WATCH: Censorship & Independent Publishing in the New Normal Reich

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The burning issue of our time:

“Paul Mescal causes outrage by not wearing a poppy on Graham Norton show”

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

—The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt

I can’t help but connect the above reflections to the totalitarian march we’re now on. There’s currently an accelerated confusion of discourse and cognitive dissonance and dissociation strategically sown by ruling institutions to reap the reward of the monoculture of AI to rule them all. As always, the artificial unity of the collective is engineered by divide-and-rule perspectivism which leaves atomized individuals at the mercy of those guarding the doors of perception. Only now there’s a fatal finality to the science of social control. Both in effect and by design, new normal totalitarianism, deploying tools and techniques tyrants past could hardly dream of, caps the history of capitalism and its continual crises, collapsing all into one great takedown of the system of production, profit, and power so as to radically reset the human condition across earth according to technocratic and transhuman governance by the Machine.

Skepticism has constantly been called for in the Market, uber alles, where it’s buyer beware everywhere. Given the universal alienation arising from us being sold back the resources of living robbed from us, how can the commodification of existence not produce inherent grounds, or groundlessness, for doubt, including the bottomless doubt of our own identity and reality, at most instrumental if not irrelevant to exchange value, which Descartes’ demon depicts as the disillusion of modernity at its origin, in which any god guaranteeing intrinsic value has died, or been killed, as Nietzsche proclaimed in its latter days? It’s doubt all the way down in a world where one can never know whether the very air we breathe, water we drink , food we eat, or any other basic sense of survival and being hasn’t just been modified, informed consent be damned, into some synthetic simulacrum by reason of some substance dumped or pumped into the earth’s ecology?*

We could not navigate the world without beliefs negotiating all that we don’t know with what we must do not only to survive but to prosper, our lives rooted in values and meanings which give them substance. Perhaps the better word here is trust, or even faith. In a world now as never before being taken from us to be given back with an iron fist, we have little choice but to question everything. But epistemic orientation by itself will prove self-defeating, a paralysis of analysis, especially in the social isolation of the digital (c)age, without existentially reclaiming the world for ourselves, establishing common senses of truth, goodness, and beauty worth living, and dying, for. Our predicament is ultimately political: build a new world within the shell of the old by rebuilding the relations with others which make for more human community and society than what the “masters (monsters) of mankind” (Adam Smith) have planned.

*To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society. For the alleged commodity “labor power” cannot be shoved about, used indiscriminately, or even left unused, without affecting also the human individual who happens to be the bearer of this peculiar commodity. In disposing of a man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity “man” attached to that tag. Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure ; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this Satanic mill.
—The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.
—The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx