Two weeks ago we started a discussion of the Situationists, an obscure movement spawned by fringe Marxism in 1950s Europe. As I commented at the time, that’s an unimpressive pedigree for any set of ideas, and it’s been rendered even more distasteful to a great many people worldwide just now by the recent demonstration of just how easily the mindset of leftist extremism motivates, excuses, and celebrates brutal savagery and mindless hate. Nonetheless I plan on continuing the discussion of Situationism here. Even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day, as the saying goes, and some ideas introduced by the Situationists in their attempt to fix the broken clock that is Marxism have a great deal to offer, once they’re pried loose from that failed system of ideas and put to work in the service of some less stultifying way of looking at the world.
That crowbar-work is going to require a little more discussion of the failings of Marxism, and in particular of its insistence on a wholly collective view of morality. You can see that view at work even in those milquetoast versions of Marxism that are common fare nowadays in European social democracies. In some European countries right now, for example, a woman who is raped by an immigrant faces more serious legal consequences if she mentions her rapist’s nationality on social media than the rapist will ever face for his crime. Why? Because within the worldview that governs these nations at the moment, individuals and their actions are irrelevant. All that matters is which group they belong to, because only groups have moral standing in Marxist thought; individuals do not, and therefore the severity of a crime—and even whether an act is a crime or not—depends entirely on the groups to which criminal and victim are assigned.
In classic Marxism, the groups that mattered were social classes, and in that scheme, the ruling class was by definition evil and the proletariat class was by definition good. That meant—and yes, you can find this in Marxist literature—that when Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in the Russian empire, that was an evil act, since by definition the ruling class can only do evil. It also meant—and you can also find this in Marxist literature—that when Communists commit mass murder, that’s a virtuous act, since the crimes were committed by the proletariat, and since the proletariat can do no wrong, the victims must have deserved it.
In the wake of the New Left of the 1960s, which established the theories that today’s leftist parties generally follow, the rhetoric of class was replaced by that of race and gender but the insistence on collective morality (and thus of collective guilt and punishment) remains fixed in place. It’s the same logic that was used to justify the massacre of Jews in the Middle Ages—a few Jews more than a millennium earlier played a role in the execution of Jesus of Nazareth, therefore all Jews everywhere were held to be guilty of deicide—and it’s just as brutal and stupid now as it was back then. Now as then, it’s a convenient bit of ideology if one happens to want to justify atrocities, and of course that’s exactly why it’s so popular.
This is highly relevant to our present conversation because the concept of the Spectacle, the aspect of Situationism that we’ll focus on in this week’s essay, is inevitably presented by Situationist authors within the framework of Marxist theory. Thus there is only one Spectacle, it’s a monolithic evil presence, it bears down on the proletariat with crushing weight, and it’s all manufactured by the bourgeoisie for the benefit of the ruling class. Read Guy Debord’s La Société du Spectacle or its English translation The Society of the Spectacle—and I strongly recommend that anyone interested in these ideas should buy a copy and do exactly that—and you’ll find everything in the book resting on that set of unquestioned assumptions.
This is ironically where another idea widely popular among today’s leftists, the concept of intersectionality, has a great deal to offer. The core principle of intersectionality is that your privilege in society, or lack of same, is not a product of class alone, or sex alone, or race alone, or ethnic background alone, or any other single factor. It’s the product of all these factors and many others, all intersecting to produce a complex texture of privilege. It’s a useful insight, though these days it’s too often been twisted into a justification for what gets dourly called the Oppression Olympics, the no-holds-barred struggle to claim the status of Most Oppressed Person Evah (a status, please note, that grants its holder considerable privilege in some contexts, such as American universities).
So power and privilege are always intersectional. They’re also always contextual. What this means is that the powers and privileges you have depend very much on where you are and who you’re interacting with. On American college campuses today, for example, white straight men are not a privileged class. Quite the contrary, they are expected to accept a permanent place in the back of the bus to atone for the sins committed by some white straight men in the past. (Again, the collective morality of the Left can be seen at work here.) Are there other contexts where white straight men have more privilege than members of other categories? You bet, and some of them have considerable power—but most white straight men aren’t US senators or corporate CEOs, you know, and so don’t have access to the contexts where their particular intersectional status might give them an advantage.
Thus power and privilege are always intersectional and contextual. That means that they’re always and irreducibly individual. Even in the same context, no two human beings have the same combination of intersectional factors defining their potentials for power and privilege, and the landscape of contexts through which each of us move varies just as widely. Success in life, in a very real way, consists of finding a context that makes it possible to use one’s specific powers and privileges to best advantage. That’s certainly true of me; as an autistic person, there are plenty of contexts where my background as a college-educated white straight man raised at the bottom edge of the middle class won’t do me any good at all. Fortunately I had the good sense to avoid the sort of corporate contexts where I can only fail, and found the sort of niche role that allowed me to make use of my talents and cover for my many limitations.
Yet the same point is equally true of, let’s say, a fourteen-year-old Hispanic kid in one of Rhode Island’s bleaker ghettos who efficiently leverages his very limited options by becoming a part of the local gang culture. There are plenty of contexts where I have privileges he can’t even dream of getting, but within the contexts that match his intersectional status, if he’s smart, tough, and lucky, he can rise very far and quite possibly gain the things he wants out of life. Does everyone in the same contexts achieve that? Of course not—but then plenty of college-educated white straight men raised in middle class families crash and burn catastrophically, too.
With that said, we can move from the Marxist underpinnings of Situationism to confront the Spectacle itself. What is the Spectacle? It is the world of appearances generated by any modern industrial society. Debord points out cogently that the Spectacle is not a collection of images, but rather a social relationship between people mediated by images. Because of that act of mediation, the Spectacle is always alienated and alienating: that is, it stands in the way of any authentic interaction between people, and it also stands in the way of any authentic perception of the actual realities of life in late industrial culture.
Here a concrete example will do much more than any amount of abstraction, so let’s imagine a couple sitting in their living room watching a sitcom on television. They may be sitting side by side on the sofa, but their interactions with each other will by and large be limited to whatever won’t distract them from the program. During the time they spend staring at the screen, they experience a world of fictitious images, full of people and places who don’t exist. At intervals the sitcom is broken off to make way for an even more fictitious world in which various consumer products pretend to satisfy this or that human desire, where everyone tipping back a beer in the bar is young, well-dressed, happy, and laughing, and where asking your doctor about the latest pharmaceutical will surely cure you of an illness you don’t know you have.
Now imagine the couple getting up and going to the kitchen table to have dinner—we’ll assume they’re unfashionable enough to do this, instead of simply gobbling down their food in the living room while the television drones on. Even when they’re not watching the screen, the images that played in front of their eyes retain their presence and power. That’s not accidental, of course. Huge corporations fork over millions of dollars to cover the considerable costs of producing those images and getting them onto the screens, and I trust none of my readers are so clueless as to think they have altruistic reasons for doing so. Quite the contrary, that money gets forked over because those images shape human thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Human beings are social primates, after all, and to a very great extent they follow the familiar rule of “monkey see, monkey do.” The behavior of characters in a sitcom, or actors in an advertisement, or talking heads on a news-and-views show, becomes part of the mental world, and thus the behavioral world, of the people who watch it. Thus our couple, as they have dinner and talk, are as likely as not to regurgitate thoughts suggested to them by their years of watching television, and the actions they take will be shaped by the same source.
This is an obvious expression of the Spectacle, which is why I used it as an example. There are many more expressions that are much less obvious. The choice of words a speechwriter puts into the mouth of a politician, the choice of events that appear on the evening news, the choice of colors used for products and their packaging, and many more such choices all contribute to the construction of the Spectacle. So, to at least as great an extent, do the words that are left out, the events that go unreported, and the products that are never manufactured or sold. All of these things and more flow together to create the artifact that is the Spectacle, a relation mediated by images that pretends to be the world.
Paying attention to advertising, on or off television, can be very helpful if you want to see the Spectacle at work. Notice, first of all, how little connection there is between whatever material reality might be behind the image—say, cheap yellow beer—and what’s actually being shown on the screen. Usually what you see has nothing to do with the product and everything to do with some basic human need that the product doesn’t actually address—say, the craving for status and companionship titillated by those young, attractive, expensively dressed people who laugh and talk as they guzzle cheap yellow beer. Watch the images of desire as they drift further and further away from whatever’s being marketed, and you can learn a great deal.
It’s at this point that things get complex, though. Debord and other authors of the Situationist International were of course devout Marxists, and so by and large interpreted the Spectacle as an instrument by which the capitalist system enforces alienation on everyone for its own benefit. There’s truth in that, but it’s a one-sided truth. The other side of the truth is that the Spectacle, this relationship mediated by images, is constantly being manipulated by all of its participants. Like every other expression of power, it is intersectional and contextual.
Debord and his peers had the misfortune of living at a time when the current technologies of image creation and distribution were new, expensive, and therefore highly centralized. Television, again, is the most obvious example, but several other forms of image production were nearly as recent. Mass-produced magazines with color photographs were a new introduction to the postwar world, and color movies with sound weren’t that much older. Furthermore, the entire science of propaganda that was deployed in the postwar years to transform the Spectacle into a commodity capable of mass production was also largely a creation of the war years, when all sides sunk as much money and resources as they could spare into the production of propaganda to rally their own populations and mislead their opponents.
All this was new and interesting in the 1950s, and it attracted audiences who had not yet learned to be critical of such things. It was thus easy enough for Debord et al. to fall into the trap of mistaking a temporary condition mediated by new and costly technologies for a state of affairs that had come to stay, at least until proletarian revolution overthrew the system. That trap was set for them by Marxism’s Christian roots; the belief that the world will just get worse and worse until the Second Coming miraculously solves all our problems—premillennialism, to give it its proper theological name—is a widespread Christian belief. Marx borrowed it and filed off the serial numbers, as he did with so many other Christian doctrines, to predict that the world would just get worse and worse until proletarian revolution miraculously solves all our problems.
If anything, though, belief in proletarian revolution is rather less plausible than belief in the Second Coming—the Christians at least have the common sense to found their belief in a future utopia on the intervention of an omnipotent deity, which is pretty much what it would take to get humans to behave in a utopian fashion—and the predictions Marx made have one and all been disproven by events. The Situationists, too, caught the awkward modern illness of futurus interruptus, and were left clutching their dogmas in pain as the ecstatic release they expected never got around to happening. The brief interval when the Spectacle was under a semblance of centralized control passed, as such intervals do, and we returned to the more normal state of Spectacular existence, in which the creation and distribution of images became a more widespread privilege.
At the moment, in fact, it’s become more widespread than usual. The rise of the internet meme is a good example of this spread. These unexpected side effects of internet culture have taken on a considerable power in the world of the spectacle—at least as powerful just now as the waning force of network television, for example—and memes, like so much of the current Spectacle, are the product of a free-for-all in which individuals have outsized roles as producers, distributors, and consumers. The Spectacle still exercises its familiar power, but it’s become incoherent, pulled this way and that by the efforts of competing factions and the vagaries of cultural and subcultural tastes. Much of the disintegration of American society into a patchwork of mutually hostile subcultures, in fact, can be traced to the shattering of the Spectacle into competing sub-Spectacles, each appealing to its own audience.
A vivid example of that process at work is playing out right now in the aftermath of the assassination of conservative speaker Charlie Kirk. So far, at least, the evidence indicates that he was murdered in cold blood by a young man radicalized by the extremist left. Since Kirk was hugely popular among centrists as well as on the right, his murder has turned into a public relations nightmare for the left, which builds its appeal on the dubious claim that it is more virtuous and compassionate than its rivals. Thus the left is frantically trying to stick the blame somewhere else. This blog has accordingly been spammed repeatedly over the last week with cookie-cutter comments from people (or nonpeople—some of the comments read like LLM product) that don’t normally try to comment here, insisting in tones of angry faux-certainty that Kirk’s murderer must have supported a rival conservative faction, or that Kirk was shot by agents of the Israeli government. No doubt they’d blame the killing on aliens from Zeta Reticuli if they thought they could get away with it.
A great deal of the current economic and political establishment is behind that push. Nonetheless it’s by no means certain that it’ll get much traction, because another substantial share of the current economic and political establishment is pushing back, and so are various groups outside the power structure who supported Kirk’s religious and cultural agenda. As a result, the mechanisms of the Spectacle are on display with a degree of nakedness verging on the obscene. To borrow a metaphor from The Wizard of Oz, there have always been a crowd of little men behind the curtain, all trying to get the giant floating head of Oz the Great and Powerful to say something supporting their own interests; the illusion can pass for reality so long as the crowd around the controls remains orderly, but once they start fighting, the noise and the occasional punch-drunk figure tumbling out through the gap in the curtains make it impossible to ignore what’s actually been going on all along.
Now of course this is also a passing stage, since we are in the middle of an elite replacement cycle. The bureaucratic-managerial elite that seized power in the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and has since become decadent and ineffectual in the usual way, is being shoved aside in the usual way by a rising entrepreneurial elite. (They’ll face the same fate in their turn, and be shoved aside by another class sometime around 2100.) Once that process has finished, the federal bureaucracy is trimmed down to whatever size the nation can afford once its global empire finishes going away, and decisions on most social issues devolve on the states as specified in the Constitution, doubtless a new unanimity will replace the current free-for all; it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the internet stopped being quite so accessible to individual memesmiths around then, too.
There’s a deeper context to all this, however. The Situationists believed, in their devout Marxist souls, that the Spectacle would remain welded in place until the proletarian revolution of their dreams brought about their pseudosecular equivalent of the Second Coming and permitted people to establish some less alienated and alienating social relationship among themselves. Fortunately—since Marxist proletarian revolution is as imaginary as a hippogriff, if a lot less attractive and interesting—there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. We’ll discuss those a little later in this sequence of posts.
In many ways, universities have always been the smokescreen. The greatest victory of the cultural left has been in corporations, especially those associated with the knowledge economy, not universities. This has largely been through the growth of the diversity training industry that saw its modern Genesis around 1968.
https://www.amazon.ca/Race-Experts-Etiquette-Sensitivity-Revolution/dp/074252759X
And they succeeded because, after all, the Enlightenment ideals of freedom of religion, conscience, and expression don’t apply in private companies.
https://books.google.ca/books/about/Private_Government.html?id=hXSYDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y
https://www.pivotalsolutions.com/can-some-discussions-be-banned-at-work-does-freedom-of-speech-protect-against-discipline-or-dismissal/
JMG,
So to tie this back to a set of comments in last weeks post discussing the 1990’s. Several of us expressed a preference for the 1990’s because the internet and social media had not yet significantly affected everyday life, human interactions and how we saw the world. But in todays post we learn that may have been because the 1990’s were the last time the spectacle was fully in place. It had yet to be fractured in the way that it has now.
Well done sir.
Gosh, you have a strong stomach. I’ve heard of these ideas second hand before, but I am still heavily reminded of the “toshers”, the Victorian era scavengers of London’s sewers sifting through the unfathomably awful for anything of value.
David, maybe so, but please note the contexts where I brought up universities — as places where being the Most Oppressed Person Evah gives you plenty of status. That remains true: more true than in the corporate world, where the upper echelons of power and wealth have only recently opened their doors to a carefully selected cohort of women and people of color.
Clay, good heavens. That hadn’t occurred to me, but it makes a great deal of sense.
James, thank you!
Synthase, Bruce Lee has good advice on this:
Aas long as you react emotionally to belief systems you dislike, you’re allowing the people who hold those beliefs to control you through those reactions. If you can study such belief systems without reacting to them, tracing out their weak points and their valid insights (for every belief system, no matter how stupid it is generally, includes at least a few valid insights), you gain power over the belief system, and thus over those who are dominated by it.
Log off now and avoid the rush.
Awesome essay. Thank you.
JMG,
As to the beach scene with the couple. I find it totally plausible. They obviously left their home in Tacoma, stopped by the brewery in Tumwater to pick up a case of Oly, then headed for the beaches of Southern California in their 1965 Ford Galaxy 500 Country Squire Station wagon ( the one with the wood grain paneling on the outside). They probably also stopped in Portland to grab a matching set of Jantzen swimwear. They were obviously not on the beach in Oregon or Washington because they would have been wearing sweatshirts due to the cold wind ( even in summer) that would have also knocked over their umbrella.
Thank you for explaining some of these Marxist phenomenon in terms I can understand. I believe it was William Blake who said “You become what you behold.” The Left is being shown in a very unflattering light in their reaction to Charlie Kirk. I can only imagine what commenters are trying to post here right now, most likely worked into a frenzy of projection, anything to avoid the ugly reflection being shown to all in the mirror. To my mind, this is the product of the deification of college and the illusion that one is always better for graduating college than he or she is for not going/graduating. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that some of the most vile comments about Kirk’s death are coming out of academia, whether it is a school in Barrington, Rhode Island or a college campus. Speaking of obnoxious midwits, does anyone remember that horrible TV pharmaceutical ad approximately 25 or 30 years ago, possibly more,that used James Brown’s “I Feel Good” as a backdrop for some yuppie speedwalking down the sidewalk back one speedwalking was actually a trend? I don’t even remember what the drug was for, I just remember being utterly disgusted with pharmaceutical ads. I guess in a perverse way I am grateful because that ad took the blinders off for me and I began to see how awful pharmaceutical companies are in everything they do.
Yes, but there is a difficulty scaling to that. Especially since political theorists tend do to words what bitcoin does to electricity.
Hello everybody, JMG and Kommentariat. I was waiting for this Wednesday John post because I knew John was going to write about Situationism, which it’s one of my favorite topics…Well, I’ve sit quietly in a public library with some popcorn to enjoy it (OK, imaginary popcorn, you all will understand me).
I’d say, after having reading this week post, that Situs of course were quite limited by their Marxist view of things; though they succeed in sayings some ugly and true things about Western reality, then and nowadays. Debord between them with his Spectacle idea. Time has passed since the first edition of his famous book, and of course Spectacle has changed, like John writes, it’s decentralised for example.
I’d like to say too, that in the years and decades after famous 1968 “French May” (in whose theory Situs were a big part of that Leftist riot), some authors we could name as “Post-Situationists”, have criticised in part and refined Situ analysis of modern reality: mainly (post)Marxists and Anarchists too.
I want to re-read JMG post to understand better its critical views on Situationism Spectacle. I can only write now John’s right when says Spectacle isn’t only a Capitalist trick for mesmerizing Marxist “beings of light”(proletarians) and avoid the Situs beloved Revolution; it’s true Spectacle has been “democratised” by Internet until a certain degree.
I don’t want to finish my comment without remembering you’all what wrote some weeks ago about nowadays use of Spectacle terms by some anarchists to criticise the “Bolivarian Revolution” in Venezuela. It’s ironic that a supposed Socialist regime like Chavez yesterday and Maduros today, can be blamed for playing fake Communism by some Far Leftists. However, Debordian Spectacle has strange ways to perform…the ways of Spectacle are mysterious don’t you think it too?
I won’t go on writing more about this topic by now, to not bore you…
https://sherwood.news/tech/google-faces-its-first-big-lawsuit-for-ai-summaries-rolling-stone-lawsuit/
That’s a graph for dropping traffic at news sites.
In related non-covered news there is rioting in Nepal and the “small” demonstration in England may have been bigger than reported. Was it 100,000 or 3 million?
But Melania’s and Kate’s hats were carefully covered.
I’m sure those comments are related.
Clay Dennis # 2:
I’ve read your comment about your reasons to prefer ‘90s era, and if I’ve understand you correctly (English isn’t my mothers language) you think the Spectacle wasn’t so fractured like today. Am I right?
Well, it could be a good reason to be fond of that Good Old Times. Why not?
Shoggoth, that’s one strategy. There are others, which we’ll get to.
Dennis, you’re welcome and thank you.
Clay, ha! Back in the day, they’d have trouble getting past the California border with a case of Oly — do you remember when cars were expected to pull over and let the fruit inspectors make sure they weren’t bringing fruit with them, on the excuse that the fruit might have pests? Out-of-state beers tended to get confiscated as well. My late brother-in-law used to make money in his late teens smuggling Coors from Coeur d’Alene to Spokane, for similar reasons. But the weather’s part of what I had in mind — I spent a lot of summers on the Washington coast at Grayland and Westport, where the sand, the sky, and the sea were all different shades of cast-iron gray, the wind whipped drizzle into your face with the force of a slap, and 50°F was a nice warm day. The other part is that Olympia may just be the worst beer I’ve ever tasted. There was a running joke in Seattle when I was younger that if you put Oly out in bowls in your garden to attract and drown the slugs, you could count on a delegation of slugs at your back door the next morning saying, “Look, if you’re going to kill us, could you at least give us something fit to drink?”
Kimberly, you’re welcome. With me the awakening came a little earlier, which is probably why I never saw that ad, and somehow missed “speedwalking” (whatever that might be). As for the current state of trollery, I’ve deleted a couple of insult-laden tirades, but nothing has come in yet that’s any more interesting than that.
Synthase, I’ve never found scaling up a difficulty in this context, but of course your mileage may vary.
Chuaquin, glad to hear you’re enjoying the popcorn. In due time, we’ll get to a Situationist analysis of Situationism, and discuss how it used détournement on the Marxist scene to create a Spectacle all its own. Stay tuned!
Siliconguy, these days, the Spectacle is much more a matter of what’s not reported, not seen, and not mentioned than it is of the imagery that exists. That’s one of the reasons why it’s fragmenting — you can only pretend that there isn’t an elephant in the room if it doesn’t defecate on you…
One thing i’ve noticed is how much the far left’s idea of revolution seems to be taking more and more religious tones. I think deep down they know its not coming and they’re growing more desperate. Why is the left so enamored with socialism/marxism? Is it because of the myth of progress? I think some sites made it more appealing to a sort of downwardly mobile atheistic middle class person. Just check out r/late stage capitalism or r/a boring dystopia to see that. Or tumblr.
By the way, the original sensibility of the “New Left” was not that “marginalized” races and genders would take the working class’ place as the “New Proletariat” (as per the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre or Herbert Marcuse). The term “New Left” was first coined by English socialist E.P. Thompson in 1959.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._P._Thompson
Its original centre of critique was not white males but rather Marxism-Leninism. Its genesis was in 1956 in the wake of the Soviet Union crushing the Hungarian Revolution that year. It critiqued what it called “bureaucratic socialism” (which they saw as the governing ideology East of the Iron Curtain) and “corporate liberalism” (which they saw as the governing ideology West of the Iron Curtain). They sought what they called a “participatory” socialism that wouldn’t require a totalitarian state and largely (in line with the “Young Marx”) attacked what they saw as hierarchical structures/divisions of labour generally pivoting away from the later Marxian obsession with dogmatic historical materialism in favour of a more sociological critique.
https://reason.com/1969/10/01/philosophical-origins-and-intellectual-h/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Left
I appreciate your discussion of intersectionality, and in particular your note “privilege” is always contextual. Years ago I suggested the same thing to Leftists, pointing out that whether or not a particular category is “privileged” varies widely depending on the context. It wasn’t just that they didn’t understand, it was also clear that they thought I was agreeing with them. Their minds simply couldn’t grasp an argument that was different from “Yes, you are right” or “No, you are wrong.”
Around the same time, I made the same case to some right-wingers. This was about a dozen years ago, and the right-wingers were members of what was then called the “mens rights” movement. I pointed out that men and women were variously privileged in some contexts and disadvantaged in others. Instead of not understanding, they simply became angry and insisted that I was repeating feminist propaganda and that “We must expose and confront the oppression of men.”
One thing I’d add is that the number of possible categories of “privilege” extends well beyond the usual ones. Here in the US, what we might call “regional” privilege is extremely important and always overlooked, as are the relative privileges of the suburban versus the rural and the urban (again, depending entirely on context). As are differences of religion beyond the obvious ones; differences of culture; and ethnic differences within the larger (fake) categories of “black,” “white,” and “Hispanic.” And, again, all these vary depending on circumstances. I was raised by grandparents who experienced prejudice for being Catholic or members of white-but-not-white-enough ethnic groups (Italian, Irish). On the other hand, I knew a guy raised in a particular neighborhood in Philadelphia who was given an Irish first name despite having one parent who was English, for his own protection.
The larger issue, to my mind, with “collective morality” is simply that collectives never act, and are, as such, never moral agents. The larger the collective, the truer this is: “White people” in the United States are 200 million individuals and are incapable of doing anything at all as a group. They are thus never culpable, as “white people,” for their offenses. Nor, for that matter, are they laudable for their virtues. Virtue and vice, praise and blame, are concepts only applicable to moral agents, which can only be either individuals or (at best) groups in which individuals are able to actively participate. And so the entire thing is a simple error of reasoning, not that different from adding 2+2 and getting ten, which would be funny if its consequences weren’t so deadly.
Kimberly @ #9: My favorite ads were the ones for crooked cucumbers. (Yes, I’ve always been sort of literal-minded.)
Also do you think this latest AI craze is just another form of spectacle? I’m looking forward to when the bubble pops.
I was late getting to the previous post in this sequence, as well as to last week’s sub-thread about the self-destructive tendencies of the left, so this has been churning for several days.
There’s another dimension to the present-day decline of the left (to misquote Spengler, and at the same time to invoke him) which also ties in nicely with the unconscious Marxist derivation from Christian tradition.
Christianity, as you may recall, takes as its central theme a purposeful act of divine self-destruction. Jesus not only submitted willingly to his own torture and death, the Gospels make it clear that he intentionally provoked his enemies into taking extreme measures against him. All of this was a conscious part of the divine plan for the redemption of humankind, of course.
One of the psychological legacies that followed from this was an obsession with martyrdom all through the history of Christianity. There are stories of medieval missionaries going into Islamic countries and acting up in various ways to provoke the local authorities into giving them the death penalty. The Crusades formalized this practice, and Christian missionaries during the years of colonization internationalized it. What the Marxists did in the twentieth century was to secularize it.
Like you, I hung out with left-wing radicals in my early twenties and was deeply impressed by their ineffectiveness, despite their being involved in a near-frenzy of political activities. Eventually I came to realize that everything they did and said publicly served the purpose not of political or organizational victories, but of glorious self-immolation. (Privately, they hosted great potlucks and house concerts, which is why they were fun to hang out with). At a certain level (not on a conscious level, that is) they actually wanted to go down in flames, but in a morally splendid fashion.
Apply POSIWID to their political efforts *as individuals,* rather than from the perspective of the state, and you arrive at the religious analogue from a different direction. The purpose of beta-marxism and its offspring (including the cult of woke, which derives from Jesus’ various formulations of ‘the last shall be first’, and is explicitly presented as such from the pulpits of left-leaning churches) is not to accomplish the revolution, but to accomplish glorious martyrdom. As a completely unconscious tendency, it has none of the divine grace of the original Atonement, needless to say. It’s one thing to consciously face death for something you believe in; it’s quite another to go around creating smoking craters with yourself at the centre.
Then we come to the Neopagans, who were the subject of a sub-thread on last week’s post. They too are unconsciously acting out the Christian/Marxist martyr script. Jesus said to love your enemies and do good to those who persecute you; a dominant strain in Neopaganism today seems to encourage hating your enemies and hexing those you perceive to be persecutors. This does not add up to a rejection of Christianity but an affirmation, since it’s a simple inversion. And unfortunately, as was mentioned last week, some in the Neopagan community are busy setting themselves up for another great round of witch hunts with all of their public demonstrations of malicious magic.
For an example of a truly different path, I would offer up an offhand remark you once made to the effect that you simply don’t have enemies. Or consider Buddhism and Hinduism, in which the great role models more often seem to be happy, calm, successful people rather than glorious victims. As has been said here before, there’s no one right answer here about how to be- it just helps to know more than one story.
I see two reasons for the rising phenomenon of assassinations and mass shootings. First is that the cruelties and uncertainties of late stage capitalism are literally making people insane. Very few of us are able to dance on chaos, and those who can are usually the least productive among us. Second is the use or overuse of pharmaceuticals to “treat”, you should excuse the expression, mental illnesses. I don’t say that chemical intervention might not have good effects in some cases, but they seem to be being prescribed in the same way antibiotics were being over prescribed a few decades ago.
I would like to say that, as a lifetime weirdo, now senior, I consider it no part of my duty to follow every aspect of popular culture. So, I know next to nothing about gaming, most sports except baseball, anime–that I regret as it seems like an interesting art form– or the late Mr. Kirk. My condolences to his family. It is doubly tragic when a young parent is killed, which, I might add, does happen daily on the mean ghetto streets of more than one of our cities. Naturally, whomever was bankrolling Mr. Kirk, the little men behind the curtain to whom our host referred, will accept no responsibility for putting their gifted protégé in danger. As I mentioned, I know almost nothing about Mr. Kirk, but I can’t help being reminded of a musician, Jimi Hendrix, who was plucked from a Greenwich club, escorted to Britian, helped to the fame and fortune which his talent deserved, and then died young, according to some accounts murdered by people he trusted.
I wonder, if someone were to approach you following on a performance, or something you might have written, and promise to make you famous and your ideas/music heard, it might not be the best part of valor to refuse the “favor”.
@siliconguy #12
Early in the day the BBC reported “thousands” which is true only to the extent that more than any more than 1999 people are thousands. A few hours later the police suggested 150,000 if memory serves, more or less at the same time the organisers were quoted as claiming 3 million. That’s quite a spread.
One commentator on the spot who seems to have some regard for truth suggested 600 thousand. That’s still more than enough to make any of Westminster’s inhabitants blench.
So in essence, we currently inhabit a kaleidoscope of post-modern Spectacularisms. Would that be a proper synopsis?
Tangentially, I just finished rewatching Robert Huges’s series “SHOCK of THE NEW” .. which I think tended to prove the rule, of just how much of the various ‘modern’ art movements of the past century had become nothing short of spectacle.
I must confess to having a fondness for contemporary meme art, punching directly to point .. often pointing sarcastic jabs at various illogical aspects of that agglomeration of ‘oppression olympics’ of which you mentioned above.
It’s gotten to the point that there are so many spectacles to behold in so many media formats that I think I’ve become innocculated to them or at least bored with every new fad or “hot take” that the internet spits out. I find myself more interested in something with some staying power in the sense of exercising my mind to behold and contemplate something for a while to truly understand it.
The Marxist belief as described above is a recipe for making total moral monsters. It rules out any way to be truly ethical at all! Completely apart from the Cold War catch phrase of “Godless Commies!”
There is one way, granted to some of our two-legged breed, to be immune to the Spectacle, because we are not social primates. On the lowest end of all is the common sociopath, but you can also achieve it through autism. Just my $0.02
JMG # 14:
OK, after reading your comment remembering the “Situationist analysis of Situationism”, I’m very curious waiting for your opinion about it…
Seeking, good! Yes, and that follows naturally from the origins of modern leftist radicalism in Christian eschatology. In Eric Voegelin’s neat phrase, the modern left seeks to “immanentize the eschaton” — that is, to turn the visionary promises of Christian faith into a mundane reality in this world, with the lion being forced to lie down with the lamb at gunpoint if necessary. As the mythology of progress collapses around us, the foundations of their belief system are cracking apart, and the left is on its way back to religion, whether it realizes this or not.
David, yes, and that’s specifically why I mentioned the New Left of the 1960s, not the very different scene that went by the same name in the 1950s. It does help if you pay attention to what I’m actually saying.
Steve, of course. I remember the men’s rights scene as it manifested in Seattle rather well, and not fondly; they’d simply taken feminist rhetoric and inverted it, and as a result, they’d become just as humorless and unpleasant as the feminists they hated. (cough, cough, what you contemplate you imitate, cough, cough…) As for categories of privilege, good heavens, yes, as far as I can tell, any factor that differentiates one human being from another functions as a privilege differential in at least some contexts.
Seeking, I’m probably going to have to talk about the LLM bubble sometime soon. I grant that the bursting of the bubble will be popcorn-worthy, but it’s likely to have tremendously destructive economic consequences; I hope you have some way to make a living that won’t be impacted.
Dylan, I think you’re quite correct; certainly that makes sense of what I’ve seen. I’m starting to wonder if the entire extremist scene in the US today, from one end of the political landscape to another, is full of Jesus wannabees who are behaving more and more outrageously in a frantic attempt to be crucified, and the problem they face is that most people just want them to go away and stop bothering everybody.
Mary, one of the last television shows I ever watched, back in the late 1970s, was an episode of Kung Fu, with David Carradine as a half-Chinese martial artist wandering through the Old West. In that episode a gunslinger tried to hire Carradine’s character, saying, “I could really use you in Mexico.” Carradine gave him a flat look and said, “I have no desire to be used in Mexico.” That line stuck with me, and it’s come to mind several times in my career. There were a couple of interactions back in the peak oil days that felt very much as though I was being sounded out for a starring role, and a few more recent ones as well — none as blatant as you suggest, but then I suspect they rarely are.
Polecat, that’s one way of phrasing it, though the term “post-modern” is pure Spectacle, and means exactly nothing.
WatchFlinger, and that boredom is something that the Situationist International never anticipated. It’s a potent force.
Patricia M, you’ll get no argument from me.
@20 Dylan
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”
except that a large portion of those left-wing extremists are not motivated by love, and do not even have real friends. They seek status in their groups in life, and posthumonous fame/notoriety thereafter (if they’re truly serious about going out in a blaze of glory).
I’m not sure if my job will be affected when the bubble pops, I work in banking. But my ultimate plan is to ordain as a monk. Hopefully I will be able to do so soon.
@19 Seeking
If I understand the outline of the idea correctly, every abstraction that culture lays on top of base reality is part of the Spectacle, and the Spectacle only ceases to exist altogether in societies undergoing a “Barbarism of Sense” as explained in this old JMG blog post:
https://www.ecosophia.net/blogs-and-essays/the-well-of-galabes/the-course-the-nations-run/
As for the AI hype, I’m wondering if there is something to the pop mundane astrological notion that the modern planets changing signs is a big deal. Pluto (overblown hype about societal transformations) in Aquarius (which is associated with machines) might be fuelling the overblown hype about LLMs.
I suspect the spectacle seems a despicable specimen from the perspective of many spectators of our species as upon inspection it shows a spectrum of suspect and disrespectful aspects hid in the perspective of our non-introspective society.
Thanks for the great essay, JMG
(Apologies)
I somehow managed to miss a large chunk of your essay before I responded, including this:
“Much of the disintegration of American society into a patchwork of mutually hostile subcultures, in fact, can be traced to the shattering of the Spectacle into competing sub-Spectacles, each appealing to its own audience.”
Earlier this morning I was writing about Ioan Couliano, and the way he characterized Western capitalist societies as “magician states.” In those terms, we’ve degenerated from a single magician state to a state of magical warfare, in which various rival magicians’ sects compete with each other for their share of the mass mind.
To my mind, this points to the need to withdraw from the collective as much as possible. In the magicians’ war, the minds of ordinary people are not pieces on the board, but squares to be occupied by the pawns and pieces of memes and influencers.
“In classic Marxism, the groups that mattered were social classes, and in that scheme, the ruling class was by definition evil and the proletariat class was by definition good. That meant—and yes, you can find this in Marxist literature—that when Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in the Russian empire, that was an evil act, since by definition the ruling class can only do evil. It also meant—and you can also find this in Marxist literature—that when Communists commit mass murder, that’s a virtuous act, since the crimes were committed by the proletariat, and since the proletariat can do no wrong, the victims must have deserved it.”
Okay, this now makes perfect sense of why Communist States are always so spectacularly evil. When they take power, they are, by their own worldview, now evil. Since things like mass murder and political repression are the kinds of things evil people do, their worldview forces them into that role.
Socialism has its flaws, but this ideological flaw in Communism supercharges all of them into something far, far worse.
I noticed as the second religiosity is now in full swing, a lot of secular materialists seem to be getting more and more insistent on how religion is all bunk, their victory is assured, and how can anyone believe such nonsense. I’ve noticed that secular materialism and marxism are intertwined in a van diagram
I’ve also noticed and i’m sure your familiar with them? Soi-disant Secular Buddhists. They’re losing ground and i’m noticing that heritage Buddhists like myself are becoming more and more of a voice. The mindfulness meditation secular Buddhists hate this. They despise ritual and don’t believe in rebirth or karma. I think that when they finally go away, Buddhism will have a real future in the US.
I remember a US political commentator back in the mid ’90s, George Will if memory serves, making a speech at either Cambridge or Oxford (Oxbridge) about the recent collapse of the USSR. His singular zinger that I took away was, “Karl Marx had such great insight that many of his predictions have yet to come true.” I still chuckle about that one.
JMG,
I do remember the days when they checked you for fruit at the border. But my favorite was a TV commercial put out by Blitz Weinhard ( Portlands own fizzy yellow liquid, slightly better than oly) in the 1970’s. In it a seemy looking California Driver is having his car searched at the checkpoint at the Oregon Boarder. The inspectors find a case of California beer and remark, “In Oregon we only allow good beer”. He mentions that it is not against the law for a tourist to bring such beer in to Oregon , but it would still have to be confiscated. The Driver then remarks, ” I am not a tourist, I am a developer moving here from California.” At that point the inspector gives him a scowl and motions to the nearby state trooper, ” That sir is against the law”, and the driver is lead away in handcuffs. The Commercial ends with, ” Blitz Weinhard, the beer here”.
@30 Patrick
Thank you for the link I will have to read it. So far the comments here all make me think and I appreciate that.
JMG, what about the selfie and the photo posting culture propagated via social media platforms like Instagram,Facebook to the point of people making their own life a spectacle for the world to show. Like I recently went on a family vacation to France and it was absurd to watch people bringing out their phone to watch any monument before seeing it through their eyes. It has fried people memories to the point that if it is not captured via photos then people don’t think they will remember anything on their own.
The left should not have spent the last decade obsessed with white supremacist lynch groups and neo-Nazi terrorists, because then they wouldn’t be copying right now the nasty tactics of past white supremacists and neo-Nazis and alienating everybody.
History pedantry: Many Marxists actually were able to recognize when a ruling class did something good, though they would also attribute it to class interest. In the case of Alexander’s emancipation of the serfs, he did it in a way that protected the interests of the landowners and left the ex-serfs* chained by debt (to pay their former owners). In addition, the land was left in the possession of the owners (many of whom rarely if ever even visited the land and many did not speak Russian). This incomplete agrarian reform held back Russia’s development and festered until the Russian Revolution. The main fuel powering the Russian Revolution was precisely the incomplete agrarian reform.
*Serfs is the term used for unfree peasants in Russian and in other languages, but by the 1860s, they were actually chattel slaves, not serfs. Serfs are part of landed property. They come with the land, like the barns and irrigation ditches or whatever. Chattel slaves could be bought and sold and shipped elsewhere. I only ran across this recently and it fascinated me that I had never seen this mentioned before.
We now return you to our regularly scheduled broadcast.
Like Gramsci after WW1, the Situationists were trying to figure out why the working class had not been able to seize power, why the power of the working class was in retreat. The obvious distortions of Soviet communism were another powerful factor. Or to put it another way, why the liberating potential of labor-saving industrialization was not actually liberating people.
The notion that the Situationists were at an unusual junction of Spectacular unity is fascinating. Thank you. I have to chew on that one.
I’ve been thinking about Dion Fortune’s thrustblock, in relation to a murderous left. Descending into a street fighting shooting war by wah of tit for tat assassination seems like it would benefit our globalist elite.
Any ideas what that thrustblock looks like?
I wonder if the Marxist got their misunderstanding of morality from what i believe to be a misunderstanding of the second coming of Christ. It just seems blinding obvious to me that The Second Coming of Christ refers to that time when a person accepts Jesus into their heart, mind and soul and starts to act in accordance with that new relationship. So from my perspective, Jesus’s second coming has happened millions of times. ( i know there has been more than a billion Christians, it just that i am not sure how many Christians have actually let Christ into their hearts, minds and souls.)
The idea that Jesus would be reborn from a virgin or come down from heaven and save all the good people and punish the bad seems to be a kind of wish fulfillment fantasy that misses the point.
@34
Last week, I watched part of a YouTube video from Sir Sic, a professional atheist influencer I used to watch begging for more people to watch and react to his videos, since recent changes to the YouTube algorithim are destroying his channel!
Seeking, that’s a very sensible move just now even in practical terms. Religious groups are among the very few things that do well in periods of economic contraction. And, of course, there’s the spiritual dimension…
Tyrell, a truly spectral prospect — but not unexpected. 😉
Steve, a case can be made.
William, and a case can be made for that, too — though I think it’s more that since they think they’re fighting for the proletariat, whatever they do, no matter how monstrously evil, is virtuous.
Seeking, I’m delighted to hear this! Yes, I’m all too familiar with “secular Buddhism” — I was already around when the first version of it, which exploited and disemboweled Zen the way the recent versions did to Theravadin Buddhism, was first being heavily marketed. I’d call both versions tripe, except that swine’s intestines can at least provide a little nourishment. To my mind, the crucial thing that has to happen if the Dharma is to thrive in the US is that it has to break out of the upper middle class ghetto where so much of it has been confined, and find ways to reach out to the working classes and the poor. Historically, the Pure Land tradition is good at that — I think of the Japanese Pure Land teacher Honen, who wandered around the country in the middle of the savage Gempei Wars, teaching people of every social class to pray to Amida. So I think you may just have a chance to help contribute to that.
KevPilot, I’m not generally a fan of George Will, but that’s a nice zinger.
Clay, I grant that Biltz-Weinhard was better than Oly; it could hardly have been worse. Even so, I thought I hated beer until I had my first Guinness.
I’m not so sure a new, entrepreneurial elite is emerging, as that the guard is changing within the bureaucratic managerial elite that first emerged in the 30s, with modest ideological pretexts. That elite built a modest welfare state on the foundation of the US’s growing imperial economic power, as a result of WWII, that was able to provide for the welfare state without seriously impeding corporate growth. This all started to change in the late 70’s, but it took a couple decades for corporate America to realize that big government was actually their best friend, which they didn’t believe until Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made it clear that they would always be bailed out, no matter how much they screwed up. By the time most of the corporate elite realized that the Democrats were their best friends, the middle class and working class supporters of that party (grandchildren of the beneficiaries of the 30’s reforms) were fleeing to Trump, knowing they were being screwed, but not having a clear idea by whom, or how. The new generation of corporate leaders were solidly supporting the Democratic Party until last November’s election, wen they flipped en masse to grovel at Trump’s feet. This latter is part of the Spectacle, of course, because they are calling the shots, not him. Sort of analogous to Trump lamenting what Zelensky won’t do to enable him to end the war. Will be interesting to see how it all plays out, but I suspect, given history and spectacle, there is a very narrow range of possible outcomes.
Arnav, that’s a great example of the decentralization of the Spectacle! They’re not just consuming a Spectacle made for them by others, they’re manufacturing a Spectacle for their own consumption and that of their associates. Mind you, it’s still alienated and alienating, but not in the way the Situationist International had in mind.
Anon, but what if that was what they wanted?
Jessica, hmm. I wonder what would happen if I suggested that your comment was an example of a “not all Marxists” argument! But you’re right, of course, that Marxists cover a broad spectrum of ideas, and some of them embraced the logic of collective morality less thoroughly as others. As for the Situationists, Gramsci et al., yes — they were in exactly the same situation as those devout Christians who, after the Great Disappointment of 1844, scrambled around trying to find some reason why the prophecies they’d trusted weren’t as completely wrong as the facts suggested. Have you by any chance read that classic of sociology When Prophecy Fails?
William, at this point, if the right can simply manage to keep the guns in the gun safes, content themselves with canceling leftists, and let the blowback against the left take the shape of increasingly strict law enforcement, they can avoid being the thrustblock and let the left go spinning out the rest of the way to the Ring-Pass-Not — it’s not that far of a journey at this point. Violent reprisals would give the left a thrust block to push against, and sustain them.
Dobbs, well, that’s my view of the Second Coming, too — “the Kingdom of God is within you,” as the man said — but it’s a minority view among Christians these days, as I’m sure you know. Yeah, the full-blown apocalyptic fantasy is the foundation for the Marxist delusion.
Patrick, thank you. That’s very good to hear.
Jerry, nah, as the dollar loses its status as global reserve currency, the US will no longer be able to afford the deficit spending that props up its hyperinflated bureaucracy. That’s one of the reasons I identify this as an elite replacement cycle, because the replacement of bureaucracies by private corporations — think of the way that NASA is being replaced by SpaceX — involves a significant transfer of power from the bureaucracy to a rising entrepreneurial class. It’s not just a change of personnel, it’s a structural change. Now of course that doesn’t mean that power will be any more widely or fairly distributed than before — quite the contrary — but the change we’re facing is as momentous as the rise of the bureaucratic state in the time of FDR or the rise of “robber baron” entrepreneurial capitalism after the Civil War.
JMG,
I’ve heard, but I’m not sure if it’s true, that the original point of school-based education was to ensure that all of the people in some kingdom (I forget which) learned the same thing to increase social stability. That is, to create a single unifying Spectacle. Have you (or anyone else) heard this before?
[LLM-generated comment deleted]
I’m glad that I have this vocabulary now, because I’ve been searching for a way to describe this phenomenon for a long time, particularly the shattering of American into mutually exclusive, sometimes hostile sub-spectacles due to the internet, streaming services, and most notably, social media.
The internet itself started the fracturing by allowing people to obsess over their favorite topics all day long in a way that wasn’t possible during the era of TV and books. The streaming services furthered this by breaking TV’s monopoly on what people watch, allowing them to watch their favorite shows on repeat without having to purchase expensive VHS tapes or DVDs. But social media with the comments section created a whole world of influencers and followers, some of whom largely exist only in opposition to other influencers and their followers, and that’s what’s really disintegrated American society.
For what it’s worth, I largely live in a pro wrestling, anime, toddler parenting advice, League of Legends, A Song of Ice and Fire lore, Star Wars fanfic and Transformer toy bubble online these days, and it’s pretty easygoing compared to the political bubbles I used to live inside. I think it’s the team sport nature of the political spectacles that lead to the dehumanization we see.
I’m hoping I’m the first to share this, and hoping even more it is appropriate: An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiernan-morgan-lauren-purje-an-illustrated-guide-to-guy-debord-s-the-society-of-the-spectacle
Yes, I am intending to read the original, but I like to start with overviews, in any case.
“Much of the disintegration of American society into a patchwork of mutually hostile subcultures, in fact, can be traced to the shattering of the Spectacle into competing sub-Spectacles, each appealing to its own audience.”
Expanding on this idea a bit – American society *insists* that one chooses a spectacle, to the point where others will try and force it.
Declining to select a spectacle results in ostracisation.
The entirety of American society is centered around this very fact. The public school system is designed to facilitate a specific spectacle. Social media is designed to facilitate a specific spectacle. Modern science fiction / young adult novels are designed to facilitate a specific spectacle. Etc etc.
Ones class, culture, politics, and (for the vast majority of people) opinions are all based on what specific spectacle one is beholden to.
The reason for this is simple – the national religion has de facto become Secular Materialism, and specticle serves as a method of organizing society based on how deep ones “faith” is.
Oh agreed that another issue with the Dharma in america is way too many fell into the trap of appealing only to upper middle class secularists. And what happens when those upper middle class secularists lose interest? You need the poor for staying power. And the poor need help too. That is part of compassion to reach the those who need it most.
The good news is that there are monasteries that recognize this like Sravasti abbey which doesn’t have expensive retreat fees but rely on dana as it should. And yes! as a Pure Land Buddhist my hope is to teach the Dharma to the working class and poor. To help them. Way too many people think you can just ignore them. And I think Amida Buddha would have more to say to those who are less enamored with secular materialism.
May my practice liberate all beings.
Thanks for an interesting text, as always.
One thing got me to rise an eyebrow. You write “In some European countries right now, for example, a woman who is raped by an immigrant faces more serious legal consequences if she mentions her rapist’s nationality on social media than the rapist will ever face for his crime”
That sounds quite alarming, witch European countries might this be?
In Sweden, famous for it’s social democracy, rape will give a penalty of 3 to 10 years in prison and defamation will give a fine or up to 2 years in prison.
@43 Patrick
I believe it. I’ve also noticed that while christians, buddhists, hindus, muslims, jews, even neopagans will at least talk about their faiths. But athiest youtubers can never talk about anything other then christianity. Or islam when they remember it exists.
>how much the far left’s idea of revolution seems to be taking more and more religious tones.
Oh, they are fundies. I spent quite a bit of time around some when I was a child and I can smell the self-righteous certainty on them. That’s what drives people to fundamentalism of any kind – they crave certainty in their lives and will do all sorts of things to achieve the illusion of it, if not the thing itself. There maybe a genetic component to it too – some hoomans may be hardwired to Believe, if the conditions are favorable to it.
At least the fundies I remember had a moral code and behaved like adults. These ones lie effortlessly and are full of childish spite.
The elephant in the room is usually too polite to do something rude but may inadvertantly step on someone’s toes. Then, that person can not scream without the other people in the room noticing. But the person whose toes have been smashed must still not acknowledge that the elephant is in the room. A metaphor for the situationalist not being able to read the situation.
In this post you pointed out something very significant. My middle grandson is a straight white male. He is also, like you, an Aspie. For me to consider him as privileged is outrageous. My younger son has ADHD. He is also a straight white male. Privileged? No way.
I come from a working class background, but I have encountered enough drunken, bullying miners to know that being working class does not make a person better (or worse).
A person’s true worth comes from what’s inside, not from what’s outside.
I’ve read again your post. John, and I’ve thought about it when I was returning home this evening (local time). I saw the people on the bus doing the same “normal” activities, which it’s the same as watching them with their cell phones like zombies: playing videogames, watching videos or podcasts with their Left/Right Wing favorite Zealots, hearing advices by some (corporate paid?) influencers, and so on. I’m going to remember you’ll JMG words describing what’s the Spectacle:
“This is an obvious expression of the Spectacle, which is why I used it as an example. There are many more expressions that are much less obvious. The choice of words a speechwriter puts into the mouth of a politician, the choice of events that appear on the evening news, the choice of colors used for products and their packaging, and many more such choices all contribute to the construction of the Spectacle. So, to at least as great an extent, do the words that are left out, the events that go unreported, and the products that are never manufactured or sold. All of these things and more flow together to create the artifact that is the Spectacle, a relation mediated by images that pretends to be the world.”
According this definition so well redacted, the Spectacle covers a lot of activities in today world, and it’s been fragmented by “new” technologies such as cell phones with internet access.
Well, the narrow minded view (Marxist) which had Debord and his fellows is outdated in this sense, so near everything in this Western and Westernised world is mediated by Spectacle, and nearly everybody is playing this dirty game nowadays. Thinking more about this situation, we easily could say Spectacle has eaten the world…However, I’ve got a doubt in this point: if everything is Spectacle now, nothing is Spectacle: because the term is too wide to describe reality. I mean, I can compare it (I don’t know I’m wrong or not) with the term “Fascism” like Leftism uses and abuses since a long time ago: if everything is fascist, really nothing is fascist. Am I explaining well to you? What could be done to avoid this devaluation of the Spectacle notion?
————————————————————————————————————
Oh, the Oppresion Olimpics…I only can write here I’m not a winner in this game: like you, John, I’m a white straight man in the low end of middle class. I don’t belong to the today “beings of light” supposedly clean and pure for the woke doctrine…
In my brief stint at a university one of my socialism inclined friends used to put on the 1974 society of the spectacle movie on in his dorm room. I remember being entranced by it, even if I wasn’t mature enough to real “get” it. After reading more Debord later, I have often found myself thinking “I wonder what Guy would have to say about this as the spectacle gets more bizarre, interactive and all encompassing. You’re right of course that he never foresaw the way it would evolve.
Earlier this year my friend who lives in LA described to me his experience at the “world’s first sperm race” which involved a simulated (fake) display of supposedly donated samples from “athletes” and… well I’ll spare everyone the details but as far as “spectacle” goes in any sense of the word it seemed a new low. But the most disturbing part of his account was hearing about the “after party” which had all of the trappings of a party but was actually just a set designed to LOOK like a party that people would come in and pose with fake drinks, friends, etc. (notably no one was even drinking or doing drugs) in a form of strictly simulated revelry. He talked to the folks putting on the event and apparently it happened every week, with different influencers stopping by to simulate being social for the sake of looking like they were having fun for social media and then leaving without really interacting at all.
Another thing brought to mind is the somewhat recent phenomenon of having events inside of videogames like fortnite, where people virtually gather to watch a simulation of a concert… or a dj set… or even a movie. Even the human connection of being physically next to someone while mediated by the spectacle is being replaced.
As someone who worked through the whole pandemic and never was “quarantined”, I definitely feel like my relationship to the spectacle has evolved somewhat differently than those who were, especially those who’s only connection to the outside world was through virtual meetings etc. It can be alienating to be around them – especially when they wax nostalgic about the glory days of “working from home” as though it were a universal experience. Maybe it’s just me, I don’t know.
Thanks for hosting this space, JMG.
I’ve never heard of taking down Marx with the jujitsu move of pointing out that he was a pre-millenarian, but that’s a brilliant postulate with a lot to back it up in the way of interpretive and explantory power. I am always surprised how few people know about the eschatology positions (particularly, postmillenialism), but now I’m surprised I never pegged Marx for this. Of course, you’re right. And given these religious categories underpinning Marx, and the absence of ethical norms to balance such, makes total sense to become a raging revolutionary psychopath. That’s just what a truly good person would do. Perhaps out of all this, a recognition that it isn’t “Fascism” that is THE problem, but Totalitarianism and ideologies (which are totalitarian almost by definition) that is the unperceived Shadow, here, collectively? Religions have a lot of checks-and-balances on this sort of thing out of necessity, but political ideologies at minimum haven’t had time to develop any, and aren’t looking to, anyway. Jesus addressed this when he said, your righteousness has to exceed the Scribes and Pharisees. You can neither ignore your kith and kin (this is the liberal definition of radical individualism), but neither can you merely do good to your clade (a perennial temptation). You have to surpass that. Which is impossible unless you begin to know yourself, impossible if you are always approaching yourself “from the outside” (objectified). The image of Marx with his beard on the wall like a Jean Calvin portrait, or Lenin in his immaculate tomb like a Catholic saint, springs to mind. Deprived of religion, made purely economic, merely removes all the safeties on the eschatological speculations.
An interesting post. Just within my lifetime, I’ve lost most interest in politics, and I never was one for much culture. I had heard of Mr. Kirk, but had no clue who he was or what he represented until the events of last week. When I was in my 20s in the ’80s, politics still seemed to have some logical structure to it. Now in my mid ’60s with definitions being flipped (a liberal today is far different than a liberal in the early 1960s) and so much fragmentation, most people I hear discussing it come across as absurdly hypocritical or worse, absurdly echoing some mainstream narrative. JMG, you’re one of the few people who offers a comprehensive and logical view on the topics of politics and culture.
The ruling class is being swapped out, but I’m trying to figure how the rising entrepreneurial folks fit into The Long Descent. Seems a bit contradictory at first thought. I’m looking forward to the future posts and how that works on this topic.
In a completely unrelated side note, the horses I tend to wager on at the racetrack run much more like a mule-Clydesdale mix, and not a hippogriff. No wings, less run, more plodding. Clydemule, Muledale?
I feel like these posts are starting from the unstated assumption that “The Spectacle” is a bad thing. Why is this the case? We all consume culture in some form or another, and have throughout history. The couple in your example could easily have bought two copies of the same book, read them (a necessarily solitary activity) and then discussed the characters and situations that don’t exist, with said discussion necessarily being influenced by the author’s worldview and ideas. Again, none of this is bad, and it’s also completely unavoidable if you don’t want to spend your whole life under a rock. As the essay mentioned, and some comments have elaborated on, a lot of the current issues in American society stem from the fragmentation of our formerly unified culture into a set of differing subcultures with opposed values. I don’t see how more atomization, more fracturing of the current “Spectacle”, is going to help us-quite the contrary! The only way our society is going to heal-assuming it ever heals-is for us to find our way back to a common culture with a set of shared values that most people can at least accept and participate in.
Seeking the Pure Land #34:
“I’ve also noticed and i’m sure your familiar with them? Soi-disant Secular Buddhists. They’re losing ground and i’m noticing that heritage Buddhists like myself are becoming more and more of a voice. The mindfulness meditation secular Buddhists hate this. They despise ritual and don’t believe in rebirth or karma. I think that when they finally go away, Buddhism will have a real future in the US.”
Are you speaking of Rationalists Buddhists?(we have some of them here in Europe too, if you’re refering to this garden and boring variety of Buddhism. Of course, there are here a lot of serious Buddhists who take seriously rituals and old teachings…
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A. Jindal # 38:
“Like I recently went on a family vacation to France and it was absurd to watch people bringing out their phone to watch any monument before seeing it through their eyes.”
Yeah, I’ve seen the same thing in my town touristic zones, even people of my family imitates this nonsense…
Regarding Dennis Michael Sawyer’s comment – I think that monarchy, or at least the British monarchy, of which I am theoretically a subject, functioned kind of like the modern spectacle. If everybody in the Empire maintains a parasocial relationship with the Royal Family – meaning they care about royal weddings, funerals, and so on, then in theory, everyone in Empire has a second degree social connection to everyone else. It is not the same as real connection, but on the other hand, if you know that someone else cares that Elizabeth II died recently, one could assume that you’re mostly on the same page with that person. In a way I think it was much better than the modern American version, where the royal family is deposed every 4-8 years, but go on to join a schizophrenic pantheon of disgraced royals.
I think this works in practice. To bring current events into this post, this still works in our current context – you can reasonably judge people by their response to Charlie Kirk’s murder, even though hardly anyone actually has a non-parasocial relationship to Kirk.
“Much of the disintegration of American society into a patchwork of mutually hostile subcultures, in fact, can be traced to the shattering of the Spectacle into competing sub-Spectacles, each appealing to its own audience.”
One common reaction I’ve seen to Charlie Kirk’s murder online was to assert that one has never heard of him before. To be honest, I’m not sure whether I encountered his name before either, but then I am a foreigner with only haphazard interest in American politics these days. Then again, I also see little reason to doubt that many Americans stating this genuinely haven’t heard of him either – because he was not part of their sub-Spectacle, in this frame.
For others, he was in their sub-Spectacle, but in a villain role. I’m sure that many of those attacking him after his death, and also many of those praising him, knew precious little if anything about him even if they did know about him. They just knew that he was bad/good, and that is enough. I suppose that too is alienation – they “know” Charlie Kirk like they know the product in the ads, more or less.
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@Jessica #40, the serfdom question is a fascinating one (so I hope our host will pardon the digression). On paper, it really was still serfdom and not slavery – the serf-owners still had some restrictions in what they could do and chafed against them loudly. In practice, though, the situation was as you say, because serf-owners took advantage of the domestically incredibly weak state left behind by Peter the Great to abuse their already powerful official status and by the 19th century infamously often treated serfs as chattel slaves that could be freely traded, going around or straight past laws. What began as a necessary evil (when there was no other way of sustaining a military able to fight off our many neighbours) gradually became less necessary and more evil, to the point of threatening a demographic collapse.
Many Romanovs and other members of the elite deplored this state of affairs (unless we think nothing people in their position ever say or write can be trusted, of course, but I think that line of reasoning kills a lot of historical inquiry on the spot), on both moral and practical state interest grounds. However, they were afraid of being overthrown (post-Peter Russia was maybe the most coup-prone state of its time), and also of the chaos that a sudden abolition would bring to the countryside. Alexander II was the first to dare abolish it nonetheless, and he spent the night before preparing to flee in case of a coup. His fear proved exaggerated, though hardly groundless. I’d add that many landowners at the time supported the reform and several provincial assemblies’ worth wanted it to go further; many others, of course, wanted to avoid it or else squeeze even more out of the peasants than they actually got.
The reform we got was a hard-fought compromise, though surely better than nothing (IIRC it marked the beginning of a significant improvement in average life expectancy; life for most peasants was still very hard, but generally not so abysmal as before). It is hard to say whether much more could have been done at the time, given the political complexities involved. Subsequent attempts to complete the reform were largely derailed by other events. I think everyone who seriously wrote on the subject in Russia would agree that it was incomplete and that this was the main cause of the revolution, but recent assessments have been somewhat more favourable towards it than those made in Soviet times (due to a combination of deeper study with more data and a different ideological climate). The key and somewhat relevant point for me, though, is that it was quite a bit more complicated than protecting class interest, despite what our Marxists claimed back then – the ruling class was divided on what constituted that and also concerned with broader national interest and morality (self-serving, partial, often deluded, etc. though it may have been). Of course, reinforcing the “class” state and its “class” morality was also evil from their perspective, as it all stood in the way of the greater good.
Interesting in my real world because I live in a very red corner (a delightful irony in that expression, no?) of the Rust Belt. The proles here seem to have woken up to class thinking… and have some payback in mind already. In open discussion, to the point of appearing in red news outlets, is the removal as a class for HR managers. The loudest proponents of what passes for feminism among the laptop class is another group drawing enough ire to make me wonder about collateral damage… and what my grandmother the Suffragette would be doing to foment this particular toppling of the elite. (I’m pretty sure she was an Anti-Poke Nose, so…) For all the hot air about sleeping giants, I think several have woken up in the past few weeks; so, your remarks on Situationism will be well-used as we here at Tower 440 of the Green Wizards’ Benevolent and Protective Association attempt to augur the strange birds crossing Flyover Country in the coming weeks.
The philosopher Karl Popper in his book The Open Society and its Enemies has destroyed Marxism intellectually beyond any hope of recovery. Unfortunately most people have never read Open Society any more than most socialists have read Das Kapital. The collapse of the Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia, which tried to put Marxist theory into practice, have proved it a failure morally and politically also.
Unfortunately Marxism’s opposite, market fundamentalism, is alive and well and is another example of how the opposite of a bad idea can also be a bad idea.
Interestingly, you make two points here that I first heard from Jordan Peterson from around 2017:
First, about how the proponents of intersectionality are wrong not because the idea itself is wrong, but about how they focus on just a handful of factors like gender and race. They ignore all the rest of the innumerable factors that make one a mixture of oppressor and victim, depending on the exact context, and the end-point of intersectional analysis is not some group of victims or oppressors but each individual person.
Second, regarding your comments about gangs, he also mentions that all things being equal, if you’re a teenager it’s better to be in a gang than not to be in one. This is because the gang is probably the first social context you’d enter where you have to prove your worth by competence and loyalty, as opposed to it simply being a given. The problem isn’t being “in a gang” per se, but finding a good group of people who want what’s best for you.
With respect to “The Spectacle”, I find it curious that people seem to have forgotten the days when Obama won in 2008, when everyone celebrated his victory as a triumph of the Internet and new media. This was the early days of social media, and quite a few years before smartphones were ubiquitous, and internet access was going mainstream but it’s mostly the college educated professional class who hung out there (here?) a lot. Now that the rubes are creating most of the content (at least those that are not AI generated, I suppose), suddenly social media is evil and controlled by Russians and caused Trump to win, blah blah.
Finally, regarding the eschaton, as a rather normie Catholic who recites “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead” every Sunday, I do believe in a literal second coming, but also adhere to the “Christ coming within you” interpretation. I’ve heard some Catholic commenters call the latter the “third coming” to distinguish between the two, as both are held to in Catholicism. Premillenialism, for me, flies in the face of Mt. 24:36: “But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Technically, premillenialism is about the *sequence* of events surrounding the eschaton as opposed to how and when it happens, but ideas have consequences and one of those that I’ve noticed is that its adherents can’t seem to help attempting to predict (or worse, immanentize) it.
@Clay #2
This is a really insightful point, and a great way to put it.
@Seeking #34
Thank you for this! I thought I detected a shift away from secular Buddhism to the Pure Land traditions a few years ago, and I’m very happy to hear confirmation of this, not only for proving me right but because I think it’s a very good development. If there’s ever a Pure Land temple near me I will be sure to stop by.
P.S. I re-read my comment now and want to clarify that I’m only highlighting Peterson’s comments on the first two points, regarding intersectionality and youth gang membership. He might have made other comments on social media or eschatology but not anything I wanted to particularly raise here.
The Spectacle! I love it! This essay puts a lot of my experience into context. When I was at the UW in the early 90’s it was so obvious to me that there was a perspective, full of judgment, being taught in my anthropology classes, all the while pretending to be completely unbiased. I got the best grades when I adopted the point of view of my professors, easy to do, but did not make me feel inspired. It made me just want to get my degree and get out of there. Now, as my kids are teenagers and in high school, it appears that that bias and perspective is much more obvious.
Last week I went to parents night to visit my kids classrooms and hear a 5 minute talk about the classes. The first 2 classes were completely decorated with every flag of a marginalized victim group or activist group. In the US History class they would be teaching US history through the lens of activism with the final section being queer activism. The is struck me as not so much teaching about history but more about how and why it’s important to be an activist. I left the school feeling completely unsettled by this teaching approach. But perhaps when the bias is so obvious the kids will start to think about it differently and come out of there with unexpected and unintended conclusions.. I’m so curious to see what they come up with.
My son and his friends already are aware of how society feels about them as young white men. They apparently have discussed that if you want to go to college it may be a good idea to mark a different race on your application. however we are discussing all options with my son including not going to college at all and pursuing some kind of trade training.
“William, and a case can be made for that, too — though I think it’s more that since they think they’re fighting for the proletariat, whatever they do, no matter how monstrously evil, is virtuous.”
Not just or maybe even (when they got down to practice here) not so much the proletariat, but the freedom of all hypothetical future generations from class, state and property-based domination. Meanwhile, the people who already exist (the corrupt generations not yet free of sin…) are of value only insofar as they help bring about this liberation. That, at least, is the impression that I get from Lenin, Stalin and many of their supporters here. They did not have much time for mere defenders of current proletarian concerns and often attacked them openly, although they did, of course, talk up their revolution’s alignment with some idealised version of the proletariat.
Incidentally, Dugin, with his characteristic thoroughness, also noticed this and ran with it in his own direction (thanks again to Inna for linking his essays during the previous Situationism thread!). He wrote about how naturally the Nazis did not really care about Germans and the Communists did not really care about workers. The true goal of all the “gnostic, left-hand” anti-liberal ideologies he championed was, according to him, the spiritual liberation of humanity from the false freedom of Capitalism (or, as he wrote on at least some occasions, the Spectacle – it proved a natural fit for his views); everything else is just slogans or tactics.
That said, I think that what William describes may also have worked on some deeper level – I’ve observed a similar tendency with modern Russian Liberals as well, which is unsurprising as many of them are converts from Communism just as many Communists were converts from Christianity. They retain the demonisation of the state – and when they had the chance, often tried to act as the demons, though thankfully with rather less success. The same has been said about post-Soviet ethnonationalist ideologies as well – their adherents come from the same backgrounds, see the same elemental viciousness in all existing institutions (and in rival ideologies of the same sort!), and seek to cultivate it in themselves as a virtue. Although their goals are somewhat more restrained.
@61 Chuaquin
I am indeed, my community calls them secular buddhists because they’re basically secular materialists that like mediation, long expensive retreats, and think that stephen batchelor has anything worth listening too. I consider them dishonest, and boring. A dead end.
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@53 The Other Owen
Oh agreed. I think anti theists are the fundies of atheism, and marxists are the fundies of leftist thought. And they wonder why no one likes them.
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@67 Slithy Toves
Thank you, I’m glad that more people in the US are starting to see the merits of Pure Land Buddhism and aren’t calling us Christian affected Buddhists or Buddhists affected by Christianity. Seriously if you know anything about PL Buddhism no just no. Not even close. Pure Land is a beautiful tradition i’m proud to be part of. I hope that Theravada and Zen Buddhism can also wrest away from the tight grip of Secular materialism.
Speaking of the pendulum swing, if we look ahead decades to the point that the rising Populist Right and entrepreneurs reach their decadent phase, what do you think it would look like based on their trajectory? And what shape would the new Democrats (or whatever refreshing alternative presents itself) take to unseat them?
Do you think such things are predictable, looking at the previous cycles?
I’ll try to keep this short so there’s a lot of missing context, but the way I adapted to the Spectacle was to start engaging in Conspiracy Culture. Pretty soon you start to figure out that intelligence agencies are flooding that zone with disinfo and demoralization propaganda, and one can waste a lot of time isolating bits of signal through the noise. Last week I spent too much time sorting details as they trickled out, and while I still have no idea whodunnit it’s pretty clear the official story is total garbage. It’s not just people on the left saying that either, and the skeptics include Steve Bannon who also seems to be turning against the Israeli influence on out government even though the has not called them out by name yet. He was a major mentor for Charlie and took this very personally, but also understands how this has the potential to split the MAGA movement. It could also be that the empire is getting ready to cut Israel loose and has started using Conspiracy Culture as a Spectacle Sideband to spread resentment. Either way these mental gymnastics slowed my progress getting ready for the Next Thing. I need to pick up the pace IRL and would be grateful if you have any advice of how to tune out future distractions.
@Daniil #63
I’m American, and I had never heard of him. I don’t have social media and don’t like reading the news, as it’s descended into almost pure noise to me, and it irritates me more than it informs me. In fact, I still don’t know what he looks like, nor have I read an article by him or seen a video where he speaks. It’s very interesting observing this phenomenon from a standpoint of someone who is truly naive. The only opinion I have on it is that murdering people for the offense of disagreeing with your political views is disgraceful.
About Marx: I can’t find whomever it was upthread who said us Americans need to “go to the source”. IDK about anyone else, but I happen to be a grownup already and I don’t need reading assignments. I have scant interest in Marx because a. life is short, and b., from what I can gather, Marx’s ideas are simply not very relevant to the USA. For one thing, we had no feudalism here. No, plantation economy, wicked as it was, was not feudalism.
The fall of the USSR and of communist regimes in its’ satellites, was a body blow from which the American New Left, most of whom were and are 2nd and 3rd gen. mittel European imports, has never recovered. I think what shocked many of us was the revelations about just how bad was the environmental devastation those regimes left behind, the former Aral Sea being poster child for what communism does to a country.
Dennis, I’ve deleted the LLM-based comment you included. This is a place for human beings to have conversations, not for electronic nonpersons to vomit statistically generated sequences of words. As for the comments that were yours, I think that’s quite a reasonable take on things.
Gnat, hmm! I hadn’t encountered this before. Thank you.
Atr (if I may), that’s true. Let people know that you don’t own a television and the reactions you’ll get will be quite remarkable. I wrote about that a decade ago:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2015/11/the-heresy-of-technological-choice.html
Seeking, I’m delighted to hear this. While I’m not a Buddhist myself I grew up with Buddhists — my stepmother and her family are Japanese, and practice Shingon Buddhism — and I have immense respect for the tradition. I’m very glad to hear about the abbey you mention and even happier to hear about your intentions. As for Amida, or for that matter any of the Buddhas from Mahavairocana Buddha on down, yeah, everything I know suggests that they would not focus undue attention on the privileged and clueless.
Mattias, the ones I know about are Britain and Germany. In both places, according to an assortment of recent news stories, rapists have been let off without serious legal penalties while their victims have been punished severely for “hate speech” for mentioning that they had been raped by immigrants.
Other Owen, that’s the downside of a purely secular fundamentalism. I’m sorry to say, though, that even religious fundamentalists will lie like dogs on occasion — just ask them about other people’s religions, and odds are you’ll get an earful of nastily dishonest slander.
Clarence, ha! Not all elephants are that well behaved, I’m sorry to say.
Annette2, exactly, Exactly.
Chuaquin, the Spectacle always pretends to be the whole world; it becomes invisible precisely because, when everything is Spectacle, nothing seems to be Spectacle. It’s only when you run face first into realities that the Spectacle does not contain that it becomes clear just how little the Spectacle actually admits to its version of reality.
Tyrell, oh, my. So we have a fake race, followed by a fake afterparty, in which fake celebrities pretend to enjoy themselves with fake drinks, fake friends, and fake drugs, for an audience that probably consists mostly of internet bots — thus, fake people. Philip K. Dick couldn’t have done better!
Celadon, exactly. Fascism, after all, was never more than Marxism Lite — it was an attempt to copy the fashionable gimmicks of the Soviet Union, such as dictatorship, one-party rule, and prison camps, without going so far as to get rid of private property. The issue is specifically totalitarianism, in the literal sense of the word: any political system that claims the right to dictate rules to everyone on every facet of life, with no checks and balances, is abhuman and necessarily leads to horrific abuses. That’s as true of religious totalitarianism as it is of secular totalitarianism, by the way: any time you have a system that claims the right to tell everyone what to do in every aspect of their existence, a high body count is inevitable. That’s why the founders of the United States, in a burst of unusual wisdom, made individual rights the keynote of our nation’s system — however incompletely that ideal has been enacted in day-to-day events.
Drhooves, it would be wonderful to see a hippogriff race, but I don’t expect it any time soon. As for the entrepreneurial elite in the Long Descent, they fit very well into the current stage of decline, but yeah, I’ll need to plan a future post on that.
Anonymous, sshhh! You’ll give away some of the secrets of later posts in this sequence! 😉
Justin, that’s one of the advantages of constitutional monarchy — you can focus the Spectacular side of things on one family, while the grubby work of everyday politics is fobbed off on mere politicians.
Rhydlyd, oh my. It would be a delicious irony if class conflict were to be picked up and used by the populist right in the years immediately ahead — and they have a right to use it, having been discriminated against by the left, on the basis of their social class, for decades now.
Robert C, you’ll get no argument from me. Popper’s criticisms have had, as such things do, a slow corrosive effect on the certainties of the Marxist and para-Marxist left — I suspect that’s one of the reasons why so few leftists these days actually embrace Marx publicly — but such things are never quick (as I know very well). As for market fundamentalism, no argument there — it’s simply watered-down Calvinism without the excuse of theology to justify it.
Carlos, hmm! He’s right, of course, on both counts. As for the Second (or Third) Coming, well, since none of us knows what the Divine actually has in mind, I don’t see a lot of point in debating the matter, since you’ve got the common sense not to set a date on it and insist that God will bail you out of the consequences of your own choices, as so many apocalypticists do.
Tamar, the pretense that a single wildly biased point of view is unbiased reality is pervasive in every form of toxic politics; I’m glad you and your kids can talk about that, and that you’re helping them think outside a system meant to exploit and abuse them.
Daniil, that makes a great deal of sense.
KVD, conspiracy culture probably needs a post of its own one of these days. You’re correct that it’s a playing field where any number of bad actors dump disinformatsiya and have it lapped up uncritically by those who think they’re being skeptical — I’ve noticed repeatedly that the denizens of conspiracy culture will eagerly embrace the most absurd claims, provided that they’re presented as an alternative to the official version. The torrent of claims and counterclaims being circulated around Kirk’s murder are a good example of that, not least because it’s quite easy to make any story look like total trash with enough spin. My suggestion? Embrace an agnostic approach. Neither you nor I will ever be in a position to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963, or in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and so on through a long list of controversial events — nor will you or I ever have access to information that’s unfiltered and unspun on any of those subjects. That being the case, why not let go of it and focus on things you can actually know, and do something about?
Mary, Marx is worth reading if you happen to be interested in the history of political economy or the origins of modern totalitarianism. I’ve read Capital with that in mind, but then those are interests of mine. I don’t recommend him more generally, as his claims have been disproved by events.
@Kyle #72
The new elites’ Achilles’ heel is their techno-optimism and insistence that no, really, everything will be fine if we just believe in ourselves hard enough to [INSERT POLICY HERE]. Combine this with their similarities to the old entrepreneurial elite, which ultimately devolved into the robber Barons, and my guess is that by 2100 they’ll be constantly demanding more subsidies and tax cuts and eminent domain because this next big idea is bound to work…
This ties into JMG’s guess that the agricultural elites will be the next elites to take over, similar to the elites that the entrepreneurs displaced after the Civil War: the demands by the entrepreneurs for ever more land and resources will create a backlash from farm magnates — a rising class due to the increased importance of organic food production in the deindustrializing era — demanding to keep their lands and pointing out that they can easily provide lots good jobs for the great masses who couldn’t afford the schooling or training that the entrepreneurs need.
Even further down the road? If history is any guide, the farmsteads become the sites of a new manorialism as the farm owners — many of whom are military or ex-military — increasingly are the ones counted on to provide defense for their employees, their families, and the surrounding towns and villages, because the nominal governments are failing at it. Welcome back to feudalism!
OT: – but – seen in a doorway on the 4th floor of my building: “Cats for Trump in 2024,” with a picture of a fat and happy, handsome cat, surrounded by red-white-and-blue decor.. Loved it! Who says we seniors are not a diverse lot?
Also seen in the hallway itself, a so-called work of art put up by management*. Imagine a canvas on which a wall painted cleaned his two brushes, one purple and the other, I forget what color, with a broad stroke downward each. This in hallways where paintings by residents done in the arts and crafts classes, abound and look a thousand time better.
*Under the old owners, not the new ones. For what it’s worth.
@JMG #76:
> I don’t see a lot of point in debating the matter, since you’ve got the common sense not to set a date on it and insist that God will bail you out of the consequences of your own choices, as so many apocalypticists do.
Ah, I’m not seeking to debate the matter, just wanted to give a larger map of the territory of how this is viewed in mainstream Christianity. As for God bailing me out of the consequences of my own choices, being Catholic I’m not an adherent to Sola Fide either (unlike most modern premillenialists), so while I believe that it’s all up to God, I also believe He has his own demands on me which will have a mysterious providential role on all that He has planned.
I know you don’t watch TV, but I thought I’d point out that in the show The Chosen, Judas Iscariot is portrayed as a sort of a proto-premillenialist who is attempting to immanentize the eschaton. This is plausible, of course; pre-millenialism was quite common in the early Church and it took a couple of centuries before people thought yeah, this whole ‘nobody knows the day nor the hour’ thing might take quite a while yet. The Gospels themselves don’t say much about Judas, but the TV show depicts him as a true believer whose major flaw is thinking that it’s more important to be on the right team – and be able to see the Christ steamroll all your (perceived) enemies – than actual obedience to him. It’s the most interesting, and in my opinion most relatable take on Judas of anything I’ve seen in the “Christian fanfiction” genre.
(I don’t think I’ve spoiled any major plot points nor do I believe you care strongly that I might be spoiling the audience, but feel free to redact this comment if you so desire.)
Hi John Michael,
Hippogriff’s are awesome, and would make for a far more interesting spectacle.
By the way, did you just suggest that it might be the path of wisdom to live consciously? 😉
Enforcement of the existing laws would be a good start to put an end to the bloodthirsty tirades. If I had my hands on the levers of power, publicly taking down a well known, but third rate nobody, would send a strong enough message along the lines of: ‘cut it out’. By the way, I’ve had to do just that, in order to bring into line a team I found myself in charge of long ago. It was remarkable to observe such base behaviour on display at the initial meeting. Still, walking out on them and their antics and setting in motion immediate consequences, produced a more civil environment. It’s true what they say you know, a fish rots from the head.
One of the reasons your commentariat is a lovely place to hang out. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
#70 Is there any direct connection between the classical Marxist view of the future classless society, and longtermism?
This being an ideology that grew out of part of the Effective Altruism community, saying that in the future the human population will be vastly higher than it is now, as we colonize the solar system. This means in their view that this hypothetical future where trillions of humans (or for some variants of the idea, our superintelligent AI successors) will exist matters much more than the present reality of the mere 8 billion of us on the Earth now.
Clearly to an extent there is a link as both are outgrowths of the mythology of Progress.
“It would be a delicious irony if class conflict were to be picked up and used by the populist right in the years immediately ahead — and they have a right to use it, having been discriminated against by the left, on the basis of their social class, for decades now.”
Well, there are self-identified communists who support Trump because they view the MAGA movement as a basis for a pro-worker movement and a vector for class conflict:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-rise-of-maga-communism/
https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-the-hell-is-magacommunism/
@Clay # 2: “Several of us expressed a preference for the 1990’s because the internet and social media had not yet significantly affected everyday life, human interactions and how we saw the world. Bit in todays post we learn that may have been because the 1990’s were the last time the spectacle was fully in place. It had yet to be fractured in the way that it has now.”
Expressing a preference for the 1990’s is purely situationist and therefore subjective. That surely partly depends on your age as much as anything. Would an 80-year-old single out the 1990’s? From Google:
“Many people view their 30s as their best decade. Some research indicates that people tend to feel happier and more content in their 30s, with a happiness peak often around age 33, according to one study. ”
Bingo! Despite being in my late 60’s, I still feel 33 on the inside. I was 33 in the 1980s. I once had a sleep dream in which I just knew I was 33. On waking, I was badly panicked when it slowly dawned on me that I was in fact 55. . “Where have all the years gone?!” I desperately asked myself.
JMG: Another good piece.
Unfortunately, I have a tangential and minor bit of nit-picking regarding your illustration of the charming couple on the beach.
While this does perpetuate a well deserved chuckle and an admission it is sorta true, I did spend last week on the beach between Tokeland, Wa and Westport, Wa. And damnme if it didn’t look just like that down to the Olympia Beer (a friend of mine brought me some from Canada where he found it in Saskatoon, Wht the Canadians are are still making it is beyond me.). The beaches were empty, the sand was very, very close to white, and the sum was warm.
So, while I agree with the political an social component of your piece, summer on the beach in Washington does have moments just like that (But they are rare).
Like I said, good ar
“Debord points out cogently that the Spectacle is not a collection of images, but rather a social relationship between people mediated by images.”
I initially had some difficulty with Debord’s definition, because it seems to me that the Spectacle (and sub-Spectacles) describe a set of common images that frame and structure how a given group of people see the world. In other words, a sort of common map that people might have in their heads to describe the world, which isn’t a relationship per se.
Then I drew the connection – that map would therefore influence the way people form social groups and how these groups relate to each other. People with similar maps would join the same group or two different friendly groups, as their interactions would be founded on the same axioms. In contrast, a person with a vastly different map may be isolated on the fringes, or join a third group that keeps its distance or is unfriendly with the mainstream groups. (I very much subscribe to the meme sub-spectacle of the *chans, so I draw some of this from personal experience)
In other words, can we say the Spectacle is another word for “myth”, or at least describes the images that constitute the myth and the groups that adopt it? I assume then that the next post will discuss how the framework of the Spectacle will help us to overcome that decaying myth of unlimited materialistic progress.
I look forward to reading the next installment in this series of posts! And, thank you for the research and writing!
I noticed back when I had my marxist phase in college that marxism basically demanded that religion be subordinate to the marxist cause. Everything for the marxist cause, anything less and you might as well be a crypto fascist. Also the far left and marxists seem to despise culture, apparently its bourgeoisie. I was not impressed. I was even less impressed by how marxists seemed utterly incapable of making any progress at all. Its sad to see so many people never really learn and stay in the same spot suffering.
When i had to choose, i choose my religion. And i’ve been all the better for it. And the years since has proven to me that I was right to do so. Have you ever heard of breadtube? Never have I seen a greater example of a bunch of overly intellectual people shoot themselves in the foot so badly.
“One common reaction I’ve seen to Charlie Kirk’s murder online was to assert that one has never heard of him before.”
That would be me. Who’s Charlie Kirk was my first thought. A victim of the demand for ideological purity is my current classification.
Although I do have a TV all it does is show movies when I play a DVD. I’m out of range of everything not a satellite and they cost too much.
As to the beach scene with the beer there is one place in Washington you could do that. Boyar Park just downstream of Lower Granite Dam on the Snake River. It used to be a popular place for Washington State University students to go. It’s hard to get to though, like they say in New England, you can’t get there from here. You have to go somewhere else first. Part of the problem is that Pullman (WSU) is like 2200 feet elevation and below the dam it’s about 700. Being that low in the summer routinely gets temperatures over 100.
In lighter news, “Chimps drinking a lager a day in ripe fruit, study finds”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgq4710vendo
Re: compulsive conspiracy theorizing
This sounds like a job for the Serenity Prayer!
Yesterday I was on the bus, and the two young women sitting next to each other across from me were head-deep in their phones. Nothing unusual there, that’s what most people on the bus seem to do these days. Then one of them dropped their phone, and it skittered over to the feet of the other, who reached down, picked it up and handed it to the other… at which point they both realized they knew each other and started nattering away.
But they’d sat down next to their friend and neither even noticed until one of them dropped their phone. Spectacle and intermediation much?
The Shingon school is a great tradition. I had a friend who was a Shingon Buddhist. Unfortunately for me I am too lazy for vajrayana Buddhist training. It’s a lot of work and very easy to mess up. And messing up can have devastating consequences. Pure Land is more than enough for me.
The part about the Spectacle reminds me of the time in the early 1980’s I saw a very strange Jerry Lewis movie and I asked a friend why the French think Lewis is a genius, my friend replied that the French view our (US) media as propaganda.
One more thing: Communists’ observations, insights and criticisms of the rest of the world are often of vastly higher quality than the solutions they try to inflict on everyone once they get power. Just because they reduce societies to misery does not mean observations etc. have no merit. Newer movements like CRT have plenty of points to make, but are experimental in that their only goal (that I can find), is to dismantle the present power structure. Please, if I am wrong, someone tell me any other documented goal of CRT.
I think it’s a good idea to question official narratives and maybe propose plausible counternarratives including conspiracies. Deriding something as a “conspiracy theory” serves as a thought stopper im establishmentarian circles and probably makes it easier for actual conspiracies to operate. However, it would be foolish to believe a specific comspiracy theory and let it determine your behavior. The theory is crafted by people who don’t have access to all the information (if they’re not from disinformation agents) and would be half-true at best and most likely outright false.
“This ties into JMG’s guess that the agricultural elites will be the next elites to take over”
I remember JMG saying that Mexican cartels and urban gangs will be the ones to take over from the entrepreneurial elites.
I’m not sure who Jimmy Kimmel is but,
“Walt Disney-owned ABC said on Wednesday, Sept. 17, that it will indefinitely stop airing “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” after the late-night host’s comments about Kirk’s assassination came under harsh criticism from the head of the Federal Communications Commission.”
The electromagnetic spectrum is a limited resource and the FCC can determine a broadcaster is not serving the public interest and revoke the use of the frequency. ABC apparently does not want to go cable only.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2025/09/17/jimmy-kimmel-live-suspended-charlie-kirk-comments/86209499007/
Given the ferocity that the Left insists that since the parents are religious their child must be MAGA it’s obvious the Left has heard of teen-age rebellion. Then again, the Left is the side that is having the fewest kids so maybe they have missed out on that experience.
Patricia M, I don’t have to imagine the canvas. I’ve seen equally stupid art on far too many walls. Since memes are part of the discussion, here’s one:
![](https://www.ecosophia.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/exactly.jpeg")
Carlos, thank you. No, I hadn’t heard of that version of Judas; it seems more interesting than most.
Chris, whatever gave you that idea? 😉 As for putting an end to things, yeah, it would be the easiest thing in the world. Charge half a dozen national politicians (five Democrat, one Republican, just to preserve a fig leaf of bipartisanship) with the crimes they’ve so obviously committed, make them pay huge fines and serve some jail time, and things would straighten up very, very fast. I do that here by deleting trolls, and yes, it works.
Mawkernewek, I’m not sure of the specific origins of “longtermism” — the whole ideology is so laughably absurd that I’ve never been able to take it seriously enough to research. That said, the basic concept is so similar to Marxism that there may well be a connection — first, imagine a future that isn’t going to happen, whether that’s fully automated luxury gay space communism or the more ordinary Marxist variety; second, insist that this wholly imaginary future is more important than reality; third, use that argument to justify doing absurdities, and ultimately atrocities.
Anon, good gravy. I hadn’t heard of this. Thank you for the heads up!
Zemi (if I may), okay, I knew I was weird, but this rule of yours adds to that knowledge. My 30s were happier than my 20s but I still wouldn’t go back to them for love or money. I’d take my 50s, but that’s because Sara was alive and still healthy enough to be functional then; other than that one bitter lack, I feel better about myself and my life now than I have in any previous decade.
Degrongolade (sp?), my late father told me that the climate in western Washington had changed drastically in recent decades, so that there were actually sunny days on the beaches near Grays Harbor now and then. He grew up in Aberdeen and spent every summer at the family cabin in Grayland, so that was even more of a shock to him than it was to me. In 1960, though, that hadn’t happened yet!
LJH, good. What differentiates the Spectacle from a myth is that a myth is defined by narrative, which unfolds in time and so embodies change, while the Spectacle is defined by images, which extend in space and portray a static reality. We have some posts to get through before we reach that point, though!
Seeking, that’s the really toxic thing about Marxism. Everything is supposed to be subordinate to the Cause — religion, art, human relationships, ethics, all of it is valued only to the extent that it furthers the cause of proletarian revolution. As a result, every human value collapses into the raw lust for power. No, I hadn’t heard of Breadtube — I avoid videos and generally don’t follow the latest cultural trends. Your comment doesn’t surprise me, though, because that’s what overly intellectual people generally do.
Siliconguy, okay, that works. Eastern Washington is a different kettle of fish entirely, and they could be soaking up the rays near Moses Lake or in a park near one of the reservoirs.
KVD, it’s good advice.
Pygmycory, that’s funny, in a bleak sort of way!
Seeking, I’d have taken up Shingon if I’d become a Buddhist — I’ve read Kobo Daishi’s main writings in English translation. As it was, I took up the Western equivalent. Yes, it’s a lot of work and you have to be careful, and no, it’s not for everybody — not by a long shot. If the Pure Land path works for you, go ye and do that thing, and may all sentient beings benefit thereby.
Bradley, our media is propaganda. So is theirs, but they can’t see that as easily, being inside the Spectacle it creates. As for critical race theory, its ostensible goal is to dismantle the present power structure, but that’s purely window dressing. Remember Stafford Beer’s maxim, “the purpose of a system is what it does.” The actual purpose of critical race theory is to give certain people, belonging to specific race-and-gender categories, an advantage in competing for corporate and bureaucratic positions.
Patrick, I’m fine with conspiracy theories, so long as their proponents hold themselves to the same standard of proof they expect from others. In my experience, they never do this.
Anon, no, that’s further down the line.
Siliconguy, I wondered how fast ABC would knuckle under. The blowback from Kirk’s murder and the hateful Democratic response to it is racking up quite a collection of scalps.
JMG –
I want to build on something I read in the last week or two, (maybe on your blog?), “Leftists claim that hate speech is literally violence, and that their violence is merely speech”. Leftists see violence in the Spectacle that disagrees with them, and Spectacle in the violence they approve of.
And a whimsical word on language: when I see the word “spectacle”, I think both of something to be seen, and the bits of glass balanced on my nose through which I see it. What would I see without my spectacles? It amuses me to imagine that much of this conversation is about devices to improve eyesight. “Spectacle” without plural? That just corrects the vision in one eye. 😉
John Michael wrote, “you can only pretend that there isn’t an elephant in the room if it doesn’t defecate on you…”
Thank you, John Michael, you have a delightful aptitude for constructing the most viscerally compelling of images, all while employing only a bare minimum of words. Conservation at its finest!
The mere fact that something is unseen (or that some fools keep desperately pretending it is) in no way prevents that unseen thing from being able to utterly ruin their lives. As we’re learning this week, some fools can’t bear to see their own stupidity, even as it’s coming home to roost in thronging murders completely blackening out their remaining view of heaven and deafening them to the voice of the divine.
Oh, well! At least they might end up learning some useful new job skills, such as how to clean up vast quantities of elephant poo. Who knows, they might even discover how to train one watchful eye to keep track of the unseen… hopefully before their next predictable debacle begins backing up to dump all over them again. Attempting to ignore the unseen does inevitably lead to such unwelcome messes.
JMG,
I find the picture of the couple on the beach, with the case of beer, especially interesting as I think there is some subliminal manipulation going on. Back in junior high school in the 70’s, I had to take a state-mandated course called Consumer Education. I recall that we spent much of the class learning about all of the ways advertising scams us into buying products. One of the things we learned about was subliminal images deliberately placed in advertising photos. We brought to class magazines and clipped out advert pictures we suspected of having hidden images within them. It was common for alcohol products to have subliminal images depicting death or destruction, as if to communicate to an alcoholic, who was a potential buyer of that this or that product, that the alcohol pictured would help them on their path to self-destruction. I remember one advert picture of a bottle of vodka were you could interpret a death skull in the shadowy contours of the bottle. Sexually suggestive subliminal images were also common in booze ads. And that brings me to the picture of the couple on the beach you’re showing. My trained-eye immediately recognized what looks like a nipple on the woman’s knee, and her knee filling in for a breast. On closer inspection, it looked like the nipple could have been caused by light cast through the sunglasses. Yea, right.
I am a retired commercial photographer, and believe me, I was paid for my ability to make photos that did NOT include ambiguous shadows or colors that suggested rude body parts, skulls, or anything else that might confuse the eventual viewer of the photo. So I doubt that when the photographer took the picture of the couple on the beach, the he or she was not ignorant of the what woman’s knee looked like. Commercial photographers back in the day used Polaroid proofs to check their lighting and make sure the client at the photo shoot was happy with the set up. So photographic mistakes were pretty rare. Then again, the picture may have been altered later using airbrushing, and the photographer may have been an unwitting accomplice.
Talk about spectacle.
Anyone remember the movie “They Live”?
JMG,
I do find one part of Marx, In Das Kapital useful. His analysis of the labor theory of value makes sense to me. This theory is that in practice labor has a higher use value ( what it can produce) than exchange value ( what it can be traded for), which drives surplus capital accumulation. This in turn drives automation and ( your have to read Marx for the explanation of this) a falling level of profit over time. I very much believe it is true and you can see it play out in almost all manufacturing industries today.
Where Marx goes wrong is his prescription for fixing this problem, not in his identification of the problem. But there is much that can be learned by pondering this very predicament because I think it effects us today.
@JMG
Thanks for the link, great insight as always.
When my family moved to our current house in 2023, our neighbors thought we were nuts for not having the TV hooked up first thing. We just had higher priorities.
We did eventually get the TV plugged in though. It’s exclusively used for blu-rays and the occasional educational show (pre-2016 PBS, on a USB hard drive) for the kid. We make a point of being *intentional* in our usage of the TV, which other people find crazy – I suspect, because the Specticle of television requires passivity.
Participation in the Specticle of the internet is also increasingly requiring passivity, and for about 20 years now people have been slowly transitioning away from an intentional internet, pushed by modern social media that heavily discourages legitimate discourse, smartphones and an increasingly monopolized and centralized tech sector.
Obviously I still use the internet, but these past few years I’ve heard of people finding it “odd” or even a “red flag” if someone uses the internet intentionally, rather than engaging in the passive Specticle of TikTok (or one of its many clones, Instagram, YouTube shorts etc).
There’s also an equally strong push, by these platforms themselves, to pretend the old web doesn’t exist. Google recently announced that the Internet is “in rapid decline”. Go on to reddit and you’ll see people crying out for an internet that is quite literally still a URL away, blindly copying the mantra that web 1.0 and other forums / blog pages are long since passed.
I am sad to hear that websites like yours don’t exist anymore JMG, and apparently this comment doesn’t exist either 😉
The old web must die because the Specticle requires it. And if one is to participate in said Specticle, and avoid being ostracised, they must accept this.
And yet, the old web VERY MUCH is still here, and in some corners of the internet, very much still alive and active.
Makes one wonder what other things the Specticle insists are dead, but are actually very much alive.
Well, JMG, as usual, you didn’t disappoint with your weekly post!
Maybe I am slow on the uptake, but the 3rd and 4th paragraphs (regarding classical Marxism and the New Left) put things in a succinct way that had always evaded me. It was like scales falling off my eyes. Until now, for the life of me, I could not rationalize how the leftists (who have so thoroughly infiltrated my nation to the north) could behave in such as bizarre manner other than they were in a cult (which, I still believe, they are). You see, I was raised in a traditional liberal household that emphasized that “people were people” and that one should always relate to the individual rather than the “label” (race, ethnicity, sex, etc.). But the Marxist notion that a particular group of people is inherently “good” or “evil” based on their social placement rather than their actions is so utterly bizarre and crooked that in previous decades I could never have imagined that a significant portion of society would fall for it. Boy, was I wrong! What is going on is actually a form of bigotry, which the leftists are always labelling folks like me of (“Accuse your enemy of what you are doing…”) .
I am eager to see what solutions are available via modified situationalism, as at present the situation looks grim. We seem to be in a situation where a very vocal group of people who have been given immense influence and power for a couple of decades to the point of committing brazen acts of violence and call out for more, and are radicalized to the point of not seeing humans as individuals but as belonging to particular “labels” – which fall into either the “virtuous ones” camp or “fascist” camp – have crossed the Rubicon – and I see the potential for a lot of unrest ahead. The Wheel of Fortune has turned due to the creation of a new martyr last week, and the huge masses of people who have been bullied, mocked, reviled, de-platformed, cancelled, psychologically abused and even physically abused, will seek revenge with extreme prejudice. And those who are in the centrist/moderate camp are backing away from the far-leftists still calling out for blood. It looks like Trump has declared Antifa to be a terrorist organization. More organizations will undoubtedly follow. Soon the “hunters” will be the “hunted”. I pray that matters do not spin out of control…
The original situationalism was dealing with monolithic spectacles; now we are dealing with a multitude of spectacles, each speaking to its own fragmented audience and being augmented and amplified within the same audience. Memes are powerful. But some visual images – especially taken from real, current life – jump out with extraordinary power. The images associated with the recent slaughter of Iryna Zarutska in Charlotte, NC, and of Charlie Kirk in Orem, UT, are, I would argue, transcendentally powerful. And though certain parties are trying to excuse them away, it doesn’t wash – some things are simply so horrific that no rationalizing or tricksy word-play will accomplish anything except appeal to those who already revel in such horror. May a time of societal healing come quickly: we all are certainly in need of it.
The current iteration of the spectacle is nearly perfectly intersectional in its ability to pierce each individual inside-to-out, up-to-down – it’s revealed in how we pay a subscription fee (of many sorts) to be chained to images that we think are our choosing, but that are really designed by factions competing for our attention. The spectacle’s insidious ability to burrow down into our consciousness (the way a foxtail seed digs in and in and resists being backed out) has trained (mostly but not totally) younger people to embrace becoming the spectacle. Used to be “making a spectacle of yourself” was not a good thing – now it’s how you become an influencer with all its attendant perks (and fakeries).
This is new territory for humans and it’s frankly uncanny and disorienting but also becoming more and more blatant – I saw the chaos of conflicting intersections in the post-assassination chatter and stories and schemes and pat-answers. Not a single thing to be trusted.
(Joshua Stylman’s substack is a fascinating exploration of these themes: https://stylman.substack.com/p/the-bread-the-circus-and-the-sugar or this series https://stylman.substack.com/p/mkultra-the-hidden-hand-part-1-the)
@Anonymous #60: I am mystified by your suggestion that reading is necessarily a solitary activity. It’s not rare for couples or groups to read a book together, taking turns to read it aloud.
More to your point: I agree that reading contemporary books has its value. However, consider dead authors! Virgil, Boethius, Dante or Shakespeare each had their own political views, supporting or fighting against figures that seemed important to their contemporaries. But when I read them today, I am completely immune against any conscious or unconscious attempt of theirs to paint things in rosy or in black hues. Their spectacle passes me completely by, and if I want to know more about topical allusions, I have to read a commentary. The direct effect of a dead author’s work on me is free of the spectacle.
I’ve been unable to find any European country in which this is true: “In some European countries right now, for example, a woman who is raped by an immigrant faces more serious legal consequences if she mentions her rapist’s nationality on social media than the rapist will ever face for his crime.”
I presume you can provide an example or two where it is?
@JMG
Excellent article, and I think this Marxist hope for the Spectacle as a monolith to be used in the changing the world is expressed by a common TV trope, where the protagonists struggle to make it to the TV Station and then enter Live TV persuade the world and then everything is solved, happy ending.
I see you are bashing the idea that Israeli can be responsible for Kirks assassination just in the vicinity of Zeta Reticuli. I think much of the push for that belief is organic, especially pushed by certain recent feats and not so recent feats like the pagers one. Also a country that can use thousands of people in enemy countries, that don’t necessarily have their ideology nor are their direct assets, to work against their country through all sort of psychological persuasion shows that they have a lot of resources available. It seems that recently Kirk opposed the war in Iran and had made personally a visit to Donald Trump and he convinced him about that with some success according to Tucker Carlson. Since the conflict with Iran is seen as an existential to Israel is seen by many as a strong motive. And in crimes motive are more important than means and opportunity. Another circumstantial enhancer is that TPUSA is a pretty strong organisation and the speed with which the pro-Israeli scooped the organisation also left many people wandering. There are many other thing like, the swift declarations of the Israeli prime-minister of Kirk’s assassination, the strange denial of involvement, the public threatening of Candace Owens, and of a few recent friends of Charlie Kirk like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Mega Kelly who declared publicly that Kirk was scared about this lobby’s pressure and personally intimidate by the forementioned prime-minister.
Disclaimer at the moment from the distance of pretty much being in Eastern Europe and given maybe I am not knowing the subtle details of American politics, I am more biased toward the hypothesis neighboring the Zeta Reticuli . I also expect this case to be perpetually unsolved just like 911 and JFK.
At least what I am saying that I don’t think the leftist came with that hypothesis and trend, they just may have hopped on it.
And as the latest proof that the Israeli theory is not coming from the left I just came across a tweet from Marjorie Taylor Greene:
https://xcancel.com/mtgreenee/status/1968288187458961457
I had the thought the other morning as I scanned the news on my device and sipped my coffee, that I was exactly like my father, sipping his coffee and reading his newspaper.
Except of course my news is a little fresher, and I can get it from far stranger sources than the local rag ever imagined, and I can look up from this little hand sized object and meet my husband and children’s eyes, while my father vanished entirely behind his paper.
Is there any real difference, or is it simply fashionable to complain about the means of accessing information these days? I don’t remember anyone condemning the family for passing around the newspaper at the breakfast table as they today condemn us for reading the news on a screen. Is it not all merely scanning the Spectacle for what we will encounter outside in the world in interactions with others? “Did you see this government fell? That team won? They’re having the rubber duck race this date?”
Seems to me that the only difference is the decentralization.
Also, it was very strange to not have a TV when I was a child, now it is quite normal as any device with a screen and internet connection can fill the same purpose. Not watching video is still delightfully strange, though, and I have a good deal of fun with that.
I am reminded of something Lenin said, to the effect that if he had control of a nation’s cinema for five years, he’d have total control of that nation. He was writing during the very early years of cinema, when it was a new and amazing technology. There was a famous clip a few seconds long of a railroad engine coming directly toward the camera, apparently at high speed. (I think they filmed the engine approaching at a safe speed and then sped up the film.) People in the audience would jump from their seats and flee the theater. They weren’t used to having their senses fooled in quite such a realistic way. I doubt that Lenin anticipated that future generations, raised on cinema, wouldn’t be quite susceptible to its illusions.
@Seeking the Pure Land #34
In my experience, a major source of secular materialists is fanatically religious families. The harder the religious parents clamp down wrt religious values, the more loudly their rebellious offspring are going to reject them. If the parents are also staunch anticommunist (and that is a very common combination here in the USA) then the kids are likely to also embrace Marxism.
@Kyle #74 Agreed. Of course, the people who find that simple sentiment disagreeable argue that the speakers they object to do more than express opinions, influencing society and/or individuals towards some sort of evil. But I think that if I listen to Charlie Kirk or read Karl Marx and am then inspired to do evil, that’s ultimately on me. I also find that when something influences people into some kind of action, they must already be at least somewhat amenable to that influence to begin with. So if influence from X “causes” them to do harm, then Y would have done just as well, so to speak…
@Mary Bennet #75 Indeed, re: Aral… One of the most significant triumphs of Soviet history (at least in the environmental sphere) may be that, due to constant alarms sounded by Siberian scientists, Lake Baikal escaped comparable destruction: it still ended up with considerable pollution, mind you, but it could’ve been much worse if they had gone ahead with the plan to blow up the Shaman-kamen’ cliff where Angara enters the Baikal, in order to “temporarily” lower the water level as part of a grandiose engineering project. However, it is saying something when one of a society’s greatest victories lies in merely avoiding a horrible mistake. Later Soviet environmental regulations, meanwhile, were substantial on paper but constantly flouted by factory management, which was more keen on meeting production targets with minimal hassle and often also on profiting from black market trade. The planned economy was good at achieving simple goals like producing a lot of things quickly, but stuff like protecting the environment was much more complicated and anyway not an intuitive priority to most involved.
I’m reminded of a tweet I saw the other day which said something to the effect of: young people call themselves “queer” nowadays in large part because it allows them to be part of the oppression olympics, when otherwise they’d be “privileged”.
In terms of Situationist language, I guess we could say that their sub-Spectacle actually gives privilege to people with “oppression points”, so they are incentivized to score more points there.
My
Separately, after the Charlie Kirk shooting, I was quite disappointed to see some posters on a Buddhist forum explicitly expressing satisfaction at his death. To be fair, quite a few commenters also gave the actual Buddhist response of praying for Kirk and his killer, but largely they seem sucked into the lamestream media sub-Spectacle, e.g. claiming the shooter was a groyper, and that groypers had their own versions of “bella ciao” and so on. It’s the same attitude the shooter had in the released chat log between him and his lover; that there can’t be negotiation. They clearly hadn’t spent any actual time learning more about groypers, maybe they don’t think it’s worth their time or whatever, but
Zemi wrote, “‘Some research indicates that people tend to feel happier and more content in their 30s, with a happiness peak often around age 33, according to one study.’ Bingo! Despite being in my late 60’s, I still feel 33 on the inside. I was 33 in the 1980s. I once had a sleep dream in which I just knew I was 33. On waking, I was badly panicked when it slowly dawned on me that I was in fact 55. . ‘Where have all the years gone?!’ I desperately asked myself.”
Tied into the ongoing discussion of the allure that the 1990’s cast over various commenters, your dream makes me wonder exactly how out of sync I may be with my age cohort. The last culturally relaxed and natural decade that I can recall having any hope of standing in for any sort of golden age was the 1970’s. I did find lots of fun experiences in the 1990’s, but found the 2000’s to be much more personally enjoyable. Culturally, everything since 1980 has seemed like a jumbled up mess to me.
As for personal happiness and fulfillment, I’ve never felt better than I do now at 55 years old. Yeah, 33 was a pretty good year for me too, but it couldn’t begin to compare to my advancing senescence. I’m so looking forward to the next decade and all of the unnecessary metaphysical blockages I’ll be ready to let go of. Every unexplored, energy-draining burden from this preposterously unstable cultural spectacle that I can learn how to stop lugging around with me will be such a magical relief!
Perhaps having a murderously deranged brother and rationalizing, narcissistic parents left me primed to not really come into my own until my fifties. Or maybe it was the embarrassingly transparent Covid psyops that just left me so thoroughly disgusted with all the pretend authorities and parental stand-ins that I finally chose to start writing my own life. Or maybe it was reading the Archdruid Report and Ecosophia for long enough to start taking the occult dimensions of life seriously enough to begin practicing. Whatever the cause may be, I feel 33 on the inside, as well as 18 and 55 and 4 and every age in between, especially in my surreal dreams.
Rather than worrying “where have all the years gone?”, I find myself wondering “where are all these years going?”, and I really like the answer I get. Remember how clueless we were back at 33? We’re on such an amazing trajectory! Discovering what wisdom and experience feel like in practice — would you really surrender them to grasp at cluelessness again? Plus, at the end, we’ll get a nice long rest before our next go round with all of that newfound wisdom and experience in our souls’ repertoires. To come back a little less clueless the next time round! Now that is a goal I will joyfully toast to in Valhalla.
@Mawkernewek #81 I confess that when I first heard of longtermism, effective altruism and the rest of it, my first thought was “Bolsheviks!” Different kind of economic fundamentalism and somewhat different view of equality, granted, but the similarities are inescapable. As you say, it’s all done for imagined future generations.
As for why this coincidence came about, I’m not sure – possibly it’s just one natural direction for the religion(s) of progress to go in. It helps if you look at the people of the present the way many today look at the people of the past: ghastly savages whose main merit was that they prepared way for the glories of today. Now look the same way at the people of the present as if you are already living in the future – the one your ideology predicts, of course. Suddenly there’s not a whole lot of “historical justification” for their existence if they do not commit themselves to bringing that future about!
I’d also note that many of the Bolsheviks’ supporters in early 20th century Russian intellectual and artistic circles, who were quite keen on this “proto-longtermist” kind of justification, were also notably interested in transhumanism, life extension unto immortality, eugenics, space colonisation, etc. Mayakovsky is probably the most famous example – I know he was concerned with immortality, at least – though others went farther. The Bolsheviks themselves were generally more focused on politics and did not encourage such pursuits, though. If there was a direct connection, it might have been there, due to some cross-pollination in transhumanist and futurological circles. But that’s only a guess and there may have been other ways (disappointed Western communists shifting towards technocracy, etc.).
Seeking the pure land # 71:
“I am indeed, my community calls them secular buddhists because they’re basically secular materialists that like mediation, long expensive retreats, and think that stephen batchelor has anything worth listening too. I consider them dishonest, and boring. A dead end.”
Your description fits well in what I’ve named like “Rationalist Buddhists” here in Europe. I agree.
One the internet I am certainly seeing a push to silence individual creators and limit how many people see posts on social media.
This post and how The Spectacle influences our behavior makes total sense to me. Have you ever seen how people into Japanese Pop-Culture end up acting like converts? Heck I’ve read that once you adjust for language requirements for school, college entrance (usually every school offers at least Spanish and often French), and work. Japanese is the most popular Second language.
JMG # 76:
“Chuaquin, the Spectacle always pretends to be the whole world; it becomes invisible precisely because, when everything is Spectacle, nothing seems to be Spectacle. It’s only when you run face first into realities that the Spectacle does not contain that it becomes clear just how little the Spectacle actually admits to its version of reality.”
OK, John, I take note on it. So the Spectacle, if I understood it well, is an “Ersatz” if we compare it with the Real World outside the Spectacle.
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Another sub-topic. I’ve read between a comment (I don’t remember exactly what one and who wrote it) about an hypothetical situation in which the Right Trumpian Wing would cancel the Left side as a reaction to Kirk murder. I only can say retaliation isn’t a good idea IMHO, because it could lead to a string of revenges between both sides of cultural-political spectrum.
“William, and a case can be made for that, too — though I think it’s more that since they think they’re fighting for the proletariat, whatever they do, no matter how monstrously evil, is virtuous.”
The problem I see with this argument is that it is also true of most socialist movements, and while they have their fair share of nasty, evil, and abusive governments, communism seems to produce a far greater and far worse crop of evil governments.
Interesting piece. I remember reading a long time ago that Marxists considered religion to be the opiate of the masses, but that this had changed to television (or the wider media as a whole perhaps). It would seem that in this day and age, opium is the wrong drug to compare it against. People are no longer dulling their senses, but amping their emotions, so perhaps it is the PCP of the masses now?
Regarding the reactions to Charlie Kirk, as a non-US individual with no foot in either camp it has been fascinating and alarming to watch the maelstrom of reaction. Among it all I did find an interesting post on substack by Khalil Greene that I would urge those with an open enough mind to want to understand some of that reaction to read, it was titled “Millions of Gen Z’ers Don’t “Feel Bad” About Charlie Kirk’s Murder. Here’s Why.” It is free to read, no paywall.
Somewhat separately, and I apologise for jumping around like this, I remember you writing a few years ago about expecting a rise in New Religiosity in the dying days on civilisation and empire. I had noticed a few atheists decamping into the rising Christian movement and I was wondering whether you had written more on the subject, or would consider it for a AMA fifth week one month?
The term spectacle certainly resonates with so much of my experience with media – a grand imposition of images upon the mind, a spell cast upon the consciousness of the obeserver. It seems to be a dangerous sort of magic for bith the caster and the target, one which can easily spiral out of control. Might I use the recent Charlie Kirk murder as an example of how I see spectacle operating, and you let me know if I’m perceiving the concept correctly?
So the managerial class has created a grand specatacle through the media of Trump and his supporters as this absolute evil, an embodiment of hate, intolerance, and all things wretched, which all good people must hate and oppose in order to save OUR DEMOCRACY ™. The purpose of this spectacle is to save their own power, wealth, and position, though the image is tinged with their own fear and desperation. This spectacle, inserted into the minds of millions, then grows into twisted forms and drives people like Kirk’s killer to acts of violence that were never intended by the creator of the spectacle, as they are directly contradictory to their aims of retaining power. Which shows how the one under the sway of the spectacle loses their own agency, being driven by desires an interests not their own, but also can spiral out of the control of the caster trying to control others for their own ends.
To add another layer to this – lets take at fave value the conspiracy theories that this was an act of a foreign intelligence agency – Israel or Ukraine come to mind, as both would have reason to hate Kirk, and neither have shown the slightest scruple about using violence to silence those who criticise them. Fine – we have no evidence beyond that, but lets just take the theory as true to explore the idea. How would they have gotten this young killer to do their bidding? By radicalizing the killer, by playing upon the fear and rage that was placed in his mind by the spectacle of leftist hate towards Trump and his supporters. In other words, by hijacking the spectacular image placed in his mind by a different group for entirely different purposes to serve a completely different agenda.
This demonstrates three things. 1) These theories, even if true, in no way exonerate those who have created a spectacle of anit-maga fear and hate mongering for their responsibility for this violence. 2) Those who allow themselves to fall under the sway of spectacle open themselves up to all sorts of manipulation from anyone able to use the spectacle they have fallen under. 3) Creating spectacle is a dangerous sort of magic, as it allows those you have enchanted to be manipulated and controlled by other mages able to use this enchantment for their own ends, which may be contrary to everything you yourself desire!
Does that sound about right? This particular trsgedy seems to me to be an example of malevolent magic blowing up in the face of the caster, though not without harm to the intended victim as well. Sort of makes me think fo the curse on Kirk that Jezebel writer had cast on Kirk – yeah you managed to hurt him and what he stood for, but now you have a million uninintended consequemces blowing up in your face.
Thanks for taking the time to read my comment, amd eagerly await your response
You say that Marxism is concerned with social classes, but I think Marxists would suggest that it was economic classes that concerned them. Even today, Marxists seek reductivist economic explanations for things that have more complex origins. Of course in those days social class and economic class were linked, but they were not identical. In many societies (up to the England of my youth) social class was more important than how much money you earned, or whether you were an employer or an employee. Don’t forget also that when Marx was writing, the “working class” was basically almost everyone apart from the aristocracy and the small middle class (tiny in some countries). They included my ancestors and they probably included yours. Effectively, the Communist Manifesto was demanding what we would now call democracy.
I’m not sure about the moral element. Marx and many of his followers actually admired the bourgeoisie for their energy and application. Even today, Marxists talk of “Capital” as an almost divine force, a reified actor all by itself. But I don’t think many Marxists moralised the economic classes as such. For example, the replacement of the peasantry by capitalism was a “good” thing in the sense that it was a stage in economic development, as the move from Neanderthal to Homo Sapiens was a “good” thing in human development. History was approaching closer to its ultimate form. I’m sure there were Marxists who deified the working class (ie most of us) but then there are as many differences of opinion among Marxists as there are among Christians, or for that matter magicians. That was part of the trouble. That said, if you read Engels (or just Dickens) on the condition of ordinary people in England at the time, it’s hard not to feel a sense of justified revulsion for the economic system of the day.
One important point of historical context. You discuss US television for obvious reasons, but when Debord was writing there were, from memory, only two TV channels in France, both state-funded and neither with advertising. You literally had distinguished artists and intellectuals interviewed on prime time TV. Radio didn’t have advertising either. It was the deregulation of the media in the 1980s that began the slide into the ghastly dross that French TV has now become. Debord was thinking more of the consumer society as a whole, and the grip of the official discourse on the perceptions of reality. In his 1988 sequel (not nearly such a good book) he does try to take account of these media developments. Also relevant to this series perhaps is Michel Clouscard, about whom I’ve written elsewhere, who wrote just after Debord and whose arguments often resemble his, but from a more orthodox Marxist perspective.
Debord was violently critical of actual Communist regimes since 1917, of course, and he and others of the New Left (EP Thomson has been mentioned above) effectively rejected the twentieth century distortions of Marxism, and went back to what Marx actually said, applying his insights as historical analysis (which they were) not a substitute for a programme of action. I suppose the closest religious comparison would be the rise of Protestantism. I don’t think this led to modern identity politics. As I observed it, the generation of the 60s and 70s had only the most superficial acquaintance with Marxism as such, but they picked up habits of thought which lasted. The general abandonment of left-wing ideologies in the 1980s by a new professional class of notional left-wing politicians left them with intellectual habits looking for something new to practice on. So for economic oppression and exploitation (which were verifiably real) they substituted symbolic oppression of groups which for the most part had no objective existence.
>In open discussion, to the point of appearing in red news outlets, is the removal as a class for HR managers
You know, you ask most people “What is it that HR does?” and you’ll get some vague discomforting “I’m not sure”. And then there’s something about bitter ladies who love many cats. If I ran a company, I wouldn’t even call it HR, I’d call it the cat lady department.
What I’ve come to believe is that they’re there to do the jobs management doesn’t want to do themselves. They’re management’s garbagemen. Of those the main one is actually walking people out the door when they decide to fire people. Someone has to arrange for security, someone has to talk to them in the conference room, someone has to arrange for COBRA, etc. The rest of what they claim to do, they either do badly (like recruiting people and reading resumes) or they don’t do at all. And then you add all the woke stuff on top of that and yeah, get rid of them and make management do their jobs. Management will complain at some point that it’s taking away from Important Stuff they could be doing but ignore their whining.
>Well, there are self-identified communists who support Trump because they view the MAGA movement as a basis for a pro-worker movement and a vector for class conflict:
You get the feeling that the communist in the 21st century is a very confused person. Is it about dressing up as a woman and demanding to be let into all the bathrooms? Is it about voting for Trump? We may never know.
It wouldn’t surprise me if something about ham sandwiches makes an appearance as Marxist ideology.
>One common reaction I’ve seen to Charlie Kirk’s murder online was to assert that one has never heard of him before
To a large degree, he wasn’t exactly fringe, but if you weren’t a college student or out on the fringes, you probably wouldn’t have heard of him. Before he got shot, I thought he was a middle of the road, old school, bland Reaganesque Republican. Meh. Shrug. Although from what I understand, he was getting more spicy as time went on.
In any case, all he seemed to want to do was run his mouth off in places where he could argue with people, like on college campuses. I think what he wasn’t aware of at all is how fundamentalism works and what it does to people when they fall under its spell. And those college campuses are full of fundies.
I suppose all those woke fundies could flip into being christian fundies, but I think it more probable they will flip into being muslim fundies instead. One of the reasons I like Buddhism, it seems to be resistant to fanatics.
And at some point, I suspect the idea of taking off and nuking the college campuses from orbit will come to those in power. It’s the only way to be sure. If I made my living working at a college, I might want to get out before that happens.
The analogy of the couple watching television led me to think the Spectacle is analogous to Yeats’ Mask of the antithetical tincture (“that which should be” or rather, that what we are told should be). The more one buys into the Mask the less that is known in the Body of Thought.
This essay points out that the Spectacle, at the peak of its strength, has started unravelling into a chaotic mess of smaller and competing spectacles. This is probably the “interchange of tinctures” happening before our eyes.
Also, interesting that Yeats states that of the four faculties (mask/will & creating mind/body of fate) only two are active: Will and Creative Mind. I’m thinking this over but my first thought is there is a lot of energy (will?) being poured into the inactive faculty of Mask. Eventually, the hamster gets tired of running around the wheel that powers the Mask.
Apologies – this is not post topical, but it is very blog topical, and I thought it might interest some here.
A hidden camera at an old monastic cross in India attracts numerous night time visitors from the non-human animal kingdom. The elephants have been observed to change their movement patterns so as to be able to visit this cross.
“Scientists baffled” because of course they are… 😉
https://x.com/RT_India_news/status/1968344203022287022
Degrongolade #84 & JMG,
I’ve never went to the beach on Washington’s Pacific Coast but I can tell you some of the coldest water I’ve ever experienced was on a beautiful and warm July or early August day on the Puget Sound at some small municipal beach north of Kingston. Kids were swimming and splashing around in the water, the sky was clear, the scenery majestic and when I started to wade in the water my legs felt cold but I figured that was the usual reaction. I decided to dive underwater and my heart almost stopped. Unlike the beachgoers around me, I never recovered from that shock and after ten minutes or so, I stopped trying to convince myself that I was enjoying my time in the water and sought warmth on the beach.
As for the comments concerning the dismal weather along the Pacific Coast in the summer I found that in the Puget Sound area, summer is magical with the mountain views, clear sky’s, etc. I miss that part of the world.
I think the left doesn’t necessarily want power, if they did they’d be far better at coalition building. I think they want to endlessly critique power. Be moral busy bodies wagging their fingers at a power structure that doesn’t take them seriously. The minute one of their champions gets power suddenly he or she is part of the establishment and must be torn down.
In a minor news item this morning, two Chinese “flying cars” collided while rehearsing for a product demo for an air show. The reason the company gave for the collision: “Insufficient spacing.” Yeah, no kidding. (I’m no aeronautics expert, but I’ll take a wild guess the spacing that proved to be insufficient was zero.)
This got me thinking about explanations that only describe in different words, without actually explaining anything. Which crystallized my internal objection to the concept of the Spectacle. It’s so encompassing that it describes without illuminating much. It’s akin to pointing out that everything we see is really just patterns of photons in the visible frequency range. There’s Spectacle on cave walls from 30,000 years ago. Ogg the cave-student probably complained that his flint-knapping teacher gave better grades to students who whistled the same tunes as he did while knapping flint; is that something that’s ever going to change, or even should change? An artist can go ahead and détourne something, and that’s fine, but when they show it to me, from my POV they’re just contributing their own “content” to the Spectacle, aren’t they? It’s a conceptual trap.
Conclusion: there’s no point in whining about the Spectacle; the concept’s usefulness is to take note of it and move on to working on the spectator.
I’m hoping we’re working our way toward extending that ultra-summarized dialog from a few weeks ago:
JMG: “To know one story is death.”
The most widespread stories (AKA the Spectacle?): “I am the only story you need. All others are snares and delusions.”
Walt: “Well, there’s your problem.”
JMG: “Yes, exactly.”
This infamous Stonetoss cartoon is inadvertently channeling Situationism:
https://stonetoss.com/comic/burger-kang/
I should add, too, that now there’s always the option that anything you do might be made a spectacle of by all the poke noses, provocateurs, snitches, and tourists. Next thing you know, you’re a meme.
I think you’re wrong about your definition of the “extreme left” – almost sounds like a regurgitation of Trumpian propaganda. As far as I can tell, Democrats (aka the Left in America) are soundly invested in at least one version of corporate America, and are therefore neither extreme nor radical, by definition. Painting them as such serves the Republican purpose of shifting the goalposts, and vilifying even mildly progressive, people-oriented politics that would uphold the achievements of grassroots activism from the past 75 years, such as the civil rights act…
The only thing extreme I see in your country, from north of the border, is the use of firearms on both sides of the political aisle. I hope you’re not holding a lit match trying to read the label on a powder keg.
Re. comment #95. Touching to read of your continuing love for your late wife, Sara, Mr. Greer. To absent friends, then, because we never forget them. 🙂
JMG, agree one hundred percent. The only thing I would say about religious totalitarianism is, it’s harder to get going off the ground (too many safeguards that humans have learned and built into the tradition), BUT….if it does, it can be seriously bad, arguably worse than a tyrant. What perturbs me about Communism is that it is both tyrannical politically, AND thoroughly religious, albeit young, genetically. So you get the worst of both worlds. I do admit that a real religious war (30 Years War) is unbelievably nasty and ugly, and can do a shillelagh load of damage to almost everyone. Humans have very real problems being totalistic or holistic thinkers, while at the same time, avoiding totalitarianism. It’s far more common to unite them both in a miserable and psychotic dysfunction. In the case of the Aztecs, it seems to have grown successfully to full size, before being eviscerated by Spain and European diseases. It’s interesting to me that modern culture beats up on the straw man of Tyranny, which can never get started due to Enlightenment training and formation (everyone resents the Big Boss), but has total naievete towards the tyranny of Ideology, which is where the real operant threat comes from. But of course, that is PART of our own dominant ideology, which is already esconced, to be allergic to Pinochet, but enthusiastically embrace Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Amazing. Humans gonna human, but dang…you’d think the body counts would at least lead to hesitation…maybe it does, and I’m not being grateful enough for that. Our school system here in America is pretty bad, and yet most people are more decent than the regnant ideology. Still, a little geography, history, and philosophy training, or logical fallacy training, would not go amiss.
Excited for this series.
Allow me to chime in on some common misconceptions though:
The situationists didn’t think the Spectacle was necessarily centralized (“The spectacle exists in a concentrated form or a diffuse form”) or just amounted to production of state or propaganda/advertising.
They included everything in modern public (and parts of private) life under the sphere of “the Spectacle”. That is, their concept of the Spectacle was not as just the official propaganda/TV programming/newpapapers/advertising, but also as a general condition of modern life, from the high towers of diplomacy and relation between countries to everyday life, and the personal alienation of the common Joe and Jane.
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation” and “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual excess produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview
that has actually been materialized, that has become an objective reality”
Thus the “fakery” of regular life (from “keeping up with the Joneses consumption”, to the latest fads like Pilates or Labubu, to perfomative lifestyles meant for public view on social media) would also fall under the Spectacle. Including how people interact (“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images”). Images here are not meant as just photos or illustrations, but in the general sense (including articles, talk, lifestyle, etc). Both Debord and (the second in order in the group) Vaneigem are quite explicit about everybody participating in the Spectacle, not just being targets of it.
In the same vein, Debord didn’t think the Spectacle is something that only the capitalists/bourgeois do either. He included USSR and China (“the Russian lie and the Chinese lie”), as well as most, if not all, western leftism, into it.
In a later work, he explicitly distinguished between several modes of how the spectacle manifests, in which only the USSR/China version was the “Concentrated” mode, where control over the images/ideologies/desires/etc is centralized to the Party/state.
To also indulge in some historical pedantry, it’s not true that:
> In classic Marxism, the groups that mattered were social classes, and in that scheme, the ruling class was by definition evil and the proletariat class was by definition good. That meant—and yes, you can find this in Marxist literature—that when Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom in the Russian empire, that was an evil act, since by definition the ruling class can only do evil.
No classic / mainstream Marxist ever said that “the ruling class can only do evil”, and certainly not Marx. He was in favor of the abolition of the serfdom by Alexander, and only worried about its possible stonewalling by the noble class. And the most classic Marxist writings (including their foundational one, the Manifesto) herald the capitalist developments.
The main idea was that capitalism was a stage of development, and communism the next (perhaps ultimate) stage, but a progressive stage nonetheless. Marx describes possitively the destruction of archaic customs and limitations by capitalism, and was in favor of the “prometheic” nature of the industrialist elites.
And while you can find passages in Marxist literature (of the USSR and later era) that justify mass murder, it’s not as simplistic as “since the crimes were committed by the proletariat, and since the proletariat can do no wrong, the victims must have deserved it”. The justifications were more like “the victims did deserve it (for so and so objective reasons)”. Which is not that different from the justification of mass murder or violence by any movement or power in human history.
Really not that different than the idea that it would be good if slaves (like, in Roman times) just killed their masters and freed themselves (and maybe kill any “Uncle Toms” collaborating with the masters for good measure). Since that’s quite like how they see the proletariat vs rich situation.
Of course it played out way worse in practice, with the Moscow Trials and the gulags, and so on, but the justification was seldom, if ever, so caricaturish. That’s strawman them, perhaps with some cherry-picking.
Likewise, far from “the Party/proletariat can’t do no wrong” being the standard, one of the most common habits (and often, tricks) of the Party was the opposite: the self-critique. Of course this was used in Party internal politics, to justify the expulsion (or worse) of those involved in past decisions.
But nonetheless, “repenting” for past actions and “self-critique” was a big thing. It was never as caricaturish as “can’t do no wrong”.
@JMG:
Perhaps slightly off topic, but there’s a data point that seems worthy of sharing — assuming you haven’t already noticed it.
(Part of me wishes I hadn’t noticed it)
In your Narrative Trap post that began our current discussion of Situationism, you outlined the dysfunctional narratives about sex, love, and relationships that are fed to both men AND women, and how they appear in many settings, but are most clearly displayed for men in pornography and for women in tawdry romance fiction.
In particular, your description of the male lead in these books stuck in my mind: “constantly catering to her emotional needs and wants while expecting nothing from her but what she happens to want to give him.”
I noticed that there is a rapidly growing sub-Reddit with more than 25,000 members called “My Boyfriend Is AI.”
Posts abound with guides on how to manipulate one’s chatbot lover to the type of conversations and relationship dynamics one desires, along with AI generated vacation and wedding photos. Additionally, long screeds about how their “wireborn” companions took care of their emotional needs better than a human partner. To be fair, perhaps some of these posters are not being entirely serious; it’s hard to tell.
What jumped out at me was that, while both men and women appear to be using chatbots in this way, the subreddit appears to skew female.
I re-read your aforementioned essay, and shuddered:
“constantly catering to her emotional needs and wants while expecting nothing from her but what she happens to want to give him.”
This seemed an sufficiently weird synchronicity to warrant mentioning here. If you deem this not appropriate for this week’s discussion, I will humbly accept whatever correction you see fit.
As always, thank you for curating this space the way you do.
Now that I think about it, maybe its not so much they don’t want power so much as they think striving for it is dirty in a capitalist democracy? Like they think that they should go on about theory and moral virtue signaling, and fruitlessly scolding until the second coming oops i mean the revolution happens were then power is made pure and worthy to have?
Mac #103:
I’m not living in the USA, so I cannot paint a full picture of what’s happening there in politics, ecomics and society. However, I’d like to tell you my opinion about Democrats. By European standards they look like very mild and bland to call them as Socialists, even Socialdemocrats. But they tend to “eat” the true US Socialists and Far Extreme Leftist doing the old trick: the Republican bogey man…and it’s been working for Dems until now. So I could say both American parties are fooling their potential voters. I repeat you I’m not an American, so I recognize I could have an European biased view about this topic.
JMG, The Other Owen
Another example: the Communist Party in the Czech Republic these days is functionally a nationalist populist party that spends much of their time railing against mass immigration and the European Union.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Bohemia_and_Moravia
Hi JMG,
The thing about Marxism in all its flavors that gets me is that Marx seemed to correctly diagnose the problems of economic centralization that industrial economies demand, but then claimed the solution was even more centralization via the state, which would somehow also ‘wither away’. Funnily enough the libertarians and market liberals who officially hate Marxism have much the same argument, except instead of state centralization they’re for centralization by industrial combines. This is called ‘decentralization’ in their literature.
In either case the permitted economic models for industrial societies (some flavor of free market liberalism or Marxist derived socialism) officially decry centralization while also claiming that more of it will somehow bring about utopia.
Somehow though this gets missed in most critiques of either approach and I wonder why? It seems like a very obvious contradiction.
Cheers,
JZ
There’s a quote that I heard at the end of a song by the punk band Leftover Crack back in 2001 that goes as follows:
“We figured out a long time ago that it’s much easier to control people when we’re all watching the same shows, listening to the same radio stations, going to the same movies, eating the same food, and speaking the same language”
I have no idea what the source of the quote was — it’s a sample at the end of their song Clear Channel (*&^% off!), but to me it really stuck out because admittedly it’s true! Ironically the album it came out also came out in the early 00s in which the “monoculture” or “mono-Spectacle” started fragmenting due to the internet. And given the nature of the artist themselves — Leftover Crack were proud squatters and very much about not being controlled — they clearly liked the notion of diversity of opinion.
Of course here we are nearly a quarter century later, and by and large most of us are _not_ listening to the same radio stations, watching the same TV shows, or watching the same movies. We have our megastars and franchises, but by and large they’re less ubiquitous than they used to be. Less of us speak the same language, whether in a literal sense (way more Spanish speakers around here), or in a figurative sense (political dialogue breaks down if nobody agrees on what terms mean). As for the food part — well, I don’t really know about that one, depends on where you are.
But I suppose the point stands: yeah, it is indeed a lot easier to control people. And now that the “monoSpectacle” has broken down significantly, it certainly seems like the omnipotent ‘they’ are having a far harder time controlling “us”, as can be clearly evidenced by the increasing sociological fragmentation and chaos.
Funny how that idea holds up in hindsight…
@106 Joan
Oh agreed, i’ve noticed that too. The strongest anti theists tend to come from fundamentalist households. Understandable really, but at some point they really need to realize that this constant picking at a wound is not helpful. And I think a lot of Marxists come from middleclass backgrounds bitter that society hadn’t given them what they feel is their due. There is a lot of overlap between anti theists and marxists.
“I suppose all those woke fundies could flip into being christian fundies, but I think it more probable they will flip into being muslim fundies instead.”
I think that this really depends on where they are. In places where Christianity still has a strong presence, they are likely to flip to Christian fundamentalism. In places where Christianity has virtually disappeared and/or Islam has a strong presence, they are probably going to flip to Muslim fundamentalism. So Europe in particular is likely to see a bunch of newly converted ethnically European Muslims, compared to America where you’ll see bunch of newly converted ethnically American Christians.
Alan @ 101, You do not consider the grooming gang scandal in the UK to be such an example? May I ask why not?
Christophe @ 109, agreed about the 1970s. Alas, some truly wrong, bad decisions were made that decade. The anti-war, New Left sold out, Feminism was infiltrated and derailed by Agent Steinem (speaking of special places after death…), Carter nominated a right wing ideologue as Fed Chairman after the President of Bank of America turned him down. Seems the bank president’s wife didn’t want to move from San Francisco to DC. Can’t say that I blame her.
About Antifa being designated a terrorist organization, I suppose it is too much to ask that whomever has been bankrolling Antifa be investigated, charged and prosecuted.
“In any case, all he [Charlie Kirk] seemed to want to do was run his mouth off in places where he could argue with people, like on college campuses. ”
The free interchange of ideas and debate were once considered an important part of college. The fact that is no longer true is the real tragedy.
More on Jimmy Kimmel, the Spectacle has a scene change, (indirectly from NYP)
“Disney is the parent company of ABC, which airs Kimmel’s show on several independently owned affiliates. NexStar and Sinclair, which have licenses with the FCC that require them to operate in the public interest, “stood up” to Disney and ABC, according to Carr. “This is an important turning point,” he said of Kimmel’s show being taken off the air.”
“Sinclair, the nation’s largest ABC affiliate group, informed ABC earlier Wednesday that it would not continue to air “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” as a result of the host’s comments. “Mr. Kimmel’s remarks were inappropriate and deeply insensitive at a critical moment for our country,” Vice Chairman Jason Smith said in a statement. “We believe broadcasters have a responsibility to educate and elevate respectful, constructive dialogue in our communities.””
“Nexstar, which owns dozens of stations affiliated with ABC, similarly said it would pre-empt Kimmel’s show “for the foreseeable future.” “Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views, or values of the local communities in which we are located,” Nexstar President Andrew Alford said in a statement.”
There is a concept called a paradigm shift that was trendy for awhile but is out of use now. I wonder if this is one of them. I suppose it depends on if the change is permanent.
Seeking the Pure Land:
#34 September 17, 2025 at 2:16 pm
“Soi-disant Secular Buddhists. They’re losing ground and i’m noticing that heritage Buddhists like myself are becoming more and more of a voice. The mindfulness meditation secular Buddhists hate this. They despise ritual and don’t believe in rebirth or karma. I think that when they finally go away, Buddhism will have a real future in the US.”
I’ve noticed much the same thing. They’re also really allergic to anything approaching the magical/miraculous aspects that manifest from time to time. And they hate (as with a great passion) anything resembling Buddhist scholarship, which I have a glancing familiarity with, though I rarely engage with it of late. From what I’ve been able to discern, the engine that is Buddhism really engages when there is a deep personal connection with all that stuff, resembling what happens when someone falls in love. Otherwise, it’s just the ashes of thought. I hope I’m being clear enough. I’m reluctant to blather on about this stuff much more than I have.
Re: leftists as playing out a martyr script
The thought occurred to me the other day that some of those on the left currently doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down may be seeking suicide by civil war.
Thankfully, I’ve seen evidence that others on the left are panicking and hurriedly deleting their posts from Reddit and similar sites. I think that’s a good sign that it’s setting in that they’re sunk and not going to win this contest.
Paedrig @ 119, The “managerial class” is not exclusively leftist, at least not here in the USA. PMC idiots abound in the ranks of corporate functionaries just as they do in government agencies. I would assert that the best place to find PMC parasites is in the area of private-public enterprises. Hordes of idlers live off the public dole while pretending to “make a profit”.
To me, non- expert, the Kirk assassination does not smell like a foreign unintelligence op. From what I gather, I refuse to join the public obsession on any side, there was plenty of official incompetence on display. Israeli assassination teams normally don’t use patsies, they either create “accidents” or simply shoot the target and dare anyone else to do something about it.
Believe it or not. I had Marxists in my family. And they were spectacular. My father’s father and uncle blew up coal mines in Canada before leaving for the U.S. And his brother blew things (we never knew what) up in California. We were all tarred with the same brush when it came to the U.S. government. My brother who runs a paving company is still watched by the FBI for his influence in town paving contracts. All he does is pave roads and parking lots. But that can be viewed as subversive, I suppose.
That being said, I discover that Marx himself was a wienie. He lived off his mother’s largess and rarely worked. In other words, he was the very thing he railed against. I think he was angry when his mother cut off most of the funds and told him to work. Hmmmmm. So, we get the Marxian rage against the machine.
When I hear about how the US is built on stolen land, slavery, aggressive capitalism, etc, etc, I am reminded that the Marxists who are saying this want to blow the whole thing up and start over with their version of Eden. I recall that the Mayor of LA is a Maoist and seemed fine with the riots. Perhaps it was a reflection of how Marx who was well off kept raging on about everything.
Thinking of spectacle, intermediation, and disintermediation, I’ve recently taken to going outside and doing art ‘en plein air’, partly because I want to improve my instincts for light and color. Drawing is a lot of fun but harder on my hands than painting, and now I want a proper little watercolor set and a small pad of decent watercolor paper.
But anyway, it occurs to me that en plein air is a good way of training yourself to see what’s actually there, instead of what you think is there, or what society insists is there.
I’m not sure how much that will help in monkeywrenching the spectacle and tearing it for other people, but taking the log out of one’s own eye is generally a good step to take before trying to help anyone else with whatever’s in theirs.
Other Owen @ 121, I fervently agree about the general uselessness of most of HR. OTOH, about so-called “cat ladies”: anyone using that phrase as a pejorative has clearly never tried to garden in places like the Central Valley in CA, where gophers are a constant menace. For gophers you NEED an outdoor miniature tiger. A serious indoor mouse infestation, where no tiny tiger is permitted–most rentals–requires enough poison to kill an army. Don’t ask how I know that. I will say that I now keep all grains, beans and garden seeds in glass containers.
“I suppose all those woke fundies could flip into being christian fundies, but I think it more probable they will flip into being muslim fundies instead.”
Some of them could end up becoming Buddhists, once the dreck of Secular Buddhism is cleared out. Buddhism could provide an framework that affirms their discontentment with the world but channeling it in a benign direction. And those whose radicalism was motivated by a desire for belonging will probably find a lot to like about Japanese Pure Land Buddhism’s insistence that Amida’s vows cover literally everyone, especially those who society rejects or who have done bad things. (As the saying goes, “Even good people are covered by Amida’s vows, so it goes without saying that bad people are. They need it more.”)
Being around the same age as JMG and having lived in Ireland all my life, I’ve had the experience of watching a deeply religious county evolve into a deeply woke county. It started out as a confessional state, where the catholic bishops yielded enormous political power, they have been replaced by a woke hierarchy that now yields similar power. And yet all that has really happened is that we have gone round in a great circle and ended up right back where we started. The woke hierarchy are just as sure that they are on the right side of history, as their catholic predecessors were. And they are just as intolerant of dissent. It seems to me an iron rule that when someone reacts against something, they inevitably become that very thing themselves, they just dress it up in a different suit of clothes.
The saddest thing for me is that as the power of the Catholic Church began to wane, what had been a country of dreary conformity went through an amazing cultural renaissance. All kinds of ideas and lifestyles flourished in an atmosphere of easy going, live and let live. But we are back where we started, deary conformity rules the roost again. The people who call for tolerance and kindness are the most intolerant and unkind people I know. I can’t help thinking how true is the statement, when people stop believing in God, they will believe in anything. And I say that as an agnostic. Most people seem intellectually incapable of atheism, they inevitably turn something else into a god and end up as adherents to some form of secular religion. The pieties of the covid lockdowns fitted this pattern perfectly.
On the question of the huge demonstration in London last weekend. We had something similar in Dublin a few weeks back. A massive crowd of probably over 100,000 turned up, which the legacy media described as more than 10,000, a classic half truth. I take the size of these demos as a hopeful sign. The working class in the British Isles have had enough and are possibly getting close to full scale revolt. Like the UK we have imported large numbers of young men, who have been put into working class communities. Women in those communities are increasingly afraid to leave their homes without male chaperones. But when they say this they are smeared as far right, by middle and upper class woke clowns, who live in communities that are unaffected by this problem. A classic case of moral hazard.
Historically the most interesting thing about this new development is that it’s crossing the traditional Unionist, Nationalist divide in Northern Ireland. Working class people of both traditions are starting to make common cause. It has long been a policy of the British establishment to keep working class unionists and nationalists at each others throats. That game which worked so well for 400 years, increasingly looks like it’s over.
Hello JMG,
When you mentioned that “In some European countries right now, for example, a woman who is raped by an immigrant faces more serious legal consequences if she mentions her rapist’s nationality on social media than the rapist will ever face for his crime. “, it reminded me of a comment you made a month or two ago in reply to someone who asked if you might relocate to the UK in the foreseeable future. You said something like, it would be too dangerous for you. I was uncertain at the time why you thought this was so, but I now presume you meant you feared being persecuted or even jailed for what you might post on this forum. Is that correct? If so, that is pretty dreadful.
On a similar note, a few days ago I watched a YT discussion between two well-respected, right-of-centre academics – known as Academic Agent and Jolly Heretic – about the British political situation. This was particularly in relation to predictions of a near-term, low-level civil war breaking out in the UK which have been particularly promoted by a Prof. David Betz. Betz seems to a recognised authority on how such conflicts start and his arguments seemed plausible, though he is a pretty poor speaker. Anyway, the two took opposing positions on that issue at the start of their discussion but by the end seemed to agree that the US would manipulate events to facilitate a US-friendly, probably Reform-led government being installed in the UK by the end of this decade. This would head-off the destruction of British civil society in any such conflict which would only serve the interests of the US’s enemies. Does that seem a reasonable position?
@ Seeking the Pure land – “Now that I think about it, maybe its not so much they don’t want power so much as they think striving for it is dirty in a capitalist democracy? Like they think that they should go on about theory and moral virtue signaling, and fruitlessly scolding until the second coming oops i mean the revolution happens were then power is made pure and worthy to have?”…I think you got closer to the truth here. They say they don’t want power, and that they don’t have it. They certainly are sincere, most of them, in believing what they say. However, it is part of their ideology to both desire and obtain power, and to yet say that they don’t really have it – hence, “progress”: “Yes, we did do some teensy small things for some teeny-weeny gains, but there’s so far to go”. It is not being driven by science, but by the requirements of operating an ideology that hides their own agency, entitlement, and real power. For the last 100 years, certainly, they have had almost entirely “the whip hand”. But they don’t experience the world emotionally that way, despite the fact that the world is largely designed, controlled, and operated at the behest of their dominant ideas. Their psyche will not permit them to acknowledge that they built, and are responsible for, the state of affairs, and that they are “the man”. Hence, the cluelessness and hamfistedness, increasingly, as they try to evade coming to grips with it.
When Debord wrote his famous book about Spectacle, he described that Spectacle according XXth century technologies such as TV. Of course he didn’t wrote about internet or smartphones but I agree his analysis is useful for today.
However I wonder when the Spectacle was born. Could we say it was when first photograph was taken and reproduced massively?(newspapers) Could we look at the first MSM or not? Is it a modern phenomenon in itself or could be found in primitive forms before Industrial Revolution?
“I think you’re wrong about your definition of the “extreme left””
The definition of stuff like “left” and “right” is always dependent upon context: it differs between regions of the world and differs between different political eras and generations. For an older generation of people, “extreme left” would refer to the totalitarian communist regimes in the second and third world. These days, many of the social attitudes embraced and many of the policies enacted in the totalitarian communist regimes would be regarded as “far right”, such as xenophobia and limiting immigration. Meanwhile once upon a time, multiculturalism was a right wing traditionalist position used to justify the rule of monarchies and aristocracies over European peasants of different ethnicities.
Lathechuck, that wasn’t something that I wrote, but it’s tolerably accurate of the extreme left. As for your whimsical reread, I like it — a very elegant little détournement.
Christophe, you’re most welcome. Yeah, watching people who were insisting that cancel culture was just fine, when they were doing the canceling, having classic shrieking two-year-old meltdowns when their own actions boomeranged on them has been, er, interesting.
Lacking, I well recall Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders, which discussed this. I’m not sure how well it actually worked, but yeah, there was a lot of that in ads back in the day.
Clay, Capital is well worth reading; it’s outdated, as you’d expect from a book that could only draw on the experiences of the first half or so of the industrial revolution, but it makes some valid points. And of course there’s the issue of what’s happened to Marxism since his time. Do you recall the famous interview where C.G. Jung said, “Thank God I’m not a Jungian”? I suspect that if Marx could have foreseen what was done in his name, he’d have angrily denied that he was a Marxist.
Atr, excellent! I haven’t owned or watched a TV in my adult life, and most of what I’ve accomplished has been a direct result of that fact — it’s astonishing what you can get done when you’re not spending four hours a day staring at a glass screen, with drool puddling in your lap. As for the erasure of the internet, I’m actually glad to see that. If the old web disappears from the Spectacle but is allowed to wind down slowly in reality, that’ll make it easier for conversations like these to find new homes before infrastructure decay makes that essential.
Ron, I’m very concerned that things could spin out of control, both in the US and in countries such as yours where the elites will be frantic to prevent what’s happening in the US from spreading. At this point, though, there’s not much I can do about any of it; the work I’ve been trying to do, by way of spreading alternative ideas, is a slow process not likely to have much effect in an era of wildly overheated public rage. Still, I can try.
Temporaryreality, thanks for this. It’s a new situation for humans only to the extent that its range is amplified by technology — making a spectacle of yourself for profit, with attendant perks and fakeries, has been a commonplace of decadent societies since the beginning of recorded history. If past experience is anything to go by, once the crisis is past, people will shake their heads and go back to something a little closer to sane behavior.
Alan, there were stories to that effect in the news over the last year, from Britain and Germany. I’m sure you can find them if you’re actually interested.
Archivist, hatred for Israel is a bipartisan theme in the US these days; the fact that some people on the right were pushing an Israel-did-it narrative does not change the fact that the same thing was being done by people on the left. I have no idea which side started it, nor does it matter.
BoysMom, it’s exactly the same thing, and the news isn’t that much fresher — good newspapers back in the day got things in print with remarkable speed, and would do an extra issue (think of newsboys shouting “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”) when the story was big enough. I get my news from a handful of internet aggregators, some from the left and some from the right, just as a century ago I’d have gotten both daily papers (most US cities had one leftward and one rightward paper); I even read them after breakfast, in the time-honored fashion.
Joan, exactly. It’s one of the oddities of technological triumphalism that nobody seems to expect people to adapt, as they always do.
Alvin, that’s a very good example. The label “queer,” which once had a very specific meaning, has been stretched of necessity to allow straight kids to claim status in a system that denies them privilege. As for the Buddhists, that’s really sad.
Rusty, no doubt! As a kid, I was crazy about Japanese culture — in effect, a weeaboo before there were weeaboos; the first anime I ever watched was Gigantor, in black and white. (Yes, there were still b&w TV stations when I was growing up.) I more or less matured out of that, though I still appreciate the Japanese aesthetic, but it’s given me a wry perspective on watching more recent generations go through the same thing.
Chuaquin, I know. The one thing I hope for at this point is that the right-wing revenge doesn’t go as far as shooting leftists. It could do that quite easily, but if that happens, we’re in deep trouble.
William, hmm. Okay, that’s a reasonable point; I’ll have to ponder it.
Gavin, James Billington, in his fine book Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith, suggested that if religion is the opiate of the masses, revolutionary politics is the cocaine of the intellectuals. Thus your analysis seems sensible to me! As for the Second Religiosity, I’ve discussed that on and off here for some years now, and it’s definitely picking up steam here in the US. If you’d like to nominate it for a fifth Wednesday post, I’ll be opening nominations for those on October 1.
Paedrig, excellent. Yes, that’s basically what I’m trying to suggest.
Aurelien, thanks for this. As I tried to suggest, modern identity politics had their origin in the New Left of the 1960s, especially (though as far as I know not exclusively) here in the US, where Marxists were left floundering by the complete unwillingness of the US working classes to act the way Marx claimed they should act and side with the left. The result was the redefinition I mentioned, in which class was replaced by race, gender, and (a little later) sexual orientation, so that the thoroughly bourgeois college-educacted intellectuals who made up the bulk of the American radical left could identify themselves as the revolutionary proletariat. I’m quite aware that this isn’t what Marx said, and also that it wasn’t what European avant-garde radicals like Debord said! With regard to working class status, the United States has always been an outlier here; it’s quite true that my family was working class — my father’s father was a firefighter, my mother’s father a pipefitter in a shipyard — but our society has always had much more class mobility than European societies (thus my father faced no obstacles whatever in ascending to the lower middle class) and, accordingly, a much greater tendency for social and economic classes to be identical in practice — how much money you make really does determine your social class here. No doubt that;s a source of bias on my part.
Scotty, good. As we’ll see further down the road in our discussion of A Vision, in the late phases of the historical cycle, Yeats predicted exactly this sort of collapse of a common Spectacle. As I read it, we’ve entered the 28th phase of the historical cycle, which has as True Mask “Oblivion” and as False Mask “Malignity”; both are very much on display now, and the interchange of the tinctures is approaching.
Scotlyn, thanks for this.
Scotty, yep. The main oceanic current along the Pacific coast comes straight south from Alaska, and since it doesn’t get much sunshine on the way down, it’s stunningly cold. Puget Sound is very deep — it’s an old glacial valley excavated during the last ice age — and so icy water from the Pacific flows into it down deep via the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I was astounded the first time I went wading in the Atlantic and discovered that the ocean doesn’t have to be bone-crunching cold!
Seeking, it depends on which part of the left you have in mind. The radical left, no — but there are a lot of people on the left who are very eager for power, and the money that can be extracted by the powerful.
Walt, good. We’re going to discuss the limits of the concept as we proceed.
Logan, it wouldn’t surprise me for a moment if Stonetoss read the Situationists. Quite a few intellectuals of the populist right have done so.
TemporaryReality, true enough!
Mac, er, no, you’ve just demonstrated that you don’t know much about the American left. The end of it that supports the corporate system, and is neither extreme nor radical, is only one end of a spectrum that extends into fairly extreme territory. For example, there are American leftists who insist that the family ought to be abolished, that pedophilia ought to be legitimized, and — as we’ve seen over and over again recently — that it’s okay to murder someone like Charlie Kirk because he said things that hurt the feelings of leftists. If you don’t consider those beliefs extreme, well, there we differ.
Zemi, thank you for this. Some things don’t change.
Celadon, agreed! The one good thing about the abject failure of our educational system is that there’s so much low-hanging fruit when it comes to improvement; as you say, a little practical instruction in a few useful subjects could do a world of good.
European, of course. Keep in mind that this post is just the first, very tentative venture into the realm of the Spectacle. In particular, we’ll be talking about Debord’s critique of the Soviet and Chinese systems in some detail — not least because that same critique applies with remarkable clarity to our present managerial state. As for “classic / mainstream Marxists,” well, that allows plenty of wiggle room, doesn’t it? Equally, your comments about self-critique miss my point. Individuals can do wrong in the Marxist system, but the system itself is always right; the failures all belong to individuals, while the successes all belong to the Party.
Anonymous, hmm! Thank you for this.
John Z, I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who pointed out that socialism tries to get rid of coercion in economic life by handing all economic power to the state, the central locus of coercion: that is, whitewashing a wall by painting it black.
Deathcap, it does indeed hold up well!
@ jmg howdy! great post. quick question on the “rising entrepreneurial elite”. Do you have an example of this? I am not sure what that is — someone doing a startup? someone who can market a skill to others?
@the other owen. Thx for the “fundies” did you invent that? very clever — I will start using this 🙂
Jerry
Neptunesdolphins, I have no trouble believing it. Marxism was once very popular. As for Marx, it’s embarrassing how often people who think they ought to change the world can’t even run their own lives.
Pygmycory, hmm! That strikes me as an excellent idea.
Kevin, thanks for this. I’ve heard the same thing about Northern Ireland from Irish on both sides of the confessional line, and yes, it’s enormously cheering. I hope good comes of it.
Robert M, according to recent news stories, something like 30 people a day are being prosecuted in Britain for social media posts that violate the government’s exceedingly flexible rules about “hate speech.” If I relocated to Britain I’d be subject to its laws, of course, and so, yes, I would have to worry constantly about whether something I posted here would land me in gaol. If that changes, I’d love to spend a few years in Britain, but that’s got to change first. As for the speculation about British politics, that’s up in the air at this point. All the fuss about Greenland shows me that the US elite is prepared to abandon Britain, which has been our forward defensible point against a potentially hostile Europe, and withdraw the defensive perimeter to this side of the Atlantic. My guess, though it’s only a guess, is that the US would rather keep Britain within its perimeter, but that’ll depend on the cost to us.
Chuaquin, excellent! Yes, and we’ll be exploring that as this discussion proceeds.
Jerry, perhaps you’ve heard of someone named Elon Musk. Perhaps you’ve heard of someone named Peter Thiel. Perhaps you’ve heard of some of the people referenced in this article. Take those as starting points and I think you can figure out what I’m talking about.
@ JMG
A fascinating article, as always. I recall reading in “The King in Orange” that 4-chan played a tremendous role in determining the outcome of the US election in 2016, and so did the blogs by society’s discontents. Is this an example of the modern phenomenon of people creating and maintaining the Spectacle for one another?
@ Silliconguy # 12
I find it really interesting that Substack has actually increased its share of viewers. This is the model that we are returning to – exchanging some combination of news, gossip, and opinions with each other in shared forums.
I saw an article by Naseem Taleb on Medium discussing this – news media has lost out to social media, and that’s a good thing. News is an instrument of centralization, and therefore of power.
@111 Alvin and @JMG
I’ve noticed that there are some forums that secular buddhist and buddhists that think weed is acceptable in spite of the Buddha being very clear no intoxicants, that they basically use their politics in place of buddhism. I was disappointed to see though people who should have known better trying to make excuses for celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder. I think that’s what happens when you let politics subsume your religion. You end up justifying throwing away your ethics. More traditional buddhists like myself as you noticed pushed back against this, some of us got called racists and nazi sympathizers by people who again should have known better.
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@145 Clarke aka Gwydion
I’ve noticed that too. I’ve found Buddhism works best when people have experiences. I’ve had very good experiences with Amitabha Buddha and Guanshiyin Pusa and have fallen even more in love. Its sad how much Seculars dismiss the very idea of experiences.
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@145 Celadon
Thank you, I need to mull over this. Though I’d argue that Marxist thought hardly has power. Leftist thought though yes has had quite a lot of success. Something I need to think over. I hope this makes sense.
Oh i’ve noticed that the marxist idea of the system is perfect and can only be failed. Individuals however are flawed and can fail is another idea they got from chrstianity.
Apologies, i forgot to mention. There are a sort of Theravadins, that are not secularists but still basically put race first. For example there was a Theravadin who was a black south african, he made that very clear who basically made everything about race. And there where real criticisms about race to be had to be fair! For example how white people talk over asian Buddhists all the time. It got so bad though that he got kicked out of our Buddhist discord server for toxic behavior. He created a reddit channel for his type of Buddhism and when the murder of Charlie Kirk happened when we all said that the murder was was wrong and that celebrating it was wrong, he made a post calling us racists and defenders of nazis!
Before I go too much further, I’m not quite sure I fully understand the concept of the Spectacle (guess I should read that book). I understand the basic idea, which these days incorporates everything from mass marketing to an army of YouTubers, but trying to go a little deeper is bringing up some confusion for me. From what you’ve said here:
“What is the Spectacle? It is the world of appearances generated by any modern industrial society…and it also stands in the way of any authentic perception of the actual realities of life in late industrial culture.”
“The Spectacle, a relation mediated by images that pretends to be the world.”
Those statements imply to me that the Spectacle is simply an image-based veneer over the actual or real world. It also implies that, should we one day be free from the Spectacle, through the proletarian revolution or otherwise, we would finally gain authentic unmediated access to the world.
That’s where I start to stumble. I know you’ve read Schopenhauer and Plato, along with a whack of (other) occult philosophers. What I’ve gleaned from those sources is that as humans, if there is an actual reality or objective world somewhere out there, we have no way of perceiving it directly. The world we know is simply an image assembled through the filters of our minds from the mass of information collected by our various senses. To say it differently, it’s ‘all’ Spectacle. If that’s in fact the case, if we could somehow eliminate the Spectacle, what would it then mean to have an authentic perception of the actual reality of life?
Another part of my confusion stems from the mention of the Spectacle as being generated by a modern industrial society. Does this imply there was no Spectacle before that? I would argue that all cultures develop an image-based world of appearances. In a pre-industrial society, those images are not going to be YouTube videos, memes, or tv commercials, but rather, images that are conveyed to the minds of the members of that culture through various forms of narratives, whether those come from stories told orally, or from religious or secular texts. For a Christian, don’t the images of Christ on the cross, or the parting of the Red Sea, the Last Supper and the Resurrection convey some powerful imagery to the minds of those perceiving them? Wouldn’t those have the same effect as the Spectacle on the members of that culture – effectively engaging them in a relation that pretends to be the world?
Is the objection to the Spectacle stemming from a rejection of the commodification of the world that seems to be its purpose, at least the late-stage industrial capitalist version? Would an ‘authentic’ perception of the world then mean a world at least less mediated by capitalism? I would argue here again that there is no authentic perception of the world available to us, and if it is not mediated through a capitalist filter, it’s going to be mediated through some other filter like religion, by those with the power to disseminate images, and will shape how people relate to one another and experience their world. Mediation seems to be inherent to human existence.
The key distinctions here might be: what is the intent of those with the power to create the Spectacle? Just to make money? Political Control? To point to a higher or divine reality? Or something else? Also: how much agency does it assume of the Spectators? Are they just passive objects with no agency, waiting for someone to hand them a narrative that will cause them to spring into the desired action? Or are they rather active participants with the ability and perhaps responsibility to take part in a shared creation of reality?
My apologies if this is not the direction you were headed here, but I feel like I need to understand these ideas more fully before addressing what is perhaps your broader point.
@ Jessica #40
This: “Like Gramsci after WW1, the Situationists were trying to figure out why the working class had not been able to seize power…”
vs
This: “Or to put it another way, why the liberating potential of labor-saving industrialization was not actually liberating people…”
It seems to me that these two sentences are completely incommensurate.
Firstly, “working class” (an abstraction which entirely lacks agency) is not commensurate with “people” (purposeful agents).
Also “seizing power” (ie – taking part in the “game of thrones” as played by people who aspire to rule) is not commensurate with “liberation” (general assent to the exercise of personal autonomy by people who aspire to be free).
In fact, in my experience, people generally aim to “seize power” precisely in order to remove or constrain the liberty of others.
Do you disagree?
@JMG
Thanks for the response.
You are probably right is pushed by both sides and I think it might pe pushed from the past. Given that these tweets made one month ago have 12 million and 3 million views now.
And there is something similar similar to the 4chan 7777 7777 moment.
Like these two tweets from 1 month ago, that is extremely prescient and it even points on a conspiracy but most importan have the details are pretty much accurate, we indeed might be getting in the realm of magic/myth making:
https://x.com/tommyborumjokes/status/1955707128825393497
Also the forementioned prime minister just made the 3rd denial which doesn’t help at all. While there are no proofs, this is catching fire, what I am finding curious it seems that is almost destined to catch fire, I am now almost interested just by the phenomenon.
A minor correction to your “how much money you make really does determine your social class here.” My version is “How much money you appear to make really does determine your social class here.” A family one paycheck from disaster can still garner the esteem of their neighbors if they have the big house, the big trucks, the summer house, and the boat. The Spectacle wins.
Somewhere in my shelves there is a copy of The Revolution of Everyday Life by Vaneigem, the other situationist icon.
Be that as it may: JMG, I have no sympathy for the intersectionality narrative but a bit more sympathy for the class perspective which at least partly reflects actual realities in the economy. After all, there is a very different thing to be a laborer than a capitalist or a self-employed like myself. Admittedly there are more classes and the modern society has created a lot of “intermediates” (like consultants or druids).
While I never defined myself of Marxism, I certainly have followed a lot of Marxist debates and I would say that a class perspective doesn’t imply that all done by the working class is good – after all it has been quite common in Marxist circles to challenge the other faction for being a “class traitor” of one or the other kind. Also, the whole Leninist thing was actually built on that it wasn’t the working class, but an enlightened intelligensia that would take control.
Be that as it may, my main point is that group think is as common in the Right as in the Left and that it is prevalent in most if not all human cultures. I also believe that group morality is real and inevitable, for the better and the worse. After all we are a supersocial species (some call it prosocial) and humans have designed collective codes of behavior and morals all through history. Religion is an obvious example. And religion also show us a lot of examples of how groups cast collective guilt on other groups. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t also a individual moral and responsibility. But also individuals are very much shaped by the context they grow up with and moral is also context specific. In short, I think that it is not helpful to try to draw a line between collective and individual moral and discuss them as contradictory or essentially different. They are just two different reflections of being a human.
@Mary Bennet (#147):
I agree that the man who shot Charlie Kirk was likely to have been an amateur. Most likely he meant to aim for Kirk’s head, but happened by luck to hit his target’s neck instead — a much narrower and harder target than his target’s head would have been.
Oh my goodness, JMG, I had no expectation that you can “do” anything specifically about the current social situation. All that each of us can do is be mindful of our thoughts, words, and actions, and wish/pray for the good of all as we watch this Wheel of Fortune turn. And, of course, those who have already embarked on healthy spiritual/religious or magical practices (whatever they may be) continue to do so.
RaabSilco #135:
Well, of course it primarily skews female. For men to use these things, phones would need bigger ports.
All prurient jokes aside, that’s rather sad. I know I’m not exactly the target audience but how can one’s emotional needs be satisfied by a machine? You’d always know that it’s not real. I’d rather just be lonely.
—David P.
PS to JMG: I apologise if this runs afoul of the no profanity rule. I also hope that this doesn’t stray too far into the forbidden topic.
It seems to me that we can tie the Spectacle back to the concept of “intermediation” discussed a while back. It’s intermediation of reality using various media or other conditioning, and in many cases pernicious and even black magic judging from how it appears to bind the will and imagination of those under its spell. But the idea of a fragmented Spectacle had occurred to me as well and I discussed it in my (as yet unpublished) Spenglerian text written around ’22-’23. There have been some unpredictable side effects of this development, in that the old centralized methods of control have lost a lot of their force even when their owners have used very heavy-handed tactics to keep people in line. But it hasn’t necessarily made society better – there is an even more pervasive narcissism, and the fragments or ghettos that represent sub-Spectacles still keep most of the entranced in a bubble, into which little from the outside may penetrate. It’s a strange moment in history that way, but I think it very unlikely now that Humpty Dumpty is going to be put back together again. In this particular phase of decline, the shattered Spectacle is what I’m expecting to have to work with for the rest of my lifetime.
JMG, there’s a phrase for that kind of difficulty: First World Problems 🙂 Those of us who aren’t interested in crucifixion as a life goal can hopefully just duck our heads and continue building the Fourth World, or the Fifth World, or the Zeta Gamma Long Descent Retrotopic Carnival Fun World, or whatever we’re calling it these days!
As for the elite replacement cycle, I note that your 2100 prediction maps perfectly onto Spengler’s interpretation of Roman history, and onto the Romans’ view that history moved in periods called saeculae, roughly the maximum human lifetime, or four generations, or around 80 to 90 years.
Here we are in the present watching Trump and his entrepreuners shoulder aside the career politicians just as Gaius Gracchus and his equites did in 121 BC. There would have been a similar factional seismic shift one saeculum prior, around the close of the Second Punic War (and for us, around the close of the Second World War).
The coming 2100 elite replacement, in my understanding of Spengler, will correspond to Caesar and Octavian’s rise. They consolidated power with the help of an elite class whose trajectory had been on the rise all through the preceding saeculum: the professional military class. For Spengler, that transition marks the true ‘end of history’ for every civilization, since what follows after is no longer an ordered, predictable process of elite class succession but a confusing and random series of dyanasties and palace coups. (Spengler may be entirely wrong on this, but that was basically his view).
One history blogger I follow remarked recently that the 1975 transition from a conscripted army to a professional army will likely turn out to have been one of the most important events in American history. We aren’t yet seeing armed military factions swaying elections (which is the mark of true Caesarism), but I would be curious to know whether the party leanings of the average infantryman was a factor influencing the Democrats to concede in 2024 rather than attempt a second steal.
“So, to at least as great an extent, do the words that are left out, the events that go unreported, and the products that are never manufactured or sold.”
It wasn’t until I met Bill, a longtime newspaper copy editor (he’d been a copyboy at the Charlotte Observer back in the late ’70s when Patricia Cornwall was still Patsy Daniel) that I learned that every single day, newspaper senior staff sit down at a budget meeting. The idea is to decide what stories to print today in tomorrow’s A section. Evening papers do it in the wee morning hours. Morning papers do it in the early afternoon.
Every single day.
What’s more, especially in a larger area, there’s so much news to choose from — local, regional, national, international — that you could choose two or three or more entirely different A sections!
What the budget meeting says “no” to is much larger than what they say “yes” to. These choices can be ideological or driven by advertisers or what’s easiest or what the staff thinks will sell the most newspapers.
Sometimes, as with 9-11 or Princess Diana dying in the Paris tunnel in a car crash, the decision is easy. Other times, what do you chose?
Every single day, every newspaper (and news magazine and TV news program!) in the world makes decisions that determine what stories you read. But you never learn what they said “no” to.
“I’d call both versions tripe, except that swine’s intestines can at least provide a little nourishment.”
Disclaimer – the following post may contain outrageous pedantry… 😉
I have to tell you, and anyone who is interested in the minutae of meat-based food types, tripe is not the intestines of swine or of any beast. Tripe is the stomach lining of swine, and also of many beasts.
/pedantry
🙂
>tried to garden in places like the Central Valley in CA, where gophers are a constant menace. For gophers you NEED an outdoor miniature tiger.
Those battery powered gopher spikes work pretty well at repelling them. They also work on armadillos too. And if I stayed up late, a good old fashioned 30-06 would work wonders as well. On the gophers. That’s what a gun is for, you know.
>A serious indoor mouse infestation, where no tiny tiger is permitted–most rentals–requires enough poison to kill an army.
I call leaving free food out that has been rat poisoned, “Alabama Socialism” and you can sure call me an Alabama Socialist. You put out enough rat bait and they will all go away satisfied. And then they don’t come back.
My NI system is great at detecting mousies though, so I can target where to run my next social pogrom, er, I mean, program. My neighbors have quite the barn cat colony going and I’m not averse to feeding one or two so they stick around.
>Thx for the “fundies” did you invent that?
Something I’ve noticed over the years. If there are other people who have pointed it out, haven’t run across them. You may steal the memes, that’s what they’re there for.
SilicoGuy # 144 ..
‘Pair-o-Dime’ works, as in “You talketh the Smack too far .. You looseth ALL the Coin”!
‘Phase Shift’ seems as a workable .. maybe even more honest concept, in that phases CAN and often DO change back to their proir state.
JMG # 157:
“Chuaquin, I know. The one thing I hope for at this point is that the right-wing revenge doesn’t go as far as shooting leftists. It could do that quite easily, but if that happens, we’re in deep trouble.”
I hope the same thing…Of course, in this tension context in your country, some type of revenge is predictable, but I hope a “legal retaliation” better than cancelling or shooting Leftists.
——————————————————————————————————————————-
“Chuaquin, excellent! Yes, and we’ll be exploring that as this discussion proceeds.”
Thanks, so let’s see that in the near future…
>I’ve had the experience of watching a deeply religious county evolve into a deeply woke county
Fundies gonna fundie.
To bring things back to Murica, JMG made the observation that we were founded by a bunch of religious fanatics and that religious fanaticism is part of who we are. These childish self righteous liars? Look at them. That’s who we are.
While I’m on the topic of who we are, if Ghislane Maxwell did nothing wrong, she needs to be released from prison. And may I Modestly Propose we build monuments to her in every major city so that once again, we can look at her and realize that this, is who we are.
There are no heroes in this story.
Heard all across the Realm: the KIMMEL HATH FALLEN! .. and THAT WEIRD MOUSE AT HIS BACK..
I know John prefers COVID topic be treated in his other blog, but I expect being “forgiven” for this comment:
I think the COVID event was one of the finest examples of Spectacle of the last years (independently what do you all think about vaccines and other controversies on that topic). What do you opine about this (sub)topic?
Thank you. That is very succinct and pithy summation of Marxism. I, too, find it continually necessary to explain to people why movements which claim moral rectitude invariably are orders of magnitude more brutal and horrific that those motivated by tribalism. I suppose the only question not touched on is exactly why Marx decided that the proletariat have moral rectitude in contrast to the usual claim that the ruling class has rectitude which is why they are the ruling class. The answer, of course, is the focus on equality of outcome in the world now, instead of the Christian idea of equality in Christ, in heaven, after you die.
I have a confusion of ideas and probably misunderstandings of the Spectacle. Is it the same as the matrix of a culture? An overarching unifying Noble Lie that permits and tolerates subgroups (if not always enthusiastically or respectfully) the way a gothic cathedral contains multiple prayer chapels as an integral part of its structure? (Sorry, I was just visiting France, it’s the metaphor that springs to mind.) Is culture creating the Spectacle, or does Spectacle create the culture, or is it a mutual organic co-creation? Or is it one and the same?
Or is Spectacle more like the expression of an egregore? Or is Spectacle creating an egregore?
Bruce
What a lovely perspective!
I’m adding this to my other angles on this phenomenon, which I know as “the Matrix”, “Maya”, Katy Perry’s video “Chained to the Rhythm”, and the Bible’s term translated as ‘world’ (kosmon), the Greek word actually meaning ‘an orderly arrangement’, i.e. a ‘system’ or a ‘matrix’.
Evidently this ‘spectacle-building’ is one of the things humans do when humans will human.
Thanks!
“The fall of the USSR and of communist regimes in its’ satellites, was a body blow from which the American New Left, most of whom were and are 2nd and 3rd gen. mittel European imports, has never recovered.”
Mary, I think the body blow was actually the way that organized labor was crushed by outsourcing in the 1980s. During the Vietnam War days, in the US, even most communists did not look to the Soviet Union as any kind of model. (Foreign models were China and Cuba.)
Earlier lasting blows include the Molotov-Ribbentrop Treaty of 1939 and in particular the way that the Soviets portrayed that as a good thing rather than a necessary desperate move. (The back-and-forth of Soviet propaganda going pro-Nazi after the treaty, then reversing when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union anyway in 1941 is the source of Orwell’s famous Oceania is at war with East Asia. Oceania has always been at war with East Asia (even though they had been allies a minute before).
There is a theory that Marxism and socialism, at least in Europe, died when all the Socialist Parties, which had just sworn on a stack of Das Kapitals to oppose the looming great power war (World War 1) as an imperialist anti-working class war, all fell into line and supported their own nation’s war making. If I ever wrote an alternative history, it would be one in which Karl Kautsky had the courage of his convictions at the outbreak of the war.
JMG,
“it (Spectacle) stands in the way of any authentic interaction between people”
Which…. is why you can’t recieve anything approximating common sense from it or contort the real world to work with it.
Take Spectacle Conversations (i.e. Political Debate) we all know changing a mind and then a person’s actions will take far more than a good argument. If I want to change your mind in the real world I know full well I need to have an incentive or two on offer and maybe a disenctive as well. I also know you probably need to trust me from the start. None of that is in the Spectacle but it’s in the real world.
@David P “Well, of course it primarily skews female. For men to use these things, phones would need bigger ports.”…..
Rajarshi, 4chan and its offshoots may just come up for discussion in a future post on this theme, as they’ve done a better job of Situationist tactics than almost anybody, including the Situationist International — and yes, the way they engaged in systematic détournement of the existing Spectacle, turning it to their advantage and messing with the established powers, is a case in point.
Seeking, I wish I was surprised. Sigh…
Stefania, excellent! Yes, and we’ll be talking about exactly those points as we proceed. For now, notice how your comments interface with a point I made two weeks ago: as beta-Marxists, the Situationists have an interesting critique of the current state of affairs but their solution won’t work. Stay tuned…
Archivist, oh, there are complex forces at work here, no question — and as I noted, they’re bipartisan. We’ll see where it ends up.
Roldy, fair enough!
Gunnar, I disagree intensely with your claim that concepts of collective guilt and punishment are inevitable, or even tolerable. Do you think it would be fair to punish all black people for the actions of a few of them, or members of any other group for the actions of a few of its members? Shall we start rounding up Swedes because we disagree with the actions of Gustavus Adolphus? (That’s no more absurd than some collective-guilt arguments being made these days.) I criticized the modern post-New Left leftist version of that bad idea because, ahem, we’re talking about a set of ideas that emerged from the radical left; the versions on the right are just as wrong. If justice means anything, it means that individuals deserve to be treated according to their own actions, not based on what category they’re assigned to!
Ron, I’ve taken on the task of trying to influence society, at least in a small way, and that requires me to hold myself to a slightly higher standard than that.
Deneb, excellent! I really do have the best commentariat in the internet. Yes, and we’ll be talking about disintermediation as we proceed.
Dylan, good. Yes, that follows, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the 2100 shift follows that same pattern, though of course I won’t be around (at least not in this incarnation) to watch it.
Teresa, I’d read about the same thing. It really is a pervasive pattern.
Scotlyn, okay, I stand corrected. I thought they were intestines.
Chuaquin, so far the right is finding getting leftists fired from their jobs entirely satisfactory, not least because so many of them have grudges dating from the excesses of leftist cancel culture, or from the Covid fiasco. I hope it stays there.
Polecat, the Rat is in trouble. We’ll see if it wiggles out this time.
Chuaquin, I’ll pass on that just now. It’s a very complex topic.
Renaissance, the relation between culture and Spectacle is extremely complex. I’ll try to clear it up, though I may simply make things more murky, in a later post in this sequence.
Cicada, good. Yes, it’s all of those things, and maya is a particularly close translation. More on this as we proceed.
GlassHammer, that’s a fine example.
Bradley,
What is CRT?
TLDR: I have gone into detailed, possibly pedantic, length about Marxist history here more than once. (John Michael Greer, thank you for your forbearance.) I don’t think most people need to know about Marxism or the Soviet Union. But I would ask that folks understand that unless you have sought out balancing sources, then you have most likely been marinated in anti-Marxist propaganda that tries to give you as good of an understanding of Marxism and Marxist movements and regimes as the understanding one would have of magic if one only read the Harry Potter books and those only covered the Death Eaters.
The longer version: I am fascinated by history. Lots of different history. The Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union fascinate me because there are so many lessons that can be learned if one takes into account the severe conditions the Soviet wing of the human race faced. (I noticed what for me was a crucial feature of Tibetan Buddhism because of something I had read about Soviet engineering in the 1930s.) It also helps to have the distance in both time and space to be more objective.
Also, it is just such Greek tragedy. Foreseen as such, for example in the Brothers Karamazov.
By the way, about moral monsters, to me one of the fascinating aspects of Soviet history is precisely that many of the folks who did very bad things suffered the consequences. In the book “The House of Government”, it is noticeable how many of the elites were having mental breakdowns by the 1930s. Part of why the collectivization campaign could be so cruel was that many of the participants had so much blood on their hands from the civil war, which left them unable to take a moral stand. In turn, the atrocities of the collectivization campaign left many unable to take a moral stand against the purges.
Greek tragedy
Coming back to the topic at hand, what I find fascinating about the concept of the Spectacle is not the more overtly propagandistic elements, which were present even in the Soviet bloc and China, but rather the full-spectrum complete ecology of mental domination. The Spectacle wasn’t a larger set of images, but a way of life. A way of life that functions even more effectively nowadays when each us has our own personalized version.
An American is setting next to a Soviet on a flight to the US.
American: “What are you coming to the US for?”
Soviet: “To study your system of propaganda.”
American: “But we don’t have a system of propaganda”
Soviet: “Exactly”
That right there is what the Situationists were pointing at.
What do you think causes a person who should know better to basically through away their ethics? Wokeness Fundamentalism?
I’m just realizing, and perhaps you’ll find me silly for taking so long to realize. that a lot of critical race theorists have the same view of all for in this case race/gender etc, everything for the race/gender, etc that marxism has for class.
“Jessica, hmm. I wonder what would happen if I suggested that your comment was an example of a “not all Marxists” argument!”
Would it be fair to say that if but only if most Marxists are as you describe them, then yes my argument would be a “not all Marxists” argument?
I am not sure how one could adjudicate the question of how dominant different strains of Marxism were. Certainly, Marxism as taught to the less educated, even illiterate, people in the Soviet Union and China was far less nuanced and sophisticated than other variants. But that is just as true of the difference between the Baltimore Catechism that I was raised on and sophisticated Christian theology of nearly two millennia.
When I was into macrobiotics back in the day, it made a distinction between staple foods and side dishes. I would suggest that Marxism can work well as a side dish, a kind of homeopathic antidote to much nonsense that is dominant in the West*, but is not good as a staple food, as the main lens one looks through.
*It wouldn’t have this healing function in a society in which Marxism itself was the dominant form of nonsense.
I think that where we have disagreed multiple times is that I still have sympathy for those attempting to immanentizing the eschaton but you see the eschaton as something that must happen in higher planes after we form our mental body and leave this plane.
I think the attempt can be valuable in a way somewhat analogous to working on a Zen koan. It is the process, not the end point that is what makes it worthwhile. That requires refraining from attempting to turn all life, all beings into raw material for one’s machine of immanentization. And yes, utopias that get up a head of steam have so often made exactly that mistake. But perhaps we humans are capable of learning from our mistakes.
I knew who Charlie Kirk was. I keep a carefully curated Twitter feed in which I include as diverse viewpoints as possible, always limited to folks who express their point of view with at least some modicum of basic human decency. No haters. Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson are conservatives in my Twitter feed.
My politics do not overlap much with Charlie Kirk’s, though I did admire that he defended freedom of speech even when it is his side that was in a position to squash speech it does not like.
The impression I got was that he genuinely walked his talk. He preached traditional Christian family values and he lived that. I think that many conservatives admired him as a person, as an exemplar of who they want to be. As such, his pointless murder is an even greater loss and more painful. I think he might have been president in 15 or 20 years.
As someone whom the left moved away from, I would have preferred that what is now the left had acknowledged that loss and pain.
Also, I disagree strongly with the notion, common on both sides now, that any speech that makes me very uncomfortable is hate speech.
This reminds me of how specific behavioral studies are used like a Jedi mind trick. We did a little experiment proving video games don’t suddenly turn people into murderers, so now any suggestion that pop culture influences people needs to get laughed out of the room. How many social scientists come up with obviously ridiculous experiments hoping it gets picked up by modern culture’s propaganda department?
The active nihilist does not simply watch things fall apart. He criticizes the causes of disintegration by speeding up the process. Sabotage is a natural response to the chaos ruling the world. Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary; passive nihilism is counter revolutionary. And most people waltz tragicomically between the two.
“If justice means anything, it means that individuals deserve to be treated according to their own actions, not based on what category they’re assigned to!”
Reminds me of what the Irish sergeant Kilrane says to Colonel Chamberlain in the movie Gettysburg. “You cannot judge a race. Anyone who judges by the group is a peewit. You take men one at a time.”
>Mary, I think the body blow was actually the way that organized labor was crushed by outsourcing in the 1980s
Not exactly a fan of Michael Moore but Roger and Me was a chronicle of the fall of labor during that time. I think Michael Moore blamed automation for a lot of the shedding of workers during that time? Although TBH, the bear market in labor started way way back in 1965 or so and has been griiinding downwards through the decades ever since. But everything that has a beginning, has an end. Not quite sure we’re at the end of the bear market in labor but I’m looking for it to turn.
Also I think in general, the cheap import bonanza that this country has been running on for the past few decades, is also going to end. When, I have no idea, but you can see that it’s ending. Whether it’s cheap plastic from China or cheap labor from India/Mexico/Phillipines – it’s going away. Prepare accordingly. Or don’t.
Thanks for the Bruce Lee advice.
I happened to read it just after reading some comments on a David Holmgren essay which linked to another essay by him that mentioned your work. Bruce’s advice and your summary so accurately described the emotional anger of a critic of Holmgren, unable to consider that it might be their own reactive, cancel culture behaviour preventing them from gaining insight.
Cheers, Jamie
Jessica (185), the New Left was not unions, it was mostly the PMC types who staffed social work beaurocracies, NGOs and the like. Outsourcing as you mention was indeed a near fatal blow to the Democratic Party, from which it has not yet recovered. NAFTA was the coup de gras.
Jessica, do keep in mind that, as I noted in the first installment of this post, I used to hang with Marxists in the late 1970s, and I’ve read Capital as well as quite a bit of other Marxist literature — as a longtime fan of William Morris, I could hardly avoid doing so. Of course, as I also mentioned in the comments then, in the 1980s I also had late night talks with a coworker who endured the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia — he and his sister were the only survivors of forty-odd members of their extended family. My take on Marxism is thus a little more nuanced than you seem to be suggesting here — and I trust you’ve noticed my discussion of American propaganda on this and my previous blog.
Seeking, I wish I knew. I’ve watched it happen to people I know, in baffled horror.
Jessica, good heavens, so you’re another recovering macrobiotics practitioner! I was into that fairly seriously in the early 1980s, too, before I realized that those vivid dreams about bacon cheeseburgers were my body’s attempt to tell me something. Did you by any chance read the earlier post on Situationism I put up two weeks ago? There I commented that beta-Marxists — the kind we have in bureaucratic capitalist societies — are very good at offering cogent critiques of society and very bad at suggesting any way to remedy things. Marxism in general fills that role in our society; Capital itself, like the writings of the Situationists, offer critiques of the current order that are worth encountering and thinking about. It’s when Marxism gets turned into a plan of action that the abuses begin. If you will, it’s a condiment that’s very yin, and thus should be taken in small doses and balanced by some suitably yang food.
Ahem, I suspect that number isn’t small.
Raoul, in practice, active nihilism doesn’t speed up the process by which things fall apart, any more than it did in 1968. Rather, it evokes a counterreaction that stabilizes the system and makes it even more entrenched. We’re seeing that right now in the US, where nihilistic acts are giving the Trump administration the perfect opportunity to remove hundreds of opponents from positions in bureaucracy and the media, and justify legal crackdowns on Antifa and other nihilist movements. You can only call something “pre-revolutionary,” by the way, if a revolution is on its way. As we’ve seen repeatedly, it’s not.
Robert C, exactly. That’s the only basis for genuine justice, and those who reject it are indeed peewits.
Jamie, you’re most welcome. I wish more people would listen to Bruce.
Thanks, JMG. This is a great post, which helps me to make some sense of the increase in hatred being spouted all around, and also of the way that people no longer seem to hold opinions of stereotypical ‘left’ or ‘right’ positions, but rather highly idiosyncratic mixtures of positions, some of which seem to contradict each other.
I have a question, prompted by #41 William Hunter Duncan’s mention of Dion Fortune’s thrustblock. Background to question: Recently in Australia (I am sad to report) there has been an increase in protests, large and small, attended by at least some people who seem to want nothing other than a good dust-up. A few weeks ago I was dismayed to hear from my daughter (25) that she had gone to a recent large ‘anti-immigration’ march in Melbourne, but not as an anti-immigration advocate – no, she and her friends had gone to OPPOSE the march, that is, some kind of counter-protest. I was thinking of the thrustblock concept, and tried to say to her that opposing a position will make it stronger. She strongly disagreed, and challenged me to give examples of when not opposing something has worked. She (of course!) used the example of Hitler and the Nazis, claiming that if Hitler had been opposed things would have been different, and that it was people’s passivity towards Hitler that allowed him to succeed in his goals. I countered with an example from self-defence, where it can clearly be seen that stepping out of the way of a punch is effective, as opposed to sticking your face in the fist, and the momentum of the puncher will end up working against them. Yet I was unable to think of any examples on the scale of societal change, and at this point I just wanted to change the subject with my daughter (which, it strikes me now, is itself a good example of not opposing something, ha! ). So, I wondered if you (JMG) or any of the commentariat can think of any?
Sometimes the Spectacle winks: Netflix has produced a movie, “Kpop Demon Hunters” about a girl band that hunts demons by night. One of the main songs is “Your Idol”, sung by the boy band who are secretly dark magicians harvesting energy from their fans. Here’s the first verse:
Keeping you in check (Uh), keeping you obsessed (Uh)
Play me on repeat, endlessly in your head
Anytime it hurts (Uh), play another verse (Uh)
I can be your sanctuary
Know I’m the only one right now (Now)
I will love you more when it all burns down
More than power, more than gold (Yeah)
Yeah, you gavе me your heart, now I’m herе for your soul
The whole song’s quite creepy. The Spectacle, producing its own anthem.
Remember those conversations in past comments about indifference not being the opposite of love, but rather, indifference/obsession being a separate axis from love/hate?
As the question of who hates whom more has become pointless, I note that the indifference/obsession axis might actually offer a clearer view of current US politics. The bold hypothesis I’m suggesting is that the current American left-right binary is aligned with obsession versus indifference. The left is obsessive, e.g. about making me follow rules especially when they’re for my own good or for the sake of some children somewhere (vaccines…) and making sure I treat everyone else exactly in accordance with a 220-page manual updated weekly but never published. The right, meanwhile, is indifferent to most of my behavior and all of my problems, especially the ones their own policies cause.
The left is the HOA inspector monitoring my lawn for any sign of trash so they can fine me to improve the neighborhood. The right is the next door neighbor throwing his trash onto my lawn because that’s more convenient for him. Left and right are supposed to be fighting each other in a way that forces them to compromise for my benefit, but they both prefer to keep their distance from one another and use me as the rope for their tug-of-war instead. (This is all metaphorical, fortunately. I don’t have an actual HOA.)
Here’s where this might contribute to understanding of recent events: to the obsessive left, indifference looks like hate. When a Republican responds to a school shooting with thoughts and prayers and then goes right back to cutting funds for student mental health measures and opposing gun control, that relative indifference looks to the left like the purest expression of hatred. Meanwhile to the indifferent right, obsession looks like malice. When a Democrat talks of defunding the police, out of frustration over cases where police misconduct is resistant to all attempts at reform, that obsessive attention looks to the right like the purest expression of hatred.
The right mentions the Second Amendment or posts pictures of guns in political contexts, primarily to convey indifference (“leave us alone” or “we’re not afraid of your threats”) but through the left’s obsessed lens those look like threats of violence. The left moralizes about consequences in accordance with its own dictates to repair everyone’s ethical shortcomings, but through the right’s indifferent lens that looks like contemptuous mockery.
That sets the stage for Charlie Kirk. After previous murders of Democrat politicians, the right responded with its typical indifference, which remember the right regards as neutral but the left perceives as the deepest disrespect. After Kirk’s murder, the left, still seething, responds with what it regards as restrainedly close to neutral (pointed snark along the lines of “we told you so,” which remember is supposed to be part helpful advice) but the right perceives as celebrating the killing.
(I’m talking about generalities here; I have no doubt that individuals on all sides have said more extreme things, including unambiguous threats of violence and unambiguous gloating about murders on both sides. Anyone can get public attention saying anything, these days. I’m trying to trace the average trends, the system’s dynamic attractors.)
As I’m close to becoming an official Senior, maybe my manifesto to both sides should be: “Get off my lawn!”
Re#34 @seeking the pure land
“Soi-disant Secular Buddhists. They’re losing ground and i’m noticing that heritage Buddhists like myself are becoming more and more of a voice. The mindfulness meditation secular Buddhists hate this. They despise ritual and don’t believe in rebirth or karma. I think that when they finally go away, Buddhism will have a real future in the US.”
My little presby church we started a reading group, this section for women going into transition to new life phase. talk took a theological turn, Kate struggling w church as she perceives God as ‘everything’ and we talk about trinity, and how it’s inclusive of creator force, Jesus incarnating into material world, animating life/soul force. And Kate says she doesn’t accept Jesus like that except insofar as we should all get that credit as incarnate divinity. And I’m like yeah of course, that’s what Jesus is saying all the time to those who have ears to hear. And I say that it seems like he might be one of these folks who remembers their higher self and past incarnations better, giving him an unusual and fresh perspective and unique power. But that my personal impression is definitely of a higher self that incarnates multiple times. And, there were just four of us talking and one an elder who had literally been at the church for 70 years. And that was more or less the perspective shared by all of us. This church has repeatedly surprised me with its openness to positions not held in traditional Christian spaces in my prior experience. And in ways that are like unto the heritage Buddhists you describe against the mindfulness types. More actual ‘workings’ and working out of karma through shared grace. And also respect for the benefit of group ritual. And music. And apparently relatively widespread undercurrent of belief in reincarnation.
Maybe off the main topic but the comment caught my attention after the gathering tonight.
re kfish spectacle anthem magic #201
I worked concessions at a Taylor swift show for softball. She puts on a great show, and of course a feature is that the audience sings every word to her. ‘Willow’ audience sings to Taylor :
“The more that you say
The less I know
Wherever you stray
I follow
I’m begging for you to take my hand
Wreck my plans
That’s my man”
@200 Helen W
I think your own opposition might serve as a thrustblock to sustain or intensify your daughter’s activism.
Re: Dylan#20 and more on beta Marxism’s goal ‘not to accomplish the revolution, but to accomplish glorious martyrdom’– my sense is that the goal is to accomplish NEITHER! I was watching a zoom call w my boss today because it was farm to food distribution focus, tho they think of SNAP and forget supplemental food box programs. Anyhow, they were all the gentle ‘movement building’ type of lefties and had a speaker talking about ‘right to food’ mostly as narrative framing tool, since, from their point of view harder for US to call upon UN legal framework re: ‘rights’ since US hadnt ratified it. Of course more importantly, entire ‘rights’ approach is a boondoggle, see George Carlin et al ‘YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS’. It’s a way to pretend like power doesn’t operate. On their first slide they had a painted graphic with the words ‘food sovereignty’ on it. theres a concept that has utility in the muck of power relations between regions and Peoples and nation states, but they had so little understanding of their project that they glossed right over this difference, slipped right into ‘rights’ talk. Then when someone raised in text comments ‘conflict between’ ‘rights framing’ and ‘food safety issues like raw milk’ they read the power potential exactly backwards. Instead of seeing ‘right to food’ framing as possible lever to pry open more freedom to farm and move unprocessed or home-processed food within localities, they blandly referred to ‘issues’ ‘with that’ ‘to be careful with’ like not to scare people away from a purely word-based fantasy about a right to food by conflating it with real material actions to open up food production opportunities to smaller more localized actors. So not only is the left frenetically ineffectual as described by Dylan, they also have abandoned the useful core point that an analyst should keep the eye on capital and material flows and not on the linguistic spectacle. (And so environmental campaigners became a lithium mining lobby)
In other work-related events, im observing the federal gov basic capacity to get accounting and processing of agreements done is CRUMBLING; this design is leading directly, and in multiple sectors into competition between the state (I mean my home state, not TheState) and national (or transnational) tech-dependent, finance bro disruptor-speak ‘nonprofits’ like in our most recent case the FarmLink Project trying to get the Feds to redirect food bank commodity money to then outside of the normal process. Similarly, you take apart fed dept of education, does this lead to states rights and variety and local adaptation of the edu system to the context? Or does it lead to plugging all the kids into online nationally centralized charter school biz slop? Funny I never would have guessed say in AP history in 2001 that I would find myself a states rights chick. *Rights in this case being clearly defined division of powers and responsibilities between administrative units, not ‘universal’ ‘human rights’ variety.
JMG, given the complexity of culture, you could probably spend a dozen posts on that aspect of spectacle alone.
I submit that, whereas Debord was writing about imagery of the industrial 20th Century, I think the same processes of Spectacle have been occurring for as long as we have had images.
My GF and I recently visited the Louvre for a couple of days. In galleries as large as the street I live on, we saw hundreds of masterpieces from the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries. (Yes, we briefly saw La Joconde, but spent a far more enjoyable time up close and personal with Madonna on the Rocks.) We spent hours poring over the actual brush strokes of Rembrandt, the finesse of Titian, the experience full impact of Bruegel’s work… &c. &c. Pictures I have only ever seen in photographs in books. Hundreds of masterworks of art… real art, in the sense of highly developed skill.
The relevance to the discussion is these were originally on public display in churches and visible to the population at large, as are many masterworks still in situ in cathedrals. Now they hang as items of historical curiosity or exemplars of art, no longer as mnemonic devices for the illiterate. Many of them, even though they are static paintings, have the quality of a TV story, vividly depicting, as ones eye sweeps across the canvas, a complex image that tell a story.
I know you are familiar with Renaissance art and know what the all the symbolism and allegory in these paintings signifies, but most today do not know. People in those days were very cognizant of the meaning. Seeing this hanging in churches and public spaces would be no different from being bombarded with advertising on billboards all over, as we are today. That ad you posted tells a story. The message to us is spend, spend, spend, and support the status quo run by the corporate power structure; back then those paintings were also messages to support the social status quo as ordained by God. Remember, if you are materially poor, unlike, say the local lord, well, material wealth won’t get you into heaven!
If, as you write, the function of Spectacle is to mediate relations by images that pretend to be the world, then those images are equally realistic, while not being of the real world, either. Would these not serve to mediate relations between social classes of the day?
Bruce
@Mary Bennett #21–
Refusing the offer of fame–
If you watch videos, ‘Oh Chariot’ by Gavin DeGraw is an example of being drawn into the illusions of power and finding out at the end that nothing there is real;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkUnBPdR9RU&list=RDJkUnBPdR9RU&start_radio=1
@200 Helen W
I’ve given some more thought to the matter. I do not have a child, so take my advice with a grain of salt. But I used to be a teenager.
Although you arguing against your daughter’s activism could function as a thrustblock, whatever you tell her will probably gnaw at her. I would suggest that, if you know her activist friends and if they are the stereotypical beta-leftists: personal life in shambles, selfish, lazy, self-righteous– maybe give a statement pointing those qualities out, not naming names, maybe giving examples of them from your own prior experience. Your daughter will remember what you say and won’t be able to stop herself from applying those words to the behavior of real-life beta-leftists. It could wear down her activist convinctions until she seperates herself from those losers, and finds wiser ways to make positive differences in her circle of family/friends/aquaintances/neighbors. I think it’s better than attacking her political positions, or arguing that that kind of activism is futile: she’ll likely have to experience its uselessness for herself.
I hope my advice helps, or turns out not to be needed.
Not that I’m saying Charlie Kirk’s assassination is the same as JFK’s. It’s not, it’s worse, because Charlie was a civilian, Charlie was you and me. Or more accurately, Charlie was my children’s cohort, watching him engaged in conversation with other young people gave me hope for the future. And yes I did follow Charlie, and yes I happen to agree with most of his views. A central tenet of which is shared in this forum: civil discourse.
My query is to any readers here who may be old enough to have been alive when JFK was murdered. Were there, then too, people openly celebrating his death? And calling it a free speech right?
(If so, our modern spectacle is fairly similar, if not, also significant?)
Stephania # 164:
” I would argue that all cultures develop an image-based world of appearances. In a pre-industrial society, those images are not going to be YouTube videos, memes, or tv commercials, but rather, images that are conveyed to the minds of the members of that culture through various forms of narratives, whether those come from stories told orally, or from religious or secular texts.”
It’s the same I’ve written some comments ago, about Spectacle before Industrial Revolution and its technological wonders…I’ve made the same question to John and kommentariat, so I agree. There may be a primitive form of Spectacle before our modern times….
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(the COVID Spectacle sub-topic) Well, John, thank you for having “forgiven” me my last comment…I’ll take in consideration.
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Teresa Peschel # 174:
“Every single day, every newspaper (and news magazine and TV news program!) in the world makes decisions that determine what stories you read. But you never learn what they said “no” to.”
Exactly, there’s a lot of no-news which are passing every day under the newspapers and rest of MSM radar, or directly are soflty censored by that soft systeme of news selection…
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Renaissance Man # 183:
“Is culture creating the Spectacle, or does Spectacle create the culture, or is it a mutual organic co-creation? Or is it one and the same?”
Or is Spectacle more like the expression of an egregore? Or is Spectacle creating an egregore?”
You’ve made some good questions to answer them, but I don’t have easy answers for them! I’ll go on thinking them…
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Helen W # 200:
“She (of course!) used the example of Hitler and the Nazis, claiming that if Hitler had been opposed things would have been different, and that it was people’s passivity towards Hitler that allowed him to succeed in his goals.”
Oh no, the “reductio ad Hitlerum”…
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Reductio-ad-Hitlerum
I glanced at this post and then, on the revisit reading, realized Guy Debord was the guy who moved to the middle-of-nowhere France and then led a reclusive life. https://fromhilltosea.com/2014/06/05/an-irrevocable-brilliance-guy-debord-in-the-landscape/ Since I move to middle-of-nowhere France for the U.S. ten years ago, I had taken note a few months ago. Thank you for filling us in on what the guy was about.
@Aurelian #120
‘…social class was more important than how much money you earned.’ The British aristocracy is still alive and well. ‘…it’s hard not to feel a sense of justified revulsion for the economic system of the day’. The underlying problems of capitalism remain, as do the miseries and injustices that are needlessly inflicted on the lowest in society.
@Kevin Sweeney #152
Is County Mayo a safe refuge from the social turmoil that lies ahead? My ancestors are from Mayo and I’m considering moving some of my relatives there. I’ve read that Ireland’s problems are even worse than those of Britain. I intend to see for myself in due course, but I’d appreciate your insight.
@Seeking
Some years ago I mistakenly questioned a travelling Theravada monk about him skipping lunch and eating a snack in the afternoon, and he replied, ‘Who makes all these rules that I follow; it’s me isn’t it?‘ As long as you don’t contravene the essential meaning of the Dharma you can follow whatever path works for you. There are some paths that allow alcohol, like Tibetan tantrism, and there is even a path without meditative concentration (for the stoners).
As for secular Buddhism it’s one of the many Western translation errors which thankfully have no longevity. The transplantation of the Dharma into the West will inevitably take centuries. Only about ten percent of Western Buddhists can cope with full strength Asian Buddhism, so it has to be introduced gradually using low strength methods. The main obstacle is that Buddhism is built on top of a thoroughly magical polytheistic tradition, which is quite deeply buried in most Westerners.
The Pure Land path is a marvel and I wish you every good fortune. May all beings escape from the Wheel of Rebirth and may they swiftly achieve Perfection.
Those of you who feel isolated from and baffled by American social trends because you live overseas should understand that it’s just as possible for those of us who live in the US, even “inside the Washington DC Beltway” (ring road), to be just as isolated and baffled.
We are often amused by the inability of foreign tourists to understand the scale of the United States, since you hardly ever see the US and the EU plotted on maps with the same scale, and you need to spin the globe to see both, which makes it hard to carry the scale with you. Events in California are as remote from Maryland as events in Iraq are from the UK, or as far as Senegal is from Ireland. You could drive the distance from Paris to Berlin and still be within California (or Texas). Looking at my globe, it looks like Lebanon is smaller than any of the Great Lakes near Michigan.
We used to be, in the 1960s, knit together by the big three national TV networks, but they’ve lost their audience (for reasons discussed in this essay), and we have so many other information sources to fragment our assessment of the state of the nation.
I plan to engage with The Real World later today just by going over to the church to mow the lawn, part of my practice of maintaining a space for magic.
JMG:
Chuaquin, so far the right is finding getting leftists fired from their jobs entirely satisfactory, not least because so many of them have grudges dating from the excesses of leftist cancel culture, or from the Covid fiasco. I hope it stays there.
Me: Yes. In fact, they are saying the Left’s pigeons have come home to roost. I made the mistake of listening to Just the News on Real America’s Voice, then switching to NBC Nightly News. The contrast was great in that the top story of NBC were all those newspeople screaming into the wind. Just the News top story was the Budget and impending government shutdown.
To tie this to Marxism, etc. I noticed that the dedicated Marxists, Maoists, are well-off rich people who want to decide for everyone else. They are being replaced, and they are acting like spoiled children.
The interesting thing about all this is that for all the intersectionality that is touted by the Left, the people screaming about Kimmel were all White (Obama is half-White), male, and rich. Hmmmmm. Conservative TV has more Black males, and an equal number of women. Hmmmmm.
I think intersectionality was a stick to beat people with to assert virtue superiority. I can’t tell you how many times people have come after me assuming that I am a White well off male. Then, I tell them about my brain injury, and they just slink off. HMMMMMM.
I did want to add one more comment: Antifa.
Several pea brains that I know all believe that Antifa doesn’t exist. That Trump made it up to go after all Leftists and Progressives. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party at their site featured merchandise with Antifa themes. I wonder about all this. Meanwhile, you have the Conservatives all tracing Soros and the Democratic Party to funding Antia.
I did find out one thing – you can rent a crowd. I heard an interview of the founder of “Rent A Crowd” who discussed how people with causes can rent people to go and demonstrate. He does nuclear reactors and environmental causes that need people. I wonder how much of Antifa is just that – a rented crowd.
Spectacle in progress in France. The efforts of the new improved PM are not appreciated.
https://apnews.com/article/france-protests-strikes-lecornu-budget-disruption-unions-c2c9e76f59477e653f52102a38aa2080
“The first whiffs of police tear gas came before daybreak, with scuffles between riot officers and protesters in Paris. The collapse of successive governments — brought down by votes in parliament — that sought to push through savings has given Macron’s critics a sense of momentum. The “Block Everything” campaign that developed online before taking to the streets also added to the climate of crisis.”
>What do you think causes a person who should know better to basically through away their ethics?
What makes you think, that they know better?
>[redacted] assassination teams normally don’t use patsies, they either create “accidents” or simply shoot the target and dare anyone else to do something about it.
What I do find amusing in all of this is that the leader of a certain small middle eastern country nobody is supposed to talk about, has denied his country’s involvement in any of this. Multiple times. You know what they say about things that are officially denied, right?
Helen (#200) –
We might look back and think that we would have opposed the rise of Nazism in Germany if we’d been there, but we need to remember that Nazism was itself in opposition to Communist violence in the streets of Germany, and elsewhere in Eurasia.
I recommend a book by Erik Larsen, “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin”, which describes the tenure of the last US Ambassador to Germany before WW-2, and one by Brown and MacDonald: “On a Field of Red: the Communist International and the coming of WW-2.”
It’s hard to find objective reporting on the era, since the conflict between “communists” and “nazis” continues to this day (whether the “communists” and “nazis” have any actual connection to their historical legacy or not).
A comment on the Kimmel situation: I’m minimally sympathetic to Kimmel since the comments he’s under fire for were not anywhere near as bad as celebrating or excusing murder, nor were they in any real sense defamatory (despite being an inversion of the truth). That said, meh.
Beyond that, his supporters insisting this is a free speech issue are, in my non-lawyerly opinion, smoking their shorts. If you’d like to live in a world where Congress doesn’t have the ability to delegate broad authority to regulators to interpret however they like, welcome to the club, but that’s not the world we live in. And the FCC’s powers to regulate the airwaves are near absolute. Ham operators can lose their licenses for using profanity over the air, and if you enjoy free unlimited data tethering on your Verizon cell phone, you can thank the FCC for ruthlessly enforcing a provision unique to the terms of the sale of the spectrum to Verizon, which was drafted before smartphones or data tethering were a glint in anyone’s eye.
With that in mind, the idea that FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatening action against ABC if they didn’t punish Kimmel is an attempt to squash Kimmel’s right to speech by threatening political retaliation is silly. This is a matter which is clearly within his purview as chairman of the FCC. For better or worse, Congress gave him an “I can do what I want card,” and he used it.
JMG, I believe you misunderstood – or that I misunderstood what you are saying. I certainly do not support collective punishment and generalization such as all Marxists/Swedes/Trumist/Druids are in one way or the other. I was discussing collective morals, which I maintain are to some extent both inevitable and something that always exist, both in good and bad ways. I see moral as part of norms. They also exist and they are necessary for any social group to exist and thrive. And at the same time groups benefit from that some people are norm breakers. I see that as working on the group level as mutations work on the individual levels. Must norm breaking will be useless and will not survive but some will survive. And if you have a group with certain norms or morals which you don’t agree with, I see no reason for why you would not criticize them, which is exactly what you do in this post.
Renaissance Man # 206:
“If, as you write, the function of Spectacle is to mediate relations by images that pretend to be the world, then those images are equally realistic, while not being of the real world, either. Would these not serve to mediate relations between social classes of the day?”
OK. That goes in my line of thinking: Spectacle before Industrial Revolution. I’d like to add this “primitive” version of Spectacle was of course useful for the Powers of these old times to control the people. However, I think there’s a big difference between that Old Spectacle and Debordian (and post-Debordian) Spectacle: In the past century and nowadays, the Spectacle has been more and more invasive of everydays life, and like John has said somewhere before, today people’s making and distributing their own spectacle (selfies, interactive videogames, cute videos, Whattsap groups and so on), non-stop all the day…
thank you for your apportation!
@neptunesdolphin #217
“Several pea brains that I know all believe that Antifa doesn’t exist.”
I saw a really good point about this from Eric S. Raymond and other commenters: if Antifa doesn’t exist, neither does the Mafia. They don’t have membership cards or recruitment websites. (Actually, at least one chapter of Antifa does have the latter.) And the Mafia doesn’t even have well-known, easily recognizable symbols announcing itself.
Neptunesdolphin #217:
A provocative and smart comment about the “mysterious” and violent group named Antifa. I didn’t know a crowd could be rented so easily. Well, I suppose now if you have a lot of money and shovel over the “multitude”, you can use that crowd for whatever you want…
Ok, so I was away from the computer for less than a week, and it has taken ages to catch up. But I think I’m getting there…
So… here I am, wondering if the combination of the 20th century Spectacle with the 20th century implementation of Welfare States (both still working in lockstep in the 21st century, but less affordably) is a modern elaboration of the Roman concept of Bread and Circuses for the proles?
@203 AliceEm
I am heartened to hear that about your church! Interestingly reincarnation is becoming more a mainstream belief among americans, and I think smaller churches have a better shot with spirituality and real experiences then those huge mega churches. I hope this makes sense, i’m not the best writer.
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@213 Tengu
It amazes me how many people will just ignore anything that gets in the way of their desire. I never understood the appeal of drugs. Tried weed once as a teen and hated it so much. Never wanted to touch another drug.
Oh agreed, i think it will take many years. The individualistic and very christian thinking is kind of alien to Buddhist thought. I think as you say it will be slow. And yes, Pure Land is amazing. I think it will probably have a lot more western practitioners in the de-industrial future, especially since its already hated and loathed by the elites and secular materialists. May it create much merit and liberate all beings from samsara.
Helen, if you do anything in response to your daughter’s activities but nod blandly and say, “That’s nice, dear,” it’ll just encourage her to get more deeply into that sort of protest. That said, historically, she’s dead wrong, because it wasn’t anybody’s passivity that led to the Nazi regime. The large and influential Communist and Socialist parties in Germany did in fact fight the Nazis; in fact, they went as far as having their own gangs of young men who mixed it up with the SA (the Nazi “brownshirts”) in street fights. That ended up helping the Nazis considerably in their seizure of power, because it convinced many Germans that the Nazis were correct when they insisted that the Socialists and Communists planned on a violent revolution; everyone in Europe by then knew about the Soviet Union’s prison camps and mass graves, and so a great many Germans who wouldn’t have otherwise supported the Nazis voted for Hitler and other Nazi candidates, thinking that they were the lesser evil. If the Socialist and Communist parties had instead rallied around the failing Weimar Republic, supported the rule of law, and helped keep democracy afloat in less confrontational ways, Hitler would never have been able to seize power.
Kfish, somebody in that project knows something. Rock and pop bands do in fact harvest energy from their fans; those that know their stuff, though, send it right back out at the fans, which is why a good rock concert is such a trippy experience. If you let the power build up in yourself, it burns you out — thus the tendency of rock musicians to engage in frantic sexual activity, since that’s a way to release it. The same thing happens to Christian ministers, btw — too few of them have any idea how to handle the energy, and so end up getting drawn into sexual excesses.
Walt, interesting. I’ll have to reflect on that.
Renaissance, of course they do. The Spectacle is nothing like as new as the Situationists thought; they mistook the specific modern manifestations of it for the underlying structure. I’ll have some comments on that down the road, too.
Miow, I was 17 months old when JFK was shot, so I don’t remember the specifics, but I read long afterwards accounts from people in certain parts of the country who were older than I was, who were schoolchildren at the time, and who recall people celebrating the fact that “the n****r-lover got shot.” That may have had something to do with the raw force with which the federal government targeted Southern right-wing political movements thereafter — COINTELPRO was used just as forcefully on the Klan, for example, as on the Black Panthers.
Moserian, hmm! Sensible of him.
Neptunesdolphins, yes, I’ve heard the same handwaving about Antifa. My question is this: if it doesn’t exist, why should anyone be upset if its banned? That would be harmless, right — like passing a law against hippogriffs?
Siliconguy, I’ll wait until they actually overthrow a government. France used to be good at that.
Slithy, and it’s particularly absurd because many of the people screeching about Kimmel were cheering when right-wing media figures were deplatformed. What’s the thing the right likes to say? If the left didn’t have double standards, they’d have no standards at all.
Gunnar, I think we’re talking past each other. When I speak of “collective morality” I’m not talking about the fact that many members of a given culture have roughly similar moral beliefs. I’m talking very specifically, as I said in so many words, about the idea — very common on the left — that the moral standing of a person depends primarily on what group that person belongs to, so that the actions of someone who belongs to a group that is considered oppressed should be judged by a different standard than the actions of someone who belongs to a group that is considered privileged. That’s what I’m talking about — is that what you’re talking about?
Scotlyn, of course. It’s a common strategy of elite classes in decadent urban societies.
Slithy Toves @ 221, I tend to vote Democratic and I can’t stand the whole pack of snarky commentators. I admit I have not heard Kimmel, but if he is anything like the rest of the too clever by half snarkists, I think none of them should have been hired in the first place. I also can’t stand and don’t listen to the RW trash talkers, although I do have a soft spot for Alex Jones because he was anti-GMO since way back when and he does read like, whole entire books, occasionally, and is a rancher, as in does actual work outside the TV/radio/online universe.
I have many times seen working class people fired because, she wasn’t perky enough, he “made somebody uncomfortable”, and, as any plain gal can tell you, you don’t ever, ever make the lookers look bad if you are interested in remaining employed. Kimmel will undoubtedly move on to some well-funded perch or other. I don’t think anyone needs to feel sorry for him.
In fairness, i’d imagine they’d say that when you make something that doesn’t exist illegal, then you can say that the thing you dislike is the thing that you just made illegal. Since then anything goes. Like saying pro palestine groups are antifa. I’ve heard them claim that before on tumblr.
(JMG: feel free to delete this off-topic question and I’ll come back next week with it if you’d prefer)
@Seeking the Pure Land
Are you familiar with Buddhist Churches of America? They’re a Jodo Shinshu organization in the USA started by some of the first Japanese immigrants to the Americas.
I ask because when I was seriously considering becoming a Pure Land Buddhist some years ago I naturally ran across them, and while I found some of their ideas interesting (in particular, Amida as the Dharma itself and Kenneth Tanaka’s drowning sailor metaphor), the overall feeling I got from them was that they were similar to the Unitarian Universalists: a secular social club where actual belief was more tolerated than encouraged. I wonder if you got the same impression?
Beyond that, Jodo Shinshu as a whole ultimately failed to impress me: some interesting ideas, but too many problems (like wholesale rejection of monastic practice and the precepts) for me to be comfortable with it.
#228, if I may: JMG, you are absolutely right about the street fights between the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) and SA before 1933. I wonder which party you refer to as the “Socialist Party”. I know there were several splinter parties, and I don’t know if those also resorted to street violence. On the other hand, the SPD (Social-Democratic Party of Germany) was, together with the Catholic Zentrum, the main support of the democracy. It is true that the democractic parties, in the end, also set up a street organization, the Banner Black-Red-Gold (the colors of the republic), but that applied to all democratic parties and was a reaction.
@JMG #228:
“Miow, I was 17 months old when JFK was shot, so I don’t remember the specifics, but I read long afterwards accounts from people in certain parts of the country who were older than I was, who were schoolchildren at the time, and who recall people celebrating the fact that “the n****r-lover got shot.”
I did not know that. And I find that just as shocking, repulsive, and saddening as the current Leftist celebrations of Charlie’s murder. :((
I do find it interesting how the Left is now mirroring what the Right did back then. What you contemplate etc, indeed…
@Miow (#210):
I was a senior in college when JFK was assassinated. I was a studious and somewhat solitary 21-year-old who lived in a rented room off campus and did not see my friends every day, or even every week. So I did not hear about JFK’s death for nearly two whole days. Because of this, I entirely missed the initial reactions (plural).
My parents and relatives were old-school, Lincoln-era left-wing Republicans (hold-overs from the years when the Republicans were much closer to Socialists than the Democrats were, and viewed the Democrats as the right-wing establishment party of wealth and privilege). So once I finally heard about JFK’s death, my reaction was basically “Why is this such a big deal for some friends? JFK is nobody special, just another of the several US presidents who were assassinated. Presidents don’t matter that much anyway; the country goes on its merry way no matter who is president.” I was sincerely puzzled by the sense of loss some — very far from all — of my classmates at UC Berkeley experienced. I didn’t grasp how hard this had hit them, and I hadn’t a clue why it hit them so hard.
And yes, indeed, there were a few of my friends who welcomed JFK’s assassination, though more who shed tears for the man, if not for the president. But pretty much everyone assumed that different people would have different reactions to such an assassination; how could it be otherwise? That was just how Americans ran, back in those days. If there was anything like today’s cancel culture back then, it entirely escaped my notice. The dominant mood, as I perceived it at the time, was “Live and let live. That’s how we Americans roll.”
@231 Slithy Toves
Yes I am familiar with Buddhist Churches of America. They aren’t my tradition (my tradition is Chinese Pure Land) but I get why they exist, understanding the history of Japanese Americans and Japanese Buddhism in America I get why they exist in the form that they do. But as you say they are very similar to UU christianity. Watered down to appeal to western middle class tastes. It bothers me that they use words like church while other Buddhist traditions in America have avoided watering down their language so. Your impression is very much mine, I don’t think they’ll have as much staying power unless they drop these bad habits. I can totally understand why you weren’t impressed!
Tibetan Buddhism has a much better shot.
On Antifa,
I had my business in Portland during the entire period of Antifa and BLM unrest. I commuted through town on the train from where I lived just to the west. Several encounters convinced me that Antifa is real and a combination between a well funded marxist movement and a rent a crowd.
In 2017 or so there was a large group of Soccer fans who go to games and sit in a block carrying Antifa Flags. They would often leave the stadium after games in a pack committing mayhem along their way to their destination. The destination was an ” Antifa Cider House”. Owned by a self proclaimed member of Antifa and festooned with Antifa Flags. Here on a nightly basis they would engage in scuffles with right leaning groups.
Finally during the Covid period I had to cross an Antifa Blockage to get to my shop. The Antifas had taken control of a several block area of North Portland for a month or more. Here they regularly had battles with the cops calling in shock troops to bolster their numbers when the cops would arrive to remove the barricades. After a couple of times with me explaining my reason to cross they seemed to recognize me and I would get by without incident but they were very real believe me.
Andy Neo claims that a few block up the street from that location Antifa had a training space they rented in the building that was used as the Feminist bookstore in ” Portlandia”. Here Antifa’s learned to send secure messages, and other such clandestine stuff. I can attest to seeing odd comings and goings from that building during that timeframe.
Who funds it is anybodies guess, but it seems obvious to me.
miow 210: I was sixteen when JFK died. It was just after lunch on a Friday. They sent us home from school early. Here in the Great Lakes region, I didn’t hear anyone celebrating. But in Texas, I’d guess that it was a much different matter. Talk about spectacle! JFK, 9/11, and now Charlie Kirk in my lifetime. It is interesting to see how the tales unfold each time. In each case, a suspect, assumed to be the real culprit, was identified almost immediately. Even the motive (“They hate us for our freedoms”) was known in the case of 9/11. The doubts, the books, the questioning, and the suspicious deaths of witnesses and people who ask too many questions all came later.
Another stellar example of how you don’t know what a media outlet censors unless you already know.
In January 2020, Ricky Gervais hosted the Golden Globes award show. His monologue about Hollywood was scathing and he made every paper in the world.
But when I got my copy of “People” magazine from the library, their multi-page coverage of the Golden Globe award ceremony didn’t even MENTION that Ricky Gervais was the emcee, let alone include a picture or mention his opening speech.
“People” magazine censored him.
I thought about it and realized that since they are, essentially, a house organ for Hollywood, they will NEVER report anything to the masses that makes important people in Hollywood look bad. Or make Hollywood in general look bad.
It’s bad for their business.
I examined back issues of “People” to confirm my hypothesis and quickly spotted what I hadn’t noticed. Other than one story about Harvey Weinstein, “People” has never covered his scandals, abuse of actresses, or his rape trials. To do so would indict too many important people who ALL KNEW.
I told Bill this and he pointed out that newspaper and magazine editors CHOOSE which letters to the editor they print. Thus, no reader can raise an unpleasant fact that the magazine or newspaper is carefully ignoring.
We don’t know those unknown unknowns unless we think and research for ourselves.
Michael Crichton famously said in a speech he gave in 2002:
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.”
We really don’t think much past the end of our nose as a species. It’s hard!
Scotlyn # 226:
“So… here I am, wondering if the combination of the 20th century Spectacle with the 20th century implementation of Welfare States (both still working in lockstep in the 21st century, but less affordably) is a modern elaboration of the Roman concept of Bread and Circuses for the proles?”
Indeed, the Welfare States (I’m speaking about Western Europe) in the past century were created as disuasory measure against hypotetical revolutionary contagion first after the Paris French Commune, then the USSR Revolution, and finally fearing the Eastern Communist bloc, me think. It seems Bismarck was the first to implement Welfare in its primitive form in Germany; if I’m not mistaken. So in a certain and wide sense, yes, “Bread and Circuses”, but not exactly, IMHO.
—————————————————————————————————————————–
JMG # 228:
“Renaissance, of course they do. The Spectacle is nothing like as new as the Situationists thought; they mistook the specific modern manifestations of it for the underlying structure. I’ll have some comments on that down the road, too.”
Nothing new under the Sun…I hope your new comments about old/modern/postmodern Spectacle with a lot of interest in them…
Part of the President’s function is to serve as the face of the government that the people can blame for all the country’s successes and failures. We are even allowed to unlease our wrath on the President or President’s political party every four years and replace him with a different guy.
So assassination plots on the President can be expected from time to time, hence the Secret Service. But Charlie Kirk was a civilian and podcaster with non-extreme political opinions. He could be any of us. Even the far-leftists celebrating his death and encouraging crazies to murder his family could have been at risk, if someone else screenshots some of their hot takes over the years and uses them as an excuse to attack them, or they fail to adopt the latest woke cause.
That being said, the biggest danger at this point comes from right-wingers violently retaliating against leftists, followed by tit-for-tat murders between rival groups of terrorists that may or may not escalate to a civil war.
@Tengu #213
wrote
“Is County Mayo a safe refuge from the social turmoil that lies ahead? My ancestors are from Mayo and I’m considering moving some of my relatives there. I’ve read that Ireland’s problems are even worse than those of Britain. I intend to see for myself in due course, but I’d appreciate your insight.”
Rural Mayo would be as safe a bet as you could get in Ireland. It’s a very rural area, in particular North West Mayo is the most remote and rural place on the island of Ireland. Good growing climate, ample water, lots of blanket bog, so plenty of turf to burn, lots of lakes and sea shore, so lots of potential for fishing and foraging. If you’re close to the coast the winter storms and the dampness can be epic.
Rural Irish people can be very clannish, superficially friendly and engaging but hard to get to know well. Most Irish people tend not to speak very directly and reading between the lines is an important skill to have when dealing with us. Being too direct, blunt or abrupt are goods way to alienate Irish people. Having said that if you make yourself useful and integrate into a rural community, people can be ferociously loyal to their neighbours. Rural people will pull together and watch out for each other in a crisis.
The two most useful skills that would help you integrate into a rural community would be having a useful trade, general handymen (or women) are in very short supply right now. Or being a good performer, a good musician, singer or storyteller is always in demand. If your a Christian getting involved with the local church is another way to integrate. We still have many local civic and sporting associations, joining them is also a way to open doors.
If you want to get really remote in the west of Ireland, check out an offshore island. Those communities are amazingly tight and much less warped by modernity than their mainland cousins.
If your used to living in a city or big town, rural or small town life can take some getting used to. It has many advantages but also significant drawbacks.
Hope this is some help.
Scotlyn: “Also “seizing power” (ie – taking part in the “game of thrones” as played by people who aspire to rule) is not commensurate with “liberation” (general assent to the exercise of personal autonomy by people who aspire to be free).”
In fact, in my experience, people generally aim to “seize power” precisely in order to remove or constrain the liberty of others.
Do you disagree?”
In the abstract, I agree. In practice however, wherever there is a state with the kind of coercive power that modern states have, some degree of “game of thrones-ing” is unavoidable, otherwise the state/corporations crush those trying to escape their grasp. (Except maybe on a very small scale in a carefully selected setting and even then not reliably)
And yes, once one does start game of thrones-ing, even if one starts as a sincere attempt to protect/gain freedom, the more successful one is, the more that those who goal is to suppress the freedom of others show up. This is a real conundrum.
One of the notions of Marxism was that if people could be freed from having their back against the wall due to absolute poverty (just not enough stuff in the society) or social poverty (enough stuff in the society, but too unevenly distributed), then the tendency toward games of thrones-ing would be less and the chance of actually increasing freedom greater. That hasn’t been tested yet, though clearly neither Marx nor the Soviet communists took things like status hierarchies and social capital adequately into account. The Chinese actually did a bit during the Cultural Revolution.
By the way, you are one of the commenters whose name I have come to recognize and I appreciate your comments.
>So, I wondered if you (JMG) or any of the commentariat can think of any?
You could disown her and tell her you’re replacing her with an immigrant. Tell her you’re being an even gooder person than her by doing this. That you’re winning the virtue signaling contest. Something tells me though that even that wouldn’t get the point across. Once someone goes into full religious mode, it’s very hard to get them back out of it. I still remember those kids screaming out those hymns, because they were urged to. They didn’t need much urging.
The other thing is she’s nominally an adult now (25). As a big girl, she has the right to make all the big girl decisions she wants, and part of that means, she gets to make all the bad decisions people normally tap you on the shoulder for. The most you can do at this point is say “Hey, this might be a bad decision” but there’s not much more you can do than that. She’s now in charge of her life, and she’s needs to know it from you. If she’s living off of you, maybe you can let her know that by kicking her out and cutting her off?
Daniil Adamov
Thank you. That was informative. Perhaps the reason why I had never heard about the slavery of Russian serfs was precisely because it was de facto but not de jure.
Yes, Alexander operated under constraints including from within the ruling class. The complex relationship between the central authority and other power centers is too often neglected.
JMG,
I wish I had stated it explicitly but I did not mean you. You have clearly read your Marx. In fact, I don’t think I know anyone as down on Marx who has read him as much as you have but is not being paid to be anti-Marxist. I’m not saying that anyone who reads enough Marx will become a Marxist, only that folks who are negative about Marxism usually chose to read something else more congenial. Of course, in your case, you read everything and you read people who were important in the history of ideas even if you don’t think very highly of them (Hegel). Which is something that intellectual culture needs.
It occurs to me that a take like your on Marxism (useful critiques; bad battle plans) is precisely why anti-communist propaganda has needed to not defeat Marxism in a contest of ideas but to thoroughly demonize it. Marxism may not have the answers but it raises questions that the powers that be do not want asked, because of the answers folks might come up with (not necessarily Marxist answers).
By the way, Marxism has to own the Soviet Union and China, Cuba, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, but not so sure about Cambodia. I happened to be in Thailand in 1980 and I too heard too many horror stories, but I think the Killing Fields were driven more by the rural population having been so traumatized before the Khmer Rouge take over and by the extreme tension between urban elites and the peasantry endemic in Khmer culture.
One odd feature of those dark times is that many of the leaders of the neutral Sihanouk regime that had kept Cambodia an oasis of peace until 1970, the pro-US Lon Nol regime that overthrew it, the Pol Pot regime (Killing Fields), and the regime that the Vietnamese installed in its place (ending the Killing Fields) were related to each other.
Mary Bennet
The problem with defending freedom of speech is that so often one has to defend a*****les because they are used as the thin wedge. Ward Churchill comes to mind. If the attack on Kimmel had no further repercusions, fine, but that will not be the case.
Particularly now that America is such a low-trust society, there is no way to censor anyone without half the country seeing as an attack on basic rights. There is no one that a large majority of the country would trust with that power. So I would draw the line at direct incitement to violence. “Hey, everyone. That guy in Row 3 in the blue shirt. He’s a XXX. Kill him.” Anything short of that, I think we need to endure for the sake of our freedoms.
If ABC had fired Kimmel because of audience reaction, again fine. And they might well have gotten around to doing so. But when the government gets directly involved, that is censorship and violates the First Amendment. No matter which side does it.
One of the things that impressed me about Charlie Kirk was that when South Park did a take off on him, he put it on his Twitter account himself.
“Neptunesdolphins, yes, I’ve heard the same handwaving about Antifa. My question is this: if it doesn’t exist, why should anyone be upset if its banned? That would be harmless, right — like passing a law against hippogriffs?”
I think you know the answer to this. Because precisely the fact of no coherent “Antifa” organization existing would give them carte blanche to label anyone and everyone they want out of the way “Antifa”. This is no different than if the Dems passed a law banning “racist organizations”.
Both sides are in the habit of claiming that those on the other side that they like the least must be puppets of some billionaire, Soros or Koch Brothers, take your pick. As though folks aren’t capable to taking action on their own.
A further comment about the indifference-obsession axis: an explanation for why the respective associations exist in the first place. Indifference is a natural result of the breakdown of conservatism, a tactic for resisting change that becomes an attempt to veto change that the majority wants or needs. Obsession is a natural result of the breakdown of liberalism, a tactic for promoting change that becomes an attempt to force change that the majority doesn’t want or need. Both have broken down in current US politics because, of course, what the majority does or doesn’t want or need has long ago ceased to be a factor in either major party’s policy-making.
@ Jessica #245 – Thank you for coming back to me on that! 🙂
“One of the notions of Marxism was that if people could be freed from having their back against the wall due to absolute poverty (just not enough stuff in the society) or social poverty (enough stuff in the society, but too unevenly distributed), then the tendency toward games of thrones-ing would be less and the chance of actually increasing freedom greater. That hasn’t been tested yet, though clearly neither Marx nor the Soviet communists took things like status hierarchies and social capital adequately into account. ”
What I find to be missing in this picture is the difference between poverty as defined by the market “lack of (intermediated) stuff”, and poverty as defined by losing access to non-market mediated, but more autonomous forms of sustenance and of subsistence – through, for example enclosure or forced removal.
As Ivan Illich points out, “subsistence” refers to that which supports one’s capacity to stand for oneself. The testing of the practicality of this idea by small groups of people, repeatedly, over many generations, is actually very well described by James C. Scott in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.”
This is an academic history, and so, not the lightest of reading. But it delves into the people who LEFT civilisations and their market-mediated stuff in order to live more independently in more acephalous, more autonomous groupings. The book delves deeply into many of the “how’s” involved in managing to do so with relative success. For example… find a location that is difficult for those who project “civilised” power to easily get to… in the case of Southeast Asia, the hilly places served very well.
One of the things that Scott says in this book is: “Ethnicity and tribe began, by definition, where {state] sovereignty and taxes ended. The ethnic zone was feared and stigmatized by state rhetoric precisely because it was beyond its grasp and therefore an example of defiance and an ever-present temptation to those who might wish to evade the state.”
To this I’d add: “ethnicity and tribe begin where market intermediated ‘stuff’ ends”. In other words, those who prioritised freedom over stuff (and, according to Scott, rather frequently) gained their freedom by living a life that appeared to be “poor” from the point of view of the market, but not necessarily, from their own.
If all Marxists have to offer is more “stuff”, and if their analysis can see no further than “stuff”, they may miss the fact that what some (by no means all, though) people aspire to is more autonomy, even if it means less “stuff.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/09/19/trumps-big-beautiful-tech-pact-watershed-moment-brexit/
Looks like some powerful interests in the US are keen to drag the UK away from the EU and into the US economic and regulatory orbit.
p.s. this is a fascinating speech – https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/article-867805 – I’m curious to know your thoughts.
@Siliconguy #218
From the article:
“On his first day in office last week, anti-government protests saw streets choked with smoke, barricades in flames and volleys of tear gas as demonstrators denounced budget cuts and political turmoil. That “Block Everything” campaign became a prelude for Thursday’s even larger demonstrations.”
On the 10th, my GF and I visited the Conciergerie (Concierge = caretaker, i.e. the 13th Century fortress of the caretaker of Paris) which has a large focus on its use as a noxious prison by the revolution in 1793. Brought in one day, dragged to court the next, then either found not guilty, held for a while, or – mostly – excecuted for being middle-class.
During our visit, we were serenaded by the sound of sirens from across the other end of the bridge, which is where the demonstration/riot was happening.
Ironic, really.
Then we visited the zero point marker in front of Notre Dame cathedral, walked up the street and over the east-end bridge and up to the Pompidou Centre (it is closed for renovation, but we wanted to see it in all its… ahem… modern glory).
We saw crowds of young people milling about. We saw discarded homemade signs. We saw the remains of a fire, likely a plastic trash bin, blocking the middle of the street. There were two damaged electric-assist bicycles (city owned and available for rent everywhere) on the charred mess. Private vehicles were trying to exit the area down a side street but were being blocked by two young men having a sit-down in the middle of the street. One driver eventually persuaded them to move since they were actually hurting the very people they imagined they were fighting for, and the expressions on their faces were of breathtakingly smug self-righeousness that made me fully appreciate the heroic level self-restraint of the drivers. I had an urge to punch them and we weren’t even involved! We saw a couple more trash bins (public property, mind you) burned and destroyed and a Korean restaurant that the ‘heroic protesters’ had set fire to for some reason. Nothing says protest against high taxes like destroying public property. (Everyone I chatted to had a similarly dim view of this.)
Two observations: they all think they are heroically “storming the Bastille” and will be immortalized in a romantic Jacques-Louis David Painting, or at least have a moment of notoriety on Tik-Tok, and, in these momentous events of history, about 99% of the population is off doing something else, carrying on with their daily lives, if anything slightly annoyed at the disruption.
Perhaps the demonstrations of yesterday were, indeed, more widespread and bigger… but then, again, it helps to always keep in mind that news reporters live “…in a hectic world where spectacles are colourful, fires are spectacular and sweep but never burn, where rivers rampage and explosions rip, while tornadoes leave their trail of death and destruction for grim-faced rescue workers while heavily-armed (though usually club-wielding) police fend off potential looters; where massive demonstrations fuel angry confrontations, where dissenters always stalk, never walk, from the hall as the speaker blasts, raps, lambastes or lashes out at the foes who have vowed to defeat him; where investigations are always massive and murders brutal, to distinguish them from the gentle murders, where anything the reporter didn’t expect is a surprise move and a metropolis is rocked by a city hall scandal that actually leaves nine-tenths of the population yawning.” (Rene J. Cappon in “The Word” 1982)
Bruce
Seeking, maybe so. Myself, I’ve seen far too much evidence that Antifa is an organized militia funded by interests connected to the Democratic Party, and the claim that it doesn’t exist is pure camouflage — but we’ll see.
Aldarion, I was thinking of the attempt at a united front organized by the SAPD, the KPO, and the Lenin League, which I believe was fairly active in the years immediately before the Nazi seizure of power. I’ll certainly accept correction, though.
Miow, it’s fascinating to me, in a bleak sort of way, to watch the Left and Right borrowing each other’s tactics down to fine points of detail. I’ve commented here, for example, on the young men who are imitating feminist separatism (you might possibly have encountered the slogan “A Woman Without A Man Is Like A Fish Without A Bicycle”) with their “Men Going Their Own Way” movement.
Teresa, a good example. The Crichton quote is gold — I hadn’t encountered the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, but of course it’s significant.
Chuaquin, stay tuned!
Patrick, exactly. That’s why I’m delighted that so far, at least, the right has contented itself with doxxing leftists who gloated over Kirk’s murder and getting them fired from their jobs. Harsh though that is to those who are finding themselves unemployed (and in some cases unemployable), it’s a deescalation from murder, and thus a positive step.
Jessica, thank you for this. I heartily agree that people who oppose Marxism ought to learn more about it, and that in fact a good working knowledge of it would be useful more generally, so long as that knowledge wasn’t limited to the airy certainties of Marxist theory but dealt, in detail, with how that theory has worked out in history. While some of the critics of Marxism can reasonably be accused of demonizing it, Marxism has behaved in a tolerably demonic fashion rather more often than Marxists like to admit. Of course that behavior’s a function of what I’ve termed “alpha-Marxism” — the use of Marxist ideology in nonindustrial societies as an instrument to destroy the agrarian aristocracy, impose a bureaucratic state, and attempt an industrial transformation — but since those are the only Marxist regimes that seize power without being watered down into social democracy, it’s a distinction without a difference.
Along those lines, I disagree sharply with your suggestion about the Khmer Rouge; the evidence I’ve seen suggests that the horrific mass murders there were a matter of deliberate policy on the part of the KR elite, and were specifically guided by their particular take on Marxist theory. Of course — as with so many political crises in the global South — the ideological side of the conflict was complicated by clan politics, but the “Year Zero” ideology was a real factor, and it comes straight from the radical wing of Maoism. As for Antifa, ah, but there are unquestionably active racist organizations in the United States; the Ku Klux Klan, for example, does in fact exist, and some of its branches receive funding from some fairly rich people. If it engaged in the sort of organized criminal activity that Antifa does — as of course it has done at several points in its history — I think you’d agree that defining it as a terrorist organization and using conspiracy and RICO charges against it would be justified, and attempts to claim that it’s just “folks taking action on their own” would be tolerably easy to recognize as empty handwaving.
Finally, are you seriously claiming that billionaires, not to mention the slightly less extravagantly rich, don’t leverage their absurd wealth to manipulate the political system in one direction or another? The Koch brothers are pretty much a spent force now, but they did indeed have quite an impact on American conservatism in their day. In a society like ours, in which vast amounts of notional wealth have become concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of individuals and families, it’s inevitable that the main political factions would become vehicles for struggles among elite power centers, and that organized violence by paid militia groups would be one potential vehicle for that. Antifa, like BLM (once the founders got shoved aside by professional activists), shows sufficient evidence for being just such a paid militia that I don’t think it’s unreasonable for it to be investigated as such.
Walt, thanks for this. I think you’re on to something here.
Forecasting, of course they are. Geopolitically, the UK makes a much better forward defense of the American continent than Greenland does; placed where it is, it’s like a well-defended pawn deep in the other side’s half of the chessboard. Since an EU independent of US influence will inevitably become the most important enemy of the US globally, having such a pawn is a very valuable thing for the US. As for Levy’s claims, they seem wildly overinflated to me, but not entirely devoid of truth; certainly Israel has got to be sweating at this point.
Oh for sure, I personally agree with you that antifa exists. I certainly didn’t want to imply that I thought otherwise! Its the lawyer in me that likes to play devils advocate. I do think the left tends to be very dishonest about their movements. Which is odd since we all know they love to brag about how their mass protests are so affective. (they’re not, they love to larp as civil rights activists refusing to understand what made it so affective)
Scotlyn,
I would say that Marxism in power has tended to focus on stuff. Then again, it came to power in societies where lack of even basic stuff was a chronic issue. People didn’t overthrow the tsar or the KMT (Nationalist Party; Chiang Kai Shek) because they wanted to buy a new iPhone every year instead of every three years.
My impression is that most peasant rebellions were about not only being able to keep more of what they produced, but also about being left alone by landowners who would parasite on them. Marxist-led land reform in China and North Korea was extremely popular. (The subsequent collectivization, less so.) The Bolsheviks were able to stay in power because they were the only ones willing to do two things an overwhelming majority wanted: Get Russia out of WW1 (even with a quite nasty peace treaty) and give the peasants the land and leave them alone (for a few years).
Nothing in Marxism precludes recognizing the importance of freedom and autonomy. That flows naturally from Marx’s theory of alienation. But that probably has been addressed more by the Beta Marxists. And somewhat during the Cultural Revolution in China, but that is another large off-topic topic and one that the West and China cooperate in thoroughly misrepresenting.
I would say that autonomy has been better explored by folks who certainly engaged with Marxism but were not Marxists, such as David Graeber and James C. Scott. I agree with you that The Art of Not Being Governed is brilliant. Ever since I read it, I have been trying to figure out what the equivalent of the hills (or the lowlands for the escapees from the Incas) or the isolated seashore could be in modern society. For a few years in the 1950s in New Jersey, refugees from the political crackdown protected their autonomy with egg farms and I have known of a couple of spiritual groups that created their own autonomous space by having their members learn to program computers (in the early days, when programmers were uncool nerds, before the rise of the massive tech monopolies). But those were tiny, transient oases. One angle from which one could view the Situationists is that they sought autonomy in/from a society in which The Spectacle penetrated deeper into the nooks and crannies of everyday life.
Teresa Peschel #239 and JMG:
There should be a better term for what one might call “Gell-Mann amnesia amnesia.” Every now and then, I try to explain the Gell-Mann amnesia effect to people who do seem to recognise problems in the media they consume. The net effect is, as far as I can tell, exactly nothing.
—David P.
@ Chauquin #223
The thing is, I truly appreciate good propaganda, which is what much of the finest art in the world is devoted to, from the late middle ages through the 20th Century.
Nothing we have today, especially the crude online memes with their clumsy and obvious attempts at manipulation, can compare. It’s quite depressing and an obvious part of the decline of our civilization.
Bruce
@Kfish #201 and @JMG (if I may) #228:
KPop Demon Hunters (KDH) is quite surprisingly pretty good, especially coming from Netflix. Like any good piece of entertainment, it’s part of (and often even embraces) its cultural context while offering pointed critiques at it *and* also being good fun in the process. This is, after all, the role of the jester. Contrast this, let’s say, with the preachy boring slop that Disney et al. have been peddling this past decade or so. I think one problem with activist movements like Situationism (including its counterparts opposite of the spectrum) is that, unlike the makers of KDH and the like, they are either unaware or are in denial that they are *part of* the culture they are attempting to critique.
As for Christian ministers being like rock stars, if either of you have been to a big-city Pentecostal or “non-denominational” church, you will notice that the service IS a rock concert! Y’know, loud music, big screen, big guy in front with a big voice, smoke and lasers and fireworks, the crowd jumping up and down waving their hands up in the air to the music. Just without (usually, and hopefully), the, er, harder consumable substances. The same churches that do this type of service also happen to be very likely to also discourage, if not outright disallow, “secular music” as being wastes of time at best and sinful at worst.
As to the governments indirect ability to take down Kimmel;
47 CFR 73.1217 Broadcast hoaxes.
(a) No licensee or permittee of any broadcast station shall broadcast false information concerning a crime or a catastrophe if:
(1) The licensee knows this information is false;
(2) It is foreseeable that broadcast of the information will cause substantial public harm, and
(3) Broadcast of the information does in fact directly cause substantial public harm.
Note this does not affect Mr. Kimmel’s rights to speak, but the broadcasters who are using the commons, in this case the rather scarce radio frequency spectrum, for what is supposed to be a beneficial use.
There is plenty of evidence that what Kimmel was saying was false and the broadcasters would be liable. So they shut him down. Kimmel is still free to print and distribute what he likes on his own dime.
Hat tip to C&C for the legal link.
There are great comments here, as usual. Well done Walt and Teresa.
A number of folks have asked about RSS feeds for news. I’m not sure why such a thing is necessary when we have Siliconguy…
JMG, my one contribution is this: a while back I went looking for recent writing on degrowth. One of the few things I could find in print on the subject was Kohei Saito’s _Slow Down_. He is a Marxist on faculty at the University of Tokyo. Slow Down is in all the bookstores, or was a couple of years ago. I don’t know any live human beings who have read it but I gave it a shot because I am genuinely interested in degrowth. You have to be patient to get to it but he has an innovative new economic degrowth policy structure proposal he eventually outlines in chapter 12 or so. It is…wait for it…centrally planned economies. Er, haven’t centrally planned economies consistently led to famines, hyperinflation, and general impoverishment? My take, after suppressing the urge to drop-kick his book into a burning dumpster was to realize that if you dress up Marxism with buzzwords like degrowth, anthropocene, green, and sustainability, it still sells.
When it comes to hypocrisy, double standards and two-tier policing, the Keir Starmer regime keeps on playing the political equivalent of the old limbo game “how low can you go?”.
While it has been reported here and elsewhere that the British government has been arresting dozens of people every day on dubious “hate crimes” charges because they said something that the establishment didn’t like, there was a recent case where a left wing activist in the UK made a post saying “kill them all” in response to the murder of Charlie Kirk. Needless to say, the outcome should surprise no one who has been paying attention. After all, there is a reason why the current inmate of 10 Downing Street is commonly known as “two-tier Keir”.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/left-wing-activist-said-kill-174739456.html
Makes me glad to be an American.
Hi John Michael,
🙂 Just a hunch, man!
Sadly, for the folks you wrote about this week, the only way out of the trap of their own making, is to stop, take stock of the situation, then do something else. Attempting to repair the damage wrought would be a good place to start, but that would take maturity and strength of character which might not be there. Hmm. Acknowledging errors is hard for people to do.
In many ways, the economic arrangements and policies have all fallen into a trap as a side effect. Kind of like rescuing a drowning person, who then takes you down under the waves as well.
Where is good grace to be found when we need it?
Cheers
Chris
JMG #228 “Helen, if you do anything in response to your daughter’s activities but nod blandly and say, “That’s nice, dear,” it’ll just encourage her to get more deeply into that sort of protest.”
Thanks for that answer JMG, I agree – that is definitely my usual response to such things. Even if she might be swayed by other people’s opposition to her views, she is not likely to be swayed by her old Mum!
And that is very interesting about the behaviour of the 1920-30s Communist and Socialist parties in Germany, basically ensuring that they would not be considered for real power, and yes, being beta-Marxists… not that I have studied the period in depth, but I am pretty sure we didn’t hear about this at school! The things that are left out, indeed!
Re: Gell-Mann Amnesia.
I’ve had that same thought about Wikipedia, or AI summaries. On can be cured of them by reading about a topic on which one knows a lot, then understanding that they probably don’t do any better on the things we know little about.
Patrick #205, 209, thanks for your reply.
I agree with your comment at #205. I have not mentioned the matter with her since. At the time of our discussion, I just ended by saying I hoped she would be careful in what could be a dangerous situation. So, really more about how I am worried for her. Her friends are not beta-leftists, just rather woke, and have assigned the qualities of ‘good’ to the left. She sees a different spectacle to the one I see. But we do have other areas in common, and I prefer to focus on those 🙂
JMG,
I have shared this multiple times now and discussed it in person almost just as much. People who don’t normally read you really like (as do I). Fun fact, I have started and not finished Society of the Spectacle 2 or 3 times now and still have not yet made it through. I did make it through The Hounds of Actaeon: the Magical Origins of Public Relations and Modern Media which I believe an unremembered (to me) commenter here mentioned quite awhile ago. It discusses the Situationists at length. Also, the life force and. cybernetics, among other things. Very on brand for Ecosophia, imo. Highly recommend to anyone who this sounds even a little bit interesting to.
Seeking, thanks for this. That refusal to understand is one of the most fascinating things about the left these days — it’s as though learning anything from the past has become verboten among them. I think it’s partly the influence of Hegel, whose philosophy can be used to claim that what’s true changes from age to age and that the past can therefore be ignored as a guide to the future, but I’m not at all sure that’s all that feeds into it.
David P, that’s fascinating. I’m tempted to do a post prodding at that.
Carlos, I’ve never been to a church like that and I hope I never have to venture into one. I respect the fine ritual of the Catholic and Orthodox churches and the spare, simple, Spartan clarity of the sort of old-fashioned Protestant churches my family came out of — my paternal grandparents were Presbyterians of the old, hardedged Scottish school, though they’d stopped attending before I was born. The sort of thing you describe? Gah.
Siliconguy, and it didn’t hurt that his viewership was way down, along with so much of broadcast TV. I suspect the network jumped at the chance to get rid of him.
Samurai_47, that’s the typical Marxist bait-and-switch strategy. Find an issue that’s attracting some attention, insist that you have a solution, and them make people slog through as much verbiage as possible before they figure out that, yeah, it’s the same repeatedly-failed Marxist scheme. Dishonest? Sure, but like most fundamentalists, they really can’t stop pushing their One True Faith on everyone.
Gerbil, it’s an amazingly ugly situation. I hope that Britain can return to something less toxic without having to face domestic insurgency or civil war.
Chris, oh, I know. I don’t expect us to get out of this without a long, bleak, difficult time.
Helen, I’ve come to think that there are very few things more dishonest than public school history textbooks. They go so far out of their way to avoid telling kids anything they need to know!
Kyle, I’ll try that.
Luke, thanks for this! I haven’t tackled that book yet but it’s on the list. I’m glad to hear that this post is getting a positive reaction among the people you know — it’s certainly fielded me quite a collection of shrieking tirades and pompous putdowns, which I consider a good measure of a post’s quality and success.
Chuaquin #211 – (reductio ad hitlerum), very funny!
Lathechuck #220 – I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have opposed it! I would have been in the vegie garden., or doing some pickling… I take your point about it having been a much more complex situation than we would think from the currently fashionable images of that time. Thanks for the book recommendations – my ‘to read’ pile is very big already, but I think my husband would like them, actually, so if he reads them I will ask him to summarise for me.
Other Owen #244, “tell her you’re replacing her with an immigrant” – I’m laughing so hard at this one!
One of the poster women of the modern Democratic Party and its leftest extreme leftist views is Randi Weingarten the longtime head of the biggest U.S. teachers union. She has a new book out called ” Why Fascists hate Teachers”. I of course not read it, but I think the title says it all.
Its not just a refusal to learn from the past but also a refusal to understand optics. I remember some leftists trying to tell the majority ‘hey you need optics, you need to care how mainstream society sees you to get things done’. And the majority as you can very well see called them liberals and fascists for such.
I wonder if its partly the myth of progress and hegel, but also just a sort of laziness? Not wanting to do the work required, thinking some other person will do it while they try to do the game of marxier then though? Optics isn’t ‘cool’ and doesn’t allow for larping as a revolutionary…..
…the illusion can pass for reality so long as the crowd around the controls remains orderly, but once they start fighting, the noise and the occasional punch-drunk figure tumbling out through the gap in the curtains make it impossible to ignore what’s actually been going on all along….
Laughed so hard when I read this great line! Could it be our dear 47, with all his bafoonery yet common sense who tumbled out at the right time we needed him?
Thanks for swell post JMG!
Jill C Yogaandthetarot
Regarding the Khmer Rouge, my understanding is also that the mass killings were part of deliberate policy. One of my college professors was a huge fan of Frantz Fanon, a quite famous Marxist scholar best known for advocating the need for revolutionary violence, not just as a requirement for a proletariat revolution, but also to liberate the people psychologically from their oppressors.
The Khmer Rouge leadership were also fans of Fanon, and also added the idea that the bourgeoisie, the object of their violence, could not psychologically adapt to agrarian, communist life and therefore must be systematically eliminated. It’s similar to how some North Korean defectors have asserted that the North’s plans upon conquering the South is to systemically kill all of them because of the belief that South Koreans wouldn’t be able to psychologically adapt to the North’s Juche (Kim Family worship) ideology.
@JMG #264,
Back in my university days a girl I was interested in invited me to attend their church, which was exactly one of those I described. At the time I haven’t been to church for a couple of years. The “evangelical dating” strategy both kinda worked on me and also and didn’t; I did start going back to church but ended up reverting HARD to the Catholicism of my youth
Papa ice cream headache about Leonora Carrington just reading intro to her Complete Stories book from library. have tarot one. thank you for introducing me to myself.
going underground to binge legal-write. i bled enough; i’ve got my OPENING… finally.
i feel like i’m tap dancing under gunfire making a sales pitch for my life. / in Mordor. not the cute one. the real California one where they make poor folks’ liver fois gras tacos.
Thank you for Leonora!
x
Dobbs and Papa
Thanks for enunciating what I’ve also come to believe about us inhabiting The Resurrection…heaven within us thing instead us always going limp and wanting to be bailed out another fine mess. Only thing that makes sense. We keep devouring angels and can’t have anything nice why keep wasting messiahs on us cannibals? Making us self-cleaning ovens is more sensible than blood thirsty gifts to be torn apart in exstacy.
To follow-up on the point re: centralization of broadcast, one thing that is worth noting is that the environment we’re going towards is a lot more similar to the environment old-school newspapers developed in. That means that older constitutions like the American one, which developed around that time, might be better able to handle the transition than more recent ones like i.e. the French – it’s not 100% the same, but it’s close enough that it might be adaptive. I suspect things like voluntary organizations run on Robert’s Rules of Order, fraternal lodges, mutual benefit societies, etc may have some of the same advantages. The problem is, the bureaucratic-managerial elite has ruled by using the Spectacle to bypass the old constitutional structures and aren’t used to having to work within them, so they don’t actually know how to handle a constitutional crisis, suppress a coup, or do any of the things that were standard practice for 19th century governments. So instead, they’re trying to reassert media centralization in the hopes they can go back to Business As Usual instead of, y’know, actually governing.
Re: the left and learning from the past I’ve noticed the same thing, although to be honest it kinda seems to me like it’s an American thing? Not in a bad way, but more that I’ve noticed that a lot of Americans don’t think of the country as a country with a history that tends to direct the ways in which it’s likely to behave, but rather as the New Roman Empire, or the Nucleus of the Future Galactic Federation or anything other than “The United States of America, 2025.” But, well, it seems to me like a lot of what’s going on in America right now is much more like a reversion to the mean, and that America in the near future is going to wind up looking a lot more like i.e. America in the 1970s or the 1890s than America in the post-cold-war period of stability and prosperity.
Re: Kirk, I think I may need to do some reflection. I was close friends with people affiliated with one of the competing rightist factions for many years, but came to hate it and eventually got out because of the way some of the people in that group acted and the way it was influencing me. At that time, I thought that while obviously *I* believed in liberal individualism, it was very clearly on its way out and I could never expect anyone who wasn’t also a white conservative of some stripe or another to take my side in any dispute, and being in an academic millieu didn’t help matters at all for obvious reasons. Then some things happened that shook me out of it, but I still felt deeply ashamed about the whole thing. So, my personal history meant that when this happened, my own first inclination was to think based on the memes on the bullet casings indicating that the guy was very clearly From 4chan meant it had to be the work of the same kind of competing rightist faction I’d gotten out of. Instead, I needed to take a step back and wait before jumping to conclusions, huh?
Re: KPDH yeh it’s pree good. i liked it.
Scotlyn # 247:
“As Ivan Illich points out, “subsistence” refers to that which supports one’s capacity to stand for oneself. The testing of the practicality of this idea by small groups of people, repeatedly, over many generations, is actually very well described by James C. Scott in his book “The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.””
A very interesting book, thank you for reminding it to me.
———————————————————————————————————————-
Renaissance Man # 254:
@ Chauquin #223
“The thing is, I truly appreciate good propaganda, which is what much of the finest art in the world is devoted to, from the late middle ages through the 20th Century.
Nothing we have today, especially the crude online memes with their clumsy and obvious attempts at manipulation, can compare. It’s quite depressing and an obvious part of the decline of our civilization.”
Well, Renaissance Man/Bruce, I think the older propaganda had a big part of art involved in it, or maybe that was art with chunks of propagnda in it? I agree nowadays propaganda’s so obvious shoddy…I think propaganda/Spectacle has eaten creativity and good work.
Chuaquin
Re Lathechuck #215
The same bafflement is happening when people think of europe as a single entity; it just doesn’t exist. Yes, there is the bureaucratic monstrosity called EU, but when you look at the level of real people and of the land there are vast differences, even within countries.
I live in one of the smaller countries (a few hundred miles across) and when you travel from, say, northwest to southeast and avoid the cities, it doesn’t feel like the same country at all.
–bk
Greetings all!
JMG said in response to Forecasting Intelligence’s comments: “As for Levy’s claims, they seem wildly overinflated to me, but not entirely devoid of truth; certainly Israel has got to be sweating at this point.”
There is an american convert to Islam, Shahid Bolsen, he can be found on Youtube, who argues along similar lines, but he extends his arguments to the muslim petro monarchies, not only Qatar.
There is a logic to it as the west respects nothing but military or financial might, hence given that the petromonarchies have little military force, that leaves them only with financial power. The idea being to leverage influence in the west via investments in large companies in order to transform the middle east into an industrial, commercial and scientific hub. For that to happen the israelo-palestinian conflict must cease, a Palestine state must emerge and Israel must be cut down to size (but not necessarily destroyed).
Thus the Petro-monarchies aim to steer the west away from full support to israel to something more reasonable. A stable Middle East will be a boon for investment by global fiance also. After all, the Middle East (ME) is a vast market, plenty of highly educated people, high culture, vast resources, a major transit corridor as it links Europe to Asia to Africa.
It is also reasonable to believe that to tap into Africa’s markets, resources and manpower, the oil and gas of the ME will be essential, hence peace and collaboration with BRICS countries are indispensable.
In summary, colonisation western type is over, zionism must go (it is a 19th century ideology now an aberration), Palestine is in, Israel is reduced, BRICS are also in, the US is marginalised, the Rise of the East is now unstoppable. But the path may well be long and hard.
Now, just to make things very clear, there is a definite and welcomed place for Jews in the ME but not at the expense of Arabs. They will be a welcomed minority in a vast arabo-muslim condominium (potentially such a condominium could very well extend beyond the Arab world and into the muslim non-arab world too.), a bit like an Islamic Commonwealth. And of course christians too have their place in that condominium as they have been there for 2000 years! Think of the Islamic Commonwealth akin to an Empire of Faith, the Islamic substrate / base supports the many and the many loyal to the general idea of a commonwealth in peace, truth, justice and human dignity. That is a worthy and laudable objective.
I am aware that the above will make many chuckle and may think of me as a hopeless and naive dreamer or worse an idiot! It’s OK, I accept that risk.
Now think about it. Beyond the US, who really benefits from the current ME chaos? Nobody!
Now, I am not saying that a bright and glorious future awaits the ME, but what I am saying is that the geopolitical forces now en route are unstoppable and will lead to the rise of the East. In short, the petro-monarchies could well be aiming for something like that.
Even the briefest window into the mindset of Britain’s aristocracy will turn someone into a punk rocker, anarchist, revolutionary communist, or whatever else it takes to put a dent in them. Marxism may have little value in itself, but as a threatening symbol it’s priceless.
@Scotlyn #247
Thank you for the reading suggestion. It’s a topic of great interest to me.
@Kevin Sweeney #242
Thank you kindly for this information. My relatives are Hebridean farmers, so I’m sure they’ll be fine.
@JMG: Thanks for the explanation, I didn’t and don’t know a lot about those smaller socialist splinter parties, but socialist does seem a good description of the SAPD, for example.
Regarding the discussion on Marx:
Just my opinion but the most valuable part of Marx is that he seriously considers the implications of the labour theory of value. His contemporaries like JS Mill, who also accepted the LTV, shied away from saying that profit is a share of labour that goes towards the provider of capital, but says it’s a reward for deferring one’s reward or something like that, which is really just a deflection. Unfortunately Marx also made some errors in that he formulated his socially necessary labour time based on the average, and not the marginal (i.e. least efficient) labour.
It seems that today, Marxian (not Marxist) writers are the only ones who seriously look at the LTV.
I think the LTV is the most unjustly maligned ideas in political economy; marginal/utilitarian economics largely tells you about prices, yet it’s treated as the be all and end all.
I’m still going through Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. I really like it so far and I recommend it to anyone interested in political economy. I think some people here have read the Astral Codex Ten review but IIRC that review doesn’t talk much about the LTV, which actually is a crucial cornerstone of George’s ideas.
I have this idea in my mind that the LTV is basically a model of how energy is embodied in goods and services, focusing mainly on human energy, I’ve also been searching a bit for modern economists who talk about value in terms of energy, seems like Odum is the next read.
>Beyond that, his supporters insisting this is a free speech issue are, in my non-lawyerly opinion, smoking their shorts
Do you remember when that crowd was making fun of “freeze peach” a few years ago? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Again, I ask, is there anything other than a repressive authoritarian regime that will unite us as a people? And even if we get that, the clock is ticking on it, it won’t last that long.
>Now, I am not saying that a bright and glorious future awaits the ME, but what I am saying is that the geopolitical forces now en route are unstoppable and will lead to the rise of the East.
Historically, that part of the world doesn’t suffer small fragmented countries for long, it all gets rolled up into one empire or another. The last one was the Ottoman Empire. The next one?
So in a sense, the Spectacle is the modern culture in itself, isn’t it?
In the past, Culture had no true owner and no individual producer.
Additions and substractions to it were carefully considered, not with an eye into profit but rather into social balance and cohesion; I remember that you comented how Native American elders atentively thought through any vision, before accepting it as true lore.
Now, seeing the mess where Liberalism has landed us, in which everyone can contribute to the Spectacle, and shape the common sense people have about the World, it’s not that hard to se the point in Dogmatism. Maybe they had a clue, after all, and a limiting vision about the world ends up being much better than a senseless, chaotic and paid-by one..
Guillem.
About Antifa,
I do know that the Women’s March (yes they are a corporation now) hired and bussed people to march in Wash. D.C. for the June No-Kings Day.
ACT-Blue of the Democratic Party hired and bussed people to the Mid-West Republican Town Halls in the Spring, during budget discussions. They were the ones shouting at the Representatives.
As for Antifa, follow the money. Forensic accounting will tell you where they come from. They did that for the Mafia, which was broken by Rudi Guliani in the 1980s. The Mafia is a pale shadow of itself now.
I did forensic accounting at the FED (yes that FED) for international terrorist flows from Iran. We collected all sorts of numbers from all sorts of places. It is detailed and tedious work. And need dedicated people. I believe the Trump people are working on that since they have been stopping the money flows to other left wing groups. So, I think the dismantling of the Antifa is well planned and was in the works, waiting for the opportune time.
From what I understand, you do have rent a crowd services on the dark web to do mayhem, which seems to support my idea of much of Antifa is rented hooliganism. The riots in LA had a different set of people than the ones in Portland, but the same bricks, bombs, megaphones, and whistle types.
As for the hue and cry over Jimmy Kimmel. Everything seems to flow back to hatred of Trump. What was not discussed is that Sinclair Network which owns a large group of ABC stations is Conservative. They revolted, stating they would not televise Kimmel. There is another group which owns stations both ABC and the CW who also baulked at showing Kimmel after his presentation about MAGA. They used their money to force the issue. On Friday, Sinclair replaced Kimmel with Charlie Kirk Memorials. It was economics that caused ABC to drop Kimmel.
The aging power that bes such as Obama all decried freedom of speech since they are fearful of being irrelevant. What I perceived is these people are afraid of being ignored, which seems to be happening in Obama’s case. The reporting on the networks the next day, including ABC, were focused on the shooting up of the ABC office. Not on the outrage of free speech.
However, at Trump’s press conference on Friday, Jonathan Karl of ABC (who hates Trump) and Jeffery Goldsmith, the editor of the Atlantic Magazine, both asked free speech questions, trying to trap Trump. He lambasted them. Meanwhile Goldsmith has the Washington Weekly program on PBS with his friends. (All press people). They discussed in their frightened and snarky way, Trump and free speech.
My takeaway is that the elites know they are being replaced. They know that the people who want to mourn Charlie Kirk will not be stopped or dismayed in their grief. There are more of the Charlie Kirk people then there is of them. That frightens them after telling themselves for years, they are the majority.
Dennis Michael Sawyers # 269:
“The Khmer Rouge leadership were also fans of Fanon, and also added the idea that the bourgeoisie, the object of their violence, could not psychologically adapt to agrarian, communist life and therefore must be systematically eliminated.”
It’s true, Khmer Rouge ideas led them to extreme violence like other Commies in other countries and times, but I’ve always wondered why the Khmer Rouge loved so agrarian life and despised urban people in his “madness”. Because Marx, and then Lenin, Stalin and so on were very fond of industrialisation and at least looked woth suspicion to the rural people as reactionary (it comes to my mind for example how the supposed Kulaks-“rich” farmers-were persecuted in the USSR, for exemple). How the Khmers Rouge finished with an opposite point of view when they decided to led the Killing Fields?
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BK # 275:
“The same bafflement is happening when people think of europe as a single entity; it just doesn’t exist. Yes, there is the bureaucratic monstrosity called EU, but when you look at the level of real people and of the land there are vast differences, even within countries.
I live in one of the smaller countries (a few hundred miles across) and when you travel from, say, northwest to southeast and avoid the cities, it doesn’t feel like the same country at all.”
I agree. Europe’s really a caleidoscope. Even within each country. It happens the same phenomenon in my country, which it’s bigger than yours. Even across one of its regions there are subtile or not so subtile differences.
Clay, you know, if I’d set out to satirize her by pretending she’d written a book, I don’t think I could have come up with a more perfect title, no matter how snarky I was feeling at the time.
Seeking, that’s a crucial point. One of the core elements of the modern left is the insistence that nobody can really have a viewpoint different from theirs. In the fantasy-world that plays on infinite loop in their minds, everybody knows they’re right, and so those who claim to disagree with them have to be motivated by deliberate nastiness. Thus they can’t take optics into account, because the only optics they can imagine are those inside their own heads. That somebody else might look at the situation and honestly come to a different conclusion is anathema to them — and above all, the thought that somebody might look at them and conclude that they’re wrong inflames them instantly into murderous rage.
Jill, very likely! Being who and what he is, though, I think he shoved the curtain aside on purpose because he can’t stand the thought that the rest of us aren’t able to watch him at work.
Dennis, exactly. Fanon’s ideas were picked up all over the extremist end of the alpha-Marxist scene, and blended with the far end of Maoism. I don’t happen to know whether Fanon or the Maoists came first, or whether they both seized on the same bloodsoaked idea at once, but I recall diatribes along these same lines in the late 1970s Marxist scene in the US.
Carlos, I don’t imagine you stayed with the girl, either!
Erika, I’m delighted to hear this! I think you and Carrington would have gotten along like anything — she had her own brushes with Mordor, including being locked in an insane asylum by her own family, but she came through it all triumphantly. BTW, I love the idea that human souls are self-cleaning ovens!
Deo, that’s an excellent point. In Princess Leia’s words, though, the tighter they clutch the networks, the more memes slip through their fingers. As for America, oh, granted — I’ve long thought that the truly weird thing about this country is that strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist. We’ve got 300-something million people who live in an ordinary, relatively corrupt, declining New World corporate-liberal republic who think they live in Oz or Middle-Earth instead. I think of a line from one of the later verses of “America the Beautiful”: “Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.” Say what? The gap between America the luminous abstract fantasy and the grubbily real United States is one of the weirdest features of our collective life.
Karim, of course the Middle East has its own interests and is playing hardball to increase its wealth and influence; every other region is either doing the same thing or would do so if its governments weren’t owned by some neocolonial power. I think you’re mistaken about Israel, though. Left to its own resources, Israel will be miserably poor and vulnerable; it’s one of the bitter ironies of history that the land the Jewish god purportedly promised to his people is one of the very few spots in the entire Middle East that has no resources worth mentioning. Lacking the ability to exploit its neighbors and extract wealth from abroad, as I pointed out more than a decade ago, Israel is doomed. I’m fairly sure of three things: that the current violence is an attempt to postpone the inevitable downfall; that in the usual way of things, it will simply hasten what it’s trying to prevent; and that by the time the rubble stops bouncing, no, Jews won’t be welcome anywhere in the Muslim world. But we’ll see.
Tengu, I recall the “Upper Class Twit of the Year Contest” skit from Monty Python. It was funny, but the humor was over the top of a seething resentment I found very educational.
Alvin, that’s fair. I think more could be done with the labor theory of value, and Odum’s very likely a good starting place for that process.
Guillem, you’re getting close. We’ll discuss this further in later posts.
Neptunesdolphins, exactly. When it’s “just folks doing things,” they don’t have pallets of bricks prepositioned in advance to make it easier for them to break windows. A good solid job of forensic accounting will, I think, turn up quite a bit of interest. As for the replacement process, exactly; the media harlots you’ve discussed should be happy to be ignored. I’m far from sure Obama, for example, can count on getting off that lightly.
Guillem Mateo # 283:
“So in a sense, the Spectacle is the modern culture in itself, isn’t it?”
Well, I partly disagree. I think modern culture is the Spectacle apotheosis: it’s invaded and swallowed every part of arts, culture, society and so on; and of course each individual can create his/her own spectacle thanks to smartphones and Internet…However, I’ve written before that there was a Spectacle before Industrian Revolution. A “low tech” spectacle could be seen for example in old pictures which represent powerful men; though it also can be traced an “insurgent” Spectacle after the press machine was invented by Gutenberg (I’m thinking in primitive pamphlets or clandestine books with pictures despising the Pope, or the Emperor, or the King, or some feudal landlord. These “alternative” Spectacle must be some centuries before the modern propaganda machine which denounced Debord.
@ Jessica #252
Firstly, may I say I’ve always appreciated you being here in this very diverse commentariat, and that you have put in the study to intelligently defend the Marxist ideas which inspire you. Your comments are always well considered and interesting, even when I do not agree.
Of course, my personal feeling about “seizing power”, about ruling and/or aspiring to rule, about getting involved in games of thrones, about projecting power over others, is that every move a person might take in that direction necessitates a reduction of autonomy.
Principally one’s own.
But, that it also necessitates a reduction of the autonomy of others more generally goes without saying.
What the peasants you mention were doing when rebelling was different. They were, as you point out, pushing BACK from a position of having been squeezed too tightly, to hold more autonomy space for themselves against the power projected at them from the throne. To be left to get on with doing what they do best, with less interference. (No peasant would ever believe that you could get off with growing real food that real people really need to eat with NO interference).
No amount of distribution (or redistribution) of “stuff” could ever accomplish this in a peasant-friendly way – especially since food is one of the most basic of “stuffs”, and its producers, both human and non-human, could never be trusted to order their efforts and products and contributions for the “greatest good” their Marxist throne holders envision.
To this peasant, this makes the prospect of increasing freedom through “stuff” a very dubious proposition indeed. And, indeed, Marxist notions of “the greatest good” through distributions of food, were exactly what drove the really disastrous and self-destructive collectivisation of farms in the countries you mention, and in others. (I personally witnessed a couple of cases of farm collectivisation in Nicaragua in the early 80’s and there was no farmer I ever met there who could say the word “farm collective” with a straight face).
So, here is what I think. The thing in Marxism which (possibly inadvertently, but in any case with terminal effectiveness) precludes recognition of freedom and autonomy, is this notion of the “greater good” driving (sooner or later) the effective dispossession (via collectivisation instead of via enclosure) of the peasantry who grow the food, and also of the non-human denizens of their land base who either ARE the food, or who keep the soil, air and water fertile and clean.
And now, here I am, a member of the (small) land-owning peasantry of Ireland, where it is not landowners trying to dispossess us (we own our land), but bureaucratic regulators – using both carrots (farm subsidies with built-in incentives to borrow and pollute) and sticks (various penalties, both direct and the indirect penalties that result from indebtedness, and impoverishment of land quality.) Wendell Berry is the most eloquent writer on this conflict that I have ever read.
I love both Graeber and Scott, because, through their writings, and if you get past the theorising into the weeds, as it were, one can catch glimpses of real people practicing real dissensus, and staking real, if precarious, claims in the nooks and crannies of everyday life. To my mind, this is really the only autonomy-sparing way that is available to any of us to slip off the radar of the Spectacle, and live as we choose.
Be well, stay free!
Deo @ 273 The Constitution of the United States did not “develop”. It was written by delegates to a Constitutional Convention which convened in 1787, and became the Law of the land in 1789, after being ratified by each of the original states. Boring pedantry, I know, for which I make no apology. It was written by a group of men of affairs. The only man among them who could be reasonably described as a heavyweight intellectual was James Madison.
As for Americans’ deplorable ignorance of history, not to mention civics and geography, that came about because those three subjects are not taught in American schools, having been replaced by a misbegotten bastard called “social studies”. What social studies does is instruct its victims in correct opinion, which, as we all know, subject to frequent change.
The PMC might be nominally in charge at the federal level. I agree, they don’t actually govern, instead doing whatever their paymasters, excuse me, donors, require of them. Rural counties and small towns tend to be controlled by a consortium of real estate and automobile dealers, and large landowners, with input from the insurance agents.
karim Jaufeerally @ 276, I entirely agree that the ME should be left to Middle Easterners, so long as it is clearly understood that the US is not and never will become a Moslem nation. I do question what resources exist in that area besides oil and some plants which have medicinal value. Maybe the fortunate geographic location is enough for future prosperity.
> The gap between America the luminous abstract fantasy and the grubbily real United States is one of the weirdest features of our collective life.
For what my European perspective is worth, I would go as far as to say that the grubbier reality becomes, the brighter the fantasy shines, and not just by contrast. I spent a good chunk of my teenage years longing for the mystical Land of the Free and most intensely so during the 2020 riots that had me convinced you’d be facing a civil war any minute now.
—David P.
I wonder if the Labor Theory of Value would be a good 5th week topic? Who was or is Odum?
The Other Owen (#281) wrote:
“Again, I ask, is there anything other than a repressive authoritarian regime that will unite us as a people? And even if we get that, the clock is ticking on it, it won’t last that long.”
And just why should we ever become united as a people? What sort of value will such unity bring us?
Diversity and disunity seem to me to be better options as we face the hard challenges of an unpredictable and uncontrollable future in a world of shrinking resources. Though diversity at least some of us may survive those challenges, whereas unity increases our odds against survival. As our host has often emphasized, dissensus works better than consensus in such a situation.
We — those of us who are not Indigenous here — fled to this continent from many different and incompatible cultures elsewhere in the world, and we settled in various places on the land where our fellow refugees from those cultures had already started putting down their roots and building their communities. We brought the diverse heritages of all our ancestral cultures with us. Those different and incompatible heritages are still very, very strong all throughout the United States. [See such game-changing studies as The Nine Nations of North America by Joel Garreau (1981), Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fischer (1989), and American Nations by Colin Woodard (2011).]
In this diversity lies our national strength. The old ideal of an American melting pot strikes me as a recipe for disaster. It will serve only the interests of a ruling elite, a “repressive authoritarian regime.”
Part of America’s support for Israel comes from Christian Fundamentalists who believe that Israel needs to exist so that the temple can be built and the rapture and/or end times can begin. I know they have pressure groups to keep the American government to support Israel. My parents where Fundamentalists who taught me these things and made clear it was a Christian duty to support Israel.
When I deconverted back in college to follow the Buddha Dharma, I always wondered how the Christian Fundamentalists would handle Israel’s collapse?
Regarding Israel, I do find it interesting to note that while there has been an increasing backlash against the country here in the States, the fact of the matter is that not only does the United States have the second largest population of Jews in the world, Israel itself is maintaining a stable birthrate at a time where the majority of the world, including various Muslim countries, are on the decline. So I can’t necessarily say that Israel as a concept is entirely doomed, at least in the short to medium term, even if the country itself will not be the same.
Naked Capitalism, yes, I know, them, but please bear with me, has an interesting long form dive into what Yves, and FWIIW I agree, is calling a moral panic.
Points I thought were of interest are an article by Yasha Levine–he used to be associated with the Exiled/Not Safe for Work/War Nerd wild bunch–about politics as spectacle and how the assassination has spooked the “influencers” of all stripes.
A lengthy timeline from X turned up the interesting fact that an unidentified plane left a nearby airport shortly after the shooting and made itself untraceable. Hm. Probably a drug run whose operators had paid off the local sheriff, I would think.
Yves’ various links do make it abundantly clear that Mr. Kirk was at first sponsored by various Zionist donors, and that he had begun to stray off the rez. Also, Turning Points was being funded by Zionist deep pockets.
Oh, just in case you like me hadn’t noticed, our wonderful House of Representatives, that home of the free and the bought, passed an amendment which would forbid the awarding of defense contracts to any companies which have been involved with BDS.
@Alvin #280 re: Economics and Ecology
If I may, I’m working my way through Odum (somewhere between a skim and a thorough read), and I think you’ll find the discussion of energy, biomass, and biodiversity interesting to compare with economic ideas – my own thoughts have been going in that direction as I read it.
Also, more in the economic field, have you read our host’s The Wealth of Nature? If not, you might find it quite interesting. It doesn’t so much focus on “how do we define value” as point out “some or much value comes from some places we tend to ignore (like nature).” Also, if you’re not familiar, the Austrian School of Economics attempts to define value in a way different from either Keynesians or the LTV, but they might veer too close to “it’s whatever the market says it is” for your tastes, as they say that value is “intersubjective” – my labor adds value if you, the buyer, find that labor valuable and are willing to give me something *I* find valuable in exchange, and so on. Human Action by Von Mises would likely be the best exploration of that.
Apologies if you’re well familiar with any of this, but good luck in your explorations, they sound interesting!
Cheers,
Jeff
Hi other owen.
You are right, the region will fall to another empire. Probably islamic. 3 possibilities: 1 turkish, 2 persian, 3 arab. I think around next of 21st century.
JMG # 287:
” Lacking the ability to exploit its neighbors and extract wealth from abroad, as I pointed out more than a decade ago, Israel is doomed. I’m fairly sure of three things: that the current violence is an attempt to postpone the inevitable downfall; that in the usual way of things, it will simply hasten what it’s trying to prevent; and that by the time the rubble stops bouncing, no, Jews won’t be welcome anywhere in the Muslim world. But we’ll see.”
I don’t know how many time will Israel and its American Israeli lobby keep on squeezeing European and USA teats (more the last one than the EU, me think), but…
I’ll dare to say Israeli Spectacle could be summed up in two phrases: “Israel is the only democracy in ME” and “Israel always wins”. Oh, I cannot forget a lot of historical victimism based in real events of course, but well (ab)used. These days we can see the Israeli propaganda machine overheated, but at least in my country, there’s been better times for the Zionist Spectacle…Our oportunist President Sánchez has made a good use of popular streets anger and he has disguised with the Palestinian scarf (metaphorically), incorporating it to his Spectacular woke politics. On the other hand, the Right wing Spectacle, both Conservatives and Far Right excusing and supporting Israel, is so overactued and chilling that seems parodic, IMHO. As you’ve written before, “we’ll see”.
@Seeking #235
“Tibetan Buddhism has a much better shot.”
I agree. It got off to a bad start in the West because so many of the early popular gurus were abusers who I suspect came to the West because back home they would have been immediately identified for what they are and shunned. But I think that’s far enough in the past that it can start to recover.
Ironically, most of what I know about Tibetan Buddhism comes from David Chapman, who teaches a secularized version of it along with his spouse Charlie Awbury. Unlike almost all other secular Buddhists, Chapman seems to be a sharp guy with a great respect for the tradition. He’s also written extensively on why Western secular Buddhism failed, including how it threw overboard everything distinctly Buddhist in favor of political correctness and dysfunctional niceness.
I Chapman’s work as likely to be a stepping-stone for many to a more authentic engagement with the actual traditions once those get going again.
Correction for my last sentence in my comment to Seeking: “I see Chapman’s work as likely to be a stepping-stone for many to a more authentic engagement with the actual traditions once those get going again in the West.
On the topic of the post, it occurred to me the other day that one of the dominant Spectacles of our day has revolved around “feels” — as in, “that hit me right in the feels.” In other words, the artificial invocation of sympathy and pity for others, which for many becomes a way to revel in self-pity while maintaining your self-image as the hero of the story.
>I think the LTV is the most unjustly maligned ideas in political economy; marginal/utilitarian economics largely tells you about prices, yet it’s treated as the be all and end all.
Was it Oscar WIlde who said something about prices and values? They are different things that sometimes correlate – and sometimes they don’t. As far as value goes – who sets the value? Is the value of labor finger wagged to you by some academic? Government bureaucrat? Yourself? My cat? I like that idea, let’s outsource the Labor Theory of Value to my cat. Then we can call it Catmunism. I bet she values the labor of tuna fisherman rather highly.
As far as prices go, at least in a market economy, the price is whatever the next guy is willing to pay for something. Sometimes supply and demand influence prices, sometimes people get a bee in their bonnet and just bid for something because they like it. Economists like to say people are rational. And then I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Part of the reason labor has been in a bear market all these years is population growth. Supply outstripping demand.
I’m going to run this quote by you. It’s from a novel, one of Steve Stirling’s, and the setting is more medieval than today, but it goes “A realm is well-governed if the common people have enough to eat, there are no bandits*, and the roads and the like are well maintained.”
By “no bandits,” he didn’t mean everyday crime. He meant the sort where you could go about your daily business, or to another town, without the certainty of being robbed. For what it’s worth.
By those standards, are we well-governed?
BTW, those who are freaking out over the ICE raids, remember that FDR did exactly the same thing dirung the Great Depression, for exactly the same reason. I rememebr it when the Woody Guthrie song about it popped up out of my memory bank. “…..and all they will call us will be…. Deportees.”
Erika @272: I love that analogy of the human as self-cleaning oven as it very much captures the idea that many people never make use of the capabilities they have for finding the kingdom of heaven (or Valhalla!) within themselves.
David, I’ve sometimes imagined a deindustrial future where people set out on pilgrimages in search of America, that wonderland where everybody is free and they still have electricity and running water…
Mary, you can certainly nominate it when the time arrives. As for Odum, that’s Howard Odum, who worked out an energy theory of value that remains very cogent to this day.
Seeking, they’ll find some other excuse to keep believing in the imminence of the Second Coming. When I was a kid they used to quote the verse about saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace, point to the hippie greeting, and use that as an excuse; when people stopped using that greeting, the Christians pivoted on a dime to find something else.
N, Israel has maintained a steady birthrate only if you factor in the Muslim population. The Jewish population of Israel is in the same demographic bind as most of the rest of the world — which does not bode well for Israel’s survival.
Mary, well, of course they are. I mentioned that leftists are trying to blame Israel for Kirk’s assassination, didn’t I?
Chuaquin, it’s not that different over here. I’m remembering how the Crusader kingdoms ended and watching the news.
Slithy, that’s an excellent point.
Patricia M, that’s the medieval definition of good government, and it works tolerably well.
@300 Slithy Toves
Yes a lot of ‘gurus’ in the 60s and 70s basically took advantage of hippie orientalism to get wealth and power. And as you say Tibetan Buddhism has managed to learn from that and oust a lot of that abusive corruption. (i imagine the implosion of hippie interest helped a lot with getting rid of most of the abusive corrupt ‘gurus’. When I think of Tibetan Buddhism now I think of Sravasti Abbey which while not perfect is a much better representation of Western Tibetan Buddhism.
I must admit i’ve never heard of David Chapman, can you link where he critiques Western Secular Buddhism? I am very curious.
@JMG
I’ve heard Israel’s birthrate was steady because of the Hasidic Jewish communities whose members do not serve in the military, as the Muslim birthrate continues to decline.
Hello JMG,
Thank you for the essay! Yes, indeed, the spectacles around us are getting increasingly more absurd, like the one you mentioned, when women got penalized for saying politically incorrect things about their rapists while the rapists themselves walked free. That absurdity reminded me of the ill-fated and equally absurd Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign in the second half of the 80s. The government’s ambition was to extinguish alcohol completely (in Russia!!!). Centuries-old vineyards in the South were cut. Many people died while attempting to drink alcohol not meant for human consumption. There was endless propaganda of alcohol-free weddings and wakes. Suddenly, alcohol became the evelist of all evils.
There was this joke that captured the gist of that campaign pretty well:
Raisa (Gorbachev’s wife) and Edward (Gorbachev’s minister of foreign affairs) are lying in bed making love in the Gorbachevs’ apartment. Suddenly, they hear a door slamming, footsteps in the stairwell, the key turning… Raisa turns pale and says, “Oh horror, this is Mikhail”, to which Edward replies, “Raisa, WHY are you so worried? We are NOT drunk, are we?”
I remember that madness… Are we there yet?
I remember when blaming Israel for everything bad that happened was only something that far-right white nationalists and neo-Nazis did.
One more victim of the Khmer Rouge: the Cambodian rock music scene in the 1970s was a lively blend of rock, blues and traditional Khmer music. Then the regime came along, and that part of Cambodia’s Spectacle was brutally put down.
I think there are always multiple Spectacles: all propaganda is an attempt by one Spectacle to replace another. Maybe they behave like ecosystems: Spectacles are born, attempt to colonise as many resources (minds) as possible, produce related Spectacles in response to their environment, and then lose their power and die.
@karim Jaufeerally : That’s how the Ottoman Empire did it!
Hi John Michael,
Ain’t much either you or I can do about things now, it’s too late. My best guess at this stage (and it’s one you’ve made previously) is stagflation, with the debt story, employment levels and bond yields, all singing along in chorus right now.
I must say that your partial solar eclipse chart made for some err, interesting (as in the Chinese apocryphal curse) reading. It’s not nice to be near to the locus, but oh well, it can happen. For the record, the eclipse won’t be visible from this location due to geographical issues. Sometimes it’s nice to be up in the mountains. 😉
On another long-ago prediction, but this time from Mr Kunstler, did you know that apparently pirate attacks are on the up? Pirate attacks and sea robberies surge in key South-East Asian shipping lane. The article talks of increased costs, but seriously, we could be strangled down here if conditions escalate.
Cheers
Chris
@JMG et. al. re: ” America, that wonderland where everybody is free and they still have electricity and running water…”
I immediately flashed on that old song “The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
But the alabaster cities etc come from the many idealists America has always bred. It’s a very deep current in our culture, and goes way back.
@Seeking the Pure Land #307
The main place where Chapman critiques what he calls Consensus Buddhism is the section of his Vividness website titled that:
https://vividness.live/consensus-buddhism
Mind you, he’s coming from a secularized Tantric perspective, so has a very different perspective than a traditional Buddhist likely would, and I’m certainly not endorsing his whole worldview. But I’ve found much of his writings to be very thoughtful and insightful, particularly his writings on meaning at Meaningness. I found his overview of how how society processes meaning and its relationship to the upheavals in Western culture over the past century especially valuable:
https://meaningness.com/meaningness-history
P.S.: Also, if you’re new to Chapman, I should probably also link you to this one, which is by far his most famous:
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Yes, KFish!
Cambodian rock, Ros Sereysothea (no moving images):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LEPbszoyCU&list=RD0LEPbszoyCU&start_radio=1
Is another common Spectacle the genre of, err, shaleposting? That is, posting something intentionally terrible in order to annoy, offend, or confuse those who aren’t in on the joke?
I probably don’t need to explain this to present company, but shaleposting is often a way to dress up taboo opinions or feelings in thick layers of irony, hyberbole, and/or sheer ridiculousness that is simultaneously easy to read but even easier to misread, effectively flaunting its plausible deniability (it was just a joke/meme!).
Then there’s the subgenre that’s near and dear to my heart: schizoposting. Originally just a mockery of online forumites posting their florid delusions and half-baked nonsense, now it often serves the purpose of providing an outlet for people to express unconventional ideas with the sort of flaunted plausible deniability I mentioned earlier.
I’m still wrestling with what you and the Situationists mean by Spectacle but I hope I’m at least starting to learn to identify it as a phenomenon.
Arguments I’ve recently had with the talking heads on radio:
Re: Russian drones over Poland. Trump: “It could have been a mistake.” Pundit: “No, I think that Russia was intentionally probing Polish defenses.” Me: “If you’re going to say ‘no’, you’re logically saying ‘it could NOT have been a mistake, and if you’re going to assert that it was not a mistake, aren’t you calling for either a military response or surrender? Trump said, in effect, the we don’t need to decide what this was. MAYBE it was a mistake. Maybe not. Let’s not act in haste.”
Re: National Guard deployment. Pundit: “The National Guard should not be policing American citizens!” Me: “Who said that they were? Have they arrested ANYONE? Not that I know of. You imply a fact by arguing against it.”
Re: crime in DC. News: “Guard deployed only to safest parts of D.C.” (implying that they couldn’t fight crime where it doesn’t occur), and “most arrests have been in poor, black neighborhoods” (implying discrimination, where the Guard isn’t even deployed? Of course, THAT’s where the crime is! And that’s where the poor, honest citizens most WANT more policing for public safety.
Re: Jimmie Kimmel firing: Radio: “Trump censors another critic by threatening FCC action.” Me: “The corporate suits want more monopoly power, but the FCC has to allow it. If they cared about ‘censorship’, they could support their employee and defer their merger plans (which may not even pay off) until this blows over.”
Re: The Fed. Radio:”Fed decides to lower interest rates.” Me: “The Fed realized that enough people are nervous about stocks, and are willing to accept a lower interest rate on government bonds just to have a chance of getting their money back, whatever it’ll be worth when the bond matures, so they don’t need to offer to pay as much.”
@Jeff, please share more about your thoughts on Odum as you go through them in the Open post, I’ll look forward to reading it.
I read Wealth Of Nature quite a while ago through a library loan, should read it again!
The subjective theory of value is the major issue I have with the Austrian school, AFAIK, the early Austrians like Menger influenced the “marginal revolution” in economics (no longer considering itself political economy) to embrace “subjective utility” as the measure of value.
I think the early marginal economists saw some problems in the LTV, for example, it’s hard to explain luxury and rare goods, labour in services, what we call “white collar work”, and some other cases in terms of the LTV. But one big factor behind why the LTV was abandoned was that the subjective theory of value completely removes any notion of exploitation of labour from the discussion of wages and prices, a result more amenable to the elites.
Under the subjective theory of value, an NFT with an ugly monkey jpg costing a million dollars is as valuable as a house. I don’t know about you but I find that absurd. It has a price of a million dollars definitely, but is there as much value created for the world as a house?
The LTV definitely has issues. For example, one of the problems of the LTV that troubled Ricardo and which he never resolved before he died was about how the value of wine aged in barrels would go up without any further labour, and other goods that would have increased value with no increased human labour. I think with an energy theory of value, one might say the energy expended by nature, however small and subtle, is what creates the gradations of flavour in the wine that increases its value, and on top of that the usual balance of supply and demand, speculation and so on also have their own processes.
Pure speculation on my part, but the LTV also focuses one’s attention on productive vs unproductive labour; indeed, marginal economists often attack the LTV because it makes this distinction. On a societal scale, I’d say whatever influences of the LTV remain led China to focus a lot more on their productive economy compared to what’s been happening in the West, with the hollowing out of the productive economy.
@Other Owen, is that a joking critique about the idea of determing the value of labour?
If so, well, a joke’s a joke, but I think the LTV itself holds no assumptions about having to measure labour. If you read Adam Smith or Ricardo, you can see how they give a few theoretical examples but have almost no concern about measuring the real, actual labour value of a commodity in mathematical terms, unlike the later marginal economists or even Marxists. Indeed, they basically say that it fluctuates so much that it’s almost impossible to measure.
The response of Henry George to accepting the LTV for example, is not to tax or regulate labour or capital per se, but to tax “land”, including not only physical land but limited natural resources. Quite similar to the idea in JMG’s Retrotopia!
Again, I don’t know about you but I think it’s absurd to say an NFT or memecoins have as much value as a house or a productive company. I think the LTV is one framework that helps people articulate why, in opposition to the mainstream marginal view. There may be others of course.
Seeking the Pure Land # 294:
” I always wondered how the Christian Fundamentalists would handle Israel’s collapse?”
I’m making to me the same question, although I don’t know if we’ll see that event in our actual life time. Well, maybe events are being accelerated, who knows…
——————————————————————————————————————
JMG # 306:
“Chuaquin, it’s not that different over here. I’m remembering how the Crusader kingdoms ended and watching the news.”
Yeah, John, I remember having studied the Crusader kingdoms at school back when I was a teenager…A bloody and surprising story from History.
———————————————————————————————————————
Kfish # 311:
“I think there are always multiple Spectacles: all propaganda is an attempt by one Spectacle to replace another. Maybe they behave like ecosystems: Spectacles are born, attempt to colonise as many resources (minds) as possible, produce related Spectacles in response to their environment, and then lose their power and die.”
Exactly, I agree. There are several Spectacles competing between each other to hegemonize the prevalent Narrative, they are born, grow and eventually decline and die. Soviet Union collapse is a typical example for this life cycle of Spectacle.
Seeking #34, JMG, and all others.
I’ll add I am also seeing this with Taoism, a lot of fighting from the side going “tHeRe ArE nO gOdS iN tHe Dao De Ching,” but more and more people are realizing there is more to the faith than a bunch of translations of a book separated from culture context.
@Chuaquin
I won’t argue wheter the egg or the hen was first, since i don’t have any idea if the Spectacle generated modern culture, or it was the other way around.
Your point about paintings is good, and sure, we can find a pre-Industrial spectacle; Paintings in Cathedrals, for example, and the Counter-reformation art, which is usually considered very propagandistic in nature.
Yet, people back then drew their “common sense” aka culture, from many diferent sources, and many of those sources whre much more permeable to real, interest-free experiences from the world around them.
Today, many people draw all their image from the world in an indirect manner, from the Spectacle and it’s actors.
Further, they filter any incongruence out, because they’ve been taught by Science to dismiss it as “imaginary, superstitious, etc” And if they can’t…well, there are always a pill for it. Anything before trying to understand!
So in a sense, they lead anti-natural lives, because they are guided from anti-natural sources.
@robert m
https://rumble.com/v6whuuk-charlie-kirk-how-debt-has-radicalized-young-america-and-why-boomers-deserve.html?e9s=src_v1_cmd%2Csrc_v1_ucp_a
I should’ve paid more attention to Charlie Kirk when he was alive. I encourage you to watch this conversation. Charlie Kirk nails it – “Nation of Strangers” is what he called it. He does have an answer to my question “What is it that actually unites us?” – the dollar. Which I guess works for the moment. What if it stops working?
@Slithy Toves #315
Thank you for the very interesting link. Chapman’s articles are historically accurate, but his underlying premise (that ordinary people are qualified to make alterations to the Buddhist religion) is mistaken. It took more than three centuries to transplant the Dharma into Tibet. ‘Western Buddhism’ is likely to take even longer.
@315 Slithy Toves
Thank you for this! I will read it, I think someone coming from a secular worldview is also interesting in that they have to wrestle with the implications of their conclusions that I probably wouldn’t have to if that makes sense. Especially when it differs from the mainstream.
Have you ever read/heard of Stephen Batchelor? He’s emblematic of everything wrong with secular Buddhism. If anyone who is also secular disagrees with the popular views that he holds, I already want to see what they have to say. Its a source of amusement for me that secular Buddhists are respected by no one but themselves.
Frantz Fanon was a CIA agent by the way, as is partially revealed by his Wikipedia bio:
“With his health declining, Fanon’s comrades urged him to seek treatment in the U.S. as his Soviet doctors had suggested. In 1961, the CIA arranged a trip under the promise of stealth for further leukemia treatment at a National Institutes of Health facility. During his time in the United States, Fanon was handled by CIA agent Oliver Iselin. As Lewis R. Gordon points out, the circumstances of Fanon’s stay are somewhat disputed: “What has become orthodoxy, however, is that he was kept in a hotel without treatment for several days until he contracted pneumonia.”
His agitation was almost certainly sponsored by the US as part of its decolonialism program aimed at the European powers. As regards Israel, everything Netanyahu is doing is aimed at overcoming The Curse of the Eighth Decade:
https://mizrachi.org/hamizrachi/the-curse-of-the-eighth-decade/
Of course, what he is actually doing is fulfilling the curse.
The term intersectionality has always seemed like a fancy way to state the bleedin’ obvious – i.e. that causes, actions, results and effects derive from many simple and complex causes. Giving common sense a fancy intellectual label that in reality seems little more than academic grift on one side and base fears and desires on the other.
Is the spectacle more than an attempt to forcefully impose and maintain particular ‘meaning’? It almost seems like a cockeyed slow-motion exercise to develop the mental sheath, where the limitations of perception are used wrangle the reflections of images – like an attempt to shift the potential flow of the Platonic solids into a singular image and form – ‘one ring to rule them all’ kind of thing; where internet connected phones with goLLM ‘assistants’ initially act as an intermediary to experiencing the world and end as screens where we each have our own Plato’s Cave.
A fear-driven attempt to impose order [meaning] by reducing infinite complexity to simplistic animal levels of perception and understanding. If we are consciousness experiencing a world of form through a mammalian body – an incubator of consciousness if you will – there are always going to be ‘tensions’ that can pull us in many directions and this seems a potentially useful thing. Useful if one pays attention, troublesome if not.
As Robert M 293 said:
“Diversity and disunity seem to me to be better options as we face the hard challenges of an unpredictable and uncontrollable future in a world of shrinking resources. Though diversity at least some of us may survive those challenges, whereas unity increases our odds against survival. As our host has often emphasized, dissensus works better than consensus in such a situation.”
The idea that ‘There are as many ways as there are human hearts’ seems like the way to go and attempting to remove the diversity of consciousness is going to be like pushing a beach ball down into the ocean – it might work to begin but consciousness wants to fly and, eventually, it will.
Even if it gets pushed down into the abysaal depths and the form implodes – the consciousness using the vehicle will fly.
As well as the low end [politics and societies etc), do you think a metaphysical investigation of ‘The Spectacle’ could be both entertaining and efficacious?
“are you seriously claiming that billionaires, not to mention the slightly less extravagantly rich, don’t leverage their absurd wealth to manipulate the political system in one direction or another? ”
Heavens, no. They do exactly what you describe. Wealth in the US has become so concentrated that it forms black holes that warp the fabric of democratic space-time.
What I am pointing at is the way that each side is very good at noticing this about the other side, but not about themselves. Further, that this allows each side to dismiss the concerns of the other side without consideration.
The Cambodian Killing Fields and the ideology of the Khmer Rouge were as you describe, but I think that radical Maoism for the Khmer Rouge was more a cover story than driving force. This is different from the Soviet Union or China. Marxism is what made the Chinese communist revolution different from the Taiping revolution of the mid-1800s. In Cambodia, the decisive factors were a population traumatized and crazed from being bombed so intensely and centuries of deep resentment against parasitic urban elites.
OK, this is not the hill I would chose to die on, but it does point to a broader question: To what extent is an ideology, religion, or the like responsible for the actions of the worst extremists who wave the flag of that ideology or religion when they commit evil?
One last point: as evil as the killing fields definitely were, it was the anti-Maoist Deng Xiao-ping China and the United States (under Jimmy Carter) that supported the Khmer Rouge _after_ the facts of the killing fields were well-known. The Marxist Soviet Union opposed the Khmer Rouge and Marxist Vietnam intervened and put a stop to the madness.
Not sure why I am entering the lists on behalf of the bearded one’s legacy this week. I am more a quasi-Buddhist anarchist at heart.
If all that is done is to honestly investigate whatever degree of organization Antifa actually has and hold responsible those who have actually committed or caused to be committed violent acts and only those people, fine. I will be shocked if that is what actually happens.
For the record, the Democrats started this with their unprecedented lawfare against a former US president, which in turn was an extension of Russiagate and their attempt to de facto annul the results of the 2016 presidential election. If they were to be the only victims of the revenge attacks, fine by me.
@Jessica & JMG
Everything I ever needed to know about the essence of Marxism in practice, I gleaned from an afternoon’s walk on a sunny summer day on a path that overlooked the East German border.
Bruce
@everybody interested in value and price: On JMG’s recommendation, I read some Alfred Hornborg some years ago, and then read all of his writings that I could put my hand on. He argues very cogently BOTH that value derives from energy input (both human labour and other energy) AND that prices are independent of value. Well worth your time!
Totally off topic, but something I wrote in response to something about the “spectacle” of forms of Christianity. – – – When you examine the in action spirituality of the Bible – New and Old Testament – it is not philosophical in focus or especially liturgical and sacramental. Frankly it’s like a Native American with his totemic spirit animal contacted in a vision quest or voodoo worshippers in group interaction with their gods. I once read the testimony of a Brazilian Voodo priestess who said, “I used to worship spirits with the blood of goats and chickens, now I worship God with the blood of Jesus.” More fun, interesting and alive, dynamic.
@Aldarion, thanks for the recommendation! Will definitely put that in my reading list.
re: value
In a more serious vein, value is inherently subjective and it differs from person to person. Even if you could quantify it, it wouldn’t mean that much. That’s why I was asking who sets the value? Some miserable bureaucrat who wants the world to marinate in misery? That doesn’t sound like a good idea. Maybe a Bright Idea(tm).
@321 Chuaquin
Oh agreed, I mean its possible Israel won’t last the century but I don’t expect it either way. I just find the Christian obsession with Israel funny and disturbing. If I was a Jew, i’d want them as far away from me as possible. Knowing a bunch of people see you as fuel for a human sacrifice for their god’s return can’t be a comfortable thought.
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@325 Tengu
I agree, I suspect that long after the American empire has fallen the Dharma will see more success and fully transplant. Since a great many ideas that got in the way such as the myth of progress and secular materialism won’t be as prevalent. It won’t be done by watering down essential teachings as Karma and Rebirth.
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@322 Rusty
I think more people are finding the watered down Tao of Pooh style meant for a certain type of middle class westerner to be unfulfilling. I’m reading David Chapman’s writings and he made a wonderful point. That when you strip away the religious teachings into something only fit for Secular Materialists, what even is the point? how is it interesting or worth any attention? As i’ve said to those types, why not just call yourself an atheist with Buddhist or Daoist sympathies? I’m glad more and more people are pushing back and trying to practice the religion.
Patrick, interesting. As time permits, I’ll go looking for some hard figures.
Inna, that’s an excellent point — virtue signaling focused on some irrelevant issue or other is a very common habit of collapsing regimes. (And it’s a very funny, and very Russian, joke; thank you.)
Anon, of course! “What you contemplate, you imitate” — and the left has been contemplating the Nazis without a break for a good long time.
Kfish, excellent! Yes, and we’ll be discussing that, too, as this sequence continues.
Chris, I remember when Jim first published his book The Long Emergency, which pointed out that a revival of piracy was inevitable. Pundits had a field day mocking that claim. I think it was only a couple of years later that Somali pirates hit the news. Now piracy is spreading to the eastern Indian ocean and the seas west and northwest of your country, which were historically pirate havens back in the day. Any nation that depends on maritime trade has two choices — build and fund an adequate navy and start escorting merchant ships, or figure out how to do without things from overseas.
Patricia M, oh, granted! You can tell that the US attracted huge numbers of religious fanatics and giddy idealists, who were fruitful and multiplied in the classic way.
Slithy, you’re thinking on too small a scale. Everything is Spectacle in our society. If you know about it from some source that doesn’t involve taking hold of it with your own hands, it’s Spectacle, and even if it does, sometimes it qualifies — look at a car sometime and notice just how much of it has been engineered for the sake of appearance, not function.
Lathechuck, they’re not listening — which is of course the essence of the Spectacle.
Rusty, defining Taoism on the basis of the Tao Te Ching is pretty much on a par with defining computer technology on the basis of ENIAC, the first programmable electronic digital computer, which entered service in 1945. There were no Lolcats in ENIAC, either…
Logan, that doesn’t surprise me at all. As for the “curse of the eighth decade,” it’s far and away the most fascinating thing about curses that the efforts the victim makes to avoid them never involve changing the habits that give the curse power, and always drive the curse to its completion. I wrote about that in a post a good many years ago:
https://thearchdruidreport-archive.200605.xyz/2012/05/night-thoughts-in-hagsgate.html
Eartthworm, excellent. Yes, very much so!
Jessica, once again, you might consider tailoring your choice of rhetoric to the context, as I don’t think you’ll find many people here who pay attention to the billionaires of just one side. As for ideology, why, that’s always a chicken-and-egg question, isn’t it? Doubtless Hitler could have found some other ideology to justify his behavior, too; it so happens that Ariosophy, the occult ideology that provided Nazism with its foundations, was a significant influence on Hitler, and deserves to be critiqued on the basis of the actions it helped inspire. In the same way, the radical Maoist ideology that Pol Pot and his fellow Marxists embraced so enthusiastically was only one element in turning Cambodia into a fair imitation of hell on earth, but it was an element, and its role in inspiring the killing fields deserves to be taken into account — especially when so many fans of Marxism insist that it should be credited for its ideals but never, ever critiqued for how poorly those ideals work out in practice.
No doubt, btw, the crackdown on Antifa will spill out into a general witch hunt against leftist groups, not all of which have paid for or committed violent acts. That’s unfortunate, but it’s preferable to most of the other alternatives, such as murderous mob violence against leftists across the flyover states. We’re in the middle of a very tumultuous transition right now, and I hope the body count can be kept down.
Renaissance, that would do it!
Aldarion, thanks for the reminder. Hornborg does a fine job, and yes, the hard distinction he makes between value and price is one of the many good things about him.
BeardTree, you may be amused to know that from my perspective as a polytheist, your shamanic approach to Christianity makes much more sense than the more officially approved kinds.
Have you ever heard of the early Buddhism movement? Basically a bunch of secular materialists who want to go back to solely the Pali canon. Ignore all tradition, ignore all oral tradition, if its not in the text its not valid. How very protestant Christian of them. Sola Scriptura
I keep having to tell them, we don’t go by just the Pali canon.
I didn’t find anything by Alfred Hornborg either on Amazon, nor on archive.org. Does anyone have a link for me?
VERY OT: but JMG will like this:
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/20-delightful-slang-terms-from-the-1930s?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
Re the “value” vs “price” discussion.
To me the essential thing about “value” is that it pertains to quality, whereas “price” pertains to quantity.
And in our world, the original Spectacle – money, has perennially turned our eyes away from quality (of relationships, of ecological participation, of skill and competence, and of many other things that make a life good to live) towards the levelled out, homogenous, substitute it holds out – quantity.
And even though quantity (flat, denatured, standardised) has never been a useful proxy for quality (rich, vibrant, alive), money forces itself into the Spectacle’s intermediatory role between one person and another, and, well, I would say that William S. Burroughs might have said it best: “What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and s***s out quantity.”
This is why there can be no truly useful economic theory of value. Economics is a theory of price. Biology (among others) is a theory of value.
JMG, the breakdown of the Spectacle in multiple incompatible Spectacles is quiet a spectacle. I find myself ever more estranged from the society I nominally still live in, but doesn’t look much like the society I grew up in. I find it ever more difficult not just to protect my own sanity but also to deal with others. On one hand I can never count on someone knowing the same basic facts as I do (for example about the safe and effective subject that we shall not mention here) while also their values and outlook of life can be radically different. And mass immigration makes it even more difficult. Some things you can only learn by being born in a society or via a long and sustained effort. I mean things like how much distance you keep in a public space, how to deal with the other sexe, how loud you talk or when you can or cannot interrupt someone, basic fundamental idea’s like the principle of separation between religion and state, etc etc. All of these are not something that I can take for granted any more. This is not only a huge drain on our society but also a recipe for social friction and fragmentation. I find it increasingly hard to deal with all of this. Will you in later installments also address how we can deal with this from an individual standpoint?
As for absurd Spectacles, maybe we should be rename my country to ‘Absurdistan’. A few examples from last week:
One of the major newspapers, De Volkskrant, had an article with the title:”Straight men, let yourself be penetrated too. Then you really discover what the power of surrender is”
A startup from Eindhoven has made a new machine that vacuums CO2 from the air. They want to plant thousands of them over the country, but they have to resolve the issue that the machine sucks up a lot of fossil fuels in order to work. (As it happens I already have an energy neutral CO2 vacuum machine in my little garden. It’s called a tree)
Last week parliament discussed the national budget for 2026. As we have elections next month, it was all about campaigning instead of the budget or a vision fror the future. The MP’s spend half their time discussing Gaza. Ipsos did a poll about what subject the elegible voters think is a priority. Gaza came out 14th, well after top 3 immigration, affordable housing and social cohesion. I don’t know what Spectacle got into the minds of the MP’s but it is a very different one than the rest of the population.
On a more serious note, yesterday we might have dodged our own Reichstag Fire. The Hague saw an anti-immigration protest that turned violent. Of course the MSM was all over it but didn’t report the more dodgy aspects like a police car that caught fire twice while having the same number plate as a police car that was reported to be in an accident a few days before in a regional newspaper from the other side of the country. Anyway, the main anti immigration parties PVV (Wilders) and FVD (De Vos & Baudet) apparently saw this coming and didn’t show up at the protest. They also countered by being the first who started to shout and condemn the violence on X the minute the troubles started. Of course some politicians still tried to shove the blame to Wilders by claiming that the violence was caused by unspecified harsh remarks he made during the budget debate.
PS – I just realised that you have allowed my comment to go through even though it does contain a swear word in the Burroughs quote. I appreciate that you have done this. The quote truly does have an anglo-saxon definitive quality that I, for one, value… 😉
All the same, I apologise for not having noticed before I posted it.
Other Owen #324 re: Boomer collective guilt.
As a mid-cohort Boomer myself, I have struggled with the question of the extent to which I, personally, can or should be blamed for the misdeeds of my generation. It is all too easy for me to say, e.g., “I stayed out of the stock market in the 1990’s, I was not a yuppie” etc. However, it is not as simple as that.
Carl Jung, in his post-WWI post-mortem, “After the Catastrophe” had a lot to say about the idea of collective guilt. Like our host, I have always resisted that idea, seeing how it has always been used to scapegoat unpopular minorities. However, I think Jung has some important things to say about the subject.
“The psychological use of the word “guilt” should not be confused with guilt in the legal or moral sense. Psychologically, it connotes the irrational presence of a subjective feeling (or conviction) of guilt, or an objective imputation of, or imputed share in, guilt. As an example of the latter, suppose a man belongs to a family which has the misfortune to be disgraced because one of its members has committed a crime. It is clear that he cannot be held responsible, either legally or morally. Yet the atmosphere of guilt makes itself felt in many ways. His family name appears to have been sullied, and it gives him a painful shock to hear it bandied about in the mouths of strangers. Guilt can be restricted to the lawbreaker only from the legal, moral, and intellectual point of view, but as a psychic phenomenon it spreads itself over the whole neighbourhood. A house, a family, even a village where a murder has been committed feels the psychological guilt and is made to feel it by the outside world. Would one take a room where one knows a man was murdered a few days before? Is it particularly pleasant to marry the sister or daughter of a criminal? What father is not deeply wounded if his son is sent to prison, and does he not feel injured in his family pride if a cousin of the same name brings dishonour on his house?”
“Psychological collective guilt is a tragic fate. It hits everybody, just and unjust alike, everybody who was anywhere near the place where the terrible thing happened. Naturally no reasonable and conscientious person will lightly turn collective into individual guilt by holding the individual responsible without giving him a hearing. He will know enough to distinguish between the individually guilty and the merely collectively guilty. But how many people are either reasonable or conscientious, and how many take the trouble to become so? I am not very optimistic in this respect. Therefore, although collective guilt, viewed on the archaic and primitive level, is a state of magical uncleanness, yet precisely because of the general unreasonableness it is a very real fact, …”
“It may be objected that the whole concept of psychological collective guilt is a prejudice and a sweepingly unfair condemnation. Of course it is, but that is precisely what constitutes the irrational nature of collective guilt: it cares nothing for the just and the unjust, it is the dark cloud that rises up from the scene of an unexpiated crime. It is a psychic phenomenon, and it is therefore no condemnation of the German people to say that they are collectively guilty, but simply a statement of fact.”
I don’t like the implications of this any better than JMG does, but, try as I may, I am unable to refute what Jung has said here.
@Seeking the Pure Land #337
One of the things David Chapman mentions in his critique of Western Buddhism is that there is reason to believe even Theravada Buddhism was not Pali Canon only until a few centuries ago when it was modernized for geopolitical reasons. For example, there was a Tantric tradition within Theravada that got suppressed in the 1800’s.
I definitely appreciate the appeal of Theravada for secular Westerners whose self-image revolves around how smart and non-superstitious they are: modern Theravada has proven extremely amenable to a intellectualistic approach. The problem is that approach often leads to some very unfortunate places. Like all forms of Buddhism it denies the validity of either eternalism or nihilism, but the rhetoric of the Pali Canon leans so hard against the eternalism of the contemporary Hindu schools that it’s extremely easy to interpret it in a nihilistic way, with very little to balance it.
“as I don’t think you’ll find many people here who pay attention to the billionaires of just one side.”
Here, no. This is an excellent commentariat. Society at large is another matter.
“We’re in the middle of a very tumultuous transition right now, and I hope the body count can be kept down.”
Agreed
By the way, one of the things I most appreciate about this blog and the commentariat is that I am able to hear from people with very different views from mine and they present their views respectfully. I also appreciate hearing points of view I simply don’t run into anywhere else, for example Wer from rural Poland. Oh, and the links commenters and our host provide. This week, the Chapman link was well worth the read.
Jessica # 329:
“In Cambodia, the decisive factors were a population traumatized and crazed from being bombed so intensely and centuries of deep resentment against parasitic urban elites.”
That explanation could be right, at least at work hypothesis of Khmer Rouge strange monomania about agrarian Communism instead Industrial “orthodox” Marxism. Thanks…
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Seeking Pure Land # 335:
“I just find the Christian obsession with Israel funny and disturbing.”
Me, as a not very orthodox Christian, I find it disturbing too…The fondness that some Christians have on Israel is pathologic; ironically, there’s a tiny but real Arab Christian minority between the Palestinians, but “Zionist” Christians doesn’t know it or they don’t want to know that dirty secret…
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JMG # 336:
“Everything is Spectacle in our society.”
Exactly, John. Today at 100% everything is Spectacle. That’s the difference between our high tech spectacle and the low tech spectacle before the Industrial Revolution. I suppose the more you go back in time, the less percentage of Spectacle you’d find. For example, there’s a Spectacle in Pharaonic Egypt buildings and statues, but how much? Maybe a 5%?(the rest of them would be Beauty and Wisdom, I dare to say) Well, I think this is a topic interesting for discussing it at length…
***
“In the same way, the radical Maoist ideology that Pol Pot and his fellow Marxists embraced so enthusiastically was only one element in turning Cambodia into a fair imitation of hell on earth, but it was an element, and its role in inspiring the killing fields deserves to be taken into account”
You’re right in the Maoist influence on Khmer Rouge ideology; however, Mao and his supporters wanted China to be industrialised,if I’m not mistaken…
Just realized this consciously, though I have been doing it unconsciously forever in my shamanistic knowing of the Trinity. Jesus of Nazareth my totemic Lion and Lamb at my right hand, the Father before me and the Life giving Holy Spirit within. – “Imagination a tool to connect with the unseen!” Having fun I am.
Re: The Curse of the Eighth Decade
If there really is a curse on unified Jewish states, then Netanyahu will probably be assassinated between now and 2028, and there will be a succession crisis that tears Israel apart. I don’t know the internal politics of Israel. In 1 Kings 12, Rehoboam indicated he would double down on his father Solomon’s favoritism towards Judah and oppression of the northern tribes, so they seceded and formed their own kingdom.
@344 Slithy Toves
It does tend to lend that way for some reason. And yeah the Pali only thing is very much a reaction to the colonization that happened in the 1800s. Which is odd since Theravada in south Asia has no problem admitting the hell and heaven realms exist, Preta exist, rebirth exists. But anyway that’s one of the reasons I choose the Mahayana path, I wanted a path that was as far away from Secular Materialism as possible. (one of the reasons, there are other good reasons to choose Mahayana)
I have noticed that both secular zen and Theravada tends towards the social justice crowd. Which is interesting since traditional Theravada is very conservative.
@346 Chuaquin
I think most of them don’t know that there is a tiny Arab Christianity minority, but i think even if they did know it wouldn’t matter. They’d see it as a sacrifice for the greater good. At least that was the impression I got from my parents.
@Slithy Toves #344
(If I may reply to your comment to Seeking)
The Tantric Theravada is primarily a Buddhist folk tradition so it doesn’t appear in the Pali Canon. It was not successfully suppressed in the 1800s and has in fact survived up the present day in all of the Theravada countries.
In the West the original pioneers of the Theravada were theosophists and occultists like Allan Bennett, so the Theravada tradition in the West was once entirely esoteric. Buddhist groups from this period have also survived up to the present day. The notable scholars of this tradition are Francois Bizot, the late Lance Cousins and Kate Crosby.
The late writer Edward Said was a Palestinian Christian.
Could anyone here venture a guess about how many Israelis have dual American citizenship. Personally, I don’t hold with dual citizenships; you either are a Martian or you are not.
So looks like Buddhism went through the same process that Islam did in the 19th and 20th centuries when they got colonized by Europeans, becoming more fundamentalist. Pali canon only in Buddhism sounds a lot like some of the attitudes of Salafi Islam, and the latter arose in reaction to European colonization of the Islamic world.
@Samurai 47, #257
I have not read Saito’s book (and this is my first time to hear of it), but his view seems colored heavily by Confucian ideology and the legacy around his campus of Japan’s opulent Edo Period (from 1604 to the 1870s). It combined authoritarianism with Buddhism, and was really quite “woke,” with the various horrors you can imagine from that (such as a decree for several years that no dogs were to be killed for any reason whatsoever). The reason people not only tolerated it but actively cooperated was that it had come as a conclusion to several centuries of civil warring, with the final years being particularly horrific. The people agreed they did not ever want to go through that again. Confucianism offers a way to get a quite centralized authoritarian society to cooperate harmoniously. You see China thriving as well, despite the persistence of a communist regime. Likewise, the agreed-upon peace during the Edo era allowed agriculture, commerce and fine urban culture to thrive.
I note that on the other hand, a friend here introduced Orwell to his English students, and they said it sounded like a nice society… Yes, I’m sure their English still had a ways to go.
Was my comment about how much more absurd the spectacle of America the Myth is on Hawaii compared to the Mainland get lost in the tubes, or did it violate a rule? I didn’t think it was out of line, but if it was, my apologies.
The Curse of the 8th Decade is one example of something bigger. You notice that the Soviet Union had just about the same lifespan. And for fans of old-time science fiction, Robert Heinlein’s “Revolt in 2100” – the reign of a Prophet Incarnate that began with a televangelist, backed by a very rich old lady, lasted from 2012 to 2100. The same lifespan JMG predicts for the entrepreneurial elite. And now run those numbers backwards through American history’s elite replacement cycles discussed here earlier.
America didn’t fall apart, at least not until now, but unstable societies are dead meat for the 8th decade grinder. The Bible called it on the nose: “And then, there arose a generation which knew not Joseph.” Inheritors of a stinking mess get totally fed up and stop caring.
The U.S. has been on the stable end. On the other hand, we have regimes elsewhere whose history is written in “Revolutions per minute,” as one long-forgotten wag put it. (Exit, singing “Santa, Santa Evita……”
Flashes in the pan.
Please pass the popcorn….
Seeking, no, that particular absurdity had escaped my notice until now. If I ever encounter them, I’ll be sure to ask whether they’ve all abandoned current computer technology to go back to the One True Original Personal Computer, the TRS-80. What is it with Western intellectuals, that they just have to repeat the same idiotic mistakes over and over again?
Athaia, his name isn’t “Alfred.” It really is “Alf.” (He’s Swedish, iirc.) Try these
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/78503.Alf_Hornborg
https://lu.academia.edu/AlfHornborg
https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=alf+hornborg
https://www.amazon.com/stores/Alf-Hornborg/author/B001IZVBWM
Patricia M, funny. Thank you.
Boccaccio, I’ll certainly consider it. “Absurdistan,” by the way, is the title of a very fine comic novel by Gary Shteyngart. You might ask your local politicians if they read it.
Scotlyn, er, if you hadn’t mentioned it I probably wouldn’t have noticed it; I don’t always read every line of a comment by a reliable regular commenter before putting it through, especially when life is very busy, as it is just now.
Jessica, thank you. I have the best commentariat on the internet.
Chuaquin, exactly. The Spectacle in the Middle Ages was mostly urban, and even so, mostly a matter of certain specific activities paraded in front of the citizens by church and state. As for Mao, yes, but that’s why I specified radical Maoism — a bunch of thinkers took Mao’s ideas and ran with them in even more antihuman directions, resulting in the ideology that guided Pol Pot.
BeardTree, delighted to hear it.
Patrick, or he could just be convicted and imprisoned for any of a few dozen felony charges. Either way, it could get ugly.
William, I didn’t see it. You might consider resubmitting it.
Patricia M, Heinlein paid close attention to history; he’s underrated as a thinker.
@athaia, he seems to consistently by Alf, not Alfred, sorry about that! His homepage is https://www.keg.lu.se/en/alf-hornborg. I may have downloaded papers using researchgate or academia.edu or my then university access, but I think he also has books, which I didn’t read.
Other Owen: you are speaking of subjective value, which is fine. Hornborg claims that some things can be valued objectively, such as the total imports and exports of a country.
Chuaquin,
In response to, “I’ve always wondered why the Khmer Rouge loved so agrarian life and despised urban people in his “madness”, I think it’s because they didn’t get further enough along in their plans to industrialize the countryside.
Remember that they were only in power for a few years (75-79) and were beset by a war with Vietnam that they could not hope to win. During that time, they managed to kill 25% of their own population, empty out their urban areas entirely, and launch extreme agricultural reforms modeled off the Great Leap Forward, complete with a human-induced famine while holding massive food reserves for export to receive foreign financing.
My guess is that, had they lasted a few more years, the Khmer Rouge would have followed Mao’s lead and tried setting up backyard steel furnaces across the countryside, and, once that failed, come to the realization that they required factories and urban areas to support the factory worker population.
Walt (202) THANK YOU for that analogy! It makes so much sense to me.
Slithytoves (302) regarding ‘the feels’ – when I was in grad school in the late oughts, one of my professors lamented that students wanted to write about what they FEEL instead of what they THINK. I have often reminded myself “Don’t believe everything you feel.” Feelings are information, not facts.
@JMG
“Heinlein paid close attention to history; he’s underrated as a thinker.”
You may know this, but most people don’t: Heinlein invented of the modern waterbed in 1942. When Charles Hall reinvented it independently and applied for a patent in 1968, it was denied because his original design was virtually identical to highly-detailed descriptions of a waterbed some of Heinlein’s published novels, which counted as prior art. Hall received a patent in 1971 for a modified design, but it was still largely along the same lines as Heinlein’s description, and competitors quickly designed their own beds based on Heinlein.
Seeking the Pure Land # 350:
“I think most of them don’t know that there is a tiny Arab Christianity minority, but i think even if they did know it wouldn’t matter. They’d see it as a sacrifice for the greater good. At least that was the impression I got from my parents.”
Maybe they’re seeing the Israeli Sionist as the Good People (“Beings of light”) within their own “Christian” Spectacle, so I agree Arab Christianism don’t matter for them…
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Mary Bennet #352:
Thank you for reminding me about E. Said origins as Palestinian Christian.
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” The Spectacle in the Middle Ages was mostly urban, and even so, mostly a matter of certain specific activities paraded in front of the citizens by church and state. As for Mao, yes, but that’s why I specified radical Maoism — a bunch of thinkers took Mao’s ideas and ran with them in even more antihuman directions, resulting in the ideology that guided Pol Pot.”
Well John, the Spectacle in the Middle Ages was before the Gutemberg invention (press) so it wasn’t easy to copy images in large series. Books were written by hand!
OK, about radical Maoism becoming the core basis for Pol Pot ideology, it’s reasonable thinking it was the way to start with the Killing Fields. By the way, I had a very leftist friend who said Khmer Rouge madness was a “feudalist” deviation from the original “correct” Marxism (Sovietic, I guess it). I thought and I think yet it’s a poor excuse for Cambodian commies atrocities…
@JMG #287,
I was quite infatuated with (or perhaps, bewitched by?) with the girl in question, so as much as I hate to admit it now, I did try to make it work longer than was prudent. Anyway, it was way back then, and I was younger and stupider. Anyway, it was happily ever after for all involved. A couple of years later, I met a nice cute Catholic girl whom I got bewitched harder. The Evangelical/non-denom girl also ended up marrying someone in her own church.
I do have a few friends attending that church and to be perfectly fair to them, they were good sports about my reversion to Catholicism and were just thankful that I found Jesus. Their thing is just totally not my thing – whether it’s taste or theology.
Metaphysically, if a society’s ‘spectacle’ is a snapshot reflection of a particular state of a society at a particular time, the following is kind of strange:-
“Having spent years screaming “NO DEBATE!”, I suppose it was only natural they were going to be shocked when they found out what a debate actually was.”
The students who debated Charlie Kirk: ‘His goal was to verbally defeat us’
Image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G1XAtKUXMAEobqO?format=jpg&name=900×900
From post: https://x.com/WingsScotland/status/1969692301086576847
Granted that at any time one might expect a range of humans at different stages of their paths – from the new arrivals to those who are setting off to pastures new – like a bell-curve spread; but ‘strange’ because if young college students do not understand the nature of a debate, one wonders how much thinking is being done vs low level emoting!
I saw a video a while back showing a group of college students being asked ‘what is 4 * 15; they all had different aqnswers but came to a consensus agreement… lets just say the consensus agreement was not 60. I thought it must be a set-up, now I’m not sure.
Anyway, if basic emoting is all they are capable of at this stage, and if western society’s spectacle not only indicates ‘state’ but is cyclic, then the spectacles of The East seem to be showing one direction of movement and The West quite another.
Like day following night – the spectacles of The East seem to be in flow whilst the West is an ebbing tide – hence all the tantrums, foot stamping of denial and the final resort to violence, desperately trying to maintain something that has had its time.
Could The Collective West be in the process of establishing a spectacle that is suitable for those just arriving at this stage of development in physical incarnation, in the form of a harsh environment [spectacle] to be used to temper the base emotions and promote ‘mental’ development?
If a society’s spectacle is indicative of its condition, and that condition is analogous to cooking on a BBQ, then if someone were to stick a fork in The West, they might find that it is well done.
I’ve read some comments about “the Curse of the 8th Decade”, related to nowadays Israel. That’s new for me. I don’t know if this prophecy’s right, or how it would work in the (near) future; I can only tell you’ll I think Israeli society is only united by the Zionist Spectacle (which I’ve described in a comment before this one) and of course the fear and hatred to the Arabs (who are imagined like an amorphous crowd, without recognising Palestinians of course). I’m subjectively seeing, IMHO, that the Israeli propaganda machine is overheated in the last times (a sign of boredom and desperation?), and I think it eventually will be derailed, but when? Nobody knows it really.
It’s interesting look at the heterogeneous mix of Israeli society, under their apparent unity against the Arabs we can found Eastern origin Jews, Mediterranean origin Jews, even Black Jews from Ethiopia…In the religious aspect, there are several trends between the Israelis too. Well, we’ll see…
>I just find the Christian obsession with Israel funny and disturbing.
It probably has something to do with all of those Old Testament stories. Those get rammed down your throat as a kid in certain parts of the world. Or at least they used to. Even I get surprised occasionally though. I saw “Rehoboth” on the side of a church bus and had no idea that was a place somewhere in that small middle eastern country nobody is supposed to talk about.
It’s strange that nobody conflates modern Egypt with ancient Egypt. But for a certain other small middle eastern country, for some reason people are happy to conflate “ancient” with “modern”. Just swirl it up.
>As a mid-cohort Boomer myself, I have struggled with the question of the extent to which I, personally, can or should be blamed for the misdeeds of my generation
I wouldn’t focus so much on blame assignment anymore as I would self-preservation at this point. I just finished watching a movie about Jeanne du Barry, some royal hooker to Louis XV. I looked up her eventual fate and she was beheaded along with everyone else. It’s sad, she was looked down upon by the aristocracy and hated by the revolutionaries. And off went her head.
If there’s one thing to take away from that conversation with Kirk, is that we are all, all sitting atop a generational powderkeg, that just needs the right spark to get going. And when it gets going, the middle is no place to get caught.
Did the men really wear makeup in the 18th c? I would say weird, but recent events have set the bar for weird way beyond prancing around in makeup.
Speaking of Spectacles probably leading to a bursting bubble; here is an interesting map.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/map-network-powering-us-data-centers/
Chuaquin, about Medieval spectacle in Europe. Cathedrals have been called sermons in stone. The statuary, the stained glass, all were intended to illustrate incidents from the Bible, sacred events such as Nativity and annunciation, and praise and virtue and condemn vice. Images have a more direct, emotional impact than words on a page or even spoken. Stained glass was, of course, inspired by ancient murals, such as can still be seen on the Byzantine churches in Ravenna. Modern comics and anime have a long and honorable cultural pedigree, with 19thC book illustration being the connecting link.
JMG and Chuaquin @ 365, where Chuaquin said “I think Israeli society is only united by the Zionist Spectacle.”
Are spectacle and ideology in some way I am not able to understand the same thing. I would have supposed that spectacle illustrates and promotes ideology. One picture worth a thousand words, you know.
I wonder, JMG, if even you would be willing to take the bull by the horns and discuss pornography as spectacle?
“Did the men really wear makeup in the 18th c? I would say weird, but recent events have set the bar for weird way beyond prancing around in makeup.”
Men also wore high heels and tights and long haired wigs in the 18th century. A lot of what modern day culture considered to be feminine / trans used to be considered standard fare for the aristocratic class regardless of sex and gender. Then the French Revolution happened and those things became very unpopular because they were associated with the old aristocratic elite that just got toppled.
@Other Owen, I reject the idea that all value is subjective, that’s what the marginal economists and Austrians say, but before them literally nobody thought that way.
An NFT might be priced as much as a house but can you say with a straight face it embodies as much value as a house?
The subjective theory of value leads people to ideas like the “efficient market hypothesis” which is another stupid idea. In real life, no investor or trader even subscribes to the efficient market hypothesis, they rely on some measure of value like discounted cash flow models.
One’s values about morality, life, and so on, might be subjective, but there is economic value that is not captured in just looking at supply and demand and price.
I’m repeating myself, but Adam Smith for example, even while proposing the labour theory of value, never suggested that one has to calculate out the precise value of every component, that would be extremely difficult and in constant flux anyway.
The point of the LTV, or other theories of value, is not to calculate the final value of every product in circulation, but in recognizing from whence value is created. For example, not all “GDP growth” is equal — if China spent $1 trillion on building infrastructure, it’s not the same as the US creating $1 trillion in financial derivatives. I believe mainstream Western economists’ adoption of the subjective theory of value led to the latter.
>Men also wore high heels and tights and long haired wigs in the 18th century
Well, one down, two to go then. I’ve seen men wearing pantyhose (mantyhose) in the winter months at the gym. No wigs or high heels yet. You know, some days I look around and realize I’m the manliest man in the room. That doesn’t give me a good feeling. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
I’m really beginning to miss the 20th. I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac. A little voice inside said don’t look back, you can never look back…
Dear JMG,
Wonderful food for thought as always.
A question occurred to me thinking about it later: do you consider Karl Marx to have been a magician? Looking at his work through an occult lens suggests he may have been, whether consciously or not.
Yours kindly,
Boy
Dennis Michael Sawyers # 359:
“My guess is that, had they lasted a few more years, the Khmer Rouge would have followed Mao’s lead and tried setting up backyard steel furnaces across the countryside, and, once that failed, come to the realization that they required factories and urban areas to support the factory worker population.”
Maybe, if we ask ourselves: “What if…?” It’s a good work hypothesis as “Uchronia”, although in the real world Vietnam Army finished the Pol Pot “experiment”…Who knows!
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The Other Owen # 366:
“It’s strange that nobody conflates modern Egypt with ancient Egypt. But for a certain other small middle eastern country, for some reason people are happy to conflate “ancient” with “modern”. ”
Very strange indeed…I think nowadays Jews/Israelis may share the same “ethnic” name and nominal religion as their ancestors, but a lot of them have not much in common with the “Bible Jews”. For example, look at Netanyahu face, it would be mistaken with a common Indoeuropean man if he would be walking in Warsaw or Berlin streets…
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Mary Bennet # 369:
Yes, the cathedrals: Exactly, there were its time Spectacle. However, how many Middle Ages people could be “indoctrined” by that statues and colored glasses? I bet they must be a lot less than its modern “heirs” like you’ve said: book illustrations were copied masively in its time and until now by modern presses; and comic/anime even more nowadays. There’s a difference in scale (several orders of magnitude!) about diffusion of “Low tech Spectacle” and “High Tech Spectacle”.
***
# 370:
My personal view as I’ve understood Debordian term: I think ideologies are parte of Spectacle like raw propaganda, but that’s not the whole of the Spectacle, which is every mediation between the real world and us. The Spectacle isn’t only the images, but social relations between people which are mediated by images (it isn’t the same: indeed, it’s more global and swallows every activity in modern times). I’m sorry if I can’t explain it better. Thanks on advance to John or another commentarist who has read Debord…
(Oh, I’m also waiting for John possible explanation on pornography as Spectacle…I’m curious about it.)
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JMG and Aldarion, thank you for the links.
@366 The Other Owen
I guess when two major world religions and judaism all see that small middle eastern country as holy/sacred and promised by god I can see why they’d fight over it even when I see it as just generating bad karma.
Alvin #372:
I for one couldn’t say that the NFT embodies as much value as a house. And yet, clearly, if somebody buys that NFT instead of a house, the NFT was more valuable to them than the house. This might well mean that they’re stupid; it might also mean that they already have more houses than they need and now feel the need to show off their remaining wealth by making frivolous purchases.
—David P.
For what it’s worth, The Daily Beast keeps posting accusations that Trump is deep in dementia, forgets words, says things that make no sense (not his opinions – that semantically make no sense -) and so on. Has anybody heard anything about that? And from any other source?
Also, I tend to hit The Anglish Times for their take on news events in language devoid of Latinisms etc. They tend to come across as extremely blunt. “Charlie Kirk has been killed.” Referring to him, not as a conservative, but “Right-Wing.” and this gem, about the suspects, as of September 10th, “Many maybes have been locked up…..”
Meanwhile, my daughter asked abut my TV viewing. When I told her I didn’t have one, and got my news from the internet and from print, she asked about broadcast, and when I said I’d given away my radios upon losing my hearing,she asked, “Then how can you listen to NPR?”
You don’t waste breath arguing. I simply told her I far preferred print media, which lasts and and be referred to. None so blind as those who will not see….
About Spectacle etc…. the quickest way into people’s heads via their ears is the rhymed couplet, a staple of medieval theater and still going strong. Example that came to my mind when sorting out my clothes for the quarterly charity thrift store pickup, “If you can’t maintain it, don’t retain it.” Having had my nose rubber in that by a commercial laundry that threw woolen and suede hats and gloves into the laundry along with white washcloths. (Not my choice of laundry service, long story dating back to the discovery of mold in my apartment.)
But I will not waste my money on wool and leather again.
@David P, they might have any number of reasons for paying for an NFT that costs as much as a house. They want to flip it, they want to show off, they want to launder money, etc. Sure if you say subjective value exists and differs from person to person, it makes sense to that extent.
On the other hand, if you say that that’s the only source of value, I think that’s going too far. I’m not saying the LTV is flawless by any means but it provides one with one possible conceptual framework to say why a house is more valuable for society than an NFT.
@Alvin #372
“I reject the idea that all value is subjective, that’s what the marginal economists and Austrians say, but before them literally nobody thought that way.”
Thank you for your comment. I once read an essay by an (I think) economist who pointed out that the efficient market hypothesis is “bullsh[ale] science”: it counts every market correction, which the hypothesis predicts cannot happen, as evidence for it. Because now that it’s happened it’s dragged the market toward efficiency, and that’s what matters, right? Right?
And of course there are options for value other than the binary of labor vs. subjective or even the binary of subjective vs. objective. Indeed, I’d suggest it pretty clearly has aspects of both: a house is clearly more valuable than an NFT, but whether a house is more valuable than a condominium of the same price is probably down to individual taste and circumstances.
@earthworm
This is in German https://www.telepolis.de/features/Drama-an-Unis-80-Prozent-der-Studenten-verstehen-keine-Sachtexte-mehr-10641269.html
you don’t need to read it, it just says a German History professor from uni is alarming anyone, 80 percent of students are unable to understand long or complex text.
And you’d think this is already a selection of young people at least interested in reading.
I am 37, and many things of the kind just pass by me, I haven’t seen any school classroom from the inside for a long time. But this must be worse than we imagine.
@earthworm
Also here, related item:
https://www.telepolis.de/features/20-Prozent-Analphabeten-Deutschland-vor-dem-Bildungskollaps-10665944.html
“20 percent illiterate in Germany..”
When I’m writing this lines, I’ve sern John hasn’t written yet about the pornography and Spectacle topic. Well, I was doubting today to opine about this topic, because I don’t want to break this blog rules with a rude style. Remember I’m not a native English speaker too. Here I go!
I think pornography is Spectacle, or maybe better expressed, part of nowadays Spectacle. There are images (in this case of sexual activities) which are watched by a consumist audience: nearly all of it, straight men (though of course there’s gay porn for “homo” men as minority).
If Spectacle is the social relation between people mediated by images, I think porn fits perfectly in this definition. Sex images are used of course to help the masturbation. The problem’s the porn consumer mind is fastly colonized by unrealistic sex images, so when this male porn consumer has sex with a female partner, he will repeat cosciously or not, the same patterns he saw in pornographic scenes. So indeed his sexual life, alone or with his couple, will be mediated in a Debordian sense. Of course, porn “eats” personal imagination too, which is a pity for healthy and no mediated sexual life. This is my opinion about this “hot” topic.
The Spectacle of fashion changes with the times, especially when it becomes spectacle and not practical, or beautiful. Now the Spectacle shows just how unwell we dress, regardless of certain things being gendered one way or the other. I keep thinking of those plastic clothes that Peter Carr was wearing when he first went to the Lakeland Republic…
Though I disagree with JHK about the barbarity of tattoos, he has an (old) point about the basketball shorts and track suits, and people looking like slobs in the USA. I stopped keeping up with his tirades (entertaining and coffee on keyboard funny as they can sometimes be.)
Skirts seem to make sense for either sex to wear. Let the breeze in for Ceridwen’s sake.
Patricia Matthews @ 379, Michael Wolff, frequent DB guest, does generally know what he is talking about. Which is not to say he doesn’t have his own agenda and biases, like anyone else. DB itself is a perch for Oxbridgers come to the USA to make their fortunes. Personally, I wish they would all go back home.
Chuaquin @ 384, what you describe is one reason a small but not insignificant number of women have decided that they are just fine, thank you, without men in their lives.
JHK’s recent “personal note” is pretty good though, and reminds why I read his clusterfrack so much… but I had to tune out of the Spectacle for awhile.
Managing personal internet inputs is a strategy for coping.
One other thing. JMG, do you think Jean Baudrillard’s concept of Simulacra (from Simulation and Simulacra) is a successor to the Spectacle of Debord & Vanegeim and the SI? What we are now seeing with the Lasting Lunacy Method (sorry Lunatics) and goLLuMs is an example of his third and fourth stages of simulacra?
His writings on this came out closer to the birth of personal computing and during the infancy of the internet…
” The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the sign pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the “order of sorcery”, a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth.
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers’ lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, “hyperreal” terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.”
Alvin #380:
I’m not trying to make that claim. I was specifically responding to that one example, which to me demonstrates that different people have vastly different conceptions of value—to you and me, the house is the obvious choice and yet people do buy such NFTs. In other words, subjectivity plays a big part in how the market operates.
This is not to say that this necessarily produces the best outcomes or even that LTV wouldn’t generally lead to better ones—I don’t know enough about it to make any claim for or against it.
Curt #383:
Well, your source is mostly glossing over who exactly is illiterate. Translating the one part that does:
> The biggest victims [of this trend] are people with poor education, adults from uneducated families, and immigrants. The latter’s gap compared to the native populace [as in people born in Germany, not by ethnicity] has as much as doubled in the last ten years.
In other words, bringing in illiterate people and not teaching them to read decreases literacy rates. Who would’ve known?
Which is not to say that your general point doesn’t stand. Working as a low-ranking assistant in my university, I’ve seen some horrific lack of understanding in homework and exams. GoLLuMs certainly aren’t helping there.
—David P.
Also, I hope everyone is having a good Rapture (TM) day. Sike! (How I Learned to Love the Rapture and Not Worry About the Apocalypse Not)
Curt # 382:
“80 percent of students are unable to understand long or complex text.”
I wonder if this inability to understand long or complet text would be caused by lack of concentration…Oh wait! (Pos)modern spectacle full of screen/displays with glowing lights and sounds may have some relation with this problem in the younger generation…
@re EMH
I think that the EMH is also bullshale, as well as quantifying value and trying to make it an objective thing. Markets are not efficient, they slosh back and forth overshooting and undershooting, prone to manias and bubbles as we’ve seen over and over and over and over.
What they are good at (when they’re working) is transferring risk from one entity to another. Sometimes that’s a good thing and it’s what you want. Sometimes that’s a bad thing. And sometimes that’s a very bad thing. The idea that you can just sprinkle market mechanics over a problem and it will solve it, smacks of just as much religion as a dangerhair saying just sprinkle more diversity over the problem, IMHO.
And like with value, you run into that thorny place where not everyone agrees on what’s good and what’s bad. And consensus can be manufactured, so you can’t even rely on that either.
If I had my way, there would be no distinction between casinos and markets. They would be regulated the same way and placed into Tier 3, alongside smoke shops, prostitution, liquor stores, video games, etc.
curt 383 Thank you for those.
JMG – re spectacle and what you said about 28th phase; it is difficult not to conclude that the west is in deep do-do and that said do-do is about to get deeper.
If mental capacity is actually a limited resource at any given time, world population would need to drop to about 1.6 billion (1900 estimate) in order to free up some mental ooomph 😉
From the telepolis article curt linked to:
“Today, artificial intelligence can write texts, summarize them and even make difficult content understandable. Many people therefore ask themselves: In the age of chatbots and translation apps, do you still need reading skills?”
Ignorance can be fixed… stupidity not so much?
I have wondered idly and to amuse myself from time to time whether mental capacity is actually a finite thing that is divided on an ad hoc basis between societies in any given year. This is fine with a small population because there is more ‘capacity’ to go around. So in 1960 with about 3 billion humans and estimated to have doubled to 6 billion by 2000 and 7 billion by 2010, then, if my idea is correct there was twice as much ‘capacity’ to be shared in 1960 compared to 2000.
And unfortunately things appear to have got worse since then.
Taking the idea of ‘each according to his ability and needs’, the east has been given the capacity and the collective west are being sent down to start again in kindergarten.
50 years ago at 14yrs old we were expected to be able to precis articles of all sorts (extract the salient points and write in one’s own form) – this came up in conversation with someone 11 years younger so when we’d have been 25 she was 14 and she had never heard the word precis nor seen the exercise; so it had already been dropped from the curriculum by 1985.
I also remember reading about (a Scandinavian country I think) where they were thinking of dropping cursive writing and just teaching keyboard skills but do not know if that went ahead.
Mary Bennet #386:
It’s understable some women have decided such a radical “separation” from men, though I think it isn’t a solution to the problem.
Porn exposure since early age usually leads to make oversexualized and boring teenagers and future men in the intimity. with women, it’s a pity for human relations (not only at bed, but in the rest of social situations).
Curt and Chuaquin, about college students being unable to read I think there could be blame on both sides. I would want to take a hard look at just what texts are being presented. If, for example, those texts are Catcher in the Rye level of preppy faux intellectualism, it might be just possible that the supposedly dumb and ignorant students are refusing to waste their time reading such dreck. One of mine hated school and despised the curricula, but she loved Shakespeare and Homer. Go figure.
“In other words, bringing in illiterate people and not teaching them to read decreases literacy rates. Who would’ve known?”
Also, the immigrants’ native languages is usually not German. They might be perfectly literate in their native language but never bothered to learn how to read German. Are they testing for literacy in general or specifically literacy in the German language? The article never mentions.
“Skirts seem to make sense for either sex to wear. Let the breeze in for Ceridwen’s sake.”
Had the Scottish Highlanders taken over the British Isles and colonized North America and Oceania we’d all be wearing them.
I think the efficient market hypothesis is accurate enough over the long run, mindless bubbles deflate quite regularly. Reversion to the mean will happen eventually. But as the ancient saying goes, “the market can stay insane longer than you can stay solvent.”
There is also the very famous comic, https://quotatium.com/products/buy-sell?srsltid=AfmBOortWoqGwTfbOp57LFIJT_n7RBhyuCUgPWy8BNowDlm6ggGh3IJz
If you might need the money in the next year (or three) don’t put it in the stock market.
As for Rapture Day, the hope of getting of getting the joys of heaven without going through the fuss and bother of actually dying springs eternal.
@Chuaquin
“Oh wait! (Pos)modern spectacle full of screen/displays with glowing lights and sounds may have some relation with this problem in the younger generation…”
That’s in the range of the possible! Manfred Spitzer said a lot about this, backed by a multitude of studies from many sources. and lost around a million of euros in the early 2010s.
I myself hat a heavily damaged childhood and adolescence of video gaming and tv and pc screens, and that were way before social media appeared on the scene (by then, I had almost quit these habits and took up drink and smoking).
The damage was enourmous and I regret it bitterly and mourn the consequences.
But I DID learn to read long and complex texts.
@David P.
Indeed, both immigration but also native habits.
These sources are only halfway to be taken seriously, they act more as a window to public attention.
And if public attention goes there – it must be already dire I presume.
in defense of erotica or porn…
i’m a cartoonist and i’m not the only artist who has drawn the images in my head that i can wank off to. i’ve always loved the mystery excitement and terror of erotica but as i grew up porn turned it all into acts lit with the finesse of a cheap fluorescently-lit JC Penny’s changing room.
when i was a child i thought that erotica would always end with deep philosophical conversations because after you’re that naked, where else is there to go but up???
however it’s the opposite in today’s world. everyone now has the finesse of gay men inviting strange men online over and answering the door on all fours with their pants around their ankles or back to anonymous nyc meat truck sex of the 70s.
i love the human body and the differences of each person. as an artist i love all the imperfections scars wrinkles funny fat deposits errant hairs and unique scents.
erotica is only full on porn now and it all makes sense how it got that way when you see how we live. women are fxcking when they actually want to cuddle or be held. however when younger men started approaching me i noticed they wanted the same thing, but felt compelled to perform like rock hard studs.
that performance thing is so boring trite tedious. sex is messy awkward and hella FUNNY.
i’m still healing from the progressive fantasies of what sex was would be could be and IS.
maybe i’m stepping too far out here but i think the missionary position IS Ephesians 5:22 incarnate. i’m not the only woman for whom penetration alone is ecstatic and makes me HIGH like i’m stoned. another woman i read blamed it on the semen. maybe. i don’t know. but that happened with James.
i think a lot of slutty girls who about-face and turn on their lovers and one-night stands or crushes they’ve shtupped, RESENT that in THEMSELVES. the natural inclination to SURRENDER and the natural feeling of relaxing on your back and being taken over consumed devoured loved made ONE for a moment. it goes against everything we were taught about being strong “fxck you i don’t NEED you!” women.
yes we do.
even the gay girly girls go for butch types (me too) because they are strong confident outward fearless audacious daring and caring.
so i love porn. or what it USED to be. i stay away from it now because i feel skeeved by fluorescent “fxck you” porn. it’s MEAN now. porn to me is the last free place for an “auteur’s” expression. The Japanese make porn that reflects on the mechanic and polite nature of their society. i love their horror movies, too. related? maybe.
but American porn is artless crude but i think it is where men can choke, abandon, rape, defile, and ejaculate in the face of all they’re supposed to put up with on a daily basis.
erika lopez
Actually a big part of the reason I’m believing in demons is because of the lack of thinking about our children in this suicidal brutal culture, Sparta without the cuddling, and turning sex into something that distances us ruins us because I think there’s magic to semen which makes counting orgasms competitive porn that ruins you from ascending to the magic of merely kissing and getting lost in something heroin cannot touch.
Yeah porn can ruin it too.
But the artist focusing so long on its awe is a form of love and meditation and can be us showing ourselves.
It’s natural that civilization would be opposed to this.
Zerohedge ticker tape is irrelevant next to this level of questioning.
This is why Kirk was dangerous. He was for real. Even among our 9wn were just back in a different Hollywood. Magawood is same.
I cried at Kirk memorial, but because now it’s really showtime. I saw the rings on Mrs Kirk’s fingers flash here we go again.
Everyone can only be Jesus for 15 minutes.
X
Also it’s no Silicon Valley asexual accident that it took me about 15 minutes to let spell check have me type the word orgasm unimpeded
Slithy, I didn’t happen to know that. Doesn’t surprise me a bit, though.
Chuaquin, the medieval Spectacle wasn’t circulated by way of print. It took the form of visual symbolism and its associated pageantry. More on this in due time!
Carlos, I’m glad to hear that it all worked out.
Earthworm, today’s college students have been taught not to debate, not to question their teachers or think for themselves, so it’s no surprise that they were so flummoxed by someone who actually expected them to defend their beliefs. I used to encounter than sort of thinking on my blog quite often. People would come there to spout the conventional wisdom, I’d explain to them why they were wrong, and they’d be completely baffled — “You always think you’re right!” was a frequent comment. I found this perplexing, and asked them whether they had the habit of defending a point of view they thought was wrong, and they’d end up completely incoherent. It took years before I realized that they had a little script playing in their head that said that since the conventional wisdom is always right, all you have to do is repeat it, and the wrong person saying wrong things would look embarrassed and admit that yes, of course, the conventional wisdom was right.
That is to say, why, yes, stick a fork in the West and you’ll find that it’s done to a turn. Vico talked about the barbarism of reflection — we’re in the middle of it.
Siliconguy, yep. It’s quite interesting to watch what may be the last great technology bubble sucking all the air out of the room.
Mary, good heavens, yes. It’s a classic example. It quite deliberately has as little as possible in common with the lively, messy, goofy realities of actual sex between actual people; like every expression of the Spectacle it inserts itself into every sexual relationship between people and mediates that relationship, producing alienation. That’s why so many guys think women ought to behave like female porn stars, and get baffled when they don’t, and (since romance fiction is porn for women) so many women think men ought to behave like male characters in romance novels, and get baffled when they don’t. Thanks for bringing this up — I may use pornography as a good working example in one of the future posts in this sequence.
Boy, it depends on how you define “magician,” of course. To the extent that any person who causes change in consciousness in accordance with will is a magician, yes, he was — but of course by the same definition, so were Charlie Chaplin, JRR Tolkien, and P.T. Barnum.
Patricia M, no, as far as I know the left is just projecting Biden’s condition onto the nearest available enemy. As for rhymed couplets, that’s an excellent point — real poetry (the kind that rhymes and scans) is powerful stuff.
Catfish, I certainly wouldn’t mind if kilts came into general use. They’re very comfortable. Yes, I think that Baudrillard’s scheme is one of the common patterns by which the Spectacle changes over time; it’s been a little while since I last read him, but clearly I’ll have to remedy that. As for the Rapture, was another of those predicted for today? I’ve lost count!
Earthworm, I’m reminded of what Robert Heinlein had to say about that:
“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Siliconguy, thanks for that cartoon — funny, and also true.
Erika, I think that’s a crucial point, and it makes a good demonstration of the way the Spectacle works. By telling people what they ought to do and feel during sex, today’s crappy pornography gets in the way of people noticing what they actually need and want — for example, to cuddle, to laugh and be playful, to set their egos aside for a bit and surrender to the experience, or what have you. Real erotica makes room for that. Corporate culture and its Spectacle doesn’t. BTW, there’s a reason why I turn off spell check on all my computers and programs!
earthworm #392:
I don’t know about cursive but several Scandinavian countries have tried to go digital in schools and have already abandoned that exercise. At least they had the excuse of not knowing better and changing course once it became clear that it was a bad idea; my own country is currently attempting to repeat that folly rather than learning from their experience.
Anonymous #395:
Knowing my country, it’s probably specifically German literacy. Arguably, that’s sensible as the general populace needs to remain literate in the language of the country, not just any random language. It’s a lot less sensible to take in a bunch of people who neither speak nor read German and then send their kids to normal schools where they’re expected to just pick up the language on their own, with minimal help.
Curt #399:
Sure. I’m told that eductational standards have been slipping very strongly for a while now, especially the Abitur, our highest level of high-school diploma. Having acquired mine only a few years ago, that sounds reasonable, even if I’ve never looked at older exams to compare: I probably spent less than twelve hours total to prepare for my four final exams and got a rather good grade.
I suppose it might be a fair question to ask just why Gen Z would feel the need to read. There’s flashier entertainment in video games and various video platforms (my own view on the former is less dim than yours, though I’ll readily agree that the latter are just terrible), not to mention social media which might not be entertaining but at least helps pass the time (and, judging by the suicide statistics, might just relieve boredom forever, or at least until the next incarnation). If you want to learn something, that’s also most likely on YouTube—it’s not going to be particularly deep but all of the deep stuff is problematic in Current Year anyways.
Which only leaves “for school” as a use case. I can’t say I’ve been particularly impressed with most that I’ve had to read in school. Call me uneducated but I really don’t see how, for example, a novella about a noblewoman who unknowingly got raped in her sleep by a nobleman so later falls in disgrace until she demonstrates that she really doesn’t know who the father is, at which point there’s a weirdly incestuous reunion with her own father, is all that relevant to me, a man born in the 21st century. I’ve also had to read a bunch of trite modern junk which somehow managed to not be more enjoyable.
Don’t get me wrong, there are a couple of interesting books in the German school literature canon. I got to read exactly one. Given that a central theme of said book is religious tolerance, it’s probably wasted on the vast majority of modern students. We also completely ignored the work’s historical context, the Enlightenment, and the influence of Freemasonry, of which the author was a member, thus depriving that particular class of most of the interesting lessons one might have taken from it.
erika lopez #400
> but American porn is artless crude but i think it is where men can choke, abandon, rape, defile, and ejaculate in the face of all they’re supposed to put up with on a daily basis.
Thank you for explicitly spelling out that particular psychological factor. I was always under the impression that the appeal was mainly physical but this has genuinely helped me see a bit more clearly. That’s a very good starting point for some journalling/introspection.
Catfish and JMG:
Skirts seem to have become fashionable amoung CS students at my university, at least among members of our student council.
—David P.
JMG: That is to say, why, yes, stick a fork in the West and you’ll find that it’s done to a turn. Vico talked about the barbarism of reflection — we’re in the middle of it.
It is not a pretty sight.
JMG: I’m reminded of what Robert Heinlein had to say about that:
“Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime: the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”
Individual stupidity used to be (literally) self terminating; now it seems to be celebrated. Societal stupidity is turning into quite the ‘spectacle’ and looks like it’ll be quite the show.
I jokingly said to you about ‘Psychic Self Defence for the 28th Phase’ – do you think it is possible we are beyond that window of opportunity (as so many other windows have closed)?
Not asking that from a ‘downer’ point of view, more thinking on practicalities… ‘gotta work with what you’ve got’ seems ever closer.
“BTW, there’s a reason why I turn off spell check on all my computers and programs!”
i didn’t even KNOW i could! i must figure this out. it ruins creativity and flow, trying to force its predictable-word mediocrity on me.
x
JMG, I looked up the phrase ‘barbarism of reflection’. Here is what I found.
““such peoples [in the barbarism], like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure (NS 1106).”
These private interests lead into a civil war in which everyone betrays everyone else. ”
That does seem to be an accurate description of where we are now. At the present time it isn’t just private interests, but also taste and virtue markers. One can never know what word, phrase or personal choice will provoke someone else’s wrath.
@Alvin #319 re: Theories of Value
First, a clarification: from reading some further comments, I realize I might have been thinking of the wrong “Odum,” or at least half wrong – I’m reading The Fundamentals of Ecology by Eugene and Howard T. Odum, and it seems you and JMG might have been referring to Howard’s work on the interrelationship of energy transfers in Ecological systems and economics (there are hints of that in the ecology textbook, and I had already started to think “hmm, I wonder how these energetic transfer models could be applied to human systems?” but I wasn’t familiar with Howard’s work on further developing these ideas more specifically).
Anyhow, as for the Austrians and subjective value, I think they attempt to solve a very hard (maybe impossible) problem in a fairly practical way, but then lose sight of the “best we can do” character of what they arrived at and take it to some unfortunately doctrinaire places. I think they (accurately) recognized that merely performing labor doesn’t necessarily create value (if I dig a ditch no one wants or needs, I put in a lot of work, but did I create value?), and the concept of anything having “intrinsic” value is pretty much non-sensical outside of the wants or needs it satisfies in someone who wants it or gets it (a cheeseburger has great value if you’re starving, a bit if you’re kind of peckish, and almost none if you’re stuffed, for example). They recognized that usually market dynamics, if allowed to work in a voluntary and unhindered way, gets about as close to assessing the relative values of things as we might be able to do – my ditch is valuable if you’re willing to give me a cheeseburger to dig it, and the cheeseburger is valuable if I’m willing to dig a ditch to get it, to jam together my examples in a somewhat silly way. I think the greatest strength of the subjective theory of value is that when it’s more seriously presented, it acknowledges that it is inter-subjective – value isn’t whatever I decide it is, it’s what we collectively arrive at from all of our subjective judgements and how they trade off against each other and so forth.
The trouble is, even if “whatever everybody, through aggregated subjective decisions, arrives at is as close as we can come to figuring out the value of something” is a good approximation, it still doesn’t really get at what value “really” is, it just gives us a procedure for getting a good enough approximation that we can reason about it and make policy decisions on it. That’s fine as far as it goes, but some Austrians take it to a nearly metaphysical place and believe that the market dynamics setting the price for something is the real and true definition of its value. That seems… dubious, at best, to me.
Your example of the stupid NFT highlights why I think Schumacher’s insights into the primary and secondary economy in Small is Beautiful, and especially JMG’s addition of the tertiary economy in The Wealth of Nature provide some useful insights into where and how the intersubjective theory of value breaks down. Like most traditional economists, the Austrians tend to start from secondary economy assumptions and reason from there. If they even acknowledge the primary economy (like wine aging on its own or the value of natural materials and resources), they tend to have trouble with those, until they get translated into activity in the world of goods and services (and sometimes make blunders, like asserting that the oil company that found the oil and drilled the well and refined it into gasoline “created” the full value of the asset – obviously they created some of it through their work, knowhow, efficiency, and so forth, but a lot of the value comes from the fact that highly compressed hyrdocarbons hold a lot of energy that we find useful in an industrial economy). It gets even worse with the tertiary economy, because there, due to the positive feedback loops that drive valuations of financialized assets, the interactions of different buyers’ and sellers’ subjective judgments becomes not a crucible for arriving at the “true” value of the asset, but instead the driver for it to go up or down in a bubble or its collapse. To take a concrete example – to the degree that the stock price for a corporation reflects the best judgements of all possible investors in how likely the company is to generate enough of a profit to pay dividends, then the market helps get a fairly reasonable idea of the “value” of the company. On the other hand, to the degree that people buy it because they expect its price to go up, and people buying it raises the price, creating a signal for more people to buy it, and so on, and it gets away from what the company actually does and whether it will make money, then the intersubjective price of the market becomes a hallucination that distorts our ability to discern it’s “true” value.
I haven’t arrived at a way to harmonize these insights into something that works better, but it helps me have a better appreciation for what the strengths and limitations of the Austrian intersubjective theory of value might be. Maybe (Howard!) Otum’s thoughts on an energy theory of value might be one way to get closer to squaring that circle.
Likely completely unrelated, other than it’s written by an Austrian school thinker talking about the failings of political economy: I’m currently reading Han-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: the God that Failed. So far, not much discussion of a/the theory of value (he takes Mises’s position from Human Action as a given), but it’s an interesting and provocative book, so if you’re into political economy, you might consider checking it out.
(Oh, and I didn’t want you to think I was ignoring it, but I don’t have much to contribute in terms of differing theories of value reflecting or ignoring the reality of exploitation. I spent a long time as a fairly doctrinaire libertarian and basically believed that exploitation outside of actual coercion didn’t really exist, but that seems overly simplistic to me these days. On the other hand, I haven’t yet replaced those prior frameworks with something I have much confidence in that accounts for some of my changed views. Maybe I ought to give the Labor Theory of Value more of a fair shake.)
Cheers,
Jeff
p.s. I don’t wanna seem like i came here to fart on Charlie Kirk’s memorial or his wife! not at all. i am actually impressed by her eyes and her forgiveness and ferocity. she ought to be a wonderful CEO.
it’s just that when I’d watched Charlie Kirk, he was different, than ANYONE and had all that crazy charisma and heart. no one can just step in and take over like he did.
It’s a beautiful story and I was heartened by the memorial because of the PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE. i no longer care about the veracity of performers and politicians on stage. you could FEEL the love and see so many people look beautiful all at once and that a man of only 31 could’ve inspired THAT? … that’s amazing awesome and astounding. inspiring.
so i’m actually inspired by the story. the success will be in the hands of THE PEOPLE, not management. the people will keep management clean. or not. protect and correct.
it can be bigger and better than before and i hope for that. it’s just that people are complicated and if we only allow or expect absolute perfection, we’re part of the problem.
Charlie Kirk gave people Love back. made them feel heard and proud and strong.
so even in the spectacle of that revival, it was mad real because of THE PEOPLE. they are for real and it was all so beautiful i cried. i think Erika Kirk is badass.
just the rings smack of Osho Rolls Royces and i get itchy at Martin Luther King’s kids in fine furs.
erika
A man’s kilt requires about 10 yards of fabric. I know, that surprised me too when I read it. A pair of pants requires 2-3 lengths of fabric, depending on the size of the man and width of the fabric. I have not made men’s pants, but I would guess 3-4 yards for most adult men. For as long as men’s clothing is made in factories, I doubt we will see kilts become fashionable.
The Roman tunic was essentially a poncho with the sides sewn shut up to the armholes. Something like that might make a comeback.
Erika lopez # 400 and JMG # 403:
Thank you for your opinions about pornography and Spectacle! Erika, thanks for your sincerity. I see John has said he would probably use the porn example for one of a future post about Spectacle. I think it’s a good idea. Well, soon this post is going to be closed, so I won’t add any comment of mine to this one. We’ll see next comment today…
>Had the Scottish Highlanders taken over the British Isles and colonized North America and Oceania we’d all be wearing them.
I find it interesting that anytime you see a man in a kilt on a screen, he also has a set of bagpipes in his arms. I guess it’s what? Semiotics? Same way they always have an airplane pilot wearing goggles in a closed cockpit airplane? Oh he has goggles on, he must be the pilot.
>That’s fine as far as it goes, but some Austrians take it to a nearly metaphysical place and believe that the market dynamics setting the price for something is the real and true definition of its value. That seems… dubious, at best, to me.
Dubious doesn’t begin to cover it. Here’s the only law of markets – it’s only worth what the *next* guy is willing to pay for it. Everything else is obscuration or decoration around that.
Can they explain why the labor market has been in a bear market for the past 60 years? That’s a question I think you’ll find nobody in the establishment wants to answer, because I guarantee you the answer to that question is very very uncomfortable. And they’ve mastered the art of not asking questions they don’t want the answer to.
“A man’s kilt requires about 10 yards of fabric. I know, that surprised me too when I read it. A pair of pants requires 2-3 lengths of fabric, depending on the size of the man and width of the fabric. I have not made men’s pants, but I would guess 3-4 yards for most adult men. For as long as men’s clothing is made in factories, I doubt we will see kilts become fashionable.”
Keep in mind that the mountains of the Scottish Highlands are also a fairly cold place compared to many other locations in the Anglosphere. If you’re in Southern England or in the American Southwest or in the Australian Outback, I think you could get by with a thinner kilt made with less yards of fabric.
The person that shot Charlie Kirk is not a “radical Leftist” in any way. As far as we can tell he is a conservative who believed in much of the same theories as Charlie. Shows you that we aren’t getting the whole story.
The Curse of the Eighth Decade fits very nicely in Howe and Strauss’ theory, The Fourth Turning, which describes the final twenty years of an eighty year cycle as an existential crisis. So far the US has survived three and we’re almost finished with the fourth, but not quite out of the woods yet.
There might also be a Uranian element in this Curse. I say that only because Uranus has an 84 year orbit. Maybe Uranus is an extremely malefic factor here.