A Culture On Fire: The Road to War

Indulgence Capitalism, irrational thinking, destroyed infrastructure & sectarian discourse

The attacks on freedom of speech, the rise of oracular faith based perception and the decline of the rational Enlightenment are important as a free standing set of regime wide problems, but not nearly as important as what is underpinning their emergence.

When in the middle of a bizarre Alice In Wonderland style epistemic (relating to knowledge or to the degree of its validation) battle and one’s back is up against an existential wall, it is hard to gain and maintain strategic analytical insight and overview. Yet without it, we are stuck in the to and fro of front line ideological struggle with the perfidious other. And while that doesn’t matter so much in the context of a pub brawl, it matters a lot when the conflict takes in a whole culture across all its institutional platforms.

The decline of Hegelian/Marxian notions of ‘forces of history’ has coincided with loss of strategic thinking and intellectual overview that explores the fundamental and long term evolutionary strengths, weaknesses and relative performance of current ruling class administration and the system it inhabits. We have to return to a notion of historically dynamic capitalism and how it is evolving, which might explain why we face the conundrums we do and suggest avenues to if not successfully confront them, at least plan a rational retreat before forces whose momentum may be too great to stop.

That does not mean we need to prop up the late lamented memory of Karl M or convert to socialism. ‘Conservatives’ (whatever that means these days, which is deeply uncertain) should be as capable of macro-systemic analysis as anyone else. Socialists should not have a monopoly on critiquing capitalism.

In my view, the roll out after the Second World War of what I call ‘Indulgence Capitalism’ is where all our problems start, mature and come to fruition, by systematically deregulating and privatizing underlying commons infrastructure on behalf of private ‘free market’ and personal entitlement ‘human rights’ interests, unencumbered by ‘limiting’ boundaries/disciplines/accountability/collective demands (self ‘regulation’) that has undermined not only the rules-based and enforceable mechanisms for producing and maintaining that infrastructure, but our collective boundary free grip on reality.

Neo-liberal deconstruction of the economic commons didn’t stop there. All platforms of the system, including the social and existential spheres were similarly affected, posing as ‘liberating empowerment’, ‘freed’ from the ‘authoritarian’ strictures and ‘repressions’ of the past and stripped of the responsible adult agency that once came with civil rights, but later very quietly substituted by unqualified/unconditional ‘human’ ones.

Twentieth century world wars unleashed unprecedented productive output growth and totalitarian mass mobilization to facilitate it, for which there were no ready made equivalent peacetime growth models to take up the slack, once the wars stopped. What evolved in the post WW2 world was the transfer of wartime overproduction and consumption run by military machines designed to bomb enemy constituencies with fast use-by-date destructive ordinance, to marketing machines designed to ‘bomb’ peacetime constituencies with ever faster use-by-date civil ‘ordinance’.

To keep economies growing exponentially, war economy transmogrified into one of expansive indulgence as an organizing principle beyond the wildest dreams of all previous generations of our species, including their kings, aristocracies and bishops. And its voracious growth appetites ate everything in their path, from the natural world to human domestic infrastructure and governance, as hedonistic egoism, unqualified self interest and loss of restraint came to dominate social behavior at all levels.

To instrumentalize this rush required the take down of a culture and economy built around disciplined/rationed needs and wants in favor of delimited/disinhibited fantasies of desire and their immediate consumer realization, regardless of longer term consequences. This was achieved with the relentless blurring of the boundaries between knowing fantasy and unknowing delusion, by bypassing evidence-based reason in favor of marketed perception/consciousness/iconic thinking.

Indulgence Capitalism is an intensely engineered totalitarianism that no longer requires state-based authoritarian governance in order to create compliant populations who do not require external disciplines to get them to conform. ‘The Matrix’, for all its special effects entertainment narrative, is an accurate fable-of-our-times in which almost the entire population has no idea what has happened to it, or what is driving the events around it, or even the nature of what it thinks is reality, as if it had been attacked, colonized and preyed upon by industrial jewel wasps.

The prisoners are not held by walls or guards. They cannot bring themselves to leave. They are held there by visions of paradise, brought to them by the proud sponsors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_cockroach_wasp

It should therefore come as no surprise that the existential dance between introspective/subjective faith-based perception/belief and reflective/external 3rd party referenced objective/logical/evidence based reason should have become so muddied and opaque that the dance has stopped and the partners to it sundered. Faith becomes blinded not only by intensifying and uncontrolled sectarian dogma, but impaired analytical vision and logical structure, and Reason, deprived of Faith’s existential/moral anchorage, becomes extrospective and opportunistic rationalization, and anybody’s plaything.

The architecture of discourse itself starts to show signs of chronic stress, intellectual blunting and sectarian feuding around non-negotiable bottom lines that are at constant risk of being breached.

Thus the rationally irrational language of asylum inmates becomes official institutional fiat. Publicrelationsmarketingspeak becomes ‘truth’. Regime disapproved ‘Wrongthink’ is discredited as ‘discriminatory’, 'racist', ‘prejudiced’, ‘privileged’,‘bigoted’ and ‘inappropriate’. Liberal Enlightenment values have been replaced by doctrinaire heresy sniffing neo-clericism. Oracular ideological declamation and indignation heads off civil debate at the pass and circumscribes the parameters of ‘acceptable’ discourse.

The university-based postmodernist retreat from evidence based inquiry, open debate and competitive schools of thought, into linguistically mangled and authoritarian gobbledygook, sloganeering, untouchable sacred site manufacture and the creation of magical word memes (stereotypes), is entirely in line with the rest of the architecture of discourse. It isn’t just an isolated bubble filled with laughing gas.

‘Always Was/Always Will Be’ in Wurundjeri* Country, where ‘Things Go Better With Coke’, are identical sloganspeak on behalf of the civil and commercial sponsors, that all bypass most critical faculties, most of the time….drip, drip drip….

Towards the end of the first third of the twentieth century, one of the fathers of public relations and marketing, Edward Bernays, engineered the take up of female smoking in public, not by organizing a debate where he would argue the virtues of female smoking against his ‘conservative’ opponents, but by changing public perception through ‘re-branding’ (re-imagining) cigarettes as female ‘torches of freedom’ and showing off attractive young women in film clips of the Easter Parades in 1929, that glamorized their smoking habit as… ‘empowering’, alluring’ and ‘stylish’.

Opposition Crumbled then, as it does now, not because it is struck down so much as creamed into a docile state of suspended psychological animation by pushing the right imaginative buttons (See Jewel Wasp above) just enough to alter unconscious behavioral/thought trajectory, without alerting or threatening the collective sense of ‘normality’ or what is being done to manipulate it.

Postmodernism is a perfect fit within a dominant culture that is based around ‘the lived experience’ of unmediated subjective perception, with all the objective third party reality and responsible adult agency checks and balances removed by a massive industrial machinery that produces the main product of the system, which is no longer industrial ‘hardware’ (mostly exported to low cost economies elsewhere) but ‘software’ consciousness production/reinforcement, to the extent that brand-based faith trumps critically autonomous evidence-based reason.

I am the maker of dreams and the seeder of thoughts.
In me are the power and the profit.
Through me you will reach the visions of your customers.
Their habits are but the sum of my old campaigns.

I cannot be denied, for I pass beneath all understanding.
I am the omnipresent silent partner.
I am the shape of ambition,
The evocation of desire,
The imagined worlds of all.

There is no escape except in me.
I am the hope and the despair,
The answer to prayers for upgrades ever after.
They who believe in me shall be saved by products
And my enemies shall be frustrated for ever.
 

Rational but heterodox dissonance all too often finds itself not just contradicted &/or condemned by The Orthodox, but unplugged. It can’t get platforms or interactive updates and becomes not merely ‘wrong’, but ‘out of step’, subject to peer/familial/community/institutional ‘pressure’ and the threat of economic, social/existential rupture, delegitimization and disemployability...which are the penalties for ‘unacceptability’.

Anyone in any doubt of just how much this cultural shift has degraded humanities academic discourse (including its lame excuses and inability to learn from being caught out) see the Grievance Studies Affair: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair ...where nonsensically spoofed articles littered with reassuring jargon, cliches, stereotypes and ideological gobbledigook, were submitted to academic journals, and in an alarming number of cases, were actually published as serious academic work.

Universities are doing what institutions of higher learning have always done since their foundation in the Middle Ages, which was to produce administrative acolytes for the extant system of social administration at the time. They started as quasi ecclesiastical bodies, went on to oversee the growth of secular science, technology, philosophy and imperial enterprise, and now return to their roots in producing neo-clerical acolytes brimming with dogma, received truth and an ideological certainty that brands opposition and criticism as heresy. This seems like a full circle.

The massive changes within both the economic and social/existential platforms of Indulgence Capitalism that have taken place over the last 50-70 years have a sustainability use-by date that is rapidly approaching. The collapse of ecosystems is matched by the collapse of interpersonal social governance/self-governance and its substitution by individual character degrading totalitarian consciousness management.

Nobody in the immediate future is likely to get more than a brief warning of just how fragile conditions have become in much the same way as at the beginning of the modern period, when an insignificant academic from a minor newbie university in Southern Germany by the name of Father Martin Luther, declared in 1517 that Papal Indulgences, which sold vastly profitable packages of divine forgiveness in the next world for sins committed in this one, were unconscionable. It was a very small spark, but late Medieval Europe convulsed and then almost immediately exploded into the modern era. What we may currently be witnessing is a similar explosion out the other side of that half millennia, driven by exactly the same concerns about Indulgence.

In my view, the next ‘big thing’ will be the abandonment of Indulgence as a social and economic principle. This will be accompanied by a rise of disciplined ‘back to basics fundamentals’, including the return to firm boundaries for determining principled moral judgment, needs from wants and materialist rather than fantasy-based reality criteria. There will be respect rather than contempt for social authority, a loss of patience with infantile narcissism, accompanied by insistence on the reproduction of mature, secure, morally trained and responsible adults, and rebuilding the infrastructure of social governance necessary to make that happen.

Up front, indulgence seems benign. Who doesn’t like to be cut some slack when it comes to a bit of greed and ‘excess’, or sub-optimal behavior and attitude? What is the harm of bending around, exceptionalizing out of or ignoring the spirit of rules based behavior and the public goods they underpin, or ‘questioning’ boundaries and successfully making excuses for the poor, risky and/or inconsequential behavior involved in crossing them? What is a little indulgent crib (conceptual overreach), fudge (conflation of the crib with its target), fluff (over-leveraging underlying fudge) ‘n bluff (moral intimidation of fluff skepticism) if it turns mass constituencies into mystified and compliant dorkasaurs?

In the short term, not much, because it takes time, repetition and inter-generational forgetfulness and dissolution to wear down the infrastructure of virtuous conduct, other regarding behavior, sacrifice for the common good, intellectual rigor and honest governance of both the self and others.

Over time, the losses start to compound and speed up until we arrive at where we are today, when things aren’t looking good and may not be retrievable within what is now the ‘Ancien Regime’. Indulged populations eventually bankrupt themselves inside a farrago of reality evasions within a milieu where nothing works, nothing is secure, nothing is resolved, everything is ‘questioned’(bypassed), and the weak, feckless and deluded inherit the earth, at least for a little while, until the existential floor caves in under them.

Universities are upper strata exemplars of a larger culture whose core is rotten, whether we are talking about the space cadets in the financial system whose lack of even the most basic moral potty training, unrestrained greed and adolescent exceptionalism (you had to ‘be there’ & of a certain mindset/age/training background/class ‘to understand’) almost destroyed capitalism, or the fatherless lumpenwelfariat on the urban mean streets, where the murder rates and the size of the drug busts are all they have left to advertise. They are all ingesting the same kind of cultural fictionalizing that deconstructs quality social product...and eventually any sort of autonomous governance outside the current means of consciousness construction, management and cultural transformation

There are no short cuts to undoing the long term effects of indulgence as a cultural norm. No one can suddenly conjure up contradictory governance values totally at variance with the decadent, excuse making and self serving ones currently extant. The whole cultural superstructure is captured by its own lies and malfeasance and fixing that means brutal contradiction and confrontation that may well not be exercisable within existing institutional structures as they presently are. Whether that turns out to be so will only be knowable once institutional reform actually starts to make itself felt.

We haven’t begun that journey.

Whatever, adolescent personal entitlement and irresponsible private interest will have to give back a lot of ground to mature and responsible adults and their collective agency.

Universities will have to re-entrench ideological toleration of heretical and unpopular analytical thinking, which means resurrecting critical judgment and the ability to work through, fully understand and debate difficult issues.

This necessitates moral discipline exercised from as soon as the individual is old enough to understand adult expectations, even before they understand abstract social virtues, so that when they do reach young adulthood, it is second nature, particularly when managing disagreement and social conflict.

It necessitates intellectual discipline, training and focus on abstract objective thinking (rather than subjective experience/belief) in order to develop from infantile consciousness to maturity of judgment, including capacity to listen to and understand all sides of an argument, assemble and logically order ideas and then work through them from a beginning (the assembly of an approach path to a problem) through a middle (laying out a line of successive cumulative points of argument and evidence for them) to a conclusion (where the points are threaded together into a collected summary and overall view).

And that has to be curated by educational mentors who have high academic standards that they can hold their students to, so that they can learn to confidently manage contradictory ideas, develop a balanced and independent view, keep track of and honestly acknowledge data/inspirational source material, differentiate fact from opinion, and communicate all that logically and persuasively to others through cogently structured argument that can withstand robust debate.

That infrastructure is dying and being replaced by cartoon faith narratives which only require students to color them in.

If challenged, the all too easily frightened and ‘vulnerable’ (existentially insecure) young acolytes run to their academic mothers superior for a cry ‘n tissues. They are fragile little Peter Pans and Wendys. When cornered, they throw two year old tantrums that can quickly turn into street violence. And their ‘educators’ so understand their injured feelings and insist on keeping them ‘safe’ from ‘hatefulness’ in the bosom of sexual ‘diversity’, racial guilt and the ideological status quo, where freedom of expression is encouraged, as long as it conforms to the existing so called ‘progressive’ line.

Anyone in any doubt about this need only follow ex-professor Frances Widdowson who was fired back in ‘21 from her tenured position at Mount Royal university, Canada, for having the temerity to challenge Establishment shibboleths regarding its sex, race and civilizational tropes. Her subsequent multi-university campus public space challenges where she tries to engage in in ‘street epistemology’ (she isn’t allowed into any of their enclosed spaces) are telling, as she is routinely overwhelmed by very hostile crowds, shouting hysteria, aggressive noise making and angry jostling that makes it impossible for her to speak or be heard before she is hustled off by security people, who think it is she who is ‘the security problem’….not the anti-intellectual street thuggery of the mainly undergraduate hooligans (‘activists’).

https://www.youtube.com/@franceswiddowson1600

If she keeps doing it, she risks injury and possibly death (Charlie Kirk), in the same way similar individuals in the universities did during the Reformation, when Protestant ideas started coming into the wider European academic milieu, disrupting its peace and civility, causing riot, punitive assault, street murder, exile and eventually, state sponsored execution and bitterly sectarian international warfare.

None of this is going to end well. We are entering what is euphemistically referred to as a ‘transitional period, as mass constituencies are eventually forced by economic hardship and deepening political conflict to pull their heads out of the consumer troughs sufficiently to see what is really going on around them.

They aren’t going to be either very happy or forgiving of the false values they have been fed, and the denuded ecological and cultural landscape they find themselves in and wondering who to blame….

The ‘Hardware’ mining, manufacture and industry services Old Capital Regime Ascendancy blames the ‘Software’ social reproduction and administration Regime Ascendancy (Woke) for trashing the social/cultural commons infrastructure and its governance templates that they have been supposed to be stewarding. The Social Softies accuse the Hardwaremeisters of trashing the ecological commons and unconscionably concentrating wealth in favor of the few at the expense of the many.

This loud and theatrical Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee intra-regime ideological blame shifting row turns fundamental sustainability problems within Indulgence Capitalism across all its platforms into relatively harmless and self canceling brawls, where it is ‘the other guy’ who is to blame, not the system as a whole. Overall regime criticism disappears in a cloud of shouting matches.

Both Regime Ascendancies are utterly guilty as charged and equally liable, as the shrillness of the mutual accusations turns to saber rattling, as the civilizational center collapses in favor of enraged and self righteous sectarians coming in from the margins. And if one of them wins the ensuing warfare, what is left of the system wins a bit more time on the stage of history, without an opposition left to call out the egregious & self-destructive vices of those left in charge.

And if I am not wrong, the second Trump presidency may well be both the result of and the official starting gun on that, with all the messy agenda mixing, confusion and rage that comes with ‘interesting times’ within a regime whose days may well be numbered by the same kind of Reformational and Counter-Reformational violence that presaged the end of the Medieval World Order, just over 500 years ago.

The road to war is always noisy
with the barking of its dogs
and littered with sad protests
at its progress,
the anger that it fertilizes
feeds and nests
as all as one begin to play
for keeps
The drawbridge of their friendships
raised too steep
as all the bets come off
impossible odds
the stakes too become too great
no one can afford to lose their bet
and the fear of that
Turns to hate
of those who'd make it real
takes over as the sun
on civil discourse sets.
And conscience turns to steel.

There is no good or happy end to this
For war must do what reason should
If we’re to salvage much for hope
By wearing down our enemies
Till they no longer have the means
To cope
Or die in the attempt
Not because we had to
But because we could
For salvation is as much
The manner of our death
As how long or how often
We took breath.

Sober is the mind that thinks these things
Knowing that the peace is stretching thin
Like skin upon a rotting corpse
That in due time will fissure and irrupt
All that stinks and is corrupt.
That sweet rancid aroma slowly creeps
Under doorways through the carpet seeps.
Every house upon the street
It will disrupt
And rage will have its day
To sound of drums and marching feet.

*Wurundjeri is the name of an Australian aboriginal tribe.