Rough-Hewn Quick Explanation of Modernism and Its Connexion to the American Empire
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 Māori 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.
