. History offers countless examples, collapse of the communism being just the latest one. Diversity of opinions, multiparty systems, and what is generally referred to as freedom of speech (even when existing only pro forma) are always superior in this context. Tolerance for existence of alternative forms of interpretation of social reality as well as social organizing (from street gangs, organized crime, religious cults, and self-sustainable communes to fringe or mainstream political parties) carries enormous informational value. After all, wasn’t the spectacular defeat of the centrist ideology in 2016 (and the traction of the right wing populism in the West) a direct consequence of ignoring the voice of the people who were left behind by progress and globalization — the people whose existence had been systematically delegitimized by neoliberalism. The diversity of opinions of the socio-political landscape allows rule of force to be replaced by a more efficient rule through freedom or self-conduct, which, while not necessarily less oppressive than the totalitarian structures, could be an economically superior alternative resulting in more robust and stable systems.

 

5.I 2017

Pregnant widow: A brief history of the next 30 years

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

(W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming)

Capitalism is disintegrating, but it is not giving way to a better alternative, it is collapsing under its own weight[1]. In the last 40 years, economic progress has been financed largely by social deficits. At the end, we found ourselves trapped in the stalemate of status quo because we agreed to let the market set prices and all other values. Things and services were sold for less than it cost to make them. The actual costs were externalized, their burden not bore by the profit centers, but by the state and increasingly more by the citizens.  However, these are actual costs somebody had to pay. So, at the end, things could not add up. Everyone was running some kind of deficit, and the game had to come to an end. Occasional hiccups during the transfer of those deficits from one side to the other were interpreted as market failures. But, in reality, there were actually no market failures per se; the market itself is the failure[2]. Eventually, this had to be recognized, and we have now come to the point where this realization can no longer be ignored: Capitalism no longer works for capitalists.

From the current standpoint, future looks anything but unambiguous. No decision has been made about the direction the future is taking. This moment of history represents what Alexander Herzen had identified as the Pregnant Widow: The old system has given way and the new one hasn’t been born yet. Does the future bring a normal infant or a Rosemarie’s baby?

We are approaching the final stages of unwind of the 500 years of history. During the 2016 Presidential campaign, we had a glimpse of the future — the three main candidates represented three distinct economic, political and social paths: Status quo (Clinton), regressive populism (Trump), and emancipatory transformation (Sanders). In the past, we had rarely had an opportunity to see such radically different visions getting such a large-scale representation and response — elections had always been about two “infinitesimally” different interpretations of a single path.

The preview of the three paths into the future might very well be a prelude to the most radical and, at the same time, the most significant transformation of capitalism after the industrial revolution. It is an announcement of the socioeconomic blowback, the arrival of times where social deficits will have to be reconciled and managed. The three paths should be seen as the three attraction centers which will define the dynamics of socio-economic developments in the next decades^[3]: Democratic fascism, Decentralized egalitarian “utopia”, and Neo Feudalism. The figure shows the three futures in the context of social and political changes after 1968.

Democratic fascism

A semi-inclusive, cast-like division into two strata: Top 20% with highly egalitarian distribution & 80% of totally disarmed working “precariat”. The key is the balance in size (in the past, similar projects failed because the top was too small).

Legitimation: The dogma of progress & neo-liberal ideology.

Alliances: Military force, Think tanks, Semi-progressive corporate conglomerates, Educational institutions.

Means: Pseudo-progressive politics, Immigration policy, Advanced media and technology, Control of food and water, military technology. To the western mind this mode is the most palatable alternative for the existing system. Favored by Neo liberals.

Decentralized egalitarian “utopia”

Inclusive, achievable through political sophistication and technology; requires accepting certain real limitations in consumption expenditures. Does not mean merely a socialization of poverty. Needs to reconcile with adverse effects of progress, e.g. creation of wealth causes destruction of value.

Legitimation: Evidence that short-termism leads to undesirable long-term outcomes

Alliances: Think tanks, Influential individuals, Technological and networking wealth, New industrial sector based on the commons.

Means: Progressive emancipatory politics, Technological and political innovations and networking. Favored by Western intellectuals (and Hipsters).

Neo Feudalism

An exclusive, highly inegalitarian world of parcelized sovereignties (an equilibrated form of the current “times of trouble”). Consolidation of fractionalized structures into bigger entities with highly vertical structure, e.g. multinational corporations, global crime syndicates…, but without endless capital accumulation as the mainspring.

Legitimation: return to a belief in natural hierarchies.

Alliances: Right wing militias, religious and other fringe elements.

Means: Paramilitary Force, Populism, Regressive non-emancipatory politics, Drugs, Authoritarian propaganda. A glimpse of this mode is seen in post socialist oligarchic systems (China, Russia, Myanmar, Mexico). Favored by Western right wing political organizations. 

We are nowhere near the new equilibrium; the developments of the last decade present just an announcement of a lengthy transformation process ahead of us, expected to take the center stage in the next 30-40 years.

The next 30 years

2016: Baby has six toes

The enthusiastic support enjoyed so far by the non-centrist parties in the developed world outline the unconscious desire for destruction of the system that has imprisoned almost everyone. More than anything, populist victories reflect a defeat of the centrist politics, a departure from what has been looking more and more like the path of democratic fascism. Trump’s victory pointed out the lines of fracture in the centrist narrative and capitalized on its symbolic insolvency. About 17% of those who voted for Donald Trump believe that he is not qualified to perform the duty of the President of the United States. It is difficult to imagine a more eloquent expression of unconditional discontent with status quo than this. Trump’s movement is de-facto a rise of the neo- feudal America. The core of its platform represents the unbundling of the neoliberalism and rebranding it as an anti-global movement. It sees the future as highly inegalitarian world of parcelized sovereignties with highly vertical structure.

By no means does this represent the end of the transformation. It is just the beginning of a troubling unwind. Pregnant widow is only in the second trimester of her complicated pregnancy.

Beyond 2016: Times of Trouble

In the next 2-3 decades, social disorder could take new dimension as demographic transformations continue to weaken state structures further. This could be expressed through two different modes. Either the discontent of ethnically excluded spreads to absorb and articulate the sentiments of other exclusions or, alternatively, discontent of the permanently excluded provokes a reaction of the redundant natives and trigger their uprising and backlash. Civil warfare, initially misdiagnosed as increase in crime, would escalate[4].

The scramble for protection (which has already begun) assumes a new form as the states cannot provide it due to lack of funding and legitimation. The state’s monopoly on violence is breached and reorganized through the expansion of private protection armies and police structure. This process had already been accomplished in the post-socialist countries about 25 years ago and is likely to serve as a blueprint for a similar transformation in the western world.

Western democratic states where these transformations take place will gradually converge towards failed states. Contours of this program are already inscribed in the Trump’s cabinet nominations. Combined with the other side-effects of globalization and the underlying social fragmentation, these developments will lead to further criminalization of societies and polarization of distribution with escalation of corruption and dismantling of the institutions of the democratic state as a natural consequence, implying further instabilities. Organized crime will blossom and reinforce its legitimacy, while developed countries will converge closer towards criminal oligarchies or other authoritarian structures.

The fourth future: A lullaby for Rosemary’s baby

Symbolically dead (from an overdose of itself) while still very much physically alive, unable to either transform by replacing itself with something else or adapt and restore itself to equilibrium, capitalism is exiting the historical scene. However, before it disappears, capitalism will continue to inhabit the world of undead. It will remain inscribed into the system in the guise of a wound which makes the social subject undead, depriving it of the capacity to die — only when this wound is healed, can the capitalist society die in peace and transform itself into something else.

As an economic system, capitalism (at this point) is showing an advanced decline in capacity to underwrite a stable society. What follows after such a disintegration of a system is a prolonged period of social entropy and disorder. For a significant length of time, a society would slip into less than a society – a society-lite — until it may or may not recover and again become a society in the full meaning of the term[5].

Out of all possible paths, this is the most radical outcome, one that is without a historical precedent and one we seem to be least prepared for. It corresponds to what Wolfgang Streeck calls the Interregnum, disintegration of society as such, a perpetual anotherhood – pregnancy without childbirth — a trajectory where the times of trouble continue indefinitely.

Neoliberal narrative which identifies the absence of structure as an ultimate expression of freedom will find new legs in the post-social phase. This is the phase of undead capitalism, the times when the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity

[1] Wolfgang Streeck, How will capitalism end?, Verso 2016

[2] Kim Stanley Robinson, in An American Utopia (S. Zizek ed.), Verso 2016

[3] I. Wallerstine, Historical Capitalism, Verso 2011

[4] I. Wallerstine, ibid.

[5] Wolfgang Streeck, How will capitalism end?, Verso 2016

 

9. XII 2016

The truth about lies

Would you believe your eyes or my words? (Groucho Marx)

The final objective of the Lacanian psychoanalysis, the end of therapy, is to reach the point of Traversing the fantasy where the patient confronts the traumatic Real and learns how to live with it, but without the fantasy as a cushion. This is the point of re-avowing subjective responsibility. Post-truth politics is a reversal of the Lacanian psychoanalysis – it corresponds to Barricading the fantasy. 2016 American Cultural revolution represents the moment of the grand denial of subjective responsibility.

Truth is highly overrated. Lies are socially useful. We lie to our children – we have to because we love them. We lie to each other, to be polite and to gain social acceptance — if you don’t speak the language of deception, no one will listen to you. We even lie to ourselves, mostly to feel better – life would be unbearable without a healthy dose of self-deception. In fact, we rarely speak truth — 90% of our communication consists of lies. Lies are the dark matter of the social universe. Life without lies would be cruel and lonely. Anyone who doubts this, should try telling their boss what they think of him, or communicate their true intentions to their date or, for that matter, be totally honest with their friends. We accept a lie and structure our social reality based on it. This is how symbolic exchange functions.

Lies are a structured response to reality, a way of dressing the truth. The first three stages of grief (denial, anger, and bargaining) are the best illustration of how we construct various protective layers around a shocking encounter with truth by using self-deception, by effectively lying to ourselves.

While lies clearly have important social function and purpose in private life, it is generally expected that truth remains sacrosanct in public life. Education, media, information sources, and institutional and political representatives – the intermediaries of truth – are expected to adhere to the facts primarily to prevent societies from drifting too far away into self-deception. Their credibility has been measured through their truthfulness. Lies have been always disqualifying.

This is where the biggest change has taken place. For over three decades, the importance of these intermediaries of truth has been systematically undermined. There are several reasons behind this transformation.

There is not enough reality to fill the 24/7 news with content that would satiate profit-hungry corporate sponsors and investors. Reality needs to be manufactured and manufacturing reality and selling it for profit no longer requires accurate reporting, but unlimited commitment to satisfy demand for self-deceptive narratives.

Facts have a low marketing value. They are definitive statements that do not spark controversies or encourage debates — only fools can disagree with facts. Every discussion ends once facts are presented. Facts are boring and have no entertainment value. Unequivocal consensus is static, divided consensus is dynamic and self-sustaining; it is a money-making machine.

Multiparty politics has always really been about the ability to shape public opinion. Political rhetoric is aligned with the interests of various political sponsors. Politicians never change their convictions. Rather than adjusting their views and actions to social realities, politicians struggle to influence public opinion so that it conforms to their policies. Their usefulness and professional worth is measured by their ability to successfully perform this task.

All this has been happening simultaneously as facts and truths have become increasingly more unpleasant and oppressive. Like in everyday life, truth, its bare version, no longer needs to be spoken.

As a result, we had an ongoing process of integration of facts and fantasy, relativization of truth, and manufacturing of consensus. Donald Trump hasn’t come out of nowhere. He is the final product of that process, the endpoint of a continuum that started with Ronald Reagan and has been perpetuated by the likes of Fox News and talk radio, which became an essential ingredient of mainstream politics. Somewhere along the way in this continuum between Reagan and Trump one finds Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Glenn Beck, Carl Rowe, Ann Coulter, …

Trump no longer just makes things up, but pretty much lies every time he opens his mouth, even about the things that do not need to be lied about. He seems to have not only mild intolerance for truth, but a deep aversion to it. In his mind, facts and truth represent an inferior and non-marketable product, a low-grade version of what is possible — something that is ultimately undesirable, something people do not want to hear or experience.

Trump is passionate about lying. Politico did an analysis of Trump’s relationship with truth. They found that in five days he lied 87 times. During the total of five hours of continuous talk during those five days, he uttered an average one lie every three minutes and 15 seconds. He lied about the loan his father gave him, about his bankruptcy, about opposing the Iraq War, about financial disclosure forms, about his endorsements, about Obama’s birth certificate, about 1000 Arabs celebrating the tragedy of the 9/11, about paying his taxes, about Hispanic poverty worsening under Obama administration, about Mexicans, about Muslims, about Clinotn’s campaign falsely inventing the phrase “alt-right”, about money from his donors, about his university. He even lied about how many floors Trump tower has.

Lies have become a winning ticket. There is a political following that has formed around Trump, an emerging class of entrepreneurs of deception and professional deniers of reality. This is a new breed of post-truth politicians and public speakers. Their goal is to stretch the boundaries of admissible by constantly producing convenient untruths – factually incorrect statements aimed at wearing down public resistance to lies and nonsense. This is the key takeaway of the 2016 Presidential elections.

Liberation from facts and truth: The American Cultural revolution

Actual belief is socially self-destructive, it has to remain virtual to be effective and socially acceptable – there is something monstrous about people who are true believers.

Lies have gotten a new lease on life. They are now presented as a new frontier, an untapped market with limitless potential. Nothing is binding and nothing sets the limits and barriers.

The United States is one of the most advanced countries. But, at the same time, it is the only developed country where scientific discoveries are not reported, but debated. The war on facts is programmatic. Science explains about 10% of observable phenomena. One would think that science and scientific method would be challenged in the vast area of the unknown and unexplained. No! Religious nut-jobs and right-wing propagandists do not go for the low-hanging fruit, they debate exactly those points that science knows with absolute certainty. This reveals the programmatic aspect of the war on facts. It is the core of the American Cultural Revolution. The primary purpose of this program is to prepare the terrain, to desensitize the public to nonsense and, in the long-run, create aversion and mistrust towards scientific method and raise anti-intellectual sentiment. This is an integral part of that same Reagan-Trump continuum: A systematic effort to discredit critical ways of thinking, to replace probable truths with palpable falsehoods, in order to prepare the ground for the new age of designer illusions.

Ignorance must be cultivated as a precious commodity, and demand for nonsense should never go away. These are the two pillars of the post-truth politics.

There is a true revolution going on. It is a cathartic ritual of collective denial of reality. In the absence of practical solutions (because the system resists change) life-serving illusions are the best surrogate and the only viable alternative. The efficaciousness of lies is being transplanted from social reality to reality in general.

Believers are back! They are a force now. This is the tragedy of the predicament of freedom of choice. Denial of a lie presents an insult to those who believe and the subsequent reaction to that insult reinforces the power of the original lie. So, lies get a life of their own as symbolic virtual – everyone pretends they believe not to disappoint the disillusioned ones.

The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss[1]

Political reality has become incompatible with truth and facts; it cannot tolerate, let alone incorporate, them. At this point, the question is really: Why bother with the truth at all? Why wait for the truth to renormalize spontaneously through social discourse? Why leave this process to chance? Instead, why not abolish facts altogether and design reality to conform to our tastes and desires? Why not take full control of the process and manufacture “facts”, opinions and ultimately consensus? In fact, why allow ourselves to be constrained by the facts when lies have no limits? This is the genius of the post-truth politics.

Facts and truth cannot find their place – there is no room for them – in the post-truth political life. We are approaching the vanishing point[2] where everything disappears. Beyond that point, the human race leaves reality and history behind, where any distinction between the true and the false disappears, where facts will fail because of fictions and successful fictions will become facts of the future.

In a perverse way, America is reinventing itself as the new primitive society of the future. It is reconnecting with its ancestral territory, planting an anchor of a sort, while at the same time staying the course of the American dream – become all it can imagine to be. This is the biggest biopolitical mindfuck of the 2016 Presidential elections. This odd mixture of continuing to dance ahead to the rhythms of its ancestral grooves while ignoring their regressive gravitational pull is predicated on an unlimited capacity for reality denial. The only way to reconcile the two opposing forces is to create images of the future through designer illusions and in that process further detach imagination from reality and reality check, not just past, but future as well. In this way, and only in this way, can America continue to refer to its dream while sticking to its true identity.

In a bad dream we are not protected by the lies of the real world. That is why we always wake up from a bad dream – we cannot take the bare truth that the dreams carry. The American dream has turned into a bad dream, a very bad one. And it is precisely because the dream must go on that we have to construct a protective layer of illusion around it. Without it, the dream could not continue. It is the dream from which America cannot afford to wake up, at least not without losing itself.

[1] Douglas Adams

[2] Elias Canetti, The Human Province

 

19. XI 2016

American anotherhood: Innocence unprotected

Post-traumatic subject is a victim who has survived its own death. After the event of symbolic erasure, a new subject emerges and there is no continuity between new and old identity

For more than a year, we couldn’t stop laughing. We laughed until it hurt, knowing all well that nothing consequential could come out of it. On November 8^th shortly before midnight the chuckle stopped, suddenly, not allowing our mouths to adjust, leaving behind a frozen smile. It felt like a hazing ritual gone wrong: someone got hurt badly. Shit got real!

Although presidential elections are political events, the election of Donald Trump is a cultural and anthropological moment. November 8, 2016 was the American cultural G-spot tornado. The long-standing illegible process became instantaneously legible by the sheer power of the event. This was the day of the encounter with the American traumatic Real, revelation of the knowledge that did not know itself. If the 2008 financial crisis was an economic response to the four decades of neoliberalism, this year’s elections, its social counterpart, is the second installment.

I wish Jean Baudrillard were alive today to enjoy the spectacle he so eloquently foretold. He would have had a blast watching the bonfire of neoliberalism: Symbolic erasure in 2008 and its sequel — symbolic resurrection of America in 2016. Baudrillard’s observations on America, as primitive society of the future, are more relevant today than ever before and are the key to unlocking the gates of its collective subconscious:

Like primitive societies of the past, America has no “ancestral territory”—speaking not of land but of symbolic terrain—that has accumulated centuries of meaning and cultivated principles of truth. America lives primarily in the unconscious realm of myths and symbols. America is like a child. It has no roots except in the future and is, therefore, nothing but what it imagines.

Americans lack a robust tradition of the absurd. Their innocence about themselves is a precious cultural commodity by no means reserved only for the unenlightened. America has been carefully protecting this innocence for ages and this protected innocence became its unique cultural dimension. This innocence was lost On November 8^th. On this day America came of age and joined the adult world.

Complex emotional response to the election’s outcome goes beyond negative aesthetics, disdain for vulgarity, cultural degradation, and outright physical repulsion of the candidate. It is aligned with a sobering self-realization and beginning of a new self-awareness. Our disappointment and anger are no longer directed at Donald Trump – he was just a catalyst; he won fair and square and against all odds — but is directed inwards. It comes from what we see through our introspection, at what we just discovered America really is. After years of anesthetizing the public discourse with neoliberal narrative and political correctness, we are shocked at what stands before us. We are staring in disbelief at our collective soul and are frightened with what we see, how deeply divided America is and how alarming its split personality has become. Suddenly, reality is heavy, dark and troubling.

The origins of divided America goes back to the crisis of governmentality and the transformation of its culture in the post-1968 world. Its initial conditions are defined by the realization that true democracy is ungovernable. This realization has shaped the constitution of the neoliberal state and its mode of governing in subsequent years. The core of that program has been centered on preventing a formation of a unified voice of discontent and consensus in general. Ideological response to that challenge has been to align people along emotional rather than economic interests, to streamline the emotions defined around various charged issues, making sure that there is a steady inflow of polarizing topics that never gets stale. For this program to work, it was important to nurture perception that we are in each other’s way on the road to happiness and prosperity — the essence of social atomization. The divide had to be permanent and irreconcilable, in other words, cultural. Only then could it be effective. As a consequence, culture no longer acted as an agent of change aimed at building consensus and enlightment, but has functioned as an instrument of seduction, to lure people into the trap in which they become eminently governable.

It is not American history per se or its lack that is so problematic, there is more than four centuries of it. Rather, it is the way America has dealt with its history, the process that can be characterized as a systematic denial of shit. Most of the troubling past had been reframed and reshelved never allowing it to become a burden, making sure the focus remains on the future.

America has been quite effective in not speaking about its traumatic past: Collective sociopathia — grotesque aggression, an archetypal love of objecthood elevated by obsession of giving up nothing at all; genocide on Native Americans, slavery, Hiroshima, internment camps, misogyny, racism, wasted lives, mass incarceration, general mixophobia, and systemic exclusion. All of this had to be suppressed, its importance marginalized, absolved of any guilt, rationalized and legitimized by reframing it as a necessity of freedom and progress. And this baggage of the past was blended to perfection with the belief that this country is entitled to permanent and unconditional greatness — this is America’s destiny, mission and goal that should be achieved regardless of the consequences. The bizarre cocktail of the two, which resurfaced during the 2016 elections, is the most troubling aspect of the emerging American political landscape.

This is America’s ancestral territory. These are the true initial conditions that define the origin of American cognitive coordinates. This terrain represents everything America so desperately didn’t want to be, everything it refused to know about itself. It represents everything that it taught itself to considers shameful and for which it reproached other nations and cultures, and for whose wrongdoings it had picked up the pieces some many times in the past.

There is no self-reflexive, self-mirroring level, the civilizing level of unhappy consciousness, which comes with history and which places a distance between the symbolic and the real[1]. Accumulation of latent rage, that made itself visible during the presidential campaign, is a result of all those passions Americans were forced to be ashamed of for so long.

The future of post-traumatic America depends on its ability to acknowledge its ancestral territory and metabolize the traumatic realization of its lost innocence. America will have to find itself in the world of adult nations. But, before it could find itself, America first has to lose its way.

[1] Jean Baudrillard, America

 

28. VIII 2016

There is something wrong with the future

Give me back the Berlin wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima
Destroy another fetus now
We don’t like children anyhow
I’ve seen the future, baby:
It is murder[1]

After getting accustomed to low crime rate since its peak in the 1990s, the world is once again entering a phase of accelerated crime growth. The rise of crime is palpable –- from rapes and robberies to homicides, from blue to white collar, from individual to mass murders, from random to organized and terrorist — although one cannot point to a single reason why. Crime is now at the inflection point. Its presence is felt everywhere, from info-sphere, media, entertainment and schools, to corporations, streets and politics. And the more efforts and resources are deployed to fight it, the more pervasive and out of control it gets. However, it would be a mistake to misidentify this trend as an aberration, an unwarranted side-effect of the post-industrial era. This state of affairs is an inevitable outcome of the neoliberal project at the core of which lies the idea of competition, a highly polarizing concept, which upsets the basic functioning of both society and the economy.

Neoliberalism was born at the intersection of the two crises, the crisis of governmentality and of dominant forms of power during the general contestation of the 60s. The emerging ideology outlined new forms of self-conduct, which satisfy aspiration to freedom in every sphere of existence, while the economic science was conceived as the newest technological invention through which new social reality revealed itself.

At the core of the neoliberal project lays the program of submission of human relationship to one single goal, competition, which has become a general political principle that governs reforms in all areas. This is an extension of market rationality to existence in its entirety. Its unprecedented systematization has profoundly shaped subsequent social reality, as a system of economic production became also a system of anthropological production[2].

So, how did we get here? What kind of reality has neoliberalism created and what is its future?

As the competent constituents of the past (e.g. bourgeoisie of industrial capitalism) gave way to the managerial class that turned competition into the only rule and virtue, the concept of competition gradually replaced that of competence. Only those who had become skilled in managerial functions could become wealthy through their labor. The decisions about production are more influenced by managers than experts as those decisions accounted for the reduction of costs and realization of profits. But, a managerial function detached from intellectual competence consists ultimately of fabrication, trickery, lies and fraudulent accounting, tax evasion and, if necessary, the physical removal of competitors[3].

Competition, once a guarantee of output’s quality, has undergone a major transformation. It has moved closer to the physical removal of competitors, ultimately leading to the systematic devastation of everything that does not submit to the profit of the strongest. Who competes better than those who eliminate their competitors? Mergers are just one form of physical elimination. Profit centers have used their considerable wealth to influence legislative process that removes all barriers for such activity. The state has become both an accomplice and a catalyst in this game. When was the last time government said no to a large merger?

Competition has become a reinforcing mechanism that provides a validation process for the legitimation of crime. Crime is no longer a hidden activity but the alpha & omega of every business, not just a marginal function, but the only way to stay in the game, and often the decisive winning factor in deregulated markets. Crime has disappeared thorough its proliferation. It cannot be eliminated, but it must be embraced. Its total and unconditional acceptance leads ultimately to its invisibility. Permissiveness has become the ultimate form of tyranny and capitalism has turned into a criminal system. Its survival in its present form is predicated on violence, because only violence is decisive.

Re-contextualization of murder: Society and human nature

Neoliberal government requires liberty as its condition of possibility: To govern is not to govern against liberty, or despite it; it is to govern through liberty to actively exploit the freedom allowed individuals so that they end up conforming to certain norms of their own accord[4].

Politics ultimately becomes the tool of social alignment with human nature and consists of the systematic removal of inhibitory mechanisms that allow us to come out as we actually are. Emergence of crime as a paradigm, its omnipresence, is the ultimate consequence of this political struggle. The modalities of resulting social structures have a deep resonance with who we really are.

This is the core problem of neoliberalism, the main reason why it is an anti-social project and why ultimately it either has to self-destruct or society as such has to disintegrate.

Designing a system of social organization which is in harmony with human nature is not something we should aspire to. It is generally a bad idea. A very bad one, actually. Without a considerable amount of inhibition, human nature is socially toxic. In fact, in order to become social, we have to abandon our true nature. The entire process of growing up, of becoming socially integrated – what is referred to as civility – is all about inhibiting our true impulses (e.g. toilette training, selfishness, lack of empathy, aggression, ability to engage in a dialogue,…). These inhibitory skills define us as social beings. Without them there is no society. We are born without those skills and we spend a considerable portion of our lives learning how to acquire and use them.

So, we are the real problem. Violence is inscribed in our genetic code and, as such, it becomes the essential component of neoliberalism. Killing as a (predominantly male) strategy of attaining the status position of dominant power has been adaptive. It is installed in the human brain because it worked. Murder has been a remarkably effective method of achieving evolutionary success (at least in the game of reproductive competition). Modern humans are descendants of those who succeeded in evolution. They are wired in the same way as their ancestors as dominant factors of success propagated[5]. Murder is inscribed deep into our genetic code; it only needs to be set free. The question is then, how close are we to the grand convergence when all barriers are removed and ideology becomes a true representation of ourselves. How far are we from setting free the murder? Well, we may not be there yet, but it is in the cards.

Life in neoliberal utopia. Who has the right to kill whom?

If utopia represents the impossible (imaginary places where social relations are represented, contested, and inverted), and developed society has reached the point where (almost) everything is possible, than the problem of finding our way is no longer the problem of disappearing utopia, but the problem of vision and politics. So what is the neoliberal utopia really like? What is a logical extrapolation of the neoliberal experience and what could be the next frontier for its all-around permissiveness?

Of all the issues that have emerged in the last years, murder has been the most divisive. From police brutality, to vigilante killings, mass murders, shooting of cops and terror attacks. All these cases were really about who has the right to kill whom, and at what price. Black lives matter, terrorism, the OJ Simpson trial, … they have all been about the same theme: Is it ok for the whites to kill blacks, for Muslims to kill Christians, for rich to kill poor, or even for the rich blacks to kill poor whites etc.? There has always been some implicit hierarchy of rules in that space.

Issues that have played a similar divisive role in the past have been alcohol prohibition, abortion (right to life), legality of drugs, prostitution, gay marriage, speed limits, etc. In many countries where these issues have been put to rest, tensions and problems associated with the issue have disappeared.

It is common sense to assume that removing an aura of taboo reduces the appeal of the vice. By legalizing something, one eliminates the challenge and reduces the abuse. For example, incidence of teenage drinking, drunken driving etc. are much lower in countries which have no minimum drinking age, and similarly in the case of car accidents vs. speed limit. In the same manner, one can argue, that legalization of drugs could lead to lower incidence of drug abuse and reduction of crimes associated with illegal drug trafficking. Same holds for prostitution. The upside of legalizing these activities is that society becomes less polarized – people get along better with each other – and, once divisive aspects are removed, politics becomes more constructive.

By analogy with these well-know cases, it makes sense to ask the same question regarding the murder. First, there is an insane number of murders every year. Obviously, the fact that murder is a capital offense is no detractor for killers; the rate of killing (individual/random/mass) keeps increasing. We now have more than one mass murder for each day in the year. The legitimate question to ask then is would the number of murders increase if they become legal. Most likely, there would be an initial surge, but then the trend would gradually subside and new lower murder rate equilibrium reached.

Death by shooting would gradually be accepted as a consequence of our freedoms, in the same way as death caused by traffic accidents, plane crashes, fire, or natural disasters have.

The benefits are immediately visible. First, guns would get the status of a regular appliance, like car or TV — everyone would own (at least) one. This would be plain common sense. All debates about the second amendment would become obsolete and with them the polarizing effects would go away. There would be no justification for the existence of the gun lobby. The NRA would be rendered politically irrelevant and politics, free of its influences, would be able to focus on issues that matter. Without polarization around the second amendment, republicans and democrats could even merge into a single party.

Smart guns would become the new technological innovation. Apple would produce first iGun, synchronizable with iPhone and iWatch, and Teslas would come with special road rage software and appropriate smart guns usable in such situations.

Compulsive killing would be frowned upon. It would be deemed uncool, along the lines people treat obesity. There would be awareness groups that provide counseling and talk shows where compulsive killers would be subject to shaming.

US would enter its post-political phase (given the current political developments, this could be a blessing). There would be less need for police; private protection would be the new area of economic expansion. There would be far fewer people in prisons, both private and state run. No debates about death penalty or life sentence? All these would free the federal budget for more constructive projects. People would be much more considerate and respectful of each other’s feelings. Conflicts would tend to be avoided. Everyone would be nice to each other (assholes would have a very low chance of survival). Generally, people would get along much better. Right?

This is the face of neoliberal utopia. At the end, it is every man for himself, or in the words of Margaret Thatcher: There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.

[1] Leonard Cohen, The Future

[2] Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society

[3] Franco Berardi, After the Future

[4] Dardot & Laval

[5] David Buss, The Murderer Next Door

 

28. VI 2016

The nostalgia of greatness and the deconstruction of a déjà vu

It takes a lot of history to make little culture.

Populism is like pornography: Everything is explicit, but the plot cannot be taken seriously. Populist reality is actualized through the positive feedback loop of suspension of disbelief: A political figure infuses a human interest and a semblance of truth into an unrealistic and far-fetched agenda, while the audience suspends judgment concerning the implausibility of the narrative. Populist politics has a very rigid form. Irrespective of its platform, its backbone consists of three basic building blocks: Flattery/seduction, self-pity, and vengeance. Systems in need of legitimation create especially fertile ground for populism. This is the key reason for its resurgence in the last decades. The mystique of populism’s appeal has the same origin and logic as pyramid schemes — when easy money (or quick fixes) is offered, we don’t ask for rationale. And we always take the bait believing that we are the perpetrators and not the victims.

Making promises gets politicians elected. Populists tend to make grand promises, but generally fall short of honoring them. They inevitably vouch to deliver greatness, bring country back to its citizens, restore the national pride, save the culture, create jobs and prosperity, and last but not least, kick some butt along the way. Populism is really there to restore the natural order of things. And while list of promises varies across regions, histories and personalities, restorative commitment to greatness is a must in all of them. Without it, there is no serious candidate.

But, what does it take to make a country great? This is a complex long-term project that requires vision. The road to greatness involves disappointment and defeat and the ultimate challenge is to stick to that vision regardless of the odds. But, more than anything, what people refuse to understand and accept, greatness is not a destination, it is just a stop on a journey.

Irresistible reasonableness of nonsensical redux

Trump’s appearance on the scene has been pure entertainment from day one. Comedians cheered, Fox news hesitated, the audience loved it. No one was indifferent. Republican debates became the greatest show on earth. All social rules were suspended. The dismantling of the sixteen opponents in the first stage of the republican debates became a blueprint for how the US will kick global butt. Everybody quickly got what they deserved: Little Marco, Low-energy Jeb, Lying Ted, Weak-little-boy Christie, there’s-something-wrong-with-her-face Carly Fiorina… Ben Carson was out before he had a chance to say a word.

However, as Trump began to lead in the polls and ultimately capture the republican nomination, collective sense of humor gradually subsided. Although his public appearances continued to be entertaining and drew high ratings, people found them progressively less funny. The passions that surfaced in his rallies, general tone of the dialogue, and a lingering sense of latent violence, ready to erupt at any moment, created an unmistakable feeling that storm troopers are among us again. A thick cloud of déjà vu gradually invaded political landscape. Suddenly, Trump was no longer funny. The laughter became silent, reactions subliminal, possibilities frightening.

Nevertheless, it remained difficult to pinpoint the exact source of the underlying uneasiness. And, as it is the case when it comes to pornography (as Hugh Hefner remarked), life can often imitate art.

Several years ago, an interesting book hit the market, Timur Vermes’s Look who’s Back Again (Er is wieder da). It became an unexpected bestseller in 2012 and was later made into a move (released in Oct 2015). A very clever book, a comedy of errors of sorts, its premise is simple: Hitler wakes up in 2010 at the exact spot where he supposedly shot himself in his bunker, now a quiet residential area in Berlin. He’s not a day older than he was in 1945, wears his uniform and speaks and behaves as Hitler would. He is mistaken for a method actor and through a strange set of circumstances becomes a YouTube sensation and TV talk show star assuming the role of a TV prophet, something like Howard Beale in the Network.

There is a moment in the movie when Hitler is asked the inevitable question: Why did you return? What is your mission? His answer: To make Germany great again!

Why did you come back?

The key word here is again. The mystique and appeal of populism is condensed in this single word. It is also the most frightening word that sends chills through our bones. Let’s compare the two sentences, one without and the other one with the word again.

There is nothing problematic about the desire to make a country great. However, nobody can promise greatness without automatically overextending and discrediting himself. Honoring such a promise would require perfect foresight and control of the future. Greatness is a long-term project, which in its initial stage requires sacrifices, sometimes of entire generations. Adding the word again changes the meaning completely. To make Germany (or America, or any other country) great again, is very different from making it great for the first time.

Again is a highly troubling word here. To begin, it implies that the country was great once, but not anymore — the romance with greatness had been sabotaged. Naturally, this begs two questions: why is the country no longer great, and who is responsible for that. In reality, the answer lies somewhere between “us” and “nobody”. Civilizations rise, evolve and disappear. Spontaneously. That is how things are. The Roman Empire was great once. It no longer exists. But, this is a hard sell – one cannot build a political platform based on these facts; this line of thinking has to be abandoned.

Again is the magic word here. It accomplishes three things in one stroke. The first effect is flattery, its purpose eminently seductive – we are the sons and daughters of great ancestors so we are entitled to greatness. Second, it establishes the emotion of self-pity – our greatness has been hijacked. And finally, it automatically provides legitimation for any and all means required to reclaim the lost greatness, and restore the natural order of things. This aspect alone has strong overtones of labor camps, gas chambers and genocide.

Again simplifies things greatly: It reduces the job of achieving greatness to extermination. All it takes to recapture greatness is to purge the social body of perverts, degenerates, aliens, and all impurities. This one word transforms an elusive, open-ended project into tangible short-term actions. No waiting, no self-sacrifice, only immediate results. What can be simpler and more appealing than that?

This is the first step in establishing false equivalence between business and politics. The methodology of corporate restructuring aimed at sustaining profits and market domination is mapped onto politics of extermination. Once that is done, the job is handed to political technocrats (present day Eichmanns) for implementation. From this naturally follows a mistaken belief that successful (or even unsuccessful) business personalities can also be good political leaders.

New rules: who’s got to be great?

When it comes to greatness, there should be some rules. The world is a global place. Everything is a zero-sum game – for anyone to prosper, someone has to suffer. Because of this, there should be an international Greatness Committee that makes decisions about all issues related to greatness: Who deserves it and who gets it and in which order, long lists, short lists… It should operate like the Olympic committee when it decides the host of the games. Greatness has to be distributed and countries should take turns. You want to become a great country? Take a number. A country that used to be, but is no longer, great, cannot have its second shot right away – has to go to the back of the line. There are no fast tracks. After all, they fucked up. Getting a second chance at greatness should not be the same as repeating a grade or retaking a test one just failed. That aspect has to be considered and accounted for so that the second shot is not wasted. Otherwise, what about Egypt? Greece? They were really, really great once. Not to mention Mongolia. They deserve a chance. Or, how about Persia? Or Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq)? Oh, yes, and China? The list is long. I bet, the Swiss wouldn’t even bother. Switzerland actually never showed interest in becoming great.

 

27. IV 2016

I have returned there where I had never been

Debt and guilt are two intimately related concepts. In some languages (Sanskrit, Aramaic, Hebrew, German) the two words even have the same root — the German makes it particularly explicit: Schulden (debt) vs. Schuld (guilt). In the same way guilt implies that we will have to atone in the future (or in the afterlife) for the sins committed today, debt is a handover of a part of our future in exchange for present consumption.

The dynamics of capital accumulation is based on the perpetual process of investment in a borrowed future. “Borrow today and repay later” logic carries an implicit bet on the future. Without an optimistic outlook on the future, there is no lending or borrowing. Debt links the present and the future in a circular way: A prosperous future cannot happen without the present, and the present cannot take off without a belief in (better) future. In this way, the very concept of the future undergoes a transformation in capitalism: It no longer represents a timeline we experience, but a concept we envision.

By now, accumulation of debt has become so pervasive that today there is more debt than wealth in the world. No debt will ever be repaid. It exists in a virtual space with an understanding that it can never be allowed to intersect with the real world. Today, debt links institutions and individuals through virtual default — everyone is both a victim and an accomplice in that game[1]. So why does debt still persist?

Debt defines the power structure inherent in the debtor-creditor relation. It has become the main instrument of biopolitics, especially in the last decades of neoliberal hegemony. In the absence of a real collateral (like house, car or any material good), creditor feels entitled to impose upon the debtor’s modes of behavior consistent with initial expectations of debt issuance. It is logical for the creditor to demand from the debtor maintenance of a lifestyle that guarantees his creditworthiness and ability to honor his obligations. For example, in the case of welfare (social debt), government has the power and (it assumes) the rights to pressure the welfare recepient into a conduct that increases his chances of getting back on track — rehabilitated and reintegrated into the mainstream society — so that his social debt is effectively reduced.

In the past, the United States, and other developed countries, used to finance the production of others — this was the traditional center-periphery interaction. Its credit-financed growth, which came to a halt in 2007, created domestic imbalances. This “domestic debt” had to be paid by borrowing from abroad — borrowing to service an already existing debt — a grand pyramid scheme of a sort. In an odd and misguided interpretation of the theory of comparative advantages, the United States specialized in the production of debt, but in international currency (US dollar). This enabled others, e.g. China, to “buy dollars” in exchange for its commodities[2]. To put it more bluntly, the United States imported from China commodities, labor and real products, in exchange for debt – a piece of paper, an IOU. (Who really got a better deal here, or who could get potentially screwed in this transaction?) Thus came about a strange situation in which the emerging world producers, the periphery, also became the net world creditors on condition, however, that payment of debt never be demanded.

United States, the world’s largest economy, owes foreign countries more than $6 trillion dollars, about 1/3 of its GDP (and another $10-12tr domestically). To China alone, it owes $1.2tr, to Japan $1.1tr and to European countries around $1.5tr — about 2/3 of its total foreign debt is concentrated in three economic regions. In principle, these three (and not to forget, rather powerful) creditors have the right to tell the United States how to “behave” — how to conduct its policies to insure its ability to service and repay its debt. In turn, the US is incentivized to comply with whatever the imposed rules, this implicit “code of conduct”, in order to maintain its creditworthiness and ability to borrow more in the future.  Global capital, thus, can demand access to the US political process, and, in order to allow that access, the US laws should be modified accordingly: Global creditors are given a way to have a say about who is elected in policy making offices, including the president of the United States. This is how debt becomes an instrument of global governance. This is the same mechanism already seen at play when IMF and the European Union used their “creditor rights” to disagree with the results of the Greek elections, their choice of the finance minister and a general shape of the local political landscape, followed by their insistence to impose austerity measures in order to insure Greece’s ability to service its debt to the large European banks and to the detriment of the Greek economy and people.

In this way, democratic process becomes compromised by influence of global capital which demands as collateral the ability to protect its interests through presence in domestic policy or eventually access to the real US assets, demand tighter regulations and smaller financial markets as a way of reducing the default risk, or more favorable trade agreements.

Submission to the tyranny of the Global becomes the other side of debt. Our lives become arranged to harmonize with demands of extraterritorial capital flows over which local politics has no jurisdiction and little or no influence. In order to keep global capital happy, budgets have to be balanced, welfare state dismantled, safety net removed and precarity and asymptotic unemployment as a way of life accepted. In this constellation of things politics becomes the problem instead of solution and status quo the only (peaceful) way ahead.

The acceptance of the existing democratic mechanisms as the ultimate frame is preventing a radical (or any other) transformation. Peaceful social life is itself an expression of the (temporary) victory of one class- the ruling one, with the state as an apparatus of class domination. Unable to perform the functions that states generally do, all states eventually become failed states.

Compromised democracy and loss of autonomy is the price to pay for excessive government debt. This is a perpetual process whose end is becoming only more elusive with time. It looks increasingly less like atonement and more like an eternal damnation.

[1] Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, Verso 2009

[2] Massimo Amato & Luca Fantacci, Saving the Market from Capitalism, Polity 2014

10. IV 2016      

Ignorance by Design and the Social Costs of Stupidity          

Seven years after the crisis, it has become clear that it is really not the crisis itself, but persistently incorrect policy response that is the main force behind both social and economic long-term damages. This is an example of the general rule (best articulated by Barry Schwartz) according to which false ideas create circumstances that make them true. Unlike bad material products, which go away if proven inferior, bad ideas don’t go away if people believe they are true. They tend to construct institutions and ways of living that are consistent with these ideas. Current state of economy is a clear illustration of this rule. We have seen this phenomenon many times through history, almost exclusively in isolated totalitarian societies.  But, how could this type of total defiance of reality be maintained in countries with a formally free press and highly educated population, remains one of the biggest puzzles of this young century.

David Graeber offers an illustration of the mechanism that accounts how cognitive dissonance takes over and becomes a governing force in our lives. Politicians, journalists, lobbyists, CEOs and corporate bureaucrats rarely talk to anyone except each other. They constitute a distinct intellectual universe. Within this universe, economic policies are designed primarily for political marketability; economic science exists largely to provide impressive diagrams and equations to sell them with. Phrases designed in think tanks and focus groups (e.g. free market, wealth creators, personal responsibility, shared sacrifice) are repeated like incantations until it all seems like such unthinking common sense that no one even asks what the resulting picture has to do with social reality. The bubble logic can be maintained only by certain studied ignorance of how the economy really works. in that context economics provides a scientific legitimation for status quo.

Ignorance by design is the trap any hegemonic ideology faces. It reinforces already invalidated paradigms, which makes things progressively worse. Maintaining status quo comes at higher costs and its legitimation requires heavier hand. This means reduced tolerance for dissent and gradual inhibition of opposition with loss of information that it provides, which leads political leadership essentially blind to whatever is happening in their back yard. As discontent grows and legitimation becomes more expensive, capitalism could begin to move against democracy. This means that there could be a growing need for adjustment of either democracy or capitalism. The end-game? The moment when status quo is no longer affordable.

9. IV 2016

Welcome to the Dictatorship of Ignorance          

Enormous efforts have been made and trillions of dollars spent to prevent change and misdiagnose epochal crisis for a cyclical one. Instead of fixing the problems which led to the crisis, the policy response has resorted to the reset-button logic aimed only to take us back to the time immediately before the crisis, but without doing any essential changes and repairing the damages. as if to have another chance to replay the sequence of events, hoping, in the meantime, for the recovery to emerge miraculously while ignoring the realities of the catastrophe. Facts work against existing ideology — its implementation comes at high costs. We had a taste of it in the last years. In the forthcoming years, there will be concentrated efforts to dilute facts and insert designer illusions and create new layers of conventional wisdom in the public discourse. The process of dissociation between politics/ideology & reality requires an extraordinary level of ignorance which had to be forced upon society.

If one believes in historical continuity, than the last 100 years has been the period of mutation of the dictatorship which manifested itself through three modes. 20th century started with the dictatorship of the state, which defined roughly its first 50 years, and concluded with the dictatorship of the markets, which created tension that led to the current crisis. Current situation, which is a natural continuation of this process, can be characterized as the dictatorship of ignorance.

The main problem with extending the dictatorship of the free market is tied to its legitimation. And this is especially difficult in the context of democratic systems, where false equivalence s had been drawn between the concepts of free markets and personal freedom, and packaged together in neoliberal ideology. In fact, equality and freedom are mutually incompatible concepts. From the point of view of profits (and economic progress) authoritarian democracies are much better social contexts.

Communism has dissolved spontaneously and peacefully. It hadn’t work out for anyone, so nobody defended it. There was no conflict, just painful period of repositioning. In contrast, free market works for a small number of very powerful people, and it works extremely well, while it fails to an increasingly large segment of the society. therefore, one can count that resistance to change will be fierce and violent. At the end, the problem will be about the numbers. How will a small number of powerful people effectively manage the growing discontent of a large majority in a democratic society. In the short-term, we have a state of exception (which is perpetuated through terrorism, crisis, refugees,…), but in the long run, panopticon is the only solution (surveillance, self-policing, private security, architecture, class differentiation through credit,…).

The efforts for ideological legitimation and subsequent reaction to it will define the violent landscape in the forthcoming decades. The battle will involve all media and culture in general and will take form of intellectual and informational oppression. The big question at this point is not how to repair the existing system, but with what to replace it. At the moment, we do not have alternative forms of social organization. We don’t even have a vocabulary to describe them. So, the first step is to develop a vocabulary, so that we can start putting together sentences and articulate our thoughts.

8. IV 2016

It’s a minefield out there         

Despite record corporate profits we are not seeing a commensurate rebound in demand. Behind this disconnect lies continued trend of consolidation, growing concentration of ownership and general focus on increasing the monopolistic power (i.e. giving up commitment to competition). Backed by strong shareholder mentality and strict fiscal discipline, the profits are effectively being hoarded. Anyone who has recently traveled on one of the major airlines (coach, of course) would have no difficulties connecting the dots: Even as the price of fuel (one of main expenses) collapsed, little of that benefit was passed on to consumers (or airline employees). The airlines story is paradigmatic as it captures rather accurately the mechanism behind the US economic slowdown.

Concentration, which has become one of the main corporate mantras, is contagious and self-reinforcing. Its onset in one sector triggers a wave of consolidation in another, which ultimately results in non-competitive markets and disrupts the mechanism behind the invisible hand, which in turn means that consumers end up paying too much for goods and services while their wages continue to stagnate. This is the territory where standard macroeconomic models are of little help — the existing economic paradigms no longer seem to be relevant to the problems we are actually facing. As a consequence, people are gradually giving up general macro frameworks as a way of facing the markets, and tactical (and high frequency) trading is taking over.

These developments come hardly as a surprise. They are seen as an advanced stage of a long running process. Long-term has become too complex and eludes consistent modeling and forecastability. This has been the biggest lesson of the last 6-7 years — the spectacular failure of economic models to forecast the future year after year borders on cognitive paradox. This has given way to short term mindset and focus. However, with the shrinking of horizons and with the use of technology and communications, short-term has become so fast that it leaves no room for human intervention. So, all efforts are aimed at designing automated (black-box) platforms capable of competing in an ever accelerating environment. In this way, responsibility has not been eliminated. It has been merely averted from say forecasting to the design stage.

There is a reason for a mild concern due to this state of affairs. Black box platforms can only function in the presence of a firm low-frequency backbone, either macro or structurally stable platforms are necessary to set the trends which black boxes use as a reference – without a backbone they become non-adaptive and disoriented. In the markets with backbone, new information typically triggers first order repositioning of big asset allocators which induces distortions due to flows and trading signals for the rest of the market. Without the backbone,  black boxes only talk to each other. There is no informational value in the market flows (garbage-in, garbage-out) and subsequent reactions have no informational content or value either. The system becomes highly sensitive to initial conditions: Even in the presence of perfect foresight where the present might determine the future, approximate present does not approximately determine the future (this is the essence of chaotic systems). As long as there is no disturbance of the market, some kind of stability could be maintained. However, relatively benign shocks are capable of causing unforeseeable changes.

6. IV 2016

Radical alterity at home              

Trump is the embodiment of radical alterity at home (not abroad). he disrupts the system in an essential way by refusing to play according to any rules and has become the object of an exercise to intervene. This is what is happening both on the left and the right, e.g. Stop Trump or Why is Trump bad for the Country movements. However, the reaction of the right has hit panic levels because Trumps candidacy  is threatening to destroy the Republican party.

His anti-immigration rants, one of the main campaign points, is the biggest threat to global capital which loves illegal immigrants because they are embodiment of the markets free of economic rigidities. Immigrants, especially illegal ones, are a politically vulnerable segment of population available to work for wages and under conditions unacceptable to people with citizenship rights. Global capital wants a pool of truly disposable and precarious “guest workers” to labor across the US economy, not their removal from the US labor market.

This has been one of the main red flags that Trump’s campaign has raised and, although it is not the only one, it has set the tone for his anti-global platform which has defined his base — white working class without college degree. If the Republican establishment cannot stop Trump, they will cross partisan lines and support a neoliberal politician like Clinton.