re: #182 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

If my assertion is correct, that we’re witnessing a worldview collapse across a significant swath of our society, then the angst arising out of the existential crises being shared in their in-groups is causing a lot of searching for anything which is an “out”.

We’re going through the same malaise as Britain—the mythology of the rightness and wholesomeness of empire can’t be sustained anymore, while the tactics of empire have been turned inwards because the hegemons that built the nationalist mythology—we’ll all work hard and get a share—were never going to diminish their cut.

Basically, Americans are experiencing the things we used to do to other countries to create the disadvantageous, when not outright exploitative, labor and resource-extraction agreements that made the nation rich. It’s Foucault’s Boomerang—the tactics that worked in other nations can and have been adapted for domestic targets.

The leopards are supposed to eat other people’s faces.

But America’s key cultural base assumptions—individualism, meritocracy, and capitalism as a moral force—don’t allow for the kind of critical scrutiny that acknowledges that there’s been a long process of stripping away capital and franchise from regular Americans for the benefit of a tiny elite that are beyond national concerns. For many Americans, their suffering cannot be an understandable consequence of the system that previously uplifted them applying the same tactics at home, it can only be the product of some kind of stone from the sky…treachery, conspiracy, the clandestine works of strangers and perverts.

We are shot full of conspiracy theories because they simplify and externalize problems that are complex and endemic: a vaudeville villain is more comforting than the idea that society itself was always kind of indifferent to your suffering. We’re playing with fascism because fascism is a convenient way to conceal a crime: the people in charge can either admit they were always fucking up and self-dealing, or they can designate a target that made everything bad.