******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
No idea who the author might be -- just thought comrades might find it well-said and compassionate, even with its appropriately bitter many-clause sentences. To invoke the dialectical idea of unity in opposition: by contradiction, the consciousness of this author -- to call out and reject the depressing and alienated dominant culture of contemporary capitalism -- shows the hope of our moment. === In The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein proposed that this is part of the great neoliberal experiment; the wealthiest echelons are attempting to see if society can operate merely from the top 1%'s consumption/spending. We already see the consequences - entire regions of America (& across the technoindustrial West) have become de-facto "sacrifice zones", not just towns like Flint; the UN considers entire swaths of the South to have slipped to a "third world" quality of life - no clean drinking water, absent or rudimentary plumbing, endemic disease. The residents of these modern-day ghettos find themselves in a situation that reveals the gut-wrenching horror of modernity - how easily, in this society, you are not only abandoned, but forgotten, erased from public view and consciousness with the ever-present Pollyanaism, narcissism and exceptionalism espoused by an increasingly frenetic, myopic popular culture. This, too, has been normalized. Combine that picture with an incredibly powerful propaganda/distraction/indoctrination apparatus, a culture that serves as an alienating panoptic of all-encompassing control, surveillance and normalization, and you get our present day schizophrenia - a nation, a world of individuals who are progressively being robbed of their livelihood and future - but fully believe that the men and women who are killing them, their families, their friends - have their best interests in mind, and with religious fervor, to boot. They do not rise up, do not resist; an immunological response never forms to the actual, extrinsic toxin. No, they blame themselves as their immediate world grows more isolating, more unaffordable, more terrifying, and pick up the heroin syringe - or the semi-automatic, and head to a crowded place. Because no contextual cause can be identified easily, because a thick shroud of propaganda obfuscates rising above the violence of alienation, they inevitably sink into the lonely, narcissized autopropaganda chamber of the mind, the increasingly volatilized "ego tunnel" within - as such, the immunological response they have is to themselves - modern day epidemiology, from opiate abuse to mass shootings - represent a terminal autoimmune disease within the body of civilization. Most "resistance" to this system has taken the shape of sightless self-destruction; perhaps it's the good old story of "monkey see monkey do" - we're raised in a society that teaches us only to manipulate, scheme, destroy, and consume, are never taught compassion or empathy, never find greater context for our lives within the fiercely competitive, materialistic "rat race" that begins in childhood - and we look out at the world it has created and find a lonely, dreadfully boring simulacra of reality, one we are told is becoming existentially more uncertain, and despite the illusionary stability of our civilization's various forms, we feel the tremors of coming catastrophe, we feel fear - and know no other way to face this fear than through the lenses we were taught; thus we meet it on the hallowed fields of brimstone with the very same archaic tools of destruction and despair that ushered in this dark timeline in the first place - as we run from our fear of death, we end up not only becoming it, but recreating the world in its image. link: https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/c6z5gs/we_are_heading_for_a_crash_worse_than_29/esci5ut?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
