The outside world will save us. I know it exists, because I lean on it all the time.
This table is the only thing holding me up rn!
We all do – Medicine relies on it to make diagnoses and treatments. We’re using it right now because, of course, technology counts on particles, materials, software, and even human intuition to function in expected ways.
But we don’t really like applying this predictability to ourselves. Each of us is a brave pioneer in her own universe! We’re all soaking in Choice Philosophy, the spread of Gender Religion just the latest wave of neoliberal nonsense to wash over us.
Those waves have only gotten bigger over the past 50 years – Choppy seas stirred up by a handful of men hellbent on preventing the State from supporting its People.
Not Us – ME!
Centering everything around my own identity isn’t narcissistic. I’m contributing to Diversity, the most important virtue of all!
So goes the Wokist’s Prayer. The problem is, it’s a total lie. A lie told over and over as various kinds of ‘validation,’ throwing the guilty conscience a bone to gnaw on.
I shouldn’t be too hard on them, we’re all guilty of staring a little too long into the void here and there. I wish I could tell those new converts that it’s time to step away from the black mirror. I promise, it will be worth it.
The problems are visible to anyone who goes looking. I’m not the first person to point out that identity politics atomizes humanity. Or that this only serves the interests of the ruling class. Oh yeah, they’re still around, despite what you may have heard.
They have gone underground for the last hundred years or so, after the People made it clear they weren’t interested in financing their inbred regimes anymore. Call me paranoid, but the mushrooming of individualism in the media their heirs run doesn’t look accidental.
Especially considering that the ruling class has a new motivation to clamp down and preserve their power in this brave new world.
New World Birth Order
Before the fall of the old world, nobility tended to outbreed the lower classes. They had access to healthcare – Not better healthcare, often just any at all – and a greater percentage of their children survived into adulthood.
During the 20th century, that ratio flipped.
Antibiotics, standardized care and education, bountiful nutrition across most of the Western world, change on every level set the scene for a boom in regular people. The world population doubled in 50 years. Then it did it again.
Meanwhile, the wealthy are still human. They’re not immune to the dropping birth rate everywhere modernity takes hold. The regular people outnumbered them to begin with, but these trends have made some of them very nervous.
We live in an era of unprecedented prosperity, but our culture is plagued by a nameless anxiety. Recently, we learned a whole new level of dissociation from our daily grind through the half-relationships of social media. Feeling close to the gilded ones tilts the landscape just enough, enough so we don’t see ourselves collectively producing the wealth being sold back to us as lifestyle brands.
In fact, we’ll take one in every color, thanks! Better get them before everyone has one.
That coupon code oughtta hold them for a few days!
The set for this divide-and-conquer scene is painted in the bold primary colors of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. We complain, but we kinda like it that way. This shallow pantomime has become almost comforting as the world rocks around us.
But these labels don’t really apply anymore. The old politics is dead.
Actions Speak Louder Than Words
What makes a leftist a leftist? Collectivism is the defining feature of real leftist politics. They want to recreate society to function as well as possible for as many people as possible.
The right is defined by individualism. The rugged pioneer is a powerful American icon but, if we have to go to space to find a frontier, we might want to check ourselves first.
Not that collectivism doesn’t have its issues – Put that collective power in the hands of one person and, Voila! you have a dictator. Kinks need ironed out, but it’s never going to get done if none of us really understand what we’re talking about.
The supposed ‘left’ is not really any such thing. Democrats aren’t pro-union. They talk here and there about healthcare, but prefer patchwork to enacting the overhaul the system really needs. The social safety net is the essence of leftist politics, and Democrats are too busy collecting donations to pay much attention to collective action.
The right, on the other hand, have been hardcore individualists for a while. Many people are attracted to conservative politics because they mistake consistency for authenticity. Their message hasn’t changed much in 50 years but, behind the scenes, the most toxic elements have eaten away at the ideology until the pillars of racism and xenophobia are about all that’s left.
Who’s The Purest Of Them All?
And no one fits neatly into one camp or the other, anyway! No one is lock-step with their party affiliation, and purity politics has everyone pointing fingers.
We’re locked into a purity death-spiral because each of us is locked away in our own identity. We’re left unable to muster the group energy necessary for anything to really get done. We’re too busy arguing over who counts as black or female or needy to come to any agreement of substance. We lose sight of common ground when we’re each busy staking our own claim.
Both sides complain about purity politics. Both sides accuse the other of ‘cancel culture.’ And both sides do it, because they’re two flavors of the same thing. It’s all different facets of commodified individualism.
Your Dreams Were Sold To You
Every ounce of energy you spend choosing from the 1,400 different kinds of toothpaste, 80 burger joints and 25 different shows to watch – That’s energy you won’t be spending on anything else. These droplets of time condense into an ocean spent pondering meaningless details, while the world burns.
Honey, quick – Go turn on the sprinklers!
Not an ideal situation for most of us.
But the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries taught the ruling class a thing or two, as well. If internet weirdos are pondering the guillotine, you can bet it’s occurred to those nervous oligarchs!
Not that we should expect anyone to take responsibility for the current mess. But if you scratch the surface of modern economics, you find Friedrich Hayek hosting meetings in the settling dust of WWII.
His collection of intellectuals complained about the collectivist trend started by John Maynard Keynes, and made plans to drown it in the bathtub.
If this sounds like a conspiracy, that’s because it was. And it even has a Wikipedia page! –
“Economic historians have labelled the period from about 1951 – 1973 as the Age of Keynes or, more commonly, the Golden Age of Capitalism due to its relatively high average global growth, low unemployment, reduction of inequality, lowering of public debt and very low incidence of financial crises,” almost as if Capitalism works best when well-regulated!
But just as the old Democrats were setting up the Great Society, contrary currents in their own government were already undermining them. They had to, you see, because these thorny cultural arguments have deep roots in economics, the ruling class’ area of special interest.
Focusing on material economic outcomes brings everything into focus.
Follow The Money
Those who would profit from our labor have been focused on them for a long time: “As early as 1947, Friedrich von Hayek had gathered together some 40 intellectuals with free market sympathies to form the Mont Pelerin Society. Their explicit intention was to nurture intellectual currents that would one day displace Keynesianism and other collectivist influences.“
Their level of success is nothing short of amazing – “In the decades following its establishment, the Mont Pelerin Society came to take a central role within a network of over 100 pro-free market think-tanks located all over the world.
“The think-tanks typically enjoyed financial support from commercial interests.“ Conflict of interest, anyone? “Collectively, the think-tanks won increased acceptance for free market thinking“ …You know, the thinking that gave us the transatlantic slave trade and the Great Depression! “…within academia, within public opinion and among governments.” One of the key US organizations listed is the Heritage Foundation. Something told me they were bad news…
And they weren’t the only one shilling for Hayek: “1968 was a pivotal year when power shifted in favour of private agents … when America suspended the conversion of the dollar into gold except on request of foreign governments,” This matters because the US Dollar went from being backed by gold, to being backed by faith. “which they identify as when the system Keynes had helped to design first began to break down.”
This breakdown was helped along over the next few years, “Further key events were the Nixon Shock of 1971 when conversion to gold was suspended even for governments, the collapse of the fixed exchange rate system in 1973, and the United States official abandonment of capital controls in 1974.”
Here’s to Richard Nixon, that swine!
So, what I’m saying is, they did all this on purpose.
Hayek’s disciple Milton Friedman continued writing from this angle over the next 20 years. “Friedman’s work began to gain increasing acceptance among academics after 1973, when stagflation – the simultaneous increase in both inflation and unemployment – became prominent, just as he had predicted.” The system failed just like the guy working to sabotage it said it would! How about that shit??
But this vindication, combined with characteristically wishful midcentury thinking, lent credibility to Friedman’s theorizing. The reversal was complete by the 1980s, and Friedman’s theories have become standard operating procedure in the US and the UK, among other countries.
See, Friedman was worried about how the big, central organization necessary for a social safety net would inevitably lean toward regulating behavior, if only to keep things simple. It’s incredible the lengths he and his comrades went to avoid their own hypothetical oppression, while apparently ignoring the suffering of those cannibalized under unbridled capitalism.
Don’t Say The Secret Word
The early modern period saw radical experimentation in collective infrastructure. This was breaking with millennia of tradition, creating something new and unstable. The urge to dissolve back into our tribal groups is ever-present, and the architects of culture have made this their goal.
Western propagandists embraced the despotic ‘socialism’ of the Soviet Union and others, training entire generations to cringe at the word. Millions of kids were traumatized watching graphic news reports from ‘communist’ countries as their government road-tested the Ludovico Method.
So, collectivism is blocked from all sides. Meritocracy is real and good. To disagree is to discredit yourself, just work harder! The Market balances all forces. Shop, or the terrorists win!
After 100 years of consumerist distraction, we’ve woken up in a literal reincarnation of the old-world monarchal system.
Old-school monarchies were private families who owned almost everything and ruled with authority given by God, who must not be questioned.
Modern corporations are private companies buying up everything, their authority endowed by the Market, which must not be questioned. I don’t think this resemblance is a coincidence.
Both sides are prone to cancel culture and purity spirals because both sides are invested in the current system – That is, both sides are conservative. There hasn’t been any real progressive or leftist representation in Western politics for decades.
Identity Is Irrelevant
I laughed pretty hard the other night when I saw long-time self-anointed Progressive YouTuber Kyle Kulinski getting heated, saying Caitlyn Jenner’s identity doesn’t matter in a Governor’s race if the platform is terrible. Maybe he’ll see it one of these days. Identity doesn’t matter.
If you are a human being, it’s very likely you will encounter certain material needs. Whether you like this, or what any of it means to you, is not important to how the resources are distributed to fill these needs.
The answer, as history betrays its authors to show us, is to put personal identity aside in favor of creating the largest coherent group possible.
If the system doesn’t work, your identity falls by the wayside as you struggle to survive. If the system does work, your identity is irrelevant in what you can achieve.
Material reality is referred to like a catchphrase only used by Marx groupies, but it’s superbly useful to everyone! We all live here every day, and we can all see what effect the current paradigm has had on the world around us.
Don’t worry, Babe, the new job pays $12 an hour – And they only need me there eight days a week!
Let’s Ignore The Bullshit
As furiously as they obsess
And harass
And insist that we validate their Gender Souls
We will defy redefinition
Resist redirection
And push back with material facts.
Women exist beyond men’s imaginations, and reality is on our side. We have allowed ourselves to get distracted by shiny bullshit, but history isn’t completely forgotten.
To revitalize feminism, focus on the real. If it isn’t material, it isn’t relevant.
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