The Cult of Intelligence (& the Ultimate Levity), pt. 2

Today’s regnant paradigm (one hesitates to call it a method) of bigger-is-better, of statistics-as-intelligence, or even of “it-from-bit”, surely requires vast technical proficiency to summon up its signs and wonders. To develop an LLM (Large Language Model) takes a team of high-level specialists (or intelligence-cultists) to collect, collate, and curate the gigabytes, terabytes and even petabytes of training data, to set up the necessary parallel computing resources to handle the training, to specify the “transformer” architecture to be trained, to pick out the hyperparameters to be used within that architecture, and so on.

Yet even this proficiency is itself remarkable more in its mindless character than its actual intelligence. The objective is to create a kind of pipeline–a one-size-fits-all mechanism, designed to ingest certain types of data in vast quantities, do some series of operations, and chuck out simulated examples in great quantity. Equally mindlessly, no one can cogently explain why this needs to be pursued in the first place: it is simply judged inevitable.

One of the basic points made by the veteran linguist Noam Chomsky and other critics of the current situation is that, being in essence statistical inference pipelines, LLMs are so general that they can be trained to very high accuracy on literally anything, whether it is truly linguistic or not. In Chomksy’s estimation, “…deep learning is useful, but it doesn’t tell you anything about human language.”

The LLM, in other words, differs profoundly from actual brains in that it makes no intrinsic distinction between learning language and learning gibberish, and thus adds nothing to understanding the difference between sense and nonsense. The pipeline is agnostic about content, whether that of its input or its output; instead, content is reconceived purely in terms of volume and style.

It has, for instance, been known for some time that neural networks can be trained on datasets of purely random labels–effectively gibberish–and still reach very high training accuracies. Furthermore, if trained on data that is corrupted or markedly different from that in their original training set, even the most well-trained artificial neural network models will rapidly “melt” into something else; they do not, for example, have any robustness against false, dangerous or corrupted data and cannot exercise “common sense” or “skepticism” to prevent such data from fundamentally rewiring them–as brains can.

Indeed, it may best to think of the modern artifical neural network as less a form of intelligence at all, than as the equivalent of hyperdimensional silly-putty: during the “training” of such a network, it is “squeezed” against the dataset, filling the textures and features in its surface and smoothly curving (interpolating) between these. On this analogy, then, it is no surprise that the neural network has no innate preference for any kind of structure, linguistic or otherwise, any more than it is a surprise that a ball of silly putty has no “preference” for being pressed against a quarter, a figurine, or a page of newsprint–or all three in succession. The artificial neural network is therefore very close to the ultimate tabula rasa–history-less and without intrinsic qualities, hence something which Chomsky, Gary Marcus and many others argue inherently contrasts with the highly structured, substantially genetically-encoded, and above all highly improbable characteristics of actual brains and actual languages.

Chomsky has been on the record in recent weeks with unsparing criticisms of ChatGPT, LLMs, and the whole current approach to “AI”. He has warned that LLMs such as ChatGPT represent only “high-tech plagiarism” and “a way of avoiding learning”–thus implicating current AI as a kind of anti-intelligence, something that not only lacks understanding, but may have the effect of fundamentally disrupting or distorting intellectual development in humans. But in a recent op-ed in the New York Times, Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull give possibly their most urgent and complete summary thus far of their concerns over these dangers of the intelligence-cult. This includes the inability of LLMs to distinguish between linguistic and non-linguistic training data, their lack of discernible structure or guiding principles.

But in this op-ed, Chomsky et al. also introduced a much less discussed perspective. They concede that LLMs, when trained, become “increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs”. But this turns out to be just the problem. Chomsky et al. quote Karl Popper, the eminent philosopher of science:

“…we do not seek highly probable theories but explanations; that is to say, powerful and highly improbable theories”.

From this, they conclude the following:

“True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things“.

This last statement could be taken as the exact maxim of the variance in its struggle against the mean–a struggle that leads not only away from the mean, but from statistics altogether.

As we consider this maxim, we begin to realize how much the relationship between probability and intelligence lies at the heart of the question of what intelligence is. As we reflect still further, the whole conception that intelligence can spontaneously arise (or in the current argot from nonlinear dynamics, “emerge”) from a purely agnostic, “silly-putty-like” statistical approach, suddenly appears uniquely vulnerable.

On the one hand, the intelligence-cultists’ dedication to a statistical view of intelligence inevitably leads them to the notion that intelligence may be found by optimizing probability: this is encapsulated in the gradient-descent method by which all neural networks are trained, which amounts to a search for a (locally) maximally-probable model. This is very clearly like taking the mean’s side of the battle: understanding is nothing more than the search for central tendencies, which in turn are found by (howsoever cleverly) sifting through aggregates of “data”. The larger the aggregates, the better the estimate of the mean. Intelligence, strangely enough, is thus understood as being based on mediocrity.

On the other hand, those who instead insist on the the inherent deficiencies of these models, such as Chomsky et al., Marcus, Filip Piekniewski, and many others, are fighting on behalf of the variance: they deal not in large numbers, but in counterexamples, adversarial cases, and “fat tails” , designed to show how models like the LLMs, once nudged out of the “mediocristan” defined by their training data, make wildly absurd errors no half-sane (or even half-intelligent) human ever would. These counterexamples are unique, flukey, even heroic in their defiance of the mean’s relentless gravity.

For these critics, and with reference to Chomsky et al’s maxim, gradient-descent alone can never yield intelligent systems, precisely because it looks for what is most probable and therefore completely misses the statistically negligible yet innumerable “heroic” cases that would nullify the mindset of central tendency and pipelines. Moreover, because the greatest advances in scientific understanding have always depended not on huge aggregates of raw data sucked through one-size-fits-all pipelines, but on the exquisitely purposeful design of very unnatural, totally improbable combinations of observations and phenomena–that is, on experiments–it follows that the widespread adoption of purely statistical methods will mean no less than the end of scientific understanding.

Given these considerations, any actual intelligence on the part of the deep learning engineers–to say nothing of the corporations blindly rolling the LLMs out with almost no transparency as to how they are built and trained–effectively averages to zero. For it must be manifest not in the final result of these engineers’ labors–the trained LLM pipeline–nor in the outputs of that pipeline. It appears, instead, in these engineers’ handling of the improbable, the intrusions of the variance, the various technical snags handled en route to the final product.

But any such intrusions of actual, variance-delving intelligence are bracketed out of the final product. Rhe goal, clearly, is to eliminate any evidence of them (ultimately, perhaps, by having LLMs replace programming jobs altogether, at which point the entire process will be, paradoxically, truly intelligence-free). The only concern seems to be that pipeline must run smoothly enough to generate plausible illusions on demand, in great quantity, and seemingly without any outside tweaking or know-how.

Again, what is singular here is not the capability of the model, nor the indefatiguable troubleshooting and exception-handling brilliance of the engineers, but the way the whole process, from end to end, admits effectively no insights. The snowballing complexity of the neural nets masks a massive intellectual simplification in the other direction, since the only “experiment” we can talk about is “what happens if we build indefinitely larger transformers, etc.?

The resulting model itself is unfathomable, an “emergent” artifact of self-organized nonlinear complexity, a “black box” as black as any ever devised (or in the phraseology of Yudkowsky, “inscrutable matrices of floating-point numbers”). Even leaving aside the oddly circular justification of its “inevitability”, the present pursuit of AI, even as it presumes to bottle the secret of intelligence and even to knock on the door of sentience, is, paradoxically, a profoundly unconscious activity.

Famed complexity researcher and physicist Stephen Wolfram summarizes this situation judiciously:

“[Designing and training neural networks] is basically an art. Sometimes—especially in retrospect—one can see at least a glimmer of a “scientific explanation” for something that’s being done. But mostly things have been discovered by trial and error, adding ideas and tricks that have progressively built a significant lore about how to work with neural nets.”

This accumulation of such “lore”, without insight into any inner workings, may in itself be a kind of intelligent activity, much as the building of the LLM pipeline itself requires some real intelligence. It may even be an “art”. But it is very far from anything we could consider science. Instead, the LLMs, as well as the myriads of other hypercomplex statistical models that fall under the term “artificial neural networks”, continue to exemplify what the late biologist Sydney Brenner described as “low input, high throughput, no output science”.

Many retort that these are just the insecurities of old fuddy-duddys whose time in the sun has long passed. Chomsky is 96 and long retired, and by his own admission his conception of language as an intricately structured whole–with innate, computationally formulable features stemming from precise cognitive and physiological considerations–has fallen out of favor in much of the linguistics community, with more and more of that community instead embracing the essentially behaviorist/Skinnerian paradigm of the mind-as-black-box.

Under this paradigm, results supersede theory, and the tabula rasa is practically a given. The researcher’s aim should be not understanding inner states or innate endowments so much as “behavioral engineering“: controlling and conditioning external stimuli to achieve desired behaviors (under which Skinner included language as “verbal behavior”). The similiarities between the process of imprinting or “nudging” behaviors via statistically-determined operants, and that of training neural nets by “pressing the silly putty against the training data” are obvious, particularly in their indifference to mechanism, explanation, or mind. Behaviorism, in fact, is deliberately mindless.

Chomsky’s intellectual disdain for Skinner’s conception of language-as-behavior, and the intellectual animosity between between their respective camps, is rather legendary. Further, given the strong and widely acknowledged similarities between behaviorism and the current AI paradigm, we may not be surprised at Chomsky et al.’s near-revulsion at recent developments. Yet given the range of howling errors produced by LLMs–these essentially behaviorist magnum-opuses of the cult of intelligence–Chomsky’s remarks should still give us pause.

On the other side, there is a curious lack of principled reply. This is not necessarily surprising, since the paradigm of current AI basically contains no principles as such (nor has any great interest in finding such). It instead returns always to the emergentist hope that, if artificiaal neural networks of sufficiently high complexity are built and trained with enough of the “right” data, there will simply “self-assemble” or “emerge” an intelligence comparable in scope, if not exact character, to that of the brain. The mean, if made large enough, will simply create its own exceptions and variances, in just the right structure.

These behaviorist-emergentists sometimes suggest that cognition is probably too complicated to be understood theoretically anyhow–which, given the well-entrenched diminishing returns on research in all sorts of complex fields, may have some truth. If the human mind is “cognitively closed” to understanding things as complex as how intelligence comes about, then indeed the only possible way to create AI is to hope that it will simply build itself. (Yet note that Chomsky himself is not averse to the idea of cognitive closure, or “mysterianism”, yet maintains his supported for the principled, rather than the black-box statistical approach to scientific understanding.)

Note that with this admission, we have moved boldly over the line from scientific work to magical work. The pipeline-builders, at once clever and clueless, sophisticated and yet completely simplified, now robe themselves as wizards, chanting invocations whose workings they know not. Yet the dimensions of this shift are not appreciated, least of all by the behaviorists, who generally seem too swept away by their own spells to concern themselves much with the potential risks should the waited-for “emergence” happen; astonishingly, their concerns, when voiced at all, mostly are confined to the worry that the AI might simply be rude, or could produce politically incorrect conclusions or language.

What else would we expect from intelligence-cultists, the purveyors of statistical, mindless, intelligence so-called?

The Cult of Intelligence (& the Ultimate Levity), pt. 1

As the accomplishments of “artificial intelligence” take up an increasing portion of the news, it becomes apparent that we in the modern world are suffering–yes, suffering–from a cult of intelligence, or rather of intelligence so-called. More and more it becomes apparent that this cult owes its power, not to intelligence per se, but to our not having at all grasped what intelligence even is.

Intelligence, more than any other personal quality, is seen as the index of one’s whole potential, the best predictor of success for individuals and groups alike. The modern world itself is an IQ test, some tell us. We live in a “knowledge economy”. We have abandoned military and religious heroes in favor of Einsteins, Edisons, and (perhaps) Musks. Parents, especially the well-to-do, want nothing more than to have the most “intelligent” children possible, and will often spare no expense to secure anything that promises to confer either the substance or the appearance of brilliance.

Who would dare consider, given this, that what we now almost ritually deem “intelligence” may just as well be a form of limitation as liberation, and may indeed prove itself to be extraordinarily petty, if not deceptive?

Yet, “intelligence” as now conceived–if the mavens of “AI” bother to stop and conceive it at all–has more and more of the qualities of a snare for the development of mind and intellect than of a means to new fulfillment of their powers.

This concern may be applied, surely enough, to other aspects of modern society that are held up as proof of our triumphant “intelligence”–not just computational or strictly scientific approaches, but social and mental habits. Nevertheless, we find very often that talk of “AI” is situated at the core of these aspects. It represents, in some way, a “blueprint” for the entire activity of the rest of the cult.

Yet as the cult of intelligence advances, it becomes more and more of a cliche, more and more of an unconscious tic–more and more like fashion. the praise of “intelligence”–artificial or not–everywhere seems more than anything else, to be a praise of repetition, of sameness.

For example, consider The Fourth Industrial Revolution, a 2016 book by World Economic Forum chairman and self-styled futurist Klaus Schwab’s. This and similar publications by WEF and other purportedly path-breaking, forward-looking, and of course extremely intelligent organizations extol an impending future of near-limitless innovation and novelty–a true revolution.

Yet throughout The Fourth Industrial Revolution, one is most struck by how strangely monotonous the proposed “revolution” actually appears. Notably, nearly all of the dozen-plus hyper-disruptive “deep shifts” Schwab heralds at the end of the book boil down to one basic trick, repeated over and over: namely, that of placing tiny computers (that is, “AI”) in every conceivable object, animal, or person, in order to continually monitor and log their minutest acts.

Taking the undoubtedly high-IQ WEF view, the culminating glory of our uniquely intelligence-obsessed culture apparently will amount to an eye-wateringly convoluted bureaucratic meshwork of remarkably gratuitous digital control and surveillance systems.

This strange combination of cognitive horsepower and complete monotony is hardly limited to the WEF and its devotees. In a more general vein, to remain in fashion and be considered highly “innovative”, one simply appends “internet of…” to some vague, portentious-sounding noun to generate ready-made “innovations”: thus “Internet of Things”, “Internet of Bodies”, “Internet of Everything”, and so on.

In the hands of the cult of intelligence, innovativeness and intelligence, it turns out, have become formulaic, algorithmic–which is to say, not very innovative or intelligent at all. The curious paradox of stagnation in everyday life combined with exponentially intensifying hype radiating from “intelligent” elite formations such as WEF epitomizes the strangenes of the situation. Something in the whole conception of what “intelligence” is, who has it, and where it should lead us has begun to overheat and malfunction. The result is a sense of widening absurdity, and a growing frustration with precisely those figures society is supposed to look up to and take its cues from.

Contemplating at the intellectual landscape of the past half-century, we seem to have become enthralled by a force that, for the intellectual world, is closely analogous to what Matt Taibbi’s vampire squid represented for the economic world. It is as if some cosmically greedy yet totally unimaginative demigod from the Outer Void has steadily tightened its grip upon our world of thought, trying to suction up everything it can possibly find, squeezing it all down into some standardized format (“data”) while evacuating it of nourishing content.

Much as the “vampire squid” in 2008 decimated the real economy, replaced it with a worthless subsitute–and expected the right to rule the financial system, so this would-be god of the intelligence-cult, standing amid the exanguinated remains of countless once-vibrant ideas, sentiments, personalities, and ways of life, now unveils a series of just-passable simulations of everything it just drained of life, and declares that this act of simulation proves its supreme “intelligence”, and its right to rule.

Our project–which may not be feasible at all–must be to defeat this god, and restore the position of true intelligence before the last examples of it are turned into simulations. Otherwise, the result must be an intellectual “financial crisis” which, by crippling not the modes of material value but of cogitation itself, will be much worse than the monetary crisis that emerged in the late ‘aughts.

* * *

At the heart of today’s AI craze, this paradoxical sameness and stagnation manifests as an obsession with mathematical, and specifically statistical thinking. Under the combined force of many decades of postmodernism and managerialism, we have arrived at a stage where “data” can not merely approximate reality, but actually replaces reality (“it from bit”). If only we chase relentlessly the limit-case of large numbers, says this philosophy, reality itself can be manufactured to taste. Thus, data must become “big”–and bigger is always better.

This map of “intelligence” has been most imposingly manifest recently in the “large language models” (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. With the branding of such huge statistical models as “artificial intelligence”, the statistical has been posited as the apotheosis of, if not successor for, intelligence itself.

Yet the same dilemma continually reappears: the statistical, by its very nature, cannot deal with truly unique cases; yet it is the unique cases that not only make life interesting, but, by requiring us to handle truly new things, reveal the actual range and power of our intelligence. This ability to handle or explore unique or “edge-case” situations without collapse is what separates intelligence from intelligence as conceived by the present computational-statistical cult.

As more and more would-be LLM users are discovering, the gaps resulting from a statistical “intelligence” system based on the complete abjuration of structure, principle, and uniqueness can be grievous. In one example, when asked “what sex will the first female president of the USA be?”, ChatGPT strains its hundreds of billions of artificial “neurons” and its terabytes of trawled Internet text and concludes that it is impossible to say in advance.

Similar examples, it turns out, abound in LLMs’ output; blatant non-sequiturs and outright fabrications appear time and again (in one case causing Google’s stock value to plummet); in other cases, the LLMs, when pushed, show highly inappropriate or disturbing behaviors.

It is something of a cliche that there are “lies, damn lies and statistics”. But it turns out that what distinguishes the LLM, as the apotheosis of statistical “intelligence”, is in many cases not the truthfulness of its output, but the meretriciousness, mediocrity, and mindlessness of that output. More data and more compute leads, after a certain point, to more “intelligent”-sounding language output, yet with diminishing improvements in actual insight, truthfulness or–to use the technical euphemism now current–“calibration.”. As one Margaret Mitrchell, chief ethics scientist at the A.I. firm Hugging Face, put the situation, LLMs “are not trained to predict facts […] They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.” Or in the still-more-pungent words of anothermachine-learning researcher:

“…ChatGPT can not really understand the underlying semantics of the sentences it spits out. This can always be seen in the ways it fails and makes complete nonsense up, which happens very frequently […] In reality chat GPT is mostly nonsense producing machine. It cannot be relied upon for accuracy or logic. It confabulates non existing sources and makes up self contradictory statements.”

This is the epitome of semblance over truth, surface over substance. In true postmodern manner, the LLM implicitly excludes the “metaphysics of presence”: there are no essences, no meanings (beyond statistical correspondence), and nothing is consistent even with itself, hence truth is just another kind of textural pattern to be imitated.

(This proclivity for style over substance–in fact no substance–reminds us of so many well-salaried and widely-praised scientific and managerial “experts” of our day, the veritable priests of the cult of intelligence. Their mistaken predictions, questionable or hypocritical conduct, counterproductive decisions, false assurances, and general unreliability, howsoever numerous the examples thereof, seem to do nothing to dislodge the default presumption of their own brilliance. Could it be these experts are the only entities of society actually less reliable than the LLMs in their pronouncements?)

* * *

The long-term result of the cult of intelligence is, actually, a pervasive mediocrity, masked by computational fervor, that is passed off as vision and rigor but soon comes to displace both like a weed. It turns out that mediocity, not stupidity, is the true opposite of intelligence. Thus wherever some event or some question deviates too far from the training-set (which represents mediocrity), too far out on the tails of the distribution, or wherever edge- or corner-cases become even moderately numerous, this once-triumphant statistical “intelligence”–human or digital–collapses into incoherence, or confabulation, like a tromp d’oeil.

Here, on these edges and corners, these places well outside the “convex hull” where the training sets of “big data” peter out, the perennial war between the mean and the variancetakes place. The mediocre, the statistical–represented by the mean–dazzles us with repeated impressions of fluency, and would lull us into the assumption that semblance and reality must be interchangeable. Yet the unique, unseen, and unexpected–represented by the variance–regularly intrudes on this illusion, and from completely unpredicted directions, revealing ghastly faults in the statistical superstructure, shattering the system’s illusion of understanding.

One of the key “early” (it was really only 8-10 years ago) discoveries of the current rennaissance of neural-network methods involved something known as “adversarial examples”. These were images or other instances of “data” which appeared perfectly recognizable to people, but, when fed to even the most scrupulously trained networks, would produce wild misclassifications–an automobile being mistaken for a tree or a baby, for instance.

The adversarial example is the classic example of the variance’s unexpected proximity to the heartlands of the mean, its ever-present capacity for sudden intrusion and overturning of the mean’s well-ordered mediocratic regime.

But as it turns out, life itself is replete with adversarial examples–including in such seemingly innocuous tasks as driving. Like the dark edges of possibility where the variance makes its rebel hideaway in plain sight, these examples may be sparse, but they are far from scarce. There are more than enough of them to reveal, glaringly and routinely, the difference between real intelligence versus the statistical, mannequin-intelligence of the Cult.

The rebels are alive and well. Not only do they mock the mindless complacency of the mean and its adherents, but–there are uncountably many of them. In time, as the Cult continues blindly in its dream of total machinic triumph, this rebellion will coalesce into full revolution.

The New Titipu: or, Cutting the Truth-Cord

Over time, the power demands of a regnant ideology have a way of producing ever-stranger equivalences between things that, rightly, should have almost nothing to do with each other. The present-day regnant ideology of “the West” is no exception.

We might call this ideology pseudo-liberalism or “postliberalism”, which in practice means an uneasy and hypocritical mash-up of social liberalism, Puritanical moralism, post-Marxist grievance, and ultraconcentrated oligarchic greed.

In the setting of post-liberalism, ideology’s search for power manifests, so far, in state-guided infiltration and censorship of media outlets such as Twitter, and of course, in the imposition of so-called “critical race theory”, “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “ESG” in most workplaces, businesses, and almost all facets of mass culture.

But as an ideology’s search for fresh deposits of psychological power over the population moves, out of its own inner logic, deeper into the very metaphysical substratum, the very sources and aquifers of reality itself must be captured or co-opted–lest the enemies that ideology sees bristling under every shadow sieze upon these sources first, and use them for nefarious (i.e., dissident) purposes.

This is not a new observation. Marxism could not get by without condemning every form of pre-revolutionary verity as “bourgeois”. The Jacobins could not simply change laws and names of things; they had to assert a whole new beginning of existence, embodied in the phrase “Year One”. And the National Socialists could not simply condemn and persecute Jews and other minorities, but had to place these acts in the context of an entire florid cosmic vision of racial biologism and social Darwinism.

This need of ideology to supplant metaphysics manifests, initially, as efforts to gain control of truth–a censorship system or Ministry of Truth, perhaps disguised as “fact-checking” or “algorithmic fairness”. Later, however, this attempt to control and define truth, as it becomes more difficult to maintain, may differentiate into a full disavowal of the very concept of “truth”.

Judging from David Liggins’ recent Aeon piece, “This essay isn’t true”, it would appear that we have already begun to move into just such later stages.

In his essay, Liggins argues for what he terms “alethic nihilism”: his position is that, at long last, it is time for humanity to give up on the idea of truth. Not out of despair of ever finding it, mind you, but because there is no such thing at all.

Crucially, Liggins argues, we must cut the “reality-to-truth link”–the process by which our observations of the world, when experienced directly and repeatedly, come to be viewed as truths about the world.

Only through this “cutting of the cord” connecting the always-tenuous human imaginarium to the outside cosmos, Liggins seems to believe, can human knowledge (or un-knowledge?) move forward. The brave new world is to be one based on the deliberate abjuring of all certainty and knowledge about the state of the world–beyond what social media has already achieved, that is.

This brings us to one of the “strange equivalencies” mentioned at the outset. Even though it appears quite different, Liggins’ essay is functionally equivalent to a DEI (“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”) training-session, or to any similar process of ideological, state-mandated indoctrination.

How is this so? In a government increasingly dependent on lies (and conversely harried by truth), sophistic-nihilistic training exercises of all sorts become increasingly essential to daily functioning. They become increasingly centralized and mainstreamed, since the very concept of truth and truth-speech is percieved, by a fraudulent State, as a threat.

We see this with DEI, which is essentially the forced repetition of the double lie that true diversity both produces increased social capital, and can genuinely flourish through standardization and conformism ideologically imposed from above. We also see it with “antiracism”, which is the false proposition that racist attitudes can be defeated by retaining all the assumptions of racism but then prepending, as it were, a negative sign to them.

Liggins’ arguments fit perfectly into this same general scheme; they serve a pressing and felt need of the State for untruth–or indeed as Nietzsche might call them,life-preserving lies.

It is becoming, to be blunt, more convenient for the postliberal State to train its citizens that “nothing is true”–and thus to completely cripple their mental faculties and any basis for factual critique–than even to get them to parrot falsehoods.

(Of course, to reform or re-found the postliberal State along more honest lines is simply out of consideration.)

Liggins, tellingly, suggests to us that the word “true” is essentially a disguised form of the word “yes”. We are to imagine that truth began its life (since everything, even truth itself, is a mere historical development) as a shorthand for repeating back, by way of agreement, whatever we have just been told. He proposes, for example, that the utterance:

“Most of what she believes is true, so listen to her”

is synonymous with:

“Most of what she believes is yes, so listen to her”

Here, in effect, we are being told that truth is identical with agreement. Yet note that such “agreement”, especially in the given example, is inseparable from obedience. “We agree with this, so you must agree with it too” is but a thinly veiled form of “do as we say”.

After all, if there is no truth, there also can be no concept of lying, nor any basis for disputation. And without these concepts, what basis is there to doubt or refuse anything one is told by authority?

Of course, Liggins’ account completely ignores why so many cultures have all developed not an equivalence, but a distinction between agreement and truth; nor does it explain how “agreement”, even on unpleasant conclusions, would ever happen in the first place. Why does not every society exist in a mentality of endless, perfect Panglossian groupthink, where everyone is in agreement that theirs is the best of all worlds?

Part of what unsettles about Liggins’ approach is its peremptory character. To say Truth is (at most) an intellectual construct, or a mode of agreement, or an emotional attitude, or even a religious residue–following Nietzsche’s tack in The Gay Science and elsewhere–is one thing. But to say flatly, as Liggins does, that there is no truth amounts to a moratorium even on these constructs, modes, and attitudes.

On this view, we must be ever-vigilant against even the possibility of truth peeking back into our thoughts and our interpretations of events, lest the nettlesome “truth-to-reality link” be re-established. Truth is like a stutter: it serves no purpose, and it must be suppressed, or perhaps even treated.

Because of this implicit requirement for complete control of thoughts and attitudes, the implications of Liggins’ Aeon essay must be classified as flatly totalitarian.

Indeed, considering Liggins’ propositions, it is hard to think of a perspective more helpful to all kinds of totalitarian designs, or more effective in bypassing the two properties of truth that are most dangerous with respect to the ideological State: firstly, truth’s capacity to be surprising, to defy plans and expectations; and secondly, its capacity to frustrate the desires of the powerful.

But notice that, although truth, being potentially dangerous to power, can in some cases be substituted with compliance and agreement–total agreement being the essence of the total State–some kind of notion of “correctness” nevertheless must be maintained. This “correctness” fills the void left by the truth-impulse, if only for rhetorical purposes.

The giveaway of this is when Liggins, while denying that anthropogenic global warming is “true”, nevertheless assures us that it is “correct”:

“Suppose someone makes the claim that human activity is the main cause of global heating. They are perfectly correct [emphasis added]”

…But what underwrites the “correctness” of a claim in a world where truth is abolished (or deprecated)? Nothing but this: the State approves of you when you agree with it and repeat it, and comes down on you when you don’t.

In the world of Liggins’ fond imagining, the State, in effect, generates its own artificial “truth-field”, hidden under the name “correctness”. This artificial field is inherently under its complete control and capable of cushioning its own increasingly numerous and indispensable lies.

So the idea that there could be a “natural truth-field” independent of the State becomes an existential threat.

This idea of natural, observer-independent correctness–what “truth” really means–is one that many people through the centuries have identified, one way or another, with God. Thus it happens the worst attacks on the very idea of truth have often happened in tandem with attacks on theism–not, as we are often told, at the hands of theism.

What we are seeing, in Liggins’ essay and now in thousands of other places throughout the “post-liberal” West, is a plain return of the 20th-century playbook and tropes of totalitarianism. And, as seen in those systems, its embrace of nihilism–made unusually up-front in this case–is an equally plain attack on theism.

In this dissolving of natural (or supernatural) truth and its replacement by a State-generated “truth-field” composed of “correctness”, in which truth disappears in a self-fulfilling circle of mindless obedience, one is first reminded, of course, of Orwell and 1984–particularly O’Brien’s remarks about how the Party defines reality and no reality exists outside of the Party, since “Nothing exists except through human consciousness”.

But as we at Peeling the Paradox predicted some time ago, to draw such a comparison now is almost beating a dead horse, since already we are well on the way to a situation where everything is Orwellian.

Thankfully there is no shortage of other parallels to draw. For example, Liggins’ distortedly utopian assertion of a truth-free world also recalls the mock-totalitarian world of Gilbert and Sullivan’s irrepressible operetta the Mikado. Set in a fanciful version of medieval Japan, The Mikado presents a world where, out of a misguided plan to improve the citizens’ morality, all flirtation, even winking or leering, has been assigned the death penalty.

It bears noting that this level of punitiveness over trivial transgressions is, as of this writing, only one or two steps removed from the current situation in many “enlightened” Western nations. (Hence the “post-” in “post-liberal”.)

Anyway, at one point early in The Mikado, the people of the town of Titipu sing about their lives under this deadly and draconian rule, nervously intoning:

“And you are right, and we are right, and everything is quite correct!“

In another spot, the Emperor, architect of the whole mess, sings,

“My morals have been declared particularly correct!“

(One feels that Liggins would no doubt salute the fictional Emperor, for not committing the solecism of calling his morals “true”.)

It is interesting and fitting to note that the The Mikado itself has become a lightning-rod for professional ideologists, due to its extremely loose imitation of Japanese culture and its tendency, as a British operetta, to be cast with Caucasians in the main roles. Likewise, it has become increasingly common to censor phrases in the operetta’s lyrics that might run against current sensibilities. Thus, The Mikado is itself an example of a work in which the truthful nevertheless has become incorrect.

Yet, all this “radicalism” is really 20th- or even 19th-century retread. There is, again, nothing truly new or even interesting happening in Liggins’ arguments, insofar as they make any sense at all. Just as DEI represents a recycling of totalitarian, pseudo-egalitarian, post-Marxist ideas that have been around for at least a century, so too has Liggins’ edgy nihilism–“alethic” or otherwise–been a going concern since the 1800s at least, whether with Nietzsche’s critique of truth or with the subsequent efforts of the post-structuralists to void the concept.

In fact this whole wider trend of anti-truthism, with its bodyguard of totalitarian entailments, is, although decked with the colors of “progressivism”, so regressive and so trite that one could hardly think of a clearer indicator of the ongoing death of Progress–which is one of the deeper causes of the intellectual, spiritual and cultural crisis we are now entering. For what happens when a “progressive” society runs out of ways to make things better–or more alarmingly, when its plans to make things better start instead looking more and more obviously dystopian?

The official answer of postliberalism seems to be to turn further into the skid, so to speak, and thus to make the appalling out to be simply “the new beautiful”–and also, it would seem, to make mere fabrication and compliance and the scrupulous avoidance of truth, into “the new truth”. Could truth itself yet become, in time, even “fascist”?

In this new world of anti-progressive antithought, even the ending of 1984 will become not a cautionary tale, but a happy, rousing, indeed romantic ending. After all, recall that that novel ends with love–yes, a great, swelling profession of brotherly love.

Dangers of Covid-19 in Retrospect: a Debrief

As we hurl the last calcified remains of 2021 into the “dustbin of history” with a resonant clang, it seems like a good time to clear the air (so to speak) surrounding Covid, and particularly about what has been claimed about it in these very pages.

In particular, four previous posts on this blog (from the first half of 2020) discussed what at the time appeared to be massive, looming, sci-fi-horror-style threats from the the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the agent responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic. Among other things, these posts:

1. …Warned that the virus might already be infecting common domestic and even wild animals, and soon could become pervasive in the environment, leading basically to some kind of doomsday situation where you might not be able to go outside without catching Covid from something (and dying);

2. …Extensively (maybe obsessively) detailed the presumptive danger of chronic or recurrent Covid infections, with potentially calamitous long-term effects, i.e., “long covid” on steroids.

3. …Suggested the danger of the virus was likely to be underestimated, and lockdowns lifted dangerously prematurely, in order to avoid a mass panic and thus to preserve the economic systems on which the richest depend.

4. …Ridiculed the Swedish government’s distinctively hands-off policy concerning Covid as a kind of insane denialism. (Though the deaths for Sweden were noticeably higher than its neighbors, the dreaded catastrophe simply failed to materialize.)

These worries all seemed to be well-supported at the time, backed by a steady stream of “authoritative” news stories and research results on Covid, each of which seemed to fuel ever deeper and ever stranger fears. All turned out to contain, at least, a grain of truth. Yet for the most part, as of this writing, all of these above concerns (and the associated essays) have turned out to be–putting it charitably–wildly overblown.

Developments since mid-2020 or so have shown the narrative of Covid-19 as some uncannily perfect and lethal bioweapon or doomsday plague–a narrative which was pushed near-universally by both the scientific establishment and media–to be misguided and disproportionate to a degree that is dangerous, reckless, and possibly even malicious. (We, at least, in accepting this narrative as far as we did in those confusing early months of 2020, certainly intended no malice.)

Much in the manner of a societal or even global-level cytokine-storm–in which the body’s overreaction to a pathogen, rather than the pathogen itself, presents the main threat–the global overreaction to a virus that was, even for the most vulnerable, only a little more deadly than a common seasonal flu, represents a kind of watershed in the development of the informational society towards a state of perpetual, media-induced schizophrenia.

The important thing now is to dissipate the storm before it is too late and all sanity is lost.

(On the other hand, we do stand by our skewering of the ridiculous politically-correct statements by the WHO and others against “assuming the virus’s origin” and the dangers of “stigmatization” allegedly produced by calling Covid “Chinese” or the “Wuhan strain”. Incidentally, it is ironic that, while denouncing the “stigmatization” of people for their ethnic group or for being ill, the WHO has simultaneously introduced the groundwork for a system whereby individuals may readily be continually tracked, stigmatized and excluded from society for refusing unnecessary medical interventions, such as mRNA inoculations.)

So, this post exists as a boring-yet-necessary end-of-year apology and debrief, in penance for (however understandably) being drawn into the cytokine-storm of fear-mongering, epidemiogical doom-porn, and finally misplaced faith in scientific pronouncements that swept into the world’s consciousness between approximately February and July of 2020, and which in many places is still raging. In subsequent posts, we will outline a new, far more insidious threat than any superplague–one which, it turns out, is directly connected with the institutional forms that bred, and now perpetuate, the Covid overreaction.

It’s not that the terrible predictions of Covid doom weren’t at all plausible, given that deadly pandemics are indeed a standard occasional visitor throughout history. It was even harder to ignore them given the huge numbers of frankly apocalyptic journal articles and preprints that wafted down from the heights of academia like snowflakes in that first half of 2020. It seemed that almost each new article professed to reveal a new, sinister, and even calamitous secret feature of the virus. Whether it was the terrifying tentacles that it seemed to shoot out of infected cells (without mentioning that many mild viruses actually do the same thing); the disquieting, almost AIDS-like way it was alleged to disable the immune system by killing off lymphocytes (turns out not so much, except in especially vulnerable people); the reports of terrifying multi-organ attack, including in the brain; or the early suggestions, written in chillingly sober forensic terms, that SARScov2 might indeed be artificial, an escaped bioweapon or HIV-vaccine target, soon to cover the world in deadly “viral swarms”–yes, with stuff like this floating around, it was hard for anyone steeped in “the literature” to even completely rule out that humanity’s future might well be measured in mere months.

The general mood of panic was further aided by the use of an RT-PCR testing methodology which, it now turns out, is ridiculously prone to misdiagnoses and false positives–to such an extent, it has now finally been revealed, that it cannot tell apart Covid-19 cases from influenza, and has been quietly retired by the CDC only after nearly two years in use. This methodology, in combination with perverse policies that paid hospitals vast additional sums to report “covid deaths” even when the virus was not the actual cause of decease, undoubtedly helped inflate the reported numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths. The shock-value of these numbers, which added to the prevailing mood of impending doom, was in no way dimmed at the time by the reality that they were substantially the result of error and graft.

Thus, if journalists are to be accused of scaremongering in the response to Covid, it must also be said that an enormous portion of the scientific community and public health officialdom was happy to set the tone for their brethren in the media.

With the benefit of hindsight, the truth about Covid (as far as such a thing is even realistically knowable anymore in our new age of tech-curated, authoritarian scientism) has turned out to be somehow not the exact opposite of the doomsday story we were originally fed, but instead a way less frightening, anticlimactic, even irritatingly banal version of it–one framed by increasingly disturbing abuses of power.

For instance, Covid does seem very likely to have originated as an escaped product of “gain of function” research–deliberately tinkering with a pathogen’s genetics in order to make it more dangerous. Further, as noted by Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, this research may even have included certain HIV-based provirus systems, lending a surprising plausibility to wacky-sounding fears of “airborne AIDS”.

Yet, barring the possibility that Covid may have briefly been much more deadly in the first few weeks of the pandemic before miraculously mellowing by a factor of ten or so, it appears that whatever escaped (if it escaped) was a rather lame bioweapon, at least by the standards of sheer lethality if not socioeconomic mayhem. Covid-19’s present infection fatality rate (IFR) of 0.15% (or lower, depending on age group and health history), almost entirely centered on the elderly and infirm, makes the initial estimates of 2-4% lethality purveyed by the WHO and other organizations early in 2020 seem very much like deliberate scaremongering. (This process continues: the latest “variant”, “omicron”, for which terrifying predictions of mass death were again trotted out far and wide, has if anything proven to have an even lower, if not immeasurably tiny, mortality rate.)

Anyway, to take the four offending posts in order:

1. Animals carrying covid everywhere. This fear was first sparked by Chinese antibody studies that suggested that SARScov2 had, even early in the pandemic, already spread to one-sixth of the stray cats in Wuhan. Cats were a particular worry, as it was thought that the ACE2 receptor in felines might be an especially good match for the virus spike protein. Spread through wildlife (and even domestic animals) is something that actually happens with respiratory coronaviruses all the time, so it would not be especially shocking if it was happening with SARScov2 as well. In addition to the occasional story about a zoo tiger or farmed minks catching Covid (ferrets having an ACE2 closely related to that of felines), the latest news suggests there is quite a bit of SARScov2 circulating in deer populations. In the case of domestic animals like cats and dogs, however, there have been only sporadic cases of mild Covid infections since this writing.

All in all, this can be classified as another fear that definitely had an element of validity, but was overstated. Given that Covid turned out to just not be terribly deadly, the whole question of whether it may be carried by some non-human animals simply loses most of its urgency and terror factor.

2. The specter of “long covid”–while rapidly spawning a new kind of cottage industry in medical and public health research–has proven little more than that–a specter. Our post did correctly observe that sometimes patients who had recovered from Covid would once again come down with symptoms, or would continue to have mild symptoms for a few months. A few also would continue to test positive for viral RNA quite some time after the resolution of symptoms; however, this is now believed not to be due to persistent live virus, but to tiny quantities of RNA incorporated in the cell nucleus which continue to be transcribed–something that happens with almost any retroviral infection and can be detected only by cranking PCR amplification tests up to absurdly sensitive levels.

In the overwhelming majority of cases, the reported symptoms of “long covid” prove so mild and so indistinct (fatigue, headache, “brain fog”) that a reasonable person could wonder whether they are even really due to Covid-19 at all–or, if they are due to it, whether they materially differ from the similarly mild aftereffects sometimes experienced with common flu or cold viruses.

To be blunt, given the saturation-bombing of the entire society with fear-porn about SARScov2, it would be unsurprising if a huge proportion of these symptoms proved to be psychosomatic. A recent French study, for example, estimated that only 4% of those with “long Covid” even test positive for the virus at all (and remember, many of these are likely to be false positives).

The related concern of reinfections by Covid also fits the general pattern of being not completely false, but vastly overblown. While reinfection with Covid is indeed possible, reinfection is actually a common and basically harmless phenomenon observed with many decidedly non-terrifying, common-cold-causing human coronaviruses. Furthermore, the case of Covid-19 reinfection specifically turns out to be substantially milder and rarer than primary infection.

Thus, with almost two years’ hindsight, the original dread–that Covid infections would recur without end, possibly in rapid succession, each time producing worse and worse disease and compounding physiological damage–simply has not been borne out.

3. Covid dangers underestimated due to elites wanting to keep the economy running. Underestimated danger? Only consider that it was these same “elites” who doggedly treated a 0.15% IFR virus as though it were a 3-4% IFR virus, and it becomes clear enough that “underestimating” the danger of Covid was never the plan for the vast majority of decision-makers.

Ah, friends, Covid taught us a lot about how power really works in the West, didn’t it? In particular, the idea of the grubby capitalist who cares only about profitability and productivity as the deciding figure in our society took a severe credibility hit. Instead, we realized that, in some sense, money and productivity are really nothing to our elites: they can conjure as much of that as they want by running the printing press, or maybe by hiring robots, with us or without us–indeed, in the current inflationary state of the American economic system, they arguably have little choice but to do so. If anything, the shutdowns showed an elite that was curiously idealistic; the crisis became a kind of playground for zealous elites and “experts” the world over to launch radical new social policies–notably the so-called “Great Reset” of the World Economic Forum–under the unimpeachable political cover of “saving the world from Covid”. In short, dreams of power always take priority over dreams of money–though our ruling class, ever adaptable, is happy to grab both.

4. Sweden was crazy for not locking down. The reality is much more nuanced. True, the Swedes had significantly more Covid cases and than their neighbors. But given Covid’s low IFR, the actual death toll per capita so far turned out very manageable, and considerably lower than countries elsewhere in Europe, such as the UK, that did pursue more extreme measures. The fact that, with only minimal isolation and other measures, the Swedes did not suffer a Covid-death apocalypse but did roughly as well as anyone else, itself raises major doubts about the public-health utility of the lockdowns. Sweden’s results from relatively early on could also have been taken as a clue that the danger of the virus was being massively overhyped.

(Incidentally, a similar but inverse phenomenon is now visible with vaccination: countries that vaccinate less extensively appear, if anything, to have slightly lower rates of new Covid cases.)

This doesn’t mean necessarily that the Swedes didn’t have a kind of weird death-wish for staying open, but–it just didn’t happen.

It may be a bit too facile to lay all the blame for these misconceptions at the feet of “science”, as though science were something completely homogeneous, although it more and more does function as a de facto globalized entity with its own wants and tastes. Some scientists associated with major universities indeed tried to warn against the coming fear-storm. For example, thanks to the work of Stanford’s John Ioannidis and his analyses of both Chinese data from early in the pandemic and the Diamond Princess incident, there was already evidence as early as March of 2020 that the WHO’s IFRs were high by at least a factor of 5-6. Also, not long after, Elon Musk, the neo-Faustian space tycoon (and now richest man in the world), was tut-tutted by many in the media and elsewhere for suggesting to Joe Rogan that the mass terror over Covid-19 was unnecessary. In particular, he argued that the WHO’s IFR estimates were an “order of magnitude” too high, and that the diagnostic tests used for Covid appeared to produce many false positives and misclassified deaths. All these concerns proved prescient. The Swedish public health officials also appear, in retrospect, to be one of the rare cases where national authorities judged the risks of the virus in a non-hyperbolic way from quite early on.

But such instances do not really exonerate the scientific or public health establishment. It’s fair to say that these were minority voices, even outliers, drowned out by the media machine and the lockstep mentality prevalent in the academy (a mentality that clearly still persists, as major universities contemplate canceling in-person classes once again over the remarkably mild omicron variant).

The upshot is that in instance after instance, worries and threats about Covid-19 that appeared to be borne out by abundant scientific publications–all pointing to the conclusion that Covid was an exceptionally lethal, persistent, fine-tuned pathogen, capable even of asymptomatic spread–turned out to be wildly exaggerated or completely meritless. If any set of events should be seen as indelibly establishing modern science’s abject bankruptcy and unreliability, it must be those of early 2020 to the present. Combined with the strong possibility that the virus itself was the result of genetic tinkering (in the name of “science”), it seems more and more appropriate to describe the creation of SARScov2, as well as the subsequent research and policy response to it, as “science’s Chernobyl“. About that, we will certainly have much more to say in the days ahead.

Conspiracy, Media, and the Two Schizophrenias

“ …a state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him, meeting with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of his own body protects him. In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion”
–Jean Baudrillard, America, p.27

In a recent post, John Michael Greer examines the phenomenon of “conspiracy theory” in the context of schizophrenia. He sensibly notes that such theories often possess more than a grain of truth, if only one interprets them in a symbolic sense–say, as indications of peoples’ loss of trust in institutions and the narratives they promote. Thus, he argues, conspiracy theories are an example of how “schizophrenia” can actually be a wholly predictable mass response to declining social conditions and more and more blatantly inconsistent dictates from officialdom.

Greer uses the specific example of “Tartaria“, an alternative-historical empire roughly coextensive with Siberia–which, recent conspiracy theories hold, has been systematically erased from history, yet is responsible for much of the grand architecture seen throughout the West. Greer unpacks this, noting for instance that “Great Tartary” definitely did exist as a region of the old Russian Empire, and concludes that the conspiracy theory of Tartaria’s noble reign and sinister erasure is a kind of all-absorbing metonym for the fate of the West itself, the result of a kind of “adaptive” schizophrenia diagnostic of our troubled times. Belief in the Tartarian Empire conspiracy-theory is thus “wrong” if taken literally, yet it also represents a highly fruitful and creative way to cope with deeper, uglier historical truths, such as the submersion of the West into ever more disenchanted, and more corrupted modes of living. By visualizing “the glory that was Grand Tartaria” (even if that glory, strictly speaking, never was), the conspiracy theorist subtly begins the process of re-imagining a society that contains the very things so sorely missing from his own.

In this defense of schizophrenia or conspiracism as a coping-strategy or as a valid symbolic development, Greer seems to harmonize with certain far-left or structuralist critiques of capitalism, notably Gilles Deleuze‘s “schizoanalysis“. Yet as important as the sociocultural angle might be in the rise of conspiracy theories, the problem, arguably, could also be regarded the exact opposite way: the issue is not one of disenchantment, but of too much enchantment, or “too much magic“.

It may be helpful here to distinguish between “positive” and “negative” conceptions of schizophrenia here. Let us define negative schizophrenia as resulting from forced denial of what is actually the case, and positive schizophrenia from forced belief in what is evidently not the case. Greer summarizes the type of social schizophrenia that breeds conspiracy theory as “suppression of the obvious”; basically, it is a consequence of the myriad attempts by officialdom in a fatally corrupted polity to suppress the reality of their own contradictions and failures. Because they are driven by the suppression of crucial issues by the established powers in society, conspiracy theories like Tartaria, despite their highly imaginative and “positive” content, would actually be products of “negative” schizophrenia: they are generated by a need to cope with an externally-imposed denial of vital realities.

Yet the problem with this is that there is also no shortage of the positive schizophrenia in our time–wild beliefs, sometimes official and sometimes informal, that seem to do nothing in particular to protect establishment powers from their own embarrassments (and if anything, increase these embarassments).

This positive schizophrenia seems to have a very different, more apolitical source, anchored ultimately in technology itself–in this case, in the very nature of media. What if it’s not just a matter of the particular tendentious ways media is used, or the absurdity of social conditions and the dawning but repressed consciousness thereof, but of media’s very essence?

The problem, in fact, is that media itself is designed to produce (mostly positive) schizophrenia, even if all else in society is working as well as anyone could hope; it is an apparatus of assertive unreality. Here, we are not dreaming up ways to navigate around an imposed denial, as with negative schizophrenia; instead, we are seduced and dragged along by a shimmering, relentless cataract of images and narratives. We are in the grip of a form magic, run amok.

Back in the 1970s, Jerry Mander’s “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television” (though a kooky and uneven book in some ways) argued that the fundamental structure of TV was such that it literally drove people into a schizophrenic condition. Totally synthetic inputs would simply displace real-world ones inside the brain, making us all completely helpless and pliable in the hands, perhaps, of a tiny few who controlled the programming. Mander’s observations sometimes read like they were penned in 2019 or so:

“Television does what the schizophrenic fantasy says it does. It places in our minds images of realities which are outside our experience (…) all reality becomes ethereal, existing only in our minds” –p. 111

“All information merges. All experience merges. (…) Contradictions do not exist. We have lost control of our minds. We are all lost in space. (…) We have merged with the influencing machine.” –p. 112

“…the human conspiracy didn’t begin the process. It resulted from another, less personal though more basic, conspiracy: a conspiracy of technological form” –p. 117

The world of “conspiracy theory”, linked with the world of negative schizophrenia, finds its complement in a “conspiracy of technological form” that inflates the world of positive schizophrenia. The latter “conspiracy” has surely flourished since Mander wrote: television is old hat and we now add to it social media, nonstop fake news, ubiquitous handheld screens, and soon also Internet of Things, Internet of Bodies, and “metaverse“. These new additions, both more powerful and vastly more accessible, amplify the “schizogenic power” of the system perhaps a million-fold over its 1970s level. Even if our rulers were marginally trustworthy (they aren’t), our experts accurately understood a tenth of what was happening (they don’t–let’s hope), and we still had some meaningful shared non-ironic conception of morality (we don’t), what hope would there there for an end to the long march of schizophrenia in such a landscape, short of an anti-mediatic Butlerian Jihad?

Under current conditions, media, insofar as it is an organ of power, reveals itself as a mass-psychiatric equivalent of trying to treat only the symptoms, hence making the problem worse. If, as a ruler, your society is becoming more and more repulsive for most of the population, and said population is increasingly haunted with suspicions and theories about why this is so–or if it increasingly is being mentally conquered by worlds of unstable, arbitrary fantasy–why bother with actual reforms or root causes that could upset your nice position? Why not just instead use media to inject some sort of counter-schizophrenia(its exact content barely matters) into the minds of the restive? Surely this will balance it all out, no?

It would be a relief if we had only to deal with the “negative” schizophrenia of conspiracy, as Greer seems to suppose, since in a way this is just a matter of the ignorance of complex and distant things, or of impotent dissatisfaction. These, in turn are problems and experiences that pre-industrial man lived in and dealt with regularly. They are, at least, nothing new. A system based on aggressive mediatic induction of positive schizophrenia, on the other hand, may be historically novel. Ignorance and censorship can, of course, lead to downfall; but the weapons of positive schizophrenia introduce something much more volatile: an ecstatic magical embrace of the unreal. Even if not in the hands of a psychopathic and brick-dumb ruling-class, such weapons would have the power to get us not simply to fall off the cliff, but to jump off it with rapt enthusiasm and a running start. And if we do jump, the dream of Tartaria’s strong arms may not be waiting to catch us at the bottom.

On the Basic Motivation Behind the Internet of Things (and Internet of Bodies, Everything, etc. etc.)

They–not the “thought leaders”, but the actual leaders of thought– have to have realized that at least in terms of human creature comforts, they have already exceeded the envelope. As humanity is presently constituted, there is nothing more to do in terms of new luxuries (except maybe immortality, anti-aging). The human is just not complex enough for them! Satiety, or else revenge for a swindle suddenly recognized, is looming on the horizon. And the old capitalist trick of inventing new needs and tastes itself is running on fumes: people are beginning to sense in their bones that things are not really getting any better, and may well be getting worse. Rebellion is on the winds.

So: we will just have to actually re-engineer humanity to have more and richer and weirder and more complex needs–and to like it! Never let your product fail when the whole thing can be repaired simply by reeducating your clientele. So transhumanism plus consumerism leads in only one direction: not towards human enhancement–at least, that is a diversion–but towards incalculable, multidimensional enfeeblement. For each new dimension of enfeeblement represents a whole new industry waiting to be born, a whole new code waiting to ensnare more beings. Remember this adage, for it governs the world now: needs are the only true resources. For only a need (fabricated or not) can ensure repeat business and perpetual authority.

Moreover, there is something I would call entraining at work: the user, increasingly enfeebled and encrusted in more and more digital luxuries, comes to be actually determined by these luxuries, to an unprecedented degree, so that the userloses all boundaries and becomes oceanically entangled with the network-logic or luxury. This is the real meaning of “fully automated luxury Communism.“

Eventually, there will be no life at all–or life will become so inured that it will be indistinguishable from death, from machine–and that is the final goal, the deconstruction of man being a mere apprentice-piece to the master-piece of deconstructing all life itself (see That Hideous Strength: “one day we shave the planet”). Or, at most, everything will be cyborg (which is delightfully compatible with postmodern-feminist ideas of revolt against reality; see Haraway).

So we are witnessing the rise of the Borg, their origin-story. Nature–humanism–disgusting! All sentimentality, inefficiency–out with all of it! Lock it down, forever, or till it dies! Up with 5G, 8G, 9G, 1000G! Give us VR in 3D, 4D, 50D, a million D! Never stop the stimuli, the exponential surge in need which entails exponential surge in gratification! Give us a separate frequency for each brain cell, feeding us, priming us, shaping us, bombarding it relentlessly day and night! Why should we stop? Why should we ever stop?

Whatever happens, always remember: the Rainbow is always just a command-prompt away.

The Age of Experiment: Programmable Minds, Programmable Flesh

…If we could listen in on the mind of the typical modern scientist, technocrat, or “thought leader” (whether geneticist, cyberneticist, or whatever else), in a moment of completely unguarded reflection, about the next steps humanity must take, what would we most likely hear? Here is the kind of voice, and the general themes, that come to mind:

“Look, we’re never going to get where we need to go if we don’t recognize the need to freely experiment–and that necessarily means on humans, and in large numbers.

“I know what you’re thinking. How crazy! How monstrous! What hubris! Another Mengele in the making! But I would ask you to consider: what really makes people react in this way to the idea of mass human experimentation? Why do they see only the bad, and never the potential? Don’t they know at all how much good has already come from such experimentation? Medicines, conveniences, foods, entertainments, defense systems, even forms of governance! But this they don’t see, as they take it for granted.

“Some might also bring up some sort of ‘metaphysical’ consideration, like the ‘inherent dignity of the person’, or the like. These too are misguided, a kind of category mistake. Such ideas are politically necessary; that doesn’t mean they actually exist. We’ve at long last managed to distance ourselves, I hope, from those metaphysical shibboleths that say ‘person’ is literally something more than a legalistic construct somewhat arbitrarily applied to certain bio-organic automata of the genus Homo. This uncoupling from literal metaphysics is really the singular liberation of modernity.

“So where does that liberation get us? To me it means we don’t have to tremble with fear when we change some base-pairs or add some new genes to a ‘person’, as if we’re somehow defacing this special masterpiece or calling down some wrath or reckoning. We’re not ‘abusing God’s creation’, say, because a) god is a myth in the first place, b) evolution shows that humanity, far from being a ‘creation’, is no more than an arbitrary and contingent snap-shot of random processes that are constantly ongoing, and c), most importantly, we’re not really abusing at all, but improving.

“We stand, in fact, on the threshold of a wondrous era when, for the first time, we can break free of evolution–when we ourselves can do what before was always fatuously attributed to some ‘god’ or other. We can be the creators, and we can be the creation. We can, for the first time, bring the spark of creation and meaning itself to this uncreated, pointless world. We can make ourselves in our own image.

“But none of it will happen if we are timid. It won’t happen if we continue, superstitiously, to stop short at certain magical ‘lines’ of conduct, as though these lines ever had an existence of their own beyond the force of nominal social convention and ignorance.

“You may say there will be side-effects or suffering if we go forward with human experiments. I reply, of course there will be some disappointments, some misfortunes. What would you expect? The whole point of experimentation is that most of the experiments yield some null result. But out of those null results, vital clues are gleaned.

“That is why I think we will mostly be able to get the experiments done voluntarily–that is, without resort to force. Helping reveal those clues in itself will offer our experimental subjects a greater sense of purpose and validation than most of them would have ever experienced in their whole lives. And after all, it’s not like we’d experiment mainly on the most essential or gifted parts of society, at least not until we are further along. We’d have a pretty hard time designing, carrying out and analyzing the results of the experiments without them!

“The experimentation, besides being voluntary, will of course have to be absolutely systematic. I think a natural way to do this would be to set up some kind of universalized yet fully accessioned and trackable system of genetic updates, like version-control–basically Github for the human genome. Similar things already exist, though not on this scale, and only for spontaneous, rather than directed variants. Then we could use routine genetic injections–say, as part of a soft-mandated vaccination regimen–to ‘push’ our updates to the experimental groups.

“So every part of the process would be voluntary, meticulously curated, and not least, deeply fulfilling for all involved. But besides all that, who can really doubt at this point that the side-effects and sufferings of doing nothing–of leaving humanity to fester in its current self-destructive, maladjusted, nay uncreated state, would be far worse than those of taking up the challenge of genetic stewardship and improvement?

“Here I in no way am intimating a return to eugenics, with its crude and inhumane methods of sterilization or sometimes deportation. Rather, we aim not to discard some, but to elevate all, through precise, targeted and ultimately liberating modification, with a grand objective of realizing unlimited self-creation for every member of humankind.

“This is a solemn charge, a vital next stage on the road. The hour grows long. It is more than a matter of Progress or Knowledge at this point. These now seem quaint, almost outdated in themselves. It is, rather, a matter of obeying the only God that matters: the god that we are meant to become. I have every confidence that in the years ahead, as we look upon what we have made, lo, we will see that it is good.”

The above is not a quotation, of course, but an impression, a thought-experiment, an attempt to live within the mind of someone I am not, and there to hear thoughts that normally would only be let free in very select company, or in disjointed pieces—a snippet here, a snippet there, like bread-crumbs. But if we grant that this impression is in fact even roughly representative of the zeitgeist in our “thinking classes”—as virtually all the philosophical motifs in the preceding are quite typical of the average scientist, or technocrat, or “thought-leader” of our day—then a much more haunting question arises.

That question is: what is to be done about such people? More specifically, we could ask: do they deserve to rule?—or for that matter: are they fit to be anywhere near positions of real power at all?

Leaving Idealia: A Fable

In the land of Idealia, everone got to be and do exactly what they felt was truest to themselves. There was no stigma, no stuffy customs, no backward-looking religion or suffocating morals. There was no longer any need to hold back one’s deepest desires; food and shelter were now plentiful, and technology could deliver all sorts of fabulous things, so everyone was free to experiment. One had only to state what one felt was the goal of one’s Truest Self, and the government made sure that it could be accommodated, posthaste.

A Traveler, making his way through the region, having heard such magnificent things about Idealia (and being of stout-hearted liberal sensibility himself), decided to make a short detour on his route so that he could see this very special place with his own eyes. After arriving late at night and staying at a small inn near the capital city, he stepped out into the bright blue morning and, choosing a nearby street at random, began to walk from house to house. It was already a clear, bustling day, with many people out to enjoy the sunshine or stretch their legs. Many could be found on their porches, or sitting in lawn-chairs out in the front-yard, or stretched out on the grass, enviably carefree. Birds tweeted, dogs barked in the distance, bright clouds swirled between rainbows of unearthly vividness, and children bounced balls in the street. It was idyllic, thought the Traveler, like all the classic neighborhoods he’d ever wanted to live in somehow rolled into one.

*

The first person the Traveler came upon had on a lab coat and his front porch and the inside of his house was visibly filled with tools and technical equipment, strange crystals and flasks of chemicals. 

“Why hello, there,” said the Traveler, waving. “What interesting equipment you have there! You seem like a man devoted to inquiry and progress.”

“Yes,” said the other, “I am fascinated by the study of nature, by the superb order and law hidden within natural phenomena, and by the potential of new technologies that draw on these phenomena. As you can see, I have many different tools and instruments that I use to probe and analyze the truths of the physical world. I seek only to discover and investigate these truths, so as to allow mankind to understand the world without fear and use this knowledge to create useful new tools that can ease man’s estate. I ask only that I be allowed to pursue my investigations without prejudice or interference, and without having to worry about my results being censored or being attacked by angry superstitious people. Here, I can do just that.”

The scientist then displayed some remarkable ultra-efficient engines that he had built, and then demonstrated the spectrum of a new chemical element he had found—a color like none the Traveler had ever seen. The Traveler clapped his hands at this tour de force. “How wonderful!” he said. “Thanks to your work, the world really is getting better and better.”

*

Continuing on, the Traveler spied a silver-haired woman, with a deeply lined, timeless-looking face and a straw hat, painting at an easel on the front lawn. On the canvas was a remarkable  phantasmagoria of color. You could tell it was meant to depict this very street, but somehow, incredible new life had been added: the colors danced and danced, and you could see that all sorts of patterns and details that were barely noticeable in the scene itself had been brought out with great intensity, and combined with new impressions and views. As he looked, the Traveler felt gripped by emotion, as it seemed that some great beauty of the world, hidden in plain sight up till now, had been raised up before his very eyes, clear and new.

“This is extraordinary work!” the Traveler exclaimed. “Is this what brought you here to Idealia?”

“Yes. I started out with sculpture, but then the painterly bug came up and bit me”, said the woman with a chuckle. “I dedicate myself to seeing what others cannot or dare not see, and then shaping that vision into a form that others can then draw strength and inspiration from. I ask only that I be free to pursue my vision of the world as it inspires and speaks to me, and to be allowed to present that vision to the world, take it or leave it, without having to explain myself or apologize to peoples’ sensibilities. If they can’t handle it, they don’t have to look, I always say.”

“How wonderful!” said the Traveler, taking the artist’s card before continuing on.

*

Soon the Traveler found himself approaching a small park near the center of the neighborhood. There he found a family at a picnic table, cheerfully enjoying a great feast: a father, a mother, and three children. Their skin was dark as midnight, their manner filled with good humor. As they looked over to the Traveler passing by, he waved and asked what they thought about life in Idealia. The father, a powerfully built man with an equally powerful gaze, looked up, put down a huge buttery piece of corn on the cob, and touched his chin thoughtfully.

“It is so cruel how people can judge a book by its cover, and black people have constantly had to deal with being judged by the color of our skin”, said the father. “We have had a terrible time of it, facing oppression after oppression, often given no voice, no freedom, struggling to be accepted by those around us. We ask only that we be treated fairly and decently, and be allowed to live our lives and pursue our dreams with dignity, and that those who entertain hatred be kept out of sight and out of our way. And also that we should receive some accommodations so we can be sure to catch up to the rest of the world, given all we’ve been through. Here, we receive all that and more. Freedom is a sweet thing.”

“How wonderful!” said the Traveler, and his heart swelled to see historic wrongs and hates being put right and consigned to the past.

*

Next the Traveler saw two women lying on a big black-and-white blanket spread out near the edge of the park. The first, a skinny brunette, wore sunglasses and a gray camisole that was knotted in the front to show her midriff. She glanced over at the Traveler, turned over to lay belly-down on the blanket, gazing implacably into her smartphone from beneath a large straw hat. The other girl, also staring at a smartphone, did not move or look up at all. As the Traveler headed in their direction, they looked on through their sunglasses, expressionless, neither smiling nor sneering. It was impossible to tell whether he was being watched or ignored.

When he reached what he hoped was still a discreet distance, the Traveler waved. “Ahoy there—I am new around here, maybe thinking of moving—how do you like life in Idealia?” 

For a minute, the Traveler was still not sure they had noticed him. But then the brunette spoke up. At first she seemed to yawn as she spoke, but soon the words came with rapid-fire, almost typewriter-like rhythm.

“Idealia’s the best. Here girls can be proud, independent, self-assured, and gorgeous in every way. Don’t think ’cause it’s Idealia that we haven’t worked hard to get where we are. We’ve been through the man’s world, and we’ve come back with heads held high. Here, we owe dudes nothing. Elsewhere, history is ‘His Story’—a sexist farce. But we break the mold. You see how self-assured we are? That’s because we’re comfortable in our own skins. We dream and achieve big. Bet you didn’t know about my organic cosmetics line. All from locally sourced beeswax. Gina here has her own hemp-fabric fashion catalogue—plans for it, I mean, they’re almost done. We do photo shoots together on Insta to help raise funds for it. Sure we got brains, but also our bikini bods are to die for.” 

“Like, that’s the kind of innovation you don’t see with patriarchy”, added the other girl. The first girl nodded deeply.

“We ask only that we be treated equally to any man, meaning that whatever we say or do be automatically accepted, and that you always affirm the deep wisdom in it.” 

“Totally“, said the second girl. “Oh—and since motherhood is basically oppressive and guys don’t have to deal with it, we ask that we be free to kill our babies, right up to the moment after birth if we want, if we decide having them would be too much of a threat to our freedom.”

“How wonderful!” said the Traveler, heartened to see such pluck, personality and enterprising spirit in these women. So unlike the demure, dutiful girls back home, who were often tediously fixated on marriage, family, and children.

*

As he was passing out of the park, the Traveler saw what looked like a huge, muscular man laid out on the grass. On a second look, though, he realized the shape was not one man, but two. One, much the smaller, was lying directly on top of the other, running his hands over the chest of the other man, who was spread-eagled on the grass. They were kissing deeply, gazing at each other. As the Traveler walked by, the smaller man, startled, rolled over onto the grass and struck an inquisitive pose, eyeing the newcomer with a hint of irritation. The larger man, smiling dreamily, just gave a little wave with his fingertips.

“Well hello!” said the Traveler, embarrassed to have interrupted. “But who might you be?”

“We are messengers of the victory of love,” said the smaller man, whose features were almost bird-like in their fineness. “Many have said great things about love in the past. But we understand that it’s not the form that love takes that matters, or even how you express it, but just that you feel it strongly enough and aren’t afraid to demand society’s acceptance for it. We seek only to express our natural love by having intercourse with other men as often as the mood strikes, with total freedom to experiment—like using drugs to enhance the amount of love we feel, or getting lots of us together at once. We ask only that you keep your judgments to yourself, and of course redefine the concept of marriage so that it sanctifies our love as much as anyone else’s.”

“That, and when it comes to education, of course,” added the other man, “children should clearly be taught as early as possible all about the rightness of our ways of loving and experimenting, so that they don’t grow up to be homophobic. Otherwise, we just want to be left alone, so that we can promote love at will.”

“How wonderful!” said the Traveler, for although he admitted his own romantic maturation had worked out well enough, it did now strike him as a bit stodgy and un-experimental.

*

The park came to an end there, and the Traveler soon rejoined the houses and sidewalks of the main street. Shortly after, he came upon a tall figure in a dress, busily pruning an enormous rose-bush in front of a large old Tudor house. It was difficult to tell whether it was “he” or “she”, since the physique and height were rather masculine—there was a bit of a pot-belly, and traces of an Adam’s-apple. Yet the person also had heavy makeup, fine, soft skin, long albeit somewhat greasy hair, and breasts that, although strangely shaped, were quite substantial.

“Hello there”, said the Traveler, waving. “I hope you don’t mind, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone quite like you before. What brought you to Idealia?”

The person turned and posed with fists on hips, the very picture of determination, then said, with an exaggeratedly lisping, unmistakably masculine voice: “Some people have the luxury of living in the right body. But I am convinced that I was born into the wrong body, and that my real spirit is that of a female. I therefore have had surgical interventions and hormones to bring my outer body into harmony with my real nature. I ask only to be treated with dignity, to be allowed to enter all activities and spaces available to any other woman, and to have all persons acknowledge my female identity and use the particular language about me that I want used—including affirming that my penis is female. Also, any child who wants to transition to be like me, should be strongly encouraged to get chemical alterations and undergo surgery to remove their sex organs, so they don’t have to go through the stigma that I did. Here in Idealia, we do just that.” And then the person turned, as if somehow irked by even having to explain this much, and said no more. 

This time the Traveler paused and thought for a moment, since the last part about the surgeries and female penises didn’t quite seem to make sense to him. But a moment later he still said, “How wonderful!” and was on his way again.

*

Now the Traveler spotted a small, maroon-colored house with a bright red clay roof, with a tall turret on the left side. In the shadow of the porch a resplendent, olive-skinned man with a pointed dark beard could be seen, surrounded by shiny metal blades. There were blades of all sorts, in fact—some shiny, some aged, some long, some squat, some serrated, some arranged on the walls and others hanging from the ceiling. The Traveler could also see that there were framed pieces of elaborate writing on the walls, like illuminated manuscripts. Though he could not make heads or tails of the language, even the writing seemed reminiscent of daggers and knives. The man, it turned out, was currently sharpening a dazzlingly shiny scimitar that he had clamped on a work-bench in front of him. The Traveler waved, and approached with his usual inquiry. The man met him with a penetrating stare from beneath a profound and serious brow and said:

“I? I pursue the greatest of destinies—for I am a warrior for my Prophet, the only Prophet. I have always known that He admires most the powerful warrior, the one who is willing to fight and die for Him at the slightest provocation, or even for no reason at all. I have also always known that He is especially fond of knives, and of all things glistening and sharp. So I love nothing more than going and finding out people who might insult my Prophet, and then making very sure that they never do it again. I ask only that I be allowed to worship my Prophet in peace, and to follow His laws exclusively, and to be able to occasionally behead, flay, or fillet anyone who says any ill of any of these. Here, in Idealia, I am free to do exactly that.”

The Traveler seemed nervous, and went a little pale, and searched his mind to see if he had said anything bad about the warrior’s Prophet. But he couldn’t remember doing so, and the warrior kept at a polite distance, so that at last the Traveler smiled and said, a little hurriedly, “How wonderful!” before continuing on his way.

*

Next the Traveler came upon a strange-looking woman on the sidewalk, who was taping posters to a lamp-post. Half her hair was dyed violet and arranged in what looked like an attempt at cornrows, while the other side of her hair had been shaved almost flat, with four mysterious capital letters carved almost down to the scalp: “ACAB”. She was pierced through the nose, lip and eyebrows, and her pallid skin was practically wriggling with tattoos of serpents and astrological signs.

“So many of us are still victims of the system,” she told the Traveler, even before he introduced himself, “but I have broken free into a new world of unbiased thought. I do this, naturally, by realizing that everything is hopelessly, systematically biased and oppressive, and needs to be completely reconstructed—according to my specifications, of course, since my approach alone is truly unbiased. I love nothing more than redefining words, reducing all thought to essential identity-categories that describe people’s true selves and true intentions, and also leading healthy, healing actions where individuals are forced to admit to their limitless guilt and bias. I ask only that I be allowed to collect an immense salary for policing and redefining ordinary words and making even the simplest thoughts unthinkable or terrifying, and also that I be free to denounce as ‘racist’ any one who stands between me and what I want, and if need be, lead a mob against them. Here, I am free to do exactly that.”

“How wonderful!” said the Traveler, although he suddenly worried that he may have agreed only because he was afraid of being called “racist”, and might therefore be quite systemically biased after all.

*

It did not take long to notice the next house, for it was badly run-down, and the front yard featured big drums with pools of flaming liquid. In the center of the drums sat a small man with deeply recessed, bead-like eyes.

“Hello, there”, said the Traveler, looking a little concerned. “Say, are you all right there? I’ve never seen quite so much fire in someone’s yard, even for barbecuing!”

The man looked up and made a tense, haunted attempt at a smile. “I guess you could say I have had my share of frustrations in my life. You see, many people have ended up with more things or nicer things than me. My family life was rough, if you’d call it ‘family’ at all. Well, before I came here, I had all that frustration balled up inside, like poison. Didn’t know what to do with it all. But then I remembered that I have always loved fire—ever since I was a child. Its bright orange plumes amaze me every time I see them. And I feel so grateful for fire and its beauty that I feel it is only right to feed it, so that it will stay beautiful and so that there will be even more fire in the world. But maybe what is most beautiful about fire is that when I feed it, I can make sure that what I could never have, no one else will have, either. So when I see something that reminds me of the old frustration, I feed it to fire, and then I feel like I’m really my true best self again. I ask only that I be allowed to pursue my chief love, by setting fire to buildings, cars, trees, neighborhoods, and sometimes people, so that I can watch fire always getting bigger, brighter, and happier, and bringing justice to the downtrodden. Here in Idealia, I get to do exactly that.”

The man quickly pulled out a lighter, struck it, and touched it to a ball of oily rags held in his asbestos-gloved other hand. The hand was instantly surrounded in a globe of orange flame. He turned his gaze to his hand, studying it intently, as if the Traveler was not even there. 

The Traveler sweated a little, and took a step back towards the fire hydrant by the curb, almost tripping on his own feet. 

“…wonderful–” he said, in a shaky voice. 

*

Reflexively the Traveler turned back to the street, but immediately he bumped into a man headed the other way in a gray turtleneck, with hefty biceps and a sallow face. He seemed to have come from nowhere. The man spoke at once, as if delivering a well-practiced pitch. 

“When I’m on the block,” this man said, “you know you’re going to get only the best. I love finding the purest bespoke opioids, both natural and synthetic, and then blending them with my secret combination of drain cleaner, cough syrup, and methylamine. I wish only to be able to conduct honest business, regulated just like any other, and to bring joy to my customers, ensuring their satisfaction so that they will always and forever come back to me. Here in Idealia, my dreams, and my spirit of service, are allowed to flower.” 

“Excuse me”, said the Traveler, “I’m so clumsy. And how wonderful!” The Traveler tried hard remembering all his college classes about libertarianism, the wisdom of market equilibria and the rules of arbitrage. He even wondered for a moment, before hurrying past, if widespread heroin use might actually be an unfairly-maligned, community-building experience.

*

Next the Traveler spotted a man lying in a hammock on one of the porches, with a pudgy, somehow infantile face and a receding hairline. He had a small girl with him, who looked to be about eight years old, wearing a two-piece swimsuit covered in bright, happy cartoon figures. The girl was running her hands slowly and somewhat clumsily around his upper thighs as he lay back, looking into space. He paused once to caress the girl’s head, and held a glass of lemonade to her lips. As she drank, he looked up at the Traveler. The girl looked, too: her gaze had a strange, piercing worldliness about it, unnerving in someone so young.

“Well hello,” said the Traveler, “I’m more tired now than I realized. And this is your daughter, I take it?”

“Ah—no, not my daughter,” said the man. “This is—ah—Allie, my little spirit-friend, who comes to help me every week or two. A common mistake, don’t worry about it. As for me, I am a beautiful soul, a connoisseur of young love—the tenderest, most beautiful, and purest sort of love. That is why I have always been tremendously excited by small children. Especially when I touch them or—ah—they touch me. I feel like I truly get to understand children this way, and that I can then be part of their wonderfully innocent world. I have always had such feelings, and I know that a feeling so wonderful can’t possibly be wrong. I used to live in a neighboring country, where I was shamed and even—ah—imprisoned. But here at last I can be satisfied and whole. I ask only that I (and all minor-attracted persons) be allowed to express the rich love in my heart by touching and undressing young children, and that they in turn be freed to discover their sexuality by performing pleasurable acts on me from time to time, without the rest of the world involving itself and getting all judgmental.”

“How wonderful?” said the Traveler, though his heart wasn’t really in it, and he found himself already turning away and heading back to the street, with a pang in his chest that felt strangely like guilt.

*

It was not long before the Traveler noticed a balcony where there stood a serious and thoughtful man, approaching middle-age, with somewhat wild-looking hair. He wore sandals and Bermuda shorts, and a t-shirt that had odd-colored stains on it. With his strongly protruding brow and wild hair, he vaguely resembled a caveman.

“Well, hello there—you look like you have had an adventure or two—what’s your line?”

“My line?! Well, I used to be a vegetarian—”, laughed the man, “—until I found out what real meat tastes like. I speak of course of the human body. Its combination of delicate texture and slightly piquant flavor is unrivaled among the victuals of the world. But it is also an extraordinary versatile resource in general. Excellent for soup, jerky, even chew-toys for dogs made from the bones and hide! Admittedly there is a bad reputation concerning the use of the hide—yes, the lampshades—that story is apocryphal, by the way, although the hide does have excellent physical properties. We therefore only make gloves and purses from it, to allay any concerns. We are highly ethical, we ethically requisition all our stock. And we know better than not to use every possible part of the animal. Nothing goes to waste, I assure you, so that the ecological footprint is, if anything, negative! Of course there is a more intimate aspect to the eating of others, almost like devouring not just their bodies, but their souls as well, and that too is precious to me. I ask only that I be allowed to slaughter and prepare people, in a fully consensual and well-regulated manner, so that I may enjoy this most exquisite of pleasures and run my very ethical business in peace. Here in Idealia, I am free to do just that.”

The man smiled, revealing a row of curled, strangely discolored, and unusually long front teeth. As he exhaled, an aroma like rotting pork and burnt hair swelled up everywhere. The Traveler, who had been listening very calmly, suddenly felt vomit surging at the back of his throat. He turned away from the man and ran towards the street, landing on all fours above the rain-grate just in the nick of time, as he puked out half his breakfast.

“How wonderful,” he coughed.

*

Once he had recovered himself, the Traveler, walking more slowly, more haggardly than before, noticed a man just stepping out onto the front door of an exceedingly tidy, modern-looking house. The house was so spotless, in fact, that it looked almost like it constantly cleaned itself. With his jaunty steps, his gleaming, freshly pressed designer shirt and slacks, elegantly coiffed black hair, his flawlessly moisturized skin, and his clear, pale gray-blue eyes, the man practically radiated well-being, affluence. His face seemed as if somehow moulded from a single piece of living plastic, with a prominent, horseshoe-shaped brow that seemed to flow around his face in a single uninterrupted sheet, as if the power of his mind was pouring directly into his face. In fact, everything about him gave an effect of sleek, completely unified intelligence: the Traveler was not sure he had ever seen a person who looked so intelligent. Attracted (despite himself) to the promise of a dose of normalcy after all he had seen, the Traveler waved to the man and asked about his role in Idealian society. With perfect politesse, the man sauntered over and shook his hand, smiling impishly.

“Well,I guess you could say my interests lie on the crossroads between Transhumanist and Technocrat—and we are all at a crossroads, aren’t we? So many things need done, and quickly, if humanity is to move to the next level. That is where I come in. I love nothing more than manipulating the very building-blocks of life and thought—and in fact, manipulating everything that I possibly can. Everything I touch, I always make better and better, healthier and safer. Of course I am all about the Knowledge Economy, Equity, Social Infrastructure, and Added Value. But more than anything, I would say, I am a student of unification—of using my skills and knowledge to bring people together and right the wrongs of past ages of darkness. Enlightenment is my oxygen, pretty much, and of course I offer it freely. Through the miracles of networking and distributed information, I am totally committed to offering people choices so they can be more free—and also making sure they are always the right choices, of course. Proper shaping and nudging of behavior is so critical, after all, if we are not to fall behind.” 

“Of course,” stammered the Traveler.

“So, how do you like Idealia so far?” the man continued, with a playful little gesture of his hand, as if it was a soufflé he’d just whipped up. “You know, you could even say that I built this whole place. You’re welcome. You’re free to explore all you like, even move here! I ask in return only that I be allowed to endlessly record, control, manipulate, and of course monetize every aspect of every event and every thought and attitude you have, everywhere, ever, and to arbitrarily substitute it with my own experiments and visions—and also that I be free to treat you, like all humanity, as raw feedstock to be endlessly modified, played with, perhaps discarded, in service to the species’ future perfection and to my inspirations of the moment. Anyway, I have a very important appointment that’s about to take place, so I must be on my way. Thanks so much for stopping by; stay as long as you like. Oh and—would you please do me one little favor from now on and call me… ‘God‘…?”

At this moment the Traveler noticed a weird, penetrating coldness spreading over his body, as if he had been laid out naked on an iced metal table and then given an electric shock. Shivering, he edged back from the Technocrat, who continued smiling, with only the slightest glimmer of mockery in his eyes. As the Traveler withdrew, he noticed that the strange, bone-piercing chill he had just felt abated proportionately with distance. 

*

The Traveler did not say that it was wonderful this time. Instead he turned and ran back to the sidewalk and then a ways further still, feeling the mild summery warmth of the day return to his skin. Then, after huddling himself for warmth for a minute—for traces of the cold lingered, as if they had been implanted deep in his bones—he said, to the whole neighborhood as it were:

“I must say, you Idealians truly have a unique society here—but I’m afraid this has gotten a bit much for me! I mean, hell, a lot of this “self-expression” is really nothing but slaughter, depravity, stupidity, power-madness and destruction! At least some of you, actually, are kind of screwed up! Maybe you should get some help! And I have to say, I’m not really sure I can get on board with some of the things that seem to be happening here with children—”

At this moment, a large man appeared by the Traveler’s shoulder. He had braids in his hair, metal spikes in his ears, arms like cannon-barrels, a leather jacket, and a huge black beard. He grasped the Traveller by the shoulders, holding him fast. The Traveler soon realized it was useless to struggle.

“Hello, who are you?” the Traveler asked.

“I am a Minder,” said the man. “My greatest joy is to find and collect skeptics, doubters, and especially haters“, said the man. “And you sound just like a hater. I ask only that you come with me, and that you not struggle or otherwise make this more difficult than it has to be.”

Then he clapped the Traveler in twenty-pound irons and a big steel collar, and began leading him away towards the gray concrete complex that crouched on the eastern horizon, like a huge gray eagle with its wings held low to the ground. For the first time the Traveler noticed this complex had long, thin lines leading from it, like threads. He gradually perceived that these lines were made of people. 

At this moment, a group of noisy, smiling passersby were going the opposite direction down the street. They spotted the Traveler—now a wretched sight, struggling in the heavy irons, with the huge bearded man just behind, ushering him onward to an unsettling fate.

The Traveler glanced towards the passersby in some forlorn hope of succor or sympathy, but he was almost immediately distracted by a surreal sight directly behind him. A stupendous transformation had occurred. Half of the block had rapidly been engulfed in fire, while two severed heads now rested in the middle of the street, beneath the gleam of one of the Warrior’s blades. Crouched on one of the lawns beside a bush, the little girl was cutting her wrists alongside the man-who-was-really-a-woman, who seemed to be muttering instructions while inserting a needle into his/her/hir/its own arm. The “former vegetarian” was sauntering nearby with a hungry little smile, a paring-knife ready on his belt. All at the same time, an extremely strange sort of grayish-metallic goo seemed to be advancing over the trees, turning them into electronics and weird, mutated forms. One of these trees was not actually a tree, the Traveler realized, but had moments before been the proudly standing form of the Technocrat, arms spread wide, as if ready to receive the world’s prayers and plaudits at the moment of his supreme victory. Now he was frozen solid, covered in little metallic crystals that looked like a cross between hoarfrost and computer-chips.

Straining his neck against the big iron garrote, the Traveler waved frantically at his captor, gesticulating towards the horrid scene. 

“Hey, hey, you might want to have a look over there—there’s a p-problem—”

But the black-bearded man did not look. He only shook his head slowly without changing his pace, as if he had heard one too many lame tricks like that before to be fooled. At the same moment, some of the passersby began pointing at the Traveler, chattering loudly again.

“How wonderful!”, he heard them exclaim, smiles all around, even as the fire advanced on them and began to swallow house after house. No one ran, no sirens could be heard. No one, it seemed, had ever thought such a mess could even happen in Idealia.

Now the Traveler kept up his pace even under the weight of his restraints, and even sped up. The disaster that was unfolding no doubt gave the possibility of escape—a possibility that minutes before had seemed remote. But any hope of escape was countered by a sinking, more philosophical despair that weighted him even more than the big iron bonds. Idealia had once been one of the most beautiful of thoughts, of worlds—maybe the most beautiful world ever, in fact. Who could have denied as much, in its earlier days? Perhaps even the chilling, manipulative Technocrat, in his time, had been truly kind, humble and well-meaning, a mere student just learning with delight how his own brilliance could bring relief to a miserable world. It had not always been lies; even now, as it burned and descended into chaos, it was not entirely lies. Some part of the Traveler, incredibly, actually yearned to apologize for his “hating”: to make amends to Idealia for his sin, to throw himself on its legendary acceptance, and then gratefully accept whatever verdict might come down on him.

But it was too late for any of this. The madness, the conflagration of acceptances, was now spreading behind him, completely unchecked—the whole country being nothing but a tinder of acceptances, and with all refusals banned, the flame could spread, indeed it must spread, till nothing but the mountains were left standing. He could feel the heat on his shoulders now, and the Minder, walking behind, could only be even more aware of its oppressive intensity. No doubt in a few minutes more it would overtake them, and his captor would be forced finally to turn, and see the truth of what was happening, and release these heavy bonds which cumbered them both in order to save himself. The time for joyful rubbernecking, or judgments, or for rueful reminiscing on lost dreams, was over: in the next few minutes, every thought, every ounce of will and persuasion he still possessed would have to turn upon the task of surviving Idealia, resisting Idealia—and if he could be so lucky, leaving Idealia.

The End of Science and the Rise of the Irrealist Priesthood

It’s hard to think of a more cut-and-dried example of the ongoing inversion of science, that erstwhile workhorse of humble inquiry and devotion to truth, into a fractal-like maze of delusions and power-drunk fantasy than this recent perspective from physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf:

“I begin to imagine an upside-down view of physics. Instead of studying a natural phenomenon, and subsequently discovering a law of nature, one could first design a new law and then reverse engineer a system that actually displays the phenomena described by the law. […] All of this is part of a much larger shift in the very scope of science, from studying what is to what could be. […] Such work might feel, at first, like “artificial” science. But a genetically designed bacterium is in no way less real, or less worthy of study, than one found in the wild.

…that’s right! Why have science be about discovering things that are out there, or that actually happen outside your own head, when you can instead start contriving “laws of nature” at whim, on the basis that some contrivance, somewhere, could appear to obey them? Why bother checking that your theories agree with experiment, when you can just design the experiments to agree with your theories?

In other words, why search for laws, when you can just simulate them, and presumably get a nice twinge of power while doing so? (Not to mention funding…)

And while we’re at it, why not arbitrarily start engineering new life forms? (Creating “novel coronaviruses” went so well, after all!) Why not shut yourself off from the world and just play God, and simply disregard any unpleasant consequences? Such consequences cannot be “real”, after all. 

In the same exact vein, we have this little marvel from MIT tech review: an article titled “A Quantum Experiment Suggests There’s No Such Thing as Objective Reality” concludes, predictably, that there is “no such thing as reality”, and that therefore,

“The next step is to go further: to construct experiments creating increasingly bizarre alternate realities that cannot be reconciled. Where this will take us is anybody’s guess.”

This invasion of scientific fields by trendy constructivism—which entails an absolute revolt against reality, and an embrace of ever more brazen absurdities and fantasies of omnipotence as somehow profound and highbrow—is itself becoming boring, predictable. 

The “progression” in this direction has been accelerating breathtakingly in the last few years. First we had how statistical significance should be retired in the sciences (since it keeps exciting “new ideas” from being widely accepted), then how of course biological differences between males and females are a matter of cultural conditioning and besides do not have anything to do with “gender”. Then critical theory came into science education demanding “other ways of knowing”, while Hossenfelder began prescribing “sociology of science” as the cure for physics’ long drought of new fundamental discoveries. Then a few months ago we had the first out-and-out avowals of “2+2=5” as a perfectly valid way of teaching math. 

Now we have, right on cue, physicists—the anointed high priests of the scientific enterprise—opining how there is “no such thing as objective reality”. 

Like, it’s all about your perspective, man!

* * *

Given that such ideologies are now being shouted from the rooftops of academia and in the sanctums of the “hardest” of the hard sciences, we are quite close to the point where anything that comes out of any formal “scientific” institution today should be assumed to have little or no validity whatsoever, except if viewed as a manipulative ploy to bring power to increasingly unhinged “expert” or “knowledge” classes. 

After all, we cannot help but wonder: why should we listen to, let alone obey a “knowledge” class that denies that knowledge exists or matters at all? If scientists no longer claim to discover anything definitive about the world, and if knowing is to be reduced entirely to sheer will, or commitment, in what does their authority consist? Why should we believe anything they tell us? Why not just make up our own ideas that feel good, and insist on those?

I say this quite seriously, just because exactly this is happening, and it is a natural effect of the philosophy that has now seized science: a philosophy that denies truth altogether. If you are convinced there is no difference between a fake and a real thing, if there is “no reality”, why would you not fake everything, lie about everything, if this can give you power and pleasure and also advance “correct” opinions and attitudes through society? Why would you not make up results and “laws”, if you’re convinced that all of these can be perfectly “true” if you just contrive the right context (or simulation) for them?

Finding truth is an arduous task, with no guarantee of success. But constructing truth is just as easy as lying.

This transvaluation of science’s original outgoing realism—which helped build modern civilization—into a sort of slurry of solipsistic virtualism/vitalism, augurs nothing less than the undoing of science and society. It is of a piece with the latter’s infiltration by postmodern antithought, and this infiltration will gather steam, because the whole psychology of scientists still depends on a feeling of “progress” and increasing control and knowledge; yet basic discoveries—you know, of reality—have stagnated, and so no longer provide that feeling. 

John Horgan, who seems more and more like a modern prophet, foresaw this development back in the ’90s. Scientists, he observed, were lapsing more and more into a strange, unfalsifiable netherworld of grandiose, pseudo-mystical speculation; moreover, this new mode might well eventually consume the whole the scientific enterprise.

Horgan, quite pithily, denoted this mode as “ironic science”. The phrase is apt, given the postmodern fondness for viewing the world “ironically” rather than in terms of truth (Richard Rorty may be the best-known representative of this stance). Ironic science, in turn, is very closely connected with a particular sentiment, now pervasive in science writing and the wider culture, that I have called “nihilistic awe“–literally amazement based on nothing.

This feeling, this amazement, this grandiosity, seems indeed to have consumed much of what once was “science”. Increasingly, there seems to be no ability, or at least no will, to tell apart the fluent thrills of nihilistic awe from the hard roads of truth. Therefore, we expect that going forward the feeling will rule, at the expense of logic, observation or principle, driving the acceptance of crazier and falser things, accompanied probably by increasingly aggressive demands that they be accepted, until something very hard and very powerful stops the whole process. This stopping, as it always does, will also probably involve much pain and, as the word itself suggests, disillusionment. 

* * *

In the end, we are indeed seeing a new faith arising. But this faith is far more expansive than the “wokeness” which, over the summer of 2020, burst free from the antiseptic laboratories of critical theory, where it had incubated for decades, and into the wider society–and which so many commentators have since compared to a new religious sect. This new faith is also far stranger than the traditional belief in a creator-god(s) ever was. 

This is the faith of irrealism—the belief that there is no such thing as reality, that everything we perceive and know is (and must, and should be) wholly constructed by some unstable combination of cultural conditioning and the demands of our own “innermost nature”—though this nature itself must be viewed simultaneously as completely mutable, completely free of preconditions and at the same time completely without free will. 

This faith, irrealism, is a beehive of opposites, as it posits all existence as inexistent, all stability as flux, all realism as virtuality, all morality as demanding ceaseless and ruthless overturning. We see its first adumbrations in the works of Nietzsche, the first Western intellectual who wrestled directly with the problems of a complete collapse of morality and faith—in short, with nihilism.

Yet it would be a mistake to equate Irrealism with nihilism, for in its own strange way it demands much faith indeed. Indeed, irrealism, with its claims that “there is no reality” or that “we should just invent laws of the universe”, demands a “leap of faith” far greater than possibly any prior religion, for the initiate must completely reject any notion of a fixed, reliable external world in favor of this strange condition of helplessly non-negotiable yet omnipotent self-interestedness. 

This leap consists of the simultaneous deification and total enfeeblement of the self, so that it becomes both the only thing that matters and also completely at the mercy of random changes.

This is all to say: we are witnessing the most immense, complex, thoroughgoing crack-up and collapse of a civilization in all of human history—and it’s still early innings.

Achieving the Impossible: How the Postmodern New Democrats Made Trump Look Sort of Okay

I suppose I might as well try to put down where I stand on the imminent US presidential election, as this event ties together in a single hideous package the whole fascinating wormy mess of present-day American politics.

The simple way of summing it up is that the Democrats, in part through their own internal dynamics and prior commitments and in part through their anaphylactic overreaction to Trump’s constant needling, have managed for now the second time in a row to do the near-impossible: to nominate, in Joe Biden, someone arguably more dishonest, unfit and fundamentally compromised than Trump himself. The resulting election just might be, as Matt Taibbi just described it, the “worst choice ever“.

I remember very well the days when the GOP was obviously and unquestionably the chief party of dreadful corporate shills, of unmitigated greed, and—particularly thanks to Bush II’s Iraq War—of the warmongering “military-industrial complex”. I remember the days when everything about the GOP suggested eerie lockstep discipline and ideological conformity. I remember the way that campaign donations seemed to sluice their way in endless abundance from corporate coffers into GOP candidates, while the Democrats, like a ragtag army living off the countryside, seemingly had to make do with the support of grassroots, nonprofits, and organized labor. I remember the policies of environmental devastation that were synonymous with Republicans. I remember the idea that the GOP was filled with intolerant if not barbaric “authoritarian personalities” who would shut down any speech they didn’t agree with and notably had no sense of humor. I remember the GOP as a party of religious fundamentalism, and the Democrats as the party of free thinkers and skeptics.

As of today, much of this has come almost full-circle: all that I once thought about the GOP is now at least as true of the Dems, and often with a quite warped extra twist.

Anyone who looks closely at American history will realize that, even granting that the US has a true two-party system (instead of, say, a “uniparty” with two painted faces), the issues and positions of those two parties have a remarkable way of periodically shifting to almost totally different ideological ground, to the point that something very close to “memory-holing” seems to be necessary in order for the parties to keep their own inner sense of continuity. The Democratic Party’s transformation from guardian of Jim Crow into the semi-obligatory home for minorities and aggrieved identity-groups that it is today is probably the most dramatic of these, followed closely by the 20th-century transformation of Progressives from moralizing Christian prohibitionists to Crowleyite, “do what thou wilt” advocates for every imaginable form of personal and social license. 

Now, with the woke revolution and the rise of Big Tech, such a reversal and memory-holing is happening again in an exponentiating way. Now increasingly the Democratic Party has become the party of prating, pseudo–religious certitude—but it manages to juxtapose this certitude with a remarkably unprincipled willingness to exploit racial division, rampant censorship, mob rule, shady unelected government authorities, abject veneration of monopolist corporations, and increasingly, outright thought-control. Though this moral hypocrisy resembles the old GOP’s juxtaposition of Religious Righteousness and corporate greed and the inevitable evangelical sex scandals, there are many new, scarier elements in the new Democratic Party that were mostly lacking from the old GOP—technological, economic, and ideological superpowers that the latter party never enjoyed. 

This new Democratic Party seems eager to validate every libertarian fear of a wild overreach of government-administrative power, seeking increasingly severe forms of expert domination in day-to-day life while fusing itself with the most depraved and invasive new aspects of AI and information technology, from panopticon-level surveillance to Chinese-style social-credit scores to pseudoscientific implicit-bias theories and trainings. 

Meanwhile, the idea of pacifism, of “stopping the war machine”, of wariness of the “military-industrial complex”—the grist for many an antiwar protest not so long ago—has become simply yet another something to memory-hole. Apparently it was all for votes, this idea of peace! 

It is one thing to notice, as Chomsky did decades ago, that if anything Democratic administrations were historically somewhat more hawkish than Republican; what really stuns about the current situation is the way that, in the dash to discredit and unseat Donald Trump by any means, the antiwar left has largely dissolved itself, or allied itself with agents of very “war machine” that it supposedly was sworn to fight, or even in some cases switched effortlessly into ideation of limitless violence and murder.

The moment it appeared that Trump might largely avoid starting or inflaming new wars (or might even broker new diplomatic relations), huge swathes of the “anti war” leftist establishment suddenly and softly vanished from sight, only to reappear on the side of the national intelligence bureaucrats and military planners. Scores of former hippie peaceniks on the “left” now readily rage at our nation’s failure to saber-rattle with Russia and North Korea and Iran, or to continue on with the pointless Afghanistan adventure.

Of course the capture of government by big business is pursued on both sides of the aisle and has been for as long as there’s been a “two-party system”. But one must still appreciate Bernie Sanders’ daring back in 2016 in using the word “oligarchy” to describe the present US system, for this word perfectly names our new national reality. (For this unfortunate tendency of occasionally calling things by their right names, Bernie was twice thrown under the bus by the New Democratic Party; the second time, after Sanders’ obliteration, all the other candidates as if on cue dropped out of the race to support the insider favorite Biden. More eerie lockstep, more bad faith.)

But the Democrats are now ahead of the GOP in this game of wooing (and submitting to) Oligarchic Capital too: they have lined up with the largest and most prestigious concentrations of capital and the most life controlling industries in the country if not the world. In a further surprise twist, Corporate America, with its eager kowtowing to the “woke” creed of terror and racial determinism, has shown itself to have been quite happily compatible with the Left (or what passes for it now). 

This new affinity between corporatist and activist, between establishment and (self-claimed) rebel, has resulted in a terrifying concentration of power, in editorial groupthink and vertically and horizontally integrated power at multiple levels of society. “Tech” workers now routinely tip the scales in favor of Democratic initiatives and underwrite “woke” mandates with lockstep precision that would have been the envy of the GOP of 30 years ago. Workers in the big tech companies give to the Democrats by something like 10 to 1. In the academy it’s probably similarly skewed. The supposedly objective, professional journalistic class, tasked with maintaining the “free press” and the “informing of the public”, has now been almost fully subsumed into what Glenn Greenwald has characterized as “the media’s rank-closing attempt, in a deeply unholy union with Silicon Valley and the ‘intelligence community’ “. We need not waste time even wondering about Hollywood or the creators of popular culture. 

As long as we are talking about shameless aggregations of corporate and cultural power, let’s not forget big finance, since this shows even more clearly the New Democratic Party’s total abandonment of the supposed basic principles of the supposed-left. Trump offers depressingly little better in this regard, in the sense that he is himself an oligarch and, predictably, hired more “vampire-squid” from Wall Street (though Obama did no different, and Clinton surely would have done the same). Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Commerce Secretary, is another billionaire-oligarch. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury pick, is a man who made millions forcing people out of their houses (with Kamala Harris’ help, interestingly) during the Financial Crisis and his face is the special kind that makes you want to punch it on sight.

And yet, for all this, it is still the New Democrats who are outraising Trump on Wall Street. The vampire-squid school must smell even more billions to be had on the “left” than on the “right”.

Given all the above, it is not completely out of order to even wonder whether the fulminant ball of high-minded, high-handed activism that now surrounds the New Democratic party should even properly be called “leftist”. More doctrinaire Marxists, such as the writers at World Socialist Website, consider the new Democratic Party’s obsessive focus on identity-politics as well as “its complete subordination to corporate America and to the demands of the military-intelligence apparatus” to be fundamentally reactionary rather than revolutionary in nature—more “reactivism” than activism. WSWS has even gone so far as to characterize the Biden-Harris ticket as essentially no less far-right than Trump:

“The Democratic Party is a party of Wall Street and the military-intelligence apparatus. The politics of race and gender identity, which it relentlessly promotes, gives expression to the interests of layers of the upper-middle class, which employ this right-wing ideology in their fight for positions of power and privilege in the state, academia and corporate boardrooms.”

—https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/13/pers-a13.html

Others on the left even have suggested, on the basis of the enormous formations of elite power and capital supporting the New Democratic Party, that the Party and its paramilitary satellites (Antifa and BLM) are fundamentally fascist, not socialist or Marxist:

“It will be difficult for those remaining on the left to understand that the Antifa foot soldiers are agents of capital, and not of labor. This is largely because of the gradual takeover of the left by new-left identity politics which crept slowly, and then rapidly, with May of 1968 and the Situationist moment being a key signifier.”

—https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/10/29/plutocrat-violence-election-night-horror-marxian-analysis-shows-that-antifa-fascist/

Another leftist writer, on Counterpunch, while berating Trump, has no illusions about the leftist bona-fides of a hypothetical Biden Administration:

“…it is an absolute guarantee that Joe Biden as President is going to suck ten times worse than the outer bounds of current imagination. The #Resistance heroes of late will return to being the lying, murdering, war mongers and domestic spies they are”

    —https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/11/elections-and-the-problem-of-politics/

* * *

Trump, for all his tendency to put his foot in it or make enemies perhaps unnecessarily, has turned out to have uncanny instincts when dealing with this venomous new pseudo-left. His claim that Obama officials had been “tapping his wires”, for example, was mocked at the time but turned out to be essentially true: an extension of the massive system of warrantless spying that had already taken root throughout the most powerful institutions of the USA, since the passage PATRIOT Act—a measure both parties supported and had been putting together for some time prior to 9/11. Trump’s claims that the Russiagate scandal was a “hoax” also turned out to be mostly correct; it is now known that the original idea of tarring Trump with Russian collusion accusations was probably engineered by Hillary Clinton’s campaign—yet another instance of the staggering bad faith of the New Democratic Party.

Trump speaks continually of “draining the swamp”—meaning paring back or bringing to heel the vast body of unelected, un-fireable, and hence unaccountable government administrators throughout the myriad federal agencies. Looking back over the past four years, it is possible to see some basis for Trump’s preoccupation. We have watched as entire government agencies vested with enormous powers and little or no accountability—too much job security—continue to expand their powers, at some times pursuing overwhelmingly ill-predicated investigations (including Russiagate), while at other times suppressing or minimizing evidence that threatens key Democratic figures (such as Hunter Biden’s now-infamous laptop, quietly kept in FBI custody as the “Ukrainegate” accusations raged).

We also increasingly see that the oligarchic-administrative pseudo-left, having captured and apparently transformed the Democratic Party, has moved on to canceling and straight-up censorship reminiscent of totalitarian societies (and likely in some ways modeled on or even employing them). Witness the string of old liberals or even leftists who thought they were “with the program”, but turned out not to be extreme enough in their denunciations, or who dared voice an unorthodox thought: Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and now Glenn Greenwald.

The truth is, totalitarianism is fast coming to be seen as inevitable, if not cool. There is a tremendous hunger among most dominant power-structures to make it seem normal and legitimate, even progressive—up to and including the calibrated devaluation of basic freedoms like speech, association, and assembly. Whether intentionally or not, the advance of Covid lockdown and other “distancing” measures seems to have blended seamlessly with this general drive. At the same time, striking numbers among the younger generation now place values of woke coercion, such as “inclusiveness“, above values of intellectual freedom and free speech. Self-censorship, even over what a decade ago would be considered straightforward fact, is skyrocketing.

It is not clear how to reverse these trends. But for the time being, Trump is a wrench in these works, rather than an enabler. Despite the shrillest denunciations from various acolytes of the New Democratic Party, Trump has generally opposed attempts to shut down speech, to impose arbitrary restrictions on individual choice and behavior. I was for example pleasantly surprised, with the arrival of Covid, by Trump’s refusal to assume massive emergency powers, which might have allowed to rule as a tyrant. Instead, he mostly eschewed such power-grabbing, insisting that the states should develop their own local plans for dealing with the virus, for which the Federal Government would assume a supportive, not dominating role. 

The result has been the kind of patchwork, sometimes improvisational approach which gives conniptions to those who dream of massive, unitary power-structures that sacrifice freedom and local diversity on the altar of a dubious efficiency. But per-capita Covid deaths in the US have remained quite similar to European nations that have endorsed far more draconian approaches.

Further evidence of Trump’s surprising aversion to totalitarian measures could be seen in his response to the nationwide riots triggered by the death of George Floyd. While many on the left have tried to paint Trump’s response as downright Hitlerian, in fact it was anything but, with only a handful of federal troops deployed to prevent rioters from destroying such areas as federal courts, critical monuments (all too few, alas) and the national capital itself. 

Trump’s straightforward rejection of the poisonous sophistry and groupthink of “critical race theory”, particularly in federal employment training, is frankly a ray of hope against a backdrop of increasingly abject intellectual conformity and error throughout the nation’s academic and professional classes. Drawing its justification from utterly fraudulent interpretations of inter-racial crime rates and their trends over time, critical race theory has become a blank-check for limitless resentment, mental submission, censorship, brutality and hatred of both self and other. Carving all society into designated masses of “victims” and “oppressors”, this pseudo-intellectual virus certainly could be called “reactionary” in that has has summoned forces almost exactly opposite to those it claims to support: “victims” become a new privileged class, capable of no wrong, while those accused by mere geneaology of belonging to the “oppressor” group are subjected to mass psychological hazing and forced to submit to the new dispensation.

The end goal of this “theory” seems to be the creation and perpetuation of a massive new administrative class of completely mendacious and parasitical thought-censors, as seen in the countless “offices of equity” and “diversity” coordinator positions that have sprung up like mushrooms throughout the universities, corporations, and government. Whereas Biden (and his likely unelected master/successor, Sen. Harris) would reinstate these “trainings” and then some, Trump’s position against this, alone, probably makes his reelection preferable.

More recently, consider the censoring and resignation of Glenn Greenwald—the left-leaning journalist who was crucial in breaking the Snowden revelations of NSA warrantless spying in our midst—from the very news agency he founded, for daring to write anything critical about Joe Biden in the lead-up to the election. 

There seems to be a kind of omerta now at work in the legacy media, and on social media, which declares: you shall not report bad things about Biden, or about the New Democrats. This is the very definition of a partisan media; the situation is by now every bit as bad as Fox News, the favorite bugbear of progressives, and it possibly much worse at this point.

Finally, as if to put an exclamation point over the miasma of corruption, collusion and censorship that surrounds the New Democratic Party, we have just had a front-row seat to twin horrors: first, the New York Post’s release of damning information about Hunter Biden’s often-sordid overseas exploits while selling the influence of his father while the latter was Vice-President—very probably with the latter’s knowledge and involvement—and second, possibly even more disturbing, the remarkably unified media suppression of the story, which ranged from Twitter and Facebook inexplicably locking the Post’s accounts to mainstream outlets largely refusing to mention the story or falsely claiming it was—wait for it—Russian disinformation. (The Biden campaign, incredibly, still has yet to formally repudiate any of the information reported by the Post, as if it were somehow beneath them to do so.)

This scandal—both geopolitical and journalistic—has not only revealed the transformation of the vast majority of American mainstream journalists into de facto operatives of the New Democratic Party, but has revealed the Bidens as potentially seriously compromised to a hostile totalitarian power, China. Once again, the same pattern shows itself: the New Democrats end up guilty of the very things they most angrily accuse Trump and the GOP of—but more so. 

* * *

Putting it all together, and one sees that a monster is being summoned into being—apparently from many corners of society, both elite and workaday, at once. Whether one calls it “reactionary” or “leftist” or “rightist” or “antifascist” is strangely beside the point, as many of these old categories are blurring into irrelevance. 

And most surprisingly of anything that has happened in the past four years, it now appears likely that Trump is not identical with this Monster, but in fact the single greatest impediment to its summoning.

Whether or not the New Democratic Party is truly “leftist” or not is in some sense moot, for there is no mistaking that it is in some sense progressive. But the deepest nature of progressivism, we are unfortunately seeing, is that it cannot stop: if it even slows down, it soon ceases to exist. Its whole essence and identity is bound up with continual, indeed compulsive change, which moreover must be praised as the highest good. Trump himself is “old-guard progressive” in many ways, with his embrace of technology and economic expansion; but it is a slower-moving progressivism, one that may still be reasoned with or paused.

We are seeing now what happens when Progress itself, in the sense of the steady and palpable improvement of life, becomes uncoupled from progressivism as an attitude: the need for progress, finding itself frustrated in the material realm, turns more and more fanatically into the ideological. The result is speech control, microaggressions, the management of all parts of life, the “deplatforming” of any ideas or people deemed “offensive”, the “canceling” of people whose work leads to conclusions even the slightest bit at variance with those of the advocates of Progress. Eventually, if unchecked, the Monster will demand complete control over speech and even thought itself. 

There is no apparent limit to the extent of this censorious power, this progressive-Socratic need to, as Nietzsche once put it, “correct existence”. This fundamentally revengeful and increasingly demented urge now extends not just to the domination of culture, nor to the management of what stories of potentially vital importance actually get aired, nor even to the criminalization of words. The Monster must grow and control more and more, or it dies. And so it presses its control out to the absolute extremes of both corporeal and intellectual reality: to our own bodies and to the very conception of truth.

Under the recent woke-New Democratic iteration of progressivism, we now see ideas that were described by Orwell as ways of destroying peoples’ minds and thus securing their total and hapless loyalty to the political machine, recast as symbols of virtue: simple statements of mathematical truth like “2+2=4” are now beginning to face critique from woke educators for being confining and (surprise) “racist”, while falsehoods like “2+2=5” are increasingly proposed as equally valid, daring and challenging opportunities to fight oppression and widen one’s cultural horizons. Physical and chemical mutilation of children under the name “transgenderism”, or insistence that male-bodied individuals are “actually” female in every sense that a born genetic female is, are other examples, and likely only the spearhead for a massive expansion of wholesale modification and manipulation of humanity and nature. Even the already-unquestionable concept of “gay marriage” in some sense represents an Orwellian assault on common sense and reason, in that “marriage” owes its whole existence to the societal need to raise and provide stable environments for children, to clarify paternity, and to cement cooperation between the opposite sexes, whereas “gay marriage” essentially serves none of these functions, and may undermine them.

We therefore have a choice: keep Trump in, and the Monster will continue to struggle and perhaps dissipate; or, replace him with Joe Biden, an enfeebled puppet of the pseudo-left progressive impulse, who will undoubtedly fill the Monster with new energy and assurance.

* * *

On the environment, we can be blunt: Trump is not very good. He loves fracking for example, which is as dirty, noisy, disgusting and land-destroying a process as you could hope to imagine. One cannot hold out much hope for a people whose idea of “brilliant innovation” is to turn huge tracts of their landscape into chemically tainted heavy-industrial sites for the sake of a temporary boom in an already rather dirty and decidedly finite energy source. Yet when one looks at the alternatives to fracking, they appear to be mostly illusory, and hardly less destructive of nature. Wind and solar are propped up by huge amounts of subsidies and—as Michael Moore was censored for observing in his recent work “Planet of the Humans”—they are quite horrid for the environment as well, requiring huge inputs of energy, rare metals, and chemicals while disrupting and uglifying equally huge stretches of nature for what is essentially another form of rapacious energy-extractive industry. 

Massive, imperiously centralized enterprises like the Democrats’ Green New Deal are in practice likely to have little to do with saving the environment or wilderness—for which the best expedient is simply to leave them alone, a very low-tech anti-managerial strategy—and everything to do with expanding human meddling and control not only of the natural world, but of other humans. In a time of diminishing physical resources such enterprises, much like efforts to achieve “green growth”, will be at best quixotic and at worst disastrous.

Trump’s pooh-poohing of man-made global warming as a major issue is concerning, but understandable given the fundamental weakness of the alternatives in sustaining a society of today’s size and complexity. Global warming, although likely overstated for the sake of accruing power to elite “experts”, is probably happening, and is likely to continue ratcheting up the general stress-level of a world that, as of 2020, is already OD’ing on stress. But this is actually an argument against massive build-out projects like the Green New Deal, and an argument for increased localism in decision-making with simpler, lower-tech solutions. Paradoxically, with his (relative) aversion to centralized administrative power-structures, Trump is likely to place the country in a more robust position for the Long Emergency that faces us than the New Democrats, with their baroque technocratic designs.

The environmental problems of industrial humanity, one must conclude, will not be solved by more human activity, whether capitalist or statist, fossil-fetishistic or faux-green.

* * *

At the end of the day, for all Trump’s unpleasantness and hyperbole, and for all the terrifying things said about him, after years of the most arduous hunt for damning criminal evidence against him, he appears not to have substantively broken any laws or to have sold out his country (in the manner of, say, the Biden family international influence-peddling schemes). 

But there is something more about this: in an age where more and more of life is being controlled by completely impersonal corporate forces; where (especially with Covid) the most basic of interactions is becoming fair game to be catalogued, monitored, “distanced”, and ultimately quashed by automated replacements; where more and more of humanity seems enslaved to a “social network” in which one may live entire days face to face with nothing but a computer screen—despite all this, Trump remains unmistakably human. A disagreeable human, sure. But there is still a character, an individuality there, a quite distinctive even eccentric one in fact—something that cares about actual things and people and responds in a more or less human (if sometimes childish) way to the limitless absurdities our era constantly throws at us. 

Here Nietzsche may have something to say as well, because he reminds us that the most pleasant and soothing characters are not always the best for life or health: they can just as well be deadly narcotics, indulgences which destroy our willingness to strive and to learn and to face the world. With the help of “social distancing”, the anathemization of all disagreement, and the sacralization of offense, we are undoubtedly already headed in this direction as a civilization. Biden, with his faltering speech, his soporific manner, and platitudes about “coming together” disguising massive administrative power-grabs, clearly fixes to press further in this direction.

Trump stands in the way of all this anonymizing, atomizing, narcotic tendency in some curious, hard-to-define way. He is a jolt of rude realities that demands, at least, attention and a lucid response. Yet for all his admiration of technology and modernity (in the older sense), he is uninterested in declaring war on the past or on history itself: he rejects the pseudo-left’s program of systemic forgetting, embodied in statue destruction all over the country. This together is enough to make him an obstacle to an idea of Progress that has long since become False Progress. Trump repels it, and all its absurd impersonal complexity, and that is why it finds him repulsive: so repulsive, indeed, that it now happily throws away whatever “liberal” or “progressive” or “pacifist” or even truly “leftist” pretenses it once espoused in order to destroy him by any means. 

Meanwhile, if Trump stands defiantly in the way of some technocratic impersonal monstrosity, the Biden campaign has been run like a mummy exhibit at the Smithsonian. The candidate is wheeled out at strategic times, like when the season is right or the sun is the right angle. “Lids” are called—no questions or campaigning, not even for the tiny number of tame journalists who travel with the candidate—as often as one-third of the days. Leaving aside his refusal to seriously address the Post’s revelations, never have I witnessed a candidate who during the campaign has done so incredibly little to merit the victory, let alone to show himself equal to the office, as Joe Biden. It is like Hillary Clinton’s run from 2016 only worse—even less charisma, even less dynamism, even less honesty, and above all even more of the attitude that “it’s my turn”. 

So to repeat, the impossible has been achieved, the miracle has happened: the Democrats and the liberals and the progressives have managed to make themselves look even more repulsive and more monstrous than Donald Trump—by a comfortable margin. It took years of careful planning and ideological self-purification (or putrefaction?), but the thing has happened, and it means anything is possible now. Perhaps next we will see lead bullets turning to gold in mid-flight and butterscotch ice-cream raining from the sky?

I therefore encourage any who read this to avoid supporting the Democratic Party in tomorrow’s election in any way, shape or form. If the Republicans and Trump still turn your stomach too much, consider choosing a third-party candidate, remembering that anything is possible.

Call me “deplorable” if you like. Given that we live in an era when all sorts of basic words and phrases have already become wildly dissociated from their literal meanings (for example, “all lives matter”), I will all the more easily bear that title with calm and dignity.