America's
problems have a lot to do with the special way it inherited the central
machine of Modernity and Empire, within which there are many intensely
social (more than material) ills. In fact, the more that social health
fails, the easier it becomes to blame this on external, material
factors, and to allow the social virus to worsen. The root cause of
disease is pervasively ignored, even subconsciously so, to our peril. It
is not 'fixable' anyway by any government or economic system -
Capitalism is as neutral a force as many others, neither good nor bad.
Our own form of Capitalism, given its concomitant union with Empire,
monopoly, outcome-obsessive behaviour, and method-focused impersonality,
tends to strike throughout a society an aura of ...
triviality/banality. As time progresses, the most earnest, deeply held
beliefs become trivialised by the rituals of day-to-day existence within
this impersonal system. Empires need strong ideals and beliefs and
magnetic energy in order to motivate people to continue what is
unnatural -- the subversion of all that is Other/Different from
themselves. As we grow, that which is Other becomes more and more
invisible and indiscernable. Emigration of fresh foreigners is perhaps
the singlemost positive thing that has happened and could ever happen to
us within this system, but we fatally then mistake our own immigrants
for the 'Other'; the two are not the same. We never see that which is
Outside. We become micro-fixated, and micro-fixation is the cause of
every mental illness, clinically and experimentally. Scientists know
that myopia is the one thing that all mental illnesses have in common.
This state of myopia is key and core to Modernism, to Empire, and to the
U..S.. which inherited those systems. It's not the people's fault per
se (we are not worse than other human beings) - but we have inherited
and continue to perpetuate something very dangerous. This accumulative
decadence within imperialist modernist ideology can be traced back to
the dawn of written history (and more recently to the early 1800s) -
something deviant, viral and very late in the evolution of Humanity
itself and which has culminated in the unsustainable philosophy of
Modernism (1820s to the Present), a way of life that works 180 degrees
against biology and the innate human drives and wishes. Deep connection
to and trust in one's fellow human beings is the central joy-generating
aspect of human life (and most mammal life too), and the ability to
have/enjoy/sacralize food, sex, physical well-being, long-term
continuity of the physical body, to unite institutions with nature, to
experience all this within fellowship between humans within Nature as
something sacred requires that human civilisation not act against the
way the world is actually wired. Most of the less-powerful world has
never acted in our deviant way - either in history or in the present
time. It is mainly Empires which do, and those systems which follow the
philosophy of Modernity.
America's
problems lie in the frailty of its social & interrelational/communal
bonds - which on the surface trick people to think all is fine
(Americans are upbeat, action-oriented, outgoing with strangers, even in
laudable ways, and stress 'positive smiley ambitious' outlook), but
none of this equals depth or permanence of trust or relationship, either
with strangers, within the family, within a community, or across a very
huge, impersonal country, impersonal not because people are 'bad' but
because we inherited the core mechanisms of Empire and Modernism. If the
Irish or MΔori became as powerful and large and impersonal as we are,
they would do no better. No human beings no matter how angelic can
handle what we've inherited and not botch it up. Modernism is a
philosophical movement, which encompasses the whole world, but is
centered in America partly 'by accident' - we inherited the British
Empire, the last world empire, and that is a multigenerational system in
which there is a hyperbolic need for control. The great need to control
human life outcomes is one of the primary facets of Modernism, and the
more successful control one acquires, the more neurosis, distrust,
impersonality and insecurity it brings across all of society since it
requires an ever bigger Administrator who can't possibly control
everyone/everything, and where that very control leads to the populace's
frustration and unfulfillment - a sense of something vital missing from
their lives. It is as if they turn to control everything they can
except for their own natures, which run rampant and out of control.
Many
of the attributes [numbered below] of the current over-inflated
American empire mirror the same ones in Modernism itself, and each
attribute contradicts its own goals to the point that most participants
*within* thte system (having no external perspective) are deceived into
thinking that each aspect is something GOOD rather than the thing it is -
something quite corrosive:
1.) A belief
that the individual trumps the tribal, familial, collective. (On the
surface, this is wonderful, and I uphold it. But all it means is that
people want to control groups of people based on their whims,
dysfunctions, on their commercial interests, and [ideally] convert as
many people as possible to their point-of-view. This constantly SUCCEEDS
in America and leads to CONFORMITY, mass and intolerant conformity.
While all this conformity is going on, the Individual sits and
narcissistically claims that the whole world revolves around the Self,
and that their country's system promotes the Self!) Can you hear the
contradiction echo? Self-empowerment is self-delusory.
2.)
A belief that the goals and ends justify the means, and that these
means can be worked into a science of exact 0-tolerance technique which
enables the same outcome to be reached again...and again...and again.
This is the system of 'scientific' Control which governments themselves,
claiming to be 'democracy', use in the Modernist period (and did not
use during the French Revolution, the new Irish Republic, the modern
Icelandic republic, or in the Polish Democratic Constitution nearly as
much, or even within our own original Colonial aims.) Plenty of
countries are currently cutting-edge and progressive without being
progressivIST or Modernist. America is not one of the subtle enlightened
few since it inherited Modernity as its machine to drive its own
anti-Other empire. Because the machine *works so well*, it is a social
fatality. That machine is highly highly effective in the beginning, but
uses up everyone's material, emotional and social resources very
swiftly, far swifter than older empires like Greece, Persia, Egypt
did..... These empires were more tolerant, subtle and nuanced - they
believed in built-in flexibility. They did not stress 0-tolerance and
exacting technique-driven systems. They were smarter than we are - and
that's why they endured longer. They could incorporate more Difference,
and remain more personal despite their impersonal systems.
3.)
A culture of intense Impersonality, where Personality is associated
with all things 'evil' (impersonal 'persons' in court, you as a
profit-number in a business or school or prison, your lack of ability to
shake the president's hand in the White House [almost impossible
today], your own outlawed and fading language dialect [too local
and personal, therefore evil], talking and doing everything face-to-face
[too uncomfortable for insecure controlfreaks], bribery, personal
opinion or eccentricity, relational devotions, life-experience bias,
familial and political feuds (like the duels in which pre-Modern
president President Andrew Jackson engaged), Jihad or tribal suicides
(madness!), dying at age 40 (how dare you?!), and anything that smacks
too much of human physicality, human passion, human opinion, human
emotion, humans showing loyalty to one or few other individuals. Anyone
who does something 'extreme' in the name of such a devotion is deemed a
lunatic in the world of Modernism. Where in reality those people are
simply personal, practical people who clearly see what is right in front
of them, and often enjoy their own lives intensely, and find intense
meaning within them. Within a system of Impersonality, you are only
allowed to do things that benefit a System of prediction and control and
exacting techniques. This leads the personal-biological individual
human being to go mad and start lashing out at his/her fellow human
beings, performing no limit of atrocities and personal violations.
People have no room to be .. themselves. Not only is Modernism against
the Body (it learned this in part from Protestantism), but Modernism is
against anything that is too upclose and personal. This is why we hate
the culture of Islam beyond almost any culture we've encountered so far -
Islamic culture is intensely personal and we therefore as overweening
Romans buried behind our shield-walls declare all the sprinting slashing
Visigoths 'Barbarians', those people who want face-to-face parley even
as the 500 tribes of native Americans did whom we also laid low as
'barbarians.' We are the insane, not they. It is often better and more
fulfilling to die than to follow a delusional tyrant - Modernism. And
their earlier way has endured for millennia - sustainable, honourable,
not prohibiting the body which is a part of every-day life; these people
do not value longevity as much as a life well lived, and within which
they experience intense personal bonds with those they love and who love
them. We, on the other hand, want Outcome through our impersonal
techniques which we are neurotically obsessed about. If those outcomes
don't work, we obsess about finding new techniques to get a narrow set
of outcomes! This is the very definition of illness.
4.)
A belief that the machine of Technology, not only technique in a
broader sense, can achieve and fulfill every human desire and whim, and
shorten the time/space-span between a desire and that desire's
fulfillment. This is nothing more and less than the One Ring; in all its
power to do great good for us (give us the quick-gratification 'good
life'), we are too weak to wield it. So we abuse it. We use technology
to do more base things than beautiful things. And we cancel out the ugly
hard step-by-step work involved in making your own domestic house by
hiring outside experts, warehousing for expensive pre-made artificial
materials, and trying to get something done as quickly and affordably as
possible within our budget instead of making an artesan house worthy of
any museum which we could own and enjoy for a few thousand dollars on a
bit of land which humans ought to be entrusted to culturize and
preserve without laying waste..... In any case, this same principle
applies to many things - even to things like bookshelves or microwaves.
The more the labour is micro-divided up, turned into mass factory
labour, the more wretched and meaningless and joyless is the labour for
the people involved in too-tiny steps of the process. The knife is
replaced by an automatic saw or can-opener; the fire is replaced by
electricity in wires; the walking stick is replaced by some monstrosity
of a thing called a wheelchair. All this leads to less life-fulfillment,
less autonomy, less pleasureable WORK. And so it also leads to
Overspecialization, another key component of Modernism.
5.)
Specialization promoted over Generalists or Renaissance skills. Fatal.
Leads not to well-balanced life or contentment. And humans, in their
quest to make big money to buy their way into all the things they now
don't get to enjoy making themselves, are often forced to become
lopsided specialists and take on unfulfilling kinds of work in their
desire to make ends meet, especially now that we are in the post-Empire
phase since the 1970s. The basic labourers have been earning less and
less ever since the 1970s when the economic prosperity stopped trickling
down to everyone and remains now in the hands of the few while that
few's own resources dwindle and their own positions become ever more
frail and meaningless.
6.) Futurism. The
Future (whatever this means and whenvever this comes) is always always
more important than any achievement or peron or personal presence or
delight or relic of the Past; it is also more important than the
Present. That is core and tantamount to Modernism. Modernists are
fascinated by but terrified of the Past - terrified of both its
brutalities and its beauties. As an exchange, Moderns choose Control,
within which no true Art can flourish. Modernists have long been too
cowardly to actually state in concrete terms what this far-off
futuristic Goal actually is. They have not only not arrived at this
never-never point, they are further away than ever from achieving even
the basic things that early Modernists achieved by the late 1800s - a
few Utopian communities, short-lived but at least some of them spread by
human will to hold-out personal places like Berlin, the Greek islands,
Cuba, South America, or Alpine Switzerland/Austria and they all sorta
worked since they were small in scale.
7.)
Strong efforts to malign and not tolerate Supernaturalism.
(Protestantism, having doffed the primal vital rituals and symbols of
Catholicism, most often gets off the Modernist hook [is sheepishly
tolerated], since Protestants tend to only speak about a Godhead who's a
sort of Head /Social/ Scientist without real involvement in his/her own
Creation.) We are, thankfully, slowly exiting this phase of myopia. The
older Supernaturalism has been tolerated here and there (where it is
disempowered) only because the subjects of the founders of Modernist
governments refused to give up their age-old beliefs. In this case, it's
not that most people ever stopped believing in supernatural powers (the
Christian God, for example), and so they, so delusioned, comfort
themselves that Modernism never took their God away from them. Wrong.
The System that feeds, clothes and governs them is innately and intensly
anti-God - and this fits in *perfectly* with a culture which stresses
the *impersonal* (hence the popularity of Buddhism, Nihilism, Monism),
the letter-of-the-law over the spirit-of-the-law (eugenics or
profit-margin-gain care only about the letter of the law, not the
spirit), and with the educational authority of Empire (where knowledge
itself = 'rightness' and the right to put down minority people groups
around the world living/grovelling subsistently and believing in arcane
spirits of trees, stars, sun, lakes, heavens, ancestors...). Nothing new
here in its outline; all other empires were inclined to persecute the
Other - which in this case is anyone claiming to be a sincere
Supernaturalist. There is a name for this big-headed self-delusional
behaviour in the hands of Powers: HUBRIS.
8.)
Short-term gains and Triviality. I lob these two points in together
because they are interfeeding and interdependent. There is nothing
earnest about Modernity except for its being pushed through at all
costs. Its *contents* is entirely trivial. That is the joke that no
self-aware educated Modernist would ever want to explore or too cleanly
admit, because it's built into the system. Modernist systems have
entirely trivial goals - like getting their own football team to win or
(more boldly) taking your wife when you lose your job, or nabbing up the
forest behind your house so they can write some slogan about how
'refreshing Mountain Springs water is, bottled at the pristine source!'
and barrage your internet pages or highways with blaring signs sporting
the same 'truth'. It's not truth - it's Triviality. `Chew Bubbalicious
Gum` is not a message that will get you to any Paradise, either on this
earth or in some next life. And the goals of such triviality infect all
relationships and are *short-term.* This infects relationships and
commitments. Therefore, in America, people switch states, spouses, jobs,
houses, hobbies and foods as swiftly and whimsically as they switch
types of pain-killers.
9.) Trend over
Longevity. It is not the goal of Modernity to preserve anything it tries
along the way to get what it thinks it wants. It is only the goal of
Modernity to preserve *itself* and to sell its image in order to spread
that ultimately material symbol of its image at home and abroad. It is
therefore quite unable to fulfill its own goals, since it is unable to
preach its own ideology at home or abroad. It does NOT know what it
wants, only what it does NOT want. It is a reactionary movement, and a
short-lived one, based on nothing of substance. It is the most
short-lived ideology the world has ever seen or likely will ever see. It
doesn't work. It does create great social sickness, and that is its own
judgment.
10.) No remorse. To mourn or show sorriness is to be
'weak.' There is never apology. Never tears. This shows a hardness
and falseness above all things. In this, they are more
anti-Judeo-Christian than any people who've ever walked the earth. Where
are the tears? Where is the remorse? There are none. I wait for that
day. When I see tears, then I know there is hope for us here again.
All
these aspects of Modernism, epitomized in the American experiment, work
toward intense and accelerated social decay. They create nutrition-less
soil underneath the social decay in America and explain why its own
populace is fairly blind to it. America, along with a few gung-ho Asian
countries, is experiencing this form of rot faster than any other
people-group on the planet. It doesn't mean we are 'worse off' in every
way, shape and form than other peoples. Not at all. In this lies all the
deception..... We comfort ourselves in our 'blessings': Pure dreaming
escapism and avoidance. And avoidant, un-listening, with no attention
span and NO REMORSE/MOURNING is what most Americans reading these
paragraphs tend to be. If you are free, break the bonds of blindness,
distrust, impersonality and pride. Mourn you, Mourn I as well; love the
wider world.
None of this outline of
Modernism has anything to do with underestimating all the 'horrible
awful wicked' things humans do in any society, any time, under any kind
of ideology. Humans have always done those things. I'm not talking about
those things. In fact, true Modernists like to think that they are
wiping those things off the face of the planet..... Greater naivite you
will not find, in so far as they comfort themselves that 'we alone are
not wicked'! They commit a far-worse hubris than the usual human evil in
that they NEVER APOLOGISE, never mourn, never show remorse. No American
President has shown remorse or apologised since I don't know when. This
is Empire-Modernist blindness. Especially because it is mostly
unintentional and unaware. This obliviousness does not excuse it.
