Cognitive dissonance under pressure
I think that what seems to have changed in the increasingly heated ideological debate now going on worldwide, is that is that the post world war democratic consensus is now breaking up under the enormous pressures of an increasingly totalitarian and radical marketing system. And the telltale sign is when faith and reason cease to meet in the middle and belief forces itself onto reason, because it cannot tolerate what reason is saying. But the thing is that the parties involved in the break up all think that this cognitive dissonance is the problem of ‘the other guy’.
What this means in practice is that everybody is getting blindsided.
The deregulatory free market libertarianism of the neo-cons and and the deregulatory civil/social libertarianism of the post-Marxist left do exactly the same kind of damage to their respective environments, but each side can only see the damage being done by ‘the other guy’.
The way the libertarian left is viewing the asylum question is every bit as intellectually and morally blind sided as Abbott and his mining oligarch mates are on the environment. The corrupt nature of much of our welfare system is paralleled by the almost insane greed of those oligarchs. The lumpen proletarian scum who smashed up parts of working class districts in London 2011 is matched by the cannibalistic criminal conspiracy of merchant bankers and investment wankers that led to the GFC in 2008.
All sides to this have a lot to answer for.
This makes for hopelessly unproductive debate, because everyone is clinging to their respective holy cows, all of which are as compromised as each other. Each side is totally correct in its assessment of the almost infantile and corrupted thinking that the other is engaging in. The effect of this is for everyone to dig in and regard the other as an increasingly dangerous enemy who must be thwarted by any means. And if we cannot get out of this repeating discourse loop, the result will very possibly lead to war, as the inevitable shit storm we have been working on now for the best part of 70 years, hits the fan.
The terrible and lamentable effects of deregulating everything and turning the entire social/ecological environment spectrum into a free-for-all is the collapse of moral integrity, social governance and the biosphere, together. Everyone is playing a terrible game where all the players are half blinded, blundering at each other and upping the stakes to include everything they respectively value.
What everybody is failing to recognize is that the probable final stage of capitalism and modern times is characterized by an economic system that is so aggressive it pulps everything it touches, from social and existential software to the biosphere. And we have all become victims because much of this has come at us under the collective radar.
Privatized totalitarianism brought to us by the proud sponsors seems neutral and even benign, but it is actually more dangerous than the despotisms of the past. It avoids the ordinary signals that usually tell people the difference between obedience to a threatening authority and the ‘freedom’ to spontaneously obey the always clamoring voices in their heads.
Privatized totalitarianism entrenches adolescence as the culture of adult society because consumers must be as children who can be carried away by the Pied Pipers of Cool to live inside the magic mountain that is Consumerland. They become Peter Pans and Wendys in Never Never Land. And their children are just like them, only younger.. They live in sub-chaos, but at the same time, they are disciplined veteran third generation shop troops who aggressively patrol the planet for buying opportunities created by the saturation bombing of markets by production war machines, who must dump ordinance in ever increasing quantities and velocities until the place eventually blows itself to smithereens.
The baleful result will be that by the time everyone is forced by circumstances to to check out what their critical judgment has failed to see, we will have lost control of events. The horse will have bolted. And then there will be no choice but to slug it out and see who is left standing at the end.
My best guess is that the old time religious fundamentalists will inherit everything, because modern times will have bankrupted itself, the toys and diversion will have gone, and mass populations will find themselves existentially stark naked, frozen stiff and with nowhere to go.
ISIS, Boko Haram and The Tea Party are just the beginning.
In response to a request for a bio, Christopher Nagle sent this, the story of my adult life:
The Pilgrim
Great journeys must be imagined first
and so trenchant in their intent
to slake the deepest kind of thirst,
it grasps imaginers by the throat
and tells them bluntly:
only through travail and trial,
by purging fire
and hammer blows be smote
can their spirit be reforged
and history’s child
be sired.
This ordeal can either temper
or destroy
according to its whim,
or perhaps the pilgrims’ strength within.
Courage can surmount faint hearts,
but how can faith presume
that having gambled all,
there is a way to save us in the end?
There are no roads upon the other side,
except the ones we make,
every step perhaps at stake
our lives,
every view through soldiers’ eyes.
And so we wile away our days
beside brooding familiarities
that will not speak to us for fear
that it is not the sun that brightens
all that we hold dear,
but the bonfire of our vanities;
that the deepening darkening shade it castes
is not shadow,
but decaying sanity.
We look for hopeful signs,
but at midnight,
the clock rings its hands and says
in anguished tones,
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
it’s time.”
