Day One: 01Jan2021

The A/V above conveys the central theme to come (click the image caption to run the six-minute video). Illustrations are by Dwayne Booth (2020, aka MR. FISH); “Auld Lang Syne” poem by Robert Burns (1788); soundtrack by Dougie MacLean, Putumayo Presents Celtic Christmas album (2011, Putuyamo World Music, from YouTube).

The Inverted Totalitarianism of Fascist Capitalism

[Cf. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism - New Edition (Introduction by Chris Hedges, 2017) and “Making Ends Meet: The Permanent Lie of Capitalism vs. Socialism” post on this blog site. It’s the fascism, stupid.]

The parenthetic portion of this post’s title is a play on the subtitle of the classic film described as follows in Wikipedia (see a trailer here):

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, more commonly known simply as Dr. Strangelove, is the 1964 black comedy film that satirizes the Cold War fears of a nuclear conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. The film was directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick and stars Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, and Slim Pickens. Production took place in the United Kingdom. The film is loosely based on Peter George's thriller novel Red Alert (1958). [From the Wikipedia article on the film.]

If these times of our death by self-inflicted doom as the 21st century breaches its third decade aren’t the blackest of absurdist tragicomic farce in human history, one must shudder to imagine what worse could lie further beyond and into the abyssal event horizon of mass extinction onrushing already into 2050, past all and any rational hope of reversal or meaningful mitigation for billions of us. As many as 70% or more of us will be dying by then of agonizing thirst, raw starvation, widespread and intensifying natural disasters, or perchance murdered in a savage attack or fatal crossfire between fascist jackboot police state cadre and marauding gangs of deluded stormtrooper vigilantes whose own survival at any and all costs by any and all means however depraved is their only categorical imperative. Our ongoing cognitive freefall has reached civilizational collapse terminal velocity now, yet we dissonantly deem the insanity of it to be the rational scientific epitome of our apex predation in this Age of Reason under the rallying cry and noble banner of Manifest Destiny’s White Burden supremacy. [Cf. Rupert Read & Samuel Alexander, This Civilisation is Finished: Conversations on the end of Empire - and what lies beyond (2019); Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization and Endgame, Vol. 2: Resistance (2006).]

The bullshit of our permanent lies to ourselves piles up so fast and so deep we’d need wings to stay above it if we weren’t already drowning in the insidiously suffocating perfusion of its mendacity. Our Apocalypse Now enshrouds the Earth entire, from every singular terroir to globally horrific pandemic terror. Silently screaming from the marrow of our being the ineffable rage of our grief, we manifest our presence in truth and reality snared and bound, desperately trapped with eyes wide shut in rabidly mad delusion. Plato’s Cave implodes around and upon us, triggering an awful avalanche of deathly denial and a terrible tsunami of terminal despair. The shadow power dynamics of our epistemic deprivation finally as black and void as the grave we’ve pulled down upon ourselves.

We bury ourselves alive in sepulchers of our own design, convinced we live right, do well, and naturally thrive guided by the false quasi-religious lights of 21st century scientism’s rapturous thrall. Small wonder a buffoon can convince an entire nation of citizens—built and standing on the bloodiest terrorism known to the history of humanity—that ‘science’ is a entirely fake news hoax and getting away with murder to keep the depravity in power. Children are naturally born fully capable of higher rationality than their elders’ perspicacious dissonance can achieve without arduous and extreme intellectual diligence. By all apparent actions and obvious evidence, we process those precious gifts to extinction by abortion and/or lifelong exploitation. We probably couldn’t be more savagely eating our own young than if we cooked them alive slowly and ate their parts while they watched.