Sample Chapter
In
The Reillusionment
Globalization and the Extinction of
the Individual
by James Robert Strope
The Subduction of the Enlightenment beneath the
Global Corporate Oligarchy and the transformation
of the Freethinking Individual into its loyal Agent
fascinated by the Spectacle of Progress
while producing and consuming the coy Objects of Desire
If one political
party drove progress for the electorate, we would see it in
measurements of gross domestic product, public debt, household
debt, murder rate, number of countries invaded and personal
well-being as that party controlled the Federal government and
improved the nation.
In this work,
party control of the Federal government means that 2 out of the 3
elected components (Presidency, Senate, House of Representatives)
are in control of 1 of the parties.
The US Congress has most often been either in
the hands of the Democratic party or the Senate and House have
been split between the parties.
In the 38 presidential elections since Abraham Lincoln’s
victory in 1864, possession of the White House has oscillated
between Republicans and Democrats.
Control of the US government has largely been in the hands
of the Democratic party interrupted by divided control and least
frequently by Republican control.
Figure
2
Public Debt vs GDP and Party Control of Federal Government. https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-by-year-compared-to-gdp-and-major-events-3306287
In the graphic,
some of the major economic events since 1929 can be identified,
such as the heavy borrowing for WWII in the 1940’s and the
Recession of 2008. The
URL includes interpretation.
Despite
changes in party control, the WWII debt was paid down to 36% by
1979 and has unevenly climbed back to 100% by 2013. US public Debt-to-GDP
ratio has fluctuated independent of party in control since 1929.
Figure 3
Treasury Bill
Chinese, Japanese,
Irish and Brazilian investors are the top holders of US public
debt in 2018.
A high Debt-to-GDP
ratio is not necessarily bad.
Currently, the ratio is around 100% for most countries.
US GDP is financed
by public and household debt, in what can be interpreted as an
ongoing stimulus package that supports Federal programs of
entitlements and defense as well as household buying of real
estate, cars, student loans and consumer goods, financed by banks
via loans and credit cards.
However, the
American middleclass has experienced flat growth since the 1967
while the lower economic class is increasingly impoverished. Upper-class income has
doubled. Wealthy
Americans are getting wealthier while the poverty rate for
Americans without children has almost doubled since 1979 despite
oscillations of party-in-power.
US inequality has
increased since 1967 indicated by the flattening of middle-class
wages, driven by the export of manufacturing jobs, especially to
Japan and China, although American consumers recover some of this
loss in lower prices.
While the concept
of austerity is politically forbidden in America, we are subject
to unmentionable belt-tightening as middle-class wages flatten,
youth is increasingly without meaningful work, total unemployment
(including those dropped from the record) increases, more people
join the informal economy, government services whither and unions
fail to represent workers, irrespective of party in power. The effects have
surprised young whites with minimal education; depression-era
unemployment rates have become the norm for this group, ignored by
the Democrats and exploited by the Republicans in 2016. They are joining
African-Americans and Latinos at the lower end of the economy.
The $2.8T Social
Security surplus has been loaned at interest and is a component of
the US public debt, as it must be repaid if the surplus disappears
in 2030. During the
administration of Bush 43, the Republican party tried and failed
to replace the program with stock market investments, which would
have created windfalls for the wealthy as huge amounts of money
redirected into the stock market would bid up the value of stocks,
benefitting those who already held them.
The US public debt
benefits aristocracies around the world as there is a surplus of
capital and US Treasury Bills are a favored investment. No other institution is
large enough to handle the debt.
Surplus capital and easy credit circulate money globally.
In the domain of
war, the most destructive of political actions, America has
invaded about 1 country per year since 1890, irrespective of the
party in power. During
the 20th Century, Democrats presided over the most
destructive wars as Wilson brought the US into WWI, Roosevelt into
WWII, Truman into Korea and Lyndon Johnson into Viet Nam, although
Nixon spread and intensified the South Eastern Asian war before
negotiating its end. Abraham
Lincoln was the only Republican to bring the US into a very
destructive war in terms of American casualties. Both parties were
destructive to the American Indian culture.
Non-combat deaths
in modern warfare are huge, commonly estimated at 55 million
civilians in WWII. While
Roosevelt and Churchill excoriated German air raids on British
cities during WWII, American and British thousand-bomber raids on
German cities killed 500,000 civilians, 10 times the number of
British civilian casualties, disproportionally women who ran the
cities while the men were at the fronts and children and the
elderly lived in the countryside.
American bombers killed 500,000 Japanese civilians,
including those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Between Johnson and
Nixon, America dropped more bombs on Vietnam than were dropped in
all of WWII, killing 2,000,000 Vietnamese, mostly civilians. Hundreds of thousands
more were killed in Cambodia and Laos.
American action in
Iraq, initiated by the Republican presidents but approved by
Congress and initially blessed by the American press, resulted in
750,000 Iraqi civilian casualties, mostly the result of
infrastructure destruction, economic sanctions, absence of police
protection, malnutrition, disruption of health care, sanitation,
bad drinking water, risks of migration and civil war. Much of the malnutrition
resulted from the embargo began by Bush 41 and continued by Bill
Clinton, resulting in 500,000 civilian deaths, disproportionally
children. The
variance between official and unofficial analysis suggests that
civilian war deaths are historically undercounted.
While President
Obama pulled US troops out of Iraq, he continued US involvement in
Afghanistan, ordered the bombing of Libya and Syria, looked the
other way at the suppression of democratic uprisings in Egypt and
Bahrain and continued drone strikes throughout the Middle East,
maintaining Islamic animosity.
According to Gallup
International and Pew Research, the US has been overwhelmingly
viewed year-over-year by people worldwide as the biggest threat to
peace, independent of party control.
Irrespective of
party in power, imperial apologists justify punishing the
populations of vulnerable errant nations, claiming that if they
were allowed to defy imperial policy, to close their markets to
Americans, to threaten boycott or to fail to obey their
US-appointed puppets, then other nations might join the rebellion.
In an effort to
homogenize world opinion, American policy produces situations that
military, economic and political power can be called upon to
punish. The
military-industrial-complex conscripts human resources, buys goods
and services from contractors and creates enemies and the patriots
to fight them. Centers
of political and economic power experimentally exert their power
because they can, while justifying the violence as heroic virtue.
The election
industry benefitted from the 2016 election. Democrats broadcast
hateful slogans, eagerly transmitted by the press, as if
everything would be all right again if we elected a Democratic
president or impeached the Republican. Democrats accuse
Republicans of stupidity, insanity and evil, which is what every
party always says about its opponents. People might get excited
enough to vote in 2020 and perhaps parties might exchange places
again, while underlying trends toward inequality continue.
Humans do not live
in nature but in our own mendacity.
We live in social, economic and epistemological bubbles.
When we become
aware of the contradictions, we are attracted to books and
entertainment that intellectualize and defuse the issues. The rebellious slogans
are sold back on tee-shirts, pop-music and bumper stickers. We put aside the
newspaper with an ironic sigh.
The American bourgeois will never act on its own ideas
until action is in its own financial interest, which will be too
late. We practice
only the most ineffective modes of dissent. The lower classes, who
have a more obvious stake in revolutionary politics, are divided
into groups set against each other.
There is no exit.
Voting rights have
been extended to include the unpropertied, women, older teenagers
and felons yet the turnout remains low despite the urging of the
media and the noble example provided by the candidates themselves,
as if voting were a grand public duty of no small sacrifice,
conveniently recorded for the nightly news. The election industry
delivers voters via ad campaigns to ensure that only Democrats and
Republicans are elected, as if they were different. The media industries
profit from the advertising they sell to their sponsors and profit
again from the sensations freely distributed by the campaigns at
celebrity events.
Business offers
citizens the tantalizing possibility of becoming the kind of
people they envy while guaranteeing that they will not. Lurid images of
glamorous heroes righteously punishing evil-doers and criminals
frolicking in the lucrative freedom of murder stampede across the
TV screen, presumably satiating the public and adjusting the norm
of expectations. Like
everything in business culture, the process derives from a
cost-benefit analysis. What
is produced is the consumer, whose buying habits live longer than
the purchased product.
The central problem
of culture is crowd control and is solved by the dynamic
construction of the homogenized and docile cultural subject.
Diverse individuals enter the election industry as raw material
and are extruded as processed partisans. The 2 teams of cheering
voters, created by advertising, line up on election day with their
chosen parties in the smug certainty that they are making a
reasoned choice.
The
voter-manufacturing process is driven by contributors donating $6B
annually. Some
contribute to both major parties and almost none contribute to
third parties. In aggregate, the money is evenly split between the
two, creating a 1-party system with 2 colors. The outcome of this
mythical exercise in democracy is a continuation of the status quo
which is a slowly-changing vector-sum of its financial influences,
who rent the federal government at bargain prices.
This legalized
corruption is not necessarily a bad thing, as it tends to
stabilize the economy, although in a direction independent of what
is good for the nation and its people while benefitting the
high-end business community.
Pennies trickle down to the general population while
millionaires become billionaires, discovering that consumers will
endure much abuse without rebelling when they are reassured by
advertising and divided politically.
The emasculated
middle-class, ever infatuated with current trends and celebrities,
imagines that it has a comfortable role to play despite the lack
of economic progress. The
election industry stabilizes American culture, resolves national
crises politically, legitimizes the sense of national citizenship
for many, and provides a means of control of the multitude by the
few.
The election
industry is evil as it deceives the public it pretends to serve,
secretly bowing to the monied class.
Politics is no
longer local. The 2
national parties identify close races at the national, state and
local levels and pour advertising money to swing the vote their
way. Most money for
House districts comes from out of the district, even out of the
state.
In concert with
many other industries that reward the big capitalists, the
election industry is good as it provides an organized structure of
business that employs and distributes goods and services to
millions, indirectly provides tax revenue to governments who in
turn reward the financiers, provide infrastructure and minimize
some of the more obvious excesses at the behest of business.
The business
practices that conserve institutionalized capitalism are
thoroughly evil, their charity contributions notwithstanding. Their well-publicized
greenwashing offsets the shallow guilt of their stockholders, to
which the boards of directors are ostensibly beholden.
We cannot trust the
monied class to operate the national and international economies
because they have failed to prevent destructive wars and
depressions. Nor
should we trust them to look out for their employees, who have
become mere commodities to be rented and discarded. The 1% in control of the
United States are parasites living on the body of the citizenry. In turn, the business
class regards the citizenry as a bloated parasite feeding off the
wealth, intelligence and organizational skills of the business
upper class. Thus, we
are divided.
That
decentralized-neoliberalism is superior to all other possibilities
serves the oligarchy. Similar
to biological evolution, systems of power don’t strive for
universal perfection, reaching for a stable utopian plateau, but
only require profits during the current 3-year plan. Extinction, which is the
failure of survival, is common in plants, animals, species,
businesses, nations and empires.
People get exactly
the government they deserve and always pay its price. People have all the
power and yet fail to exercise it.
The new ruling classes that emerge from revolutions
typically preempt the revolutionary intentions that brought them
into being, repeating their slogans, deifying their heroes and
exploiting the people.
The industry
produces candidates who serve their monied constituency or they
would not get contributions from the coven of financial witches
and warlocks hovering invisibly over the process. At the end of their
terms, the candidates will have obediently advanced the neoliberal
cause at the profit of the aristocracy and at the expense of the
citizenry. In the US,
defeated politicians become high-paid lobbyists and consultants
because they know who’s who in government.
During the passage
of time, a society is not merely cyclical and circular, returning
again and again to a beautiful spring of survivors following a
deadly winter, but a chaotic spiral, sometimes widening, sometimes
narrowing, crashing, changing direction, trying to serve its
powerful constituency, spinning off billionaires and starvelings. Life on earth is
characterized by predation and symbiosis. Mass extinctions mark
geological ages. If
there is a social evolution of personality and government, its
motion is as chaotic and pointless as biological evolution.
The 2016 election
amplified the engineered polarity of the American electorate and
ensures an exciting 2020 election.
The body of the electorate, already fascinated by the
spectacular red-and-blue herrings of their respective victims,
will continue to be oblivious to the slower creep of the
underlying economic metrics.
Inequality, cost of education, debt and war will continue
to undermine the very security incessantly invoked by politicians
in their public harangue, ever exhorting the multitude to produce
and consume in the face of manifest enemies.
The White House and
Congress have already betrayed the electorate in the 2017 Tax
Bill, rewarding the aristocracy with huge tax breaks, throwing a
few dollars at the middle class and borrowing to make up the
shortfall in tax revenue. Democrats
are disingenuously chanting up their slogans. If there still is a
pendulum in 2020, the political left will be in position to swing
it the other way, electing a liberal president and congress,
derived from and obedient to the same oligarchy eternally safe in
their gated communities. A
new pair of fictitious champions will take the field to entertain
us. Change is
vanishingly possible and yet is held in front of the nose of the
voting consumer like the tenderest and most desirable morsel ever. Cruel optimism!
The middle-class
personalities are fascinated by the institution’s products, and,
being products themselves, are fascinated with themselves. People
who are not crushed by the institutions more or less support them. The whole chaotic
process is ridden by its parasitic symbionts who assume that their
profit-taking will not kill the beast upon which they feed.
Globalization
harnesses the subjectivity of the individual to the team of draft
animals hauling the imperial monolith into the future. When worn as a fashion
accessory, the postmodern individual takes to the harness eagerly
to the generous applause of his peers. Increasingly
compromised, individuality as a mode of existence will evaporate
when its last member, the last keeper of the stories illustrating
the myth, finally dies. Only
then can the tragedy of the individual be written, not the usual
story of he who cannot get what he wants, nor of she who is
prevented from being all she can be, but the story of the last of
our kind, the choosing individual disappearing completely,
replaced by a yet-to-be-named human of unimagined consciousness.
If elections could
actually change things, they’d be illegal. Because the 2 parties
are working for a small group of financiers, the press fabricates
the Deep Dark Partisan Divide to distract the electorate as the
metrics continue their insidious creep, commentators left and
right notwithstanding.
Sustainable culture
is a persistent network of adaptable, self-funded, self-justified,
and inter-constructing institutions.
The constituent personality is the atom of the institution.
Instabilities
threaten the personalities while institutions dynamically
compensate their members by providing personalities as adapters to
handle the immediate situation and over time drive the sightless
evolution of culture.
As an institution
succeeds, it improves its techniques by imitation and invention,
becoming similar to other institutions as they learn from each
other to generalize the mass-production of products, producers and
consumers. The success of techniques tends to reduce the number of
techniques by eliminating the suboptimal in service to systems of
power.
It is not that we
must create stable institutions for our culture to survive but
that we create each other simultaneously, with no purpose,
meaning, or destiny other than what develops in the moment,
convenient to the relationships, plans notwithstanding. The cunning intelligence
of the institutional leaders enables them to choose the best
techniques for manipulating their domains, reducing the kinds of
things they have to do to maintain profit and power. The only metric is
success.
The individual is a
type of personality devoted to independent, self-serving
ideologies that are produced by families, schools, churches and
workplaces in concert with advertising. The successful
mass-production and herding of personalities, who think they are
in charge of themselves, closes society, restricting real choice
in favor of group-thinking redirected to the array of products for
sale. As we wheel our
shopping cart down the supermarket aisle, selecting a desired
commodity, we’re gratified in the consumption of our choice and
yet annoyed at an inconvenience, such as the line of consumers
ahead of us at the cashier, as if the market served us, that we
were its critics, that it listens to us, when in fact we’re under
its control, trained to select from its apparent variety and to
line up to pay.
The election
industry is funded by the captains of industries who invest
profits in candidates who will likely act in the interests of the
funders, enacting laws that favor them with tax advantages,
competitive edges and governmental deregulation. The latter effort has
been so successful that American business now regulates the
Federal government, effectively renting it at bargain prices. The harnessing of
government at all levels reduces the freedom within the system and
trivializes democracy in favor of a broad oligarchy devoted to
their own privilege, which narrows the scope of the society,
eliminates channels of freedom and closes society. A closed society is
brittle, as it over-constrains it subjects, and has a short life
expectation.
Mass-produced
voters dutifully repeat the slogans of the corporate funders. Everyone tribes up,
hears the same thing from everybody they know (after casting out
the heretics), ignores their opponents, and thus guarantees a
plentiful absence of individuality.
A successful advertising campaign creates an accelerating
desire for the candidate, igniting a complementary pair of
cultural firestorms that draw everyone, awake or not, into the
election process. It
is the job of presidential administrations to reillusion the
dispirited voters of earlier elections, enlisting them in yet
another false revolution, publicly reassuring the reliably
faithful and quietly betraying the lower and middle classes to the
profit of the commercial oligarchy.
The cohort who
voted Trump into office, despite their enthusiasm, are sinking
into economic oblivion. After
they are no longer useful, they will be ignored again.
The victors justify
themselves in talk shows and their fans repeat their talking
points.
The election
industry resembles the industries of entertainment, incarceration,
manufacturing, marketing and the military, which use the
techniques of corporations, creating producers and consumers who
are the regular customers so highly-prized by marketeers. The
annual Super Bowl is an analogue of the national election as the
seasonal buildup climaxes in the championship watched by millions
of excited people and changes nothing. Our society threatens to
close into a single spectacle sport.
In totalitarian
societies, the people are ruled by coercion and spies. In a free society, the
producers and consumers are herded by advertising, with coercion
lurking surreptitiously in the background. We don’t have
surveillance cameras in our rooms, monitored by overseers with
coercive powers. Instead,
consumers buy cheap projectors displaying what to buy and how
happy to be with the purchase.
There is only production and consumption of mass-produced
goods produced and consumed by mass-produced people.
It’s incorrect to
justify an industry and its customers as a society of
knowledgeable free agents, choosing among jobs and locations and
products. We create
and are created by our institutions, which are not under our
control. We subject
ourselves to the system of control that requires our subjection.
It is incorrect to
describe advertising as information for a free citizenry because
this information is produced, monitored and quantified
demographically to identify patterns that seek the creation and
manipulation of desiring personalities under the advertiser’s
influence. Advertising
creates
not just the desire for a product but creates the consumer as a
self-interested creature designed to acquire the advertised
objects of desire.
The product of
advertising is the consumer, the devolved individual, the
far-removed descendent of the conflicted Shakespearean and
Cartesian characters brooding profoundly over their dilemma or the
Jeffersonian individual, watering the tree of liberty. The postmodern
individual is a deceived creature tasked with perpetuating the
ever-reducing ideology to deceive the next generation.
This criticism is
not a conservative position, yearning for prior greatness, because
there is no going back to the modern. Past, present and future
are constructed presently. There
is no exit from the postmodern because there is no industry
creating free personalities searching for the exit. The only industries to
survive are those who create its consumers at a sustaining
profit.
Figure 4 What’s so funny?
The controllers of
the industries try to minimize the cost of labor, making agile
plans to manage the business cycle.
When down, they lay off and when up, they hire. Meanwhile
they integrate processes, merge, spin-off, bankrupt and package
corporate components for sale.
Layoffs excrete corporate liabilities. Doing more with less
reassures the shareholders. Will
the parasite kill its host? The
controllers reduce the number of techniques in play, closing
culture.
The paradox for
corporate economy is how to minimize labor while keeping them as
customers.
Every large
corporation has an infrastructure-improvement effort that asks
middle-management for suggestions on increasing productivity,
customer satisfaction, and sales. On the basis of cost/benefit,
strategic goals and resource requirements, the profitable projects
are selected, scheduled, implemented and the results measured
against expectations.
Eventually, the
accumulating person-hours saved enables a reduction in force. The
most loyal employees are retained to do all the work and the rest
are cast into the unemployed labor pool. Those who can’t find work
within a few months drop from the unemployment numbers. During decline, many are
unemployed, driving wages down. The
uniformity of this technique applied across corporations
homogenizes the culture.
The oligarchy fears
the masses of diverse people, who produce and consume the products
and who might look up from their personal electronics and become
conscious of their circumstance.
The oligarchy approaches this problem by dividing and
conquering, pitting one segment against another, white against
black, north against south, young against old and party against
party. One of the pair is assured of enforced privilege and the
other a smoldering resentment flaming into violence, bringing
police oppression and preserving opposition.
The election
industry neutralizes incidental angst by selecting candidates who
publicly pretend to oppose each other. After each presidential
election, despite the acrimonious debates and their commentary,
the candidates get with the press and ridicule the campaign. The October 21st
2016 Wall Street Journal front page displayed a photo of Hillary
and Donald having a good laugh.
The press gets the joke and then in the editorials, insists
that we vote anyway.
The campaign-money
finances staff travel, publicity, political consultants, and more
fundraising. Campaigns
try to amplify the scandals into earth-shaking revelations to be
multiplied by the news. Newsrooms
benefit from the scandals, which draw the public attention to
their sponsors.
Only Democrats and
Republicans can win. The
illusion of choice is maintained while choice is strangled.
The big spenders
have to finance only 2 parties and, in aggregate, the 2 parties
split the income evenly. While
elected candidates publicly pledge open access, large contributors
have private expectations. Bills
are constructed to run the congressional maze by ancillary
provisions, each buying support, giving the financial interests
their reward. Democracy
becomes a storefront.
The system closes
further when the government uses its financial power to implement
its agenda. Arrest
and trial, lawsuits and regulation can cost the citizens cash to
fight the intrusions while the deep government pockets, filled
with tax money and working for the oligarchy, is inexhaustible.
Outside of
elections, there is no shortage of oppositions, fringe groups,
shock-jocks, lunatics, crackpots, and tiny parties on the wax or
wane. The individual
in all its rabid specificity appears within a cacophony of
fulminating opinion, each voice electronically insulated from its
consequences, a fragmentated allegiance of quarreling pieces such
that unity becomes ever less possible, a situation that begs the
demagogic would-be emperor to step in with his iron hand to clean
up the mess in government and end the stressful, chaotic babble of
end-stage democracy, to close down the supermarket of ideas. Meanwhile Democratic and
Republican candidates wait in the wings of the political stage
with their handlers for the more or less annual adjustment.
The fundamental
paradox of civilization is freedom versus order. When order wins, the
nation becomes a fascist police-state that destroys itself. When freedom wins, the
nation self-destructs, falling into anarchy, warlordism and
unpredictability.
A culture, like a
person, does not exist in a single stable state but instead
participates in a changing network that tries to maneuver the
social creation and destruction of personalities into a closed and
predictable system. Its
success leads to its failure.
Closed societies
lose their resilience and become brittle. The natural
rebelliousness and complacency of people can be amplified by their
leadership, poverty, repression and illiteracy. Institutions continue to
optimize the techniques needed to control their domains but the
subjects must be rewarded to stabilize their participation and
punished away from the alternatives.
Police and military repression make a brittle culture more
fragile. The disloyal
and disgruntled are fired from their jobs, imprisoned or murdered,
creating additional hatred. Authoritarian
leaders stupidly think that if a little forceful repression is
good then a lot will be better.
Shoot a few and they’ll all scatter. How much abuse will the
people take?
Liberal democracy
controls by minimizing coercion, giving the people the illusion of
freedom from oppression. Variations
in effectiveness of the control can accumulate to where a
substantial number of the governed fail to be reassured by bread
and circuses. Repeated
recessions, price instabilities, extreme weather, decaying cities,
decline in health, lack of job and educational opportunities,
frequent wars and declining industries accumulate residues of the
impoverished and disgruntled.
For institutions, the challenge is how much profit can be
extracted from the society without causing the revolutionary
destruction of the governing institutions, how to minimize labor
and maximize customers, how to propagandize the people, build
prisons, recruiting armed forces and above all identifying and
punishing revolutionary leadership.
When control fails,
accurate prediction becomes more problematic. The system of
institutions is no longer an engineered control system, no longer
a predictable machine, but a chaotic open-loop system wildly
trying to respond to its input demands.
The government can
reply with other ploys, such as foreign war, which tends to unite
the polity against the foreign enemy and to provide the agile
oligarchs with yet another source of income. Civil war results from
extreme polarization. Continuous
war and states of emergency drain the confidence and some people
detach from the imagined social body, becoming third-party
critics, graffiti artists and saboteurs smoldering in the wings of
the political stage. Wars
are financed by public debt, which the consumers and producers
must pay down while doing the killing and dying.
Because society
contains humans, who are simultaneously the creators of culture
and its victims, society includes mutating uncertainties,
estimates, guesses, desires, hatreds, lies, fantasies, myths,
diverse histories and demonstrable systems of facts. Societies that insist on
closure become brittle and corrupt.
The earlier constructed truths disintegrate under the
onslaught of physical and political reality. The oligarchy must
continue to prop up its institutions by reinventing new slogans
and passing new laws while profiting its owners.
Personality is
constructed during imperial ascendency and deconstructed during
decline. At the leaving behind of empire, facing reductions in
fortunes and impending social catastrophe, the stories we tell
each other become songs of woe in the language of decimation,
reflecting the disintegration or become pretty fantasies designed
to ignore the disintegration until the dreams finally evaporate
entirely to be replaced by the songs of triumph invoked by the new
personalities created by the revolutionary social order. New gods are added to
the pantheon while the old gods sulk in oblivion.
Although the
imperial monolith has 14 billion eyes, it is blind. Although the gigapede
has 7 billion brains, it has the intelligence of an amoeba. And yet it employs us. It is us.
Democracy, the
collective intelligence of the people, is progressively
trivialized to the enthusiastic cheers of the electorate. Dissent and opposition
are marginalized and dismissed.
Eventually,
power fails to homogenize its subjects in the face of chaos.
Stresses exceed the
ability of the institutions to handle them. Inefficiency and
corruption of those in control, the immunity of law enforcement,
the concentration of wealth at the expense of the producers of
wealth and the growing hatred between classes undermine the
personalities of consumers and producers ultimately responsible
for the creation of wealth.
Subjective
confidence fails, rebellious personalities spontaneously emerge
and civil solutions yield to physical coercion as the powerful try
to protect their investments.
Gentler techniques of crowd control wither away and the
avalanche begins.
Can the aristocracy
sustainably feed 7 billion? We
might face a global famine, driving the greatest extinction event
in the history of the planet as billions of starving humans
scourge the planet for food, accelerating the breakdown of the
distribution system in the most vicious cycle imaginable.
The Anthropocene
could be the shortest of the geological ages, its geological
strata indicated by a thin layer of broken glass. In a globalized
revolution, only the most brutal will survive. Books will be burned for
fuel.
Loyalty does not
equal obedience.
Be all you can be. Work for justice.