How Can We Fight What We Cannot See?
∇. Eliminative Capacity, or the Redshifting of Ideas
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine
— Coleridge, Ode on Melancholy
The largest country on my night-light globe of the world circa 1989 always fascinated me as a little kid. I remember asking my mother about this mysterious U.S.S.R. “That’s a very dark place”, she answered, in an ominous whisper. And it was: The triumph of Diamat decoupled from human needs reduced its citizens to husks of their former selves, condemned to state servitude and an endless daily performance of what Czesław Miłosz called Ketman, a mental defense against cognitive dissonance intoning public self-gaslighting displays of state piety… Sovereignty, authenticity and creativity, all are severely curtailed by the menace of immanent authoritarian constraints and the need for performative dissimulation. I wonder, is that so different from what we live today in the West? Consider:
Western Ketman: Performative Self-deception in the capitalist mind
Capitalism, with its single-minded emphasis on exalting market values of productivity and efficiency, is similarly decoupled from such real human needs as meaningfulness, affection, understanding, creativity (c.f. Chilean economist Max-Neef’s taxonomy of fundamental human needs); one could even go so far as to ask whether, in Game A, the economy has ever been coupled to them in the first place. The totalizing effect of market logic is such that its eliminative capacity — its capacity to project a field of certainty while proactively redshifting, i.e., eliminating, all trace of its incommensurate antecedents — has assiduously erased the memory of those human needs, even the words to express them, while touting its own story as inevitable. We now find our defended blind spots manned by potemkin ideas.
The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worthwhile which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death.
― Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind
This is akin to the effect the expansion of the universe is predicted to have on the observations of future astronomers: Imagine, for a second, all galaxies as marbles that have just been dropped on a table: Most will roll off the edges, while a couple may remain and roll toward one another. In three billion years time, a handful of our nearest blushifting galactic neighbours will have merged with the Milky Way into one giant elliptical galaxy, while every single other galaxy in the cosmos will have redshifted off the edges of our light cone. If our current knowledge of the night sky were to be lost, future astronomers would forever be deprived of the notion of a universe teeming with galaxies: Shapley would win the Great Debate by a strange twist of expansionary fate, after all.
The redshifting of ideas from the light-cone of our collective consciousness occurs when history is rewritten to suit the ends of the victors rather than the historicity of recorded events and the integrity of the cultural record. Witness in the phrases “cost of living”, and “earning a living”, the common acceptance of life as inherently debt-bearing, or the pernicious axiom of natural resource scarcity underlying our economic system. With such flourishes, the indelibility of the censor’s ink has nearly succeeded in blotting out two previously widespread ontologies of Gift and Abundance, replacing them with ontologies of separation-induced egocentricity and scarcity that presently scaffold the western European worldview.
We live within a cultural mythology that tells us we are separate beings in competitive relation for power, even for survival. We long to return to a culture of inclusiveness, cooperation, and the sharing of gifts.
— Charles Eisenstein, The Longing for Belonging
Denizens of The Letheic and Aletheic — phase spaces of Truth
Our general inability to speak of, let alone imagine, a world of abundance and a gift economy attuned to the stewarding of a global commons, juxtaposed with the persistent notion something we cannot quite put our finger on is deeply wrong with our world, have generated a profound cognitive dissonance we repress through increasingly desperate flag-waving displays of western Ketman, ideas generative of the tripartite dark attractors of nihilism, absolutism and self-delusion. I would argue the ideas at the core of these behaviours should be banished to the Letheic, the phase space of all truths we ought to forget:
- The ascendancy of the Having mode over the Being mode and the addiction to ubiquitous, market-sanctioned, hedonic treadmills servicing the gratification of our sense desires with a constant barrage of hypernormal stimuli.
- The society of the spectacle, wherein civic respect (re-spectare) is drowned out by social spectacle (spectare) and scandal.
- Behaviour as a virtue signalling means, to guarantee our inclusion within fragmented memetic tribes, rather than as an authentic manifestation of our inner selves attuned to our divine doubles.
- The contortionist apologetics of naive “enlightenment 2.0” techno-optimism, paying tribute to the windfalls of global capitalism while avoiding any scrutiny of either its violent origins in primitive accumulation, or its self-terminating undermining of Nature, the natural substrate upon which it depends, and from which it has gone through such pains to separate itself.
- The reductive overreach of scientism in its over-reliance on decontextualised (de-ecologised) propositional knowledge at the expense of en-placed and ensouled knowledge.
- The cults of objectivity, materialism and measurability, sanctioned by science to mask the emptying of Being from the world through the dispatching of God by our underlying egocentric and materialist metaphysical mode (Gestell), which views Nature as Other, and the Being of Nature as an instrumentalised standing reserve of exhaustible “resource” in service of Technology as an end in itself.
- The program of total control through money, or congealed power, of all possible contingencies, an outgrowth of the immortality project, itself a symptom of our fearful rejection of the finitude of Life as Being-toward-Death.
- Technology as the ultima ratio regum of Capitalism, the guarantee and guarantor of infinite progress toward we don’t quite know what, but auto-telically toward, at any rate.
The idea of transcendence over earthly life, the life cycle, and death continues in science in another guise, and that is the notion of technological progress
— Susan Griffin, The Eros of Everyday Life
Neoliberalism, or the Nefarious Saccharine
The valid but unsound belief we must work to pay off our life debt, i.e., debt peonage or primordial debt theory, is at least explicit under Communism. The wrong can be seen and named: The non-living state’s sovereignty has been elevated above the individual’s, whose freedom is forfeit and whose glory must be the state’s. Under Neoliberalism, however, it is a different story entirely. Only if we render the translucent opaque, do we begin to see traces of eliminative capacity hard at work in all spheres of public life: The nefarious saccharine, a gelatinous bureaucratic force of non-stick teflon suits with disembodied cheshire smiles, harnesses whole institutions and nations through a weaponised narrative of total work, for the faint promise of an ever-receding horizon of plenty. No blame can be pinned on one enemy because the invisible hand adventitiously spreads blame, like an amorphous Miyazaki oil, over all actors — if we are all hypocrites, then maybe none of us are, right? These interlocking syn-necrotic systems are hard to spot, so shrouded over are they by the Mayas of progress and all-is-well-ism.
More pestilential and dangerous even than the conspicuously overt jackboot and gulag, those blood-lettered signatures of 20th c. totalitarianism, is the miasmic unnameable wrong. For how can one fight what one cannot see? Huxley’s dystopia, far more to be feared than Orwell’s. Or is this just my bourgeois gauche caviar upbringing rendering more salient the nebulous defection at hand, and its attendant vectoring of the world toward total collapse, than the distant tragedies of the Holocaust, the Gulag archipelago, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the North Korean prison camps, and the Xinjiang Uygur re-education camps? These stains on our record must never be trivialised or forgotten. Still, they are products of evils that can be seen and named.
The Aletheic, the realm of all truths we once knew but have largely forgotten (and I would argue, ought to remember), includes unmeasurably precious gems whose premeditated redshifting from human culture’s shared scroll of inherited ideas constitutes nothing short of a crime against history as a whole. The idea of The Commons, the cultural and natural resources accessible to, and shared by, all, and the commons thinking that stewards these spaces, figure among them. The siphoning of our natural, cultural, genetic, spiritual, attentional, behavioural, temporal, patrimonial, futural, electromagnetic, outer space and internet commons into capital by market forces is a daily occurrence that goes largely unseen. In the name of the profit motive, the invisible enemy hunts, corners, captures, and encloses that which, as our cosmic bequest, ought to be designated and protected as unenclosable. This evil often remains unseen and unnamed.
We must be very careful, then, not to craft the discourse on the commons in such a way as to allow a crisis-ridden capitalist class to revive itself, posturing, for instance, as the environmental guardian of the planet.
— Silvia Federici, Feminism and the Politics of the Commons
To understand our participation in the economy as it is presently instantiated implies acknowledging our responsibility for the plundering of our commonwealth and our own resulting self-impoverishment. It lends the lie to any notion of sustainable economic growth or moral capitalism in our current economic paradigm. It implies we have awakened to our collective sleepwalking toward the abyss of collapse under the spell of mediatically administered soma, shackled to a narrow conception of progress stemming from a flawed metaphysics presupposing ultimate separation, and the concomitant ultimate deadening of Being into pure measurable, extractable, packageable, sellable, consumable instrumentality. It implies acknowledging the system is the shadow, and the shadow is us. All of us.
No splinters when you are the world
How to live now? Break your social system? How to not lose hope? Is Game B truly Episode IV? How do we foster belief in the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible? How do we go on radiating compassion for all of these poor humans, including ourselves, engaged in their own fleecing? In case you thought this piece offered solutions, I hate to burst your bubble: We’re not leaving Aporetic station anytime soon. What I can say is this: if you catch my drift, you have a responsibility to share these ideas. The hand that taketh away must re-learn how to give back.
If we listen carefully, the world beyond our conceptual labels pours forth in infinite beauty, abundance, and inexhaustible sublimity. It pulls us beyond the horizon of ourselves, auguring the emergence of an anamnestic collective intelligence, one that might just un-forget the answers it always knew it knew. It is then we find incarnation to be but a flickering firefly, navigating for a spell a great shower of sparks issuing from the cosmic bonfire of Being — dangerous, knowing, joyful. Align with that, whenever possible, for there can be no splinters when you are the world.
I wish my story had a clear and present villain, but the realm we inhabit, like a doddering Lear, simultaneously absolves, and acclaims villains of us all. Now safely in colonial hands, polished and propped up at Berlin’s Pergamon museum, the famous lapiz blue Ishtar Gates were once arrived at by means of the main processional road which wended its way through the ancient city of Babylon, known as Aj-Ibur-Shapu. It means “the invisible enemy should not exist.” How I wish that were true. But the invisible enemy does exist. It is all around, doing its work while it lulls you to sleep. Let’s wake up and eat the shadow before the shadow eats us.
Many a true word hath been spoken in jest.
― William Shakespeare, King Lear
About the author:
The Greek warrior-poet Archilochus calls us hedgehogs or foxes, specialists or generalists. An unapologetic fox, I seek deep structure across the disciplinary boundaries parcelling up Truth, and I share what I find.
