The Gods that Failed: Diagnosing the Dying Religions of Conservatism and Liberalism

Beliefs are very hard things to let go of. When one’s entire life becomes devoted to upholding and maintaining a faith, the utter failure and disintegration of that belief system can become unbearable. In order to cope, many people indulge in escapist fantasies. This is not due to any lack of intelligence or moral failing; rather, a close examination shows that we can find complex psycho-social reasons for why and how denial, repression, and various defense mechanisms operate in the spheres of economics and politics.

In today’s world, there seems to be a genuine lack of understanding of how political ideology molds people into compliant, obedient citizens and consumers who willingly and voluntarily assimilate into a society that does not serve their fundamental, basic human interests. Part of the reason is that it’s become normalized for thousands of years in Western civilization: we seem to accept illegitimate hierarchies and social structures because they have fed, clothed, and sheltered us and our kin for generations, and without these institutions most of us would be like fish out of water. We’ve become domesticated and reluctant to “bite the hand that feeds”.

Capitalism Is Not Your Friend

Published Oct. 27, 2021. Also published on Medium here, and at Dissident Voice and Countercurrents.org. View my Medium profile here.

“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” –Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology

“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out that’s not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven’t pulled the knife out, much less healed the wound. They won’t even admit the knife is there.” –Malcolm X, in a March 1964 interview

How does our capitalist economic system work? Upon what structural elements does it depend, and how does money function in a modern economy? These are some questions nearly everyone has pondered at some point in their lives. As pretty much everyone knows, the system we call capitalism has built the modern world and is the basis for mainstream economic theory. According to most establishment pro-capitalist economists, capitalism can provide for a decent life for all of humanity, conserve wildlife and ecosystems, and maintain prosperity for nearly everyone if we only listen and apply their theories.

Boycott Vaccine Mandates and Covid Passports

Published Sept. 9, 2021 at Dissident Voice and Global Research

Just as many predicted over a year ago, the rollout of the vaccine for Covid-19 and its implementation has introduced intense polarization and social segregation through the implementation of mandatory vaccination for employees and vaccine passports. Medical authoritarianism and the burgeoning biosecurity state are here, expanding in real time. In New York City, San Francisco, France, and Italy, vaccine passports are mandatory for entrance to nearly any indoor public venue: restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas, and more. Also, hundreds of corporations, colleges, federal and state agencies are mandating rushed emergency experimental injections with no long-term knowledge of side effects.

Yes, we’re all well aware that the Pfizer vaccine just got full FDA approval. Did anyone think that it wouldn’t? Did anyone in the media bother to ask if the forces of power, money, and technocratic medical tyrants would back down and not give full approval, considering how these forces have managed to shape reality and scare to death half of the population over a disease with a very low mortality rate? Regardless of your opinion of how severe the disease is, mandates and passports are incontrovertibly coercive, tyrannical measures. If the vaccines do not stop transmission, which the medical authorities have already admitted to varying degrees, then what is the point of these mandates and passports?

The Rise of the Terminally Online: Digital Subjectivity and Simulation of the Social

“Americans, rich or poor, now live in a culture entirely perceived through simulacra-media images and illusions. We live inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation that has not existed for quite some time now. Our national reality is held together by images, the originals of which have been lost or never existed. The well-off with their upscale consumer aesthetic, live inside gated Disneyesque communities with gleaming uninhabited front porches representing some bucolic notion of the Great American home and family. The working class, true to its sports culture aesthetic, is a spectator to politics . . . politics which are so entirely imagistic as to be holograms of a process that has not existed for decades in America, if ever. Social realism is a television commercial for America, a simulacrum republic of eagles, church spires… and ‘freedom of choice’ between holograms. America’s citizens have been reduced to balkanized consumer units by the corporate state’s culture producing machinery. We are all transfixed on and within the hologram and cannot see one another in the living breathing flesh.”

–Joe Bageant, from a 2005 interview with my late friend, Richard Oxman

“We need to understand that technology is not simply a relation between humans and their natural environment, but more fundamentally a way of organizing global human society.”

–Alf Hornborg, “Technology as Fetish: Marx, Latour, and the Cultural Foundations of Capitalism”, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 31, no. 4

Note to readers: This is an impromptu, long overdue, unsolicited, and frankly incomplete second attempt at describing aspects of digital media and “extremely online” culture and ideology. You can read my first essay “Questioning the Extremely Online” by clicking the link. There are conservative, liberal, and leftist variants of the extremely online crowd; what unites them are social media as well as internet and screen addictions, a lack of class analysis, and technological fetishism.