Not that neoliberalism didn’t represent a new form of hyper (or late-stage) capitalism; it did. See Philip Mirowski, Neoliberalism; The Movement That Dare Not Speak It’s Name.
‘In clear cutting, you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls 'weed trees', and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. Then you dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed away humas, inject the seedlings with growth forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellents and raise a uniform crop of trees all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height [not maturity; that would take too long] you send in a fleet of tree harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster and tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole.’ Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang.
23. The Myth of Science
A scientific body to which had been confided the government of society would soon end by devoting itself no longer to science at all, but to quite another affair; and that affair, as in the case of all established powers, would be its own eternal perpetuation by rendering the society confided to its care ever more stupid and consequently more in need of its government and direction.
Michael Bakunin, On Science and Authority
What we call ‘science’ is really the technical operation of the system and the opinion of its favoured technicians · · · Actual science is useful and interesting, but impotent to explain anything of importance to men and women; including its own origins and limits · · · Basing society on the literal illusions of science leads to mass ignorance and existential insecurity.
The practical and mechanical component of the modern system — its machinery — was largely founded on the activities of working mechanics, the technical and ideological basis of which was but one element in a much wider philosophy of rational systematisation which had been progressing since the dawn of history but which, with the advent of the modern era, began to completely supplant human activity, replacing it with a series of output-maximising technical practices. We ordinarily call this approach to life — the abstraction or isolation of a few elements of experience, the complete disregard for everything else (technical term; ‘noise’) and the manipulation of these elements in order to produce a definite result — science.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the elites of giant corporations realised the extraordinary potential of this ‘science’ as a means of furthering the accumulation of capital1, at which point it instantly overcame the classics as the principle purpose of ‘higher education.’ Powered by the energy sources and potent organisational procedures discovered by a new class of professional ‘scientists’ and their reduction of the immeasurable complexity of life to manageable ‘simplicity’ (i.e. monotony), capitalist organisations were able to massively expand their generative powers and their geographical reach, and the system, which had hitherto concentrated on managing a few aspects of production and output, could now, with new techniques of analysis and new mechanisms of observation and manipulation, concern itself with converting every minute aspect of life into a process, a resource or a product. Nothing, but nothing, systems-man began to understand, could evade the technical-scientific process of abstraction, measurement and, crucially, total control. To be sure, servile human beings were still necessary for wealth-creation, and a great deal remained to be incorporated into the market; sunlight, air, the use of bodily organs, fertilization and face-to-face conversations, for example, continued to be, to the frustration of scientific management, beyond the reach of the market, and there were still a few organisational and disciplinary functions which were yet to be fully automated, but the end finally drew into view; the bright utopian moment when human beings could, once and for all, be made completely redundant; a prospect, incidentally, celebrated by a rising movement of ‘left-wing’ thinkers who look forward to a day when all work (yes, all of it) will be done by machines, leaving us ‘free’ to prance around on silver spaceships, gravity all nonsense now. No problem building, fuelling and maintaining this champaign world, apparently, and no chance that omnipresent technology will alienate us even further from our own nature. These children, choosing to ignore the fact that the over-production of technology accompanies and hastens the decline of all terminal civilisations, call themselves ‘fully automated luxury communists,’ in order to disguise the fact that they are actually ‘fully addicted and domesticated state-capitalists.’
Returning to modern institutional science; its primary purpose is not to explain certain objective aspects of the world or to improve our lives, but to justify the system, to further its techniques (software) and technologies (hardware) and to adjust nature to fit its requirements (the proper term for this process is domestication). Each advance always begins with optional, innocuous, helpful improvements and inventions2 and always ends by further enslaving people and deforming human nature. We begin with cars that help us get around, or phones that help us communicate, or antibiotics that help us overcome infection, or washing machines that help us ‘save time,’ and we end by becoming completely dependent on motorways, computers, drugs and home appliances, unable to use our legs to get to where we need to go, our mouths to speak, our bodies or our environment to heal ourselves, or our time to get things done. Meanwhile nature dies, communities decay, ‘traditional values’ break down3, bodies sicken, minds crack up and we become estranged from our own nature, but none of this is enough for any but a few scattered cranks to suggest that many of our gravest problems might be a consequence of living in servitude to industrial technology and the hyper-rationality it is built upon4.
The modern system may have seized on the technical power of science only recently, but the common root of system and science reaches as far down as the foundations of civilisation. All three — science, system and civilisation — were built on the mind’s ability to isolate subjects and objects from consciousness and context, represent those subjects and objects as abstractions and — in the tertiary process we normally call science — systematise those abstractions into testable narrative theories. The abstract world created by this ‘isolating-representing-systematising’ activity slowly became, as civilisation progressed, more and more useful, ‘accurate’ and, crucially, neat (internally coherent5) which served to conceal the fact that science has almost no bearing on ordinary existence (life, death, love, creativity, beauty, self-knowledge and so on) which is far better served by myth, folk-knowledge and art and, that, ultimately, the entire project of mind was founded on an illusion. The utility and factual accuracy of science conceals this truth; that the world as mind understands it was brought into existence by the activity of the mind.6
Civilisation, in other words — the man-made ‘world’ as we ordinarily experience it — is ultimately built on abstract sand. All of its dominating ideologies — superstitious, religious, philosophical and scientific — are founded on a world made by the mind and on the foundational belief that what the mind creates is real or that it is capable of apprehending reality. Thus shamans, priests, philosophers and scientists may believe different things, and violently disagree about their beliefs, but they all behave in exactly the same way; treating reality as a mind-knowable mechanism (operated by laws or by gods), conflating consciousness and thought,7 subordinating experience (what is actually happening) to knowledge (what I know about what is happening) and widening the gulf between them, restricting access to knowledge or technique to the uninitiated, dressing up Big Men in gowns, dressing up language in jargon, taking metaphor (the scientific metaphor of measurement or the religious metaphor of myth) as factually true, completely dismissing the testimony of the individual, being reflexively outraged by attacks on orthodoxy, and either sucking up to power or monopolising it.
Because the ‘civilised’ hyper-literal mind has, on its own, no standard by which to judge that which precedes or transcends itself, any foundational experience of reality which is paradoxical, non-dualistic, qualitative or impossible to grasp with abstraction is automatically rejected as false, heretical or insane. God, says mind, is a literal thing, consciousness is a literal thing, matter is a literal thing, society is a collection of literal things, reality, or the context, is a collection of literal things, labour, land and life itself are literal things, and all these literal things relate to each other literally, in ways which mind can also reveal. Thus, to fit in with God’s plan, or to harmonise with the ‘natural’ order revealed by science, or to take your place in capitalist society, or to accede to professionally determined reality you — who are also a literal thing — must relate to them in the correct way. Any other approach is heresy, madness or pure fantasy to literal systemoids; to laws and lawyers, to cults and religious fundamentalists, to third-wave feminists (‘no means no’), to anti-racism extremists and modern leftists, to technophiles (and the social media they create or use), to standard psychology, to journalism (left and right), to management, to scientism, to postmodernism, to the ancient Greeks and their heirs and to all chronically boring people everywhere. To all these people truth is literal (either exclusively or ultimately) and paradox, implication, metaphor, mystery and quality are sources of existential discomfort which must be obliterated.
And yet, strange to say, the ideologues of uncivilisation never tell us what the literal things they worship or depend on actually are. Neither religion nor science ever explain or express what anything actually is, only how they can be described and how they behave. What things are (the thing-in-itself) is utterly and inherently opaque to the scientific mind, which can only perceive appearance (via measurement). This is why science concerns itself entirely with cause-and-effect, and why it is unable to explain anything of any importance (the creation of the universe, the origins of life, the nature of consciousness, the reality of death, how to write a timeless love song of what to do about a moody). Everything that happens is said to happen as the result of a prior, mind-isolated, event. Consciousness, the ineffable quality of existence, its freedom from all cause and its consequent responsibility (see myth 16) is intolerable to the mind-made world, and must be annihilated. This is the project of systemic science, and its partner in crime, law (see myth 14) which seek to define everything out of existence; because only the defined can be controlled.
It is the chronically and perpetually insecure ego which seeks to control reality. It seeks to transform the universe into a network of rigid definitions, just as it seeks to transform sensual reality into a controllable simulacrum (myth 9). This habit-comfortable pseudo-self is in charge of the world’s scientific institutions, just as it is in charge of every other institution, which is why the abstract scientific world view is presented as uncritical orthodoxy, why ‘the scientific establishment’ is uniformly insensitive, selfish and stupid, and why it sees, wherever it looks, a reality which is insensitive, selfish and stupid. The universe, according to the ‘consensus,’ is a literal mechanism, nature is constant warfare and man is inherently egotistical; because those who form the consensus — predictable, belligerent, selfish types — can do nothing but go looking for literal mechanisms, conflict and reflections of the ‘reality’ they know.
It was extraordinarily convenient for the system that after a religious ideology which defined life as inherently sinful lost its power over society, a scientific ideology arose which defined the universe as essentially meaningless and life as inherently selfish. It was also rather convenient that, as the focus of attention shifted from the organism to the gene — lo! we find that the gene is meaningless and self-interested too! What extraordinary good luck! Granted, there were heretical movements which challenged the doctrine of original sin (the so-called ‘Christian mystics’) as they did Darwinism (Lamarckism and Kropotkinian theories of mutual aid), as they do neo-Darwinism (Epigeneticists and Neo-Lamarckists), but somehow these ideas don’t quite make it onto the teevee. Somehow they always manage to get proved wrong.
Proof is vital because it absolves individuals of responsibility for their philosophies and theories. ‘It is not me who believes humans are sinful or selfish, it has been proved. Look, it is in The Bible / On the Origin of the Species / The dsm / the Wealth of Nations / the Tragedy of the Commons… It is written, it is rationally self-evident, it is indisputable. Much as I would like to believe we’re all good, or that we are responsible, I have to remain faithful to the facts, you see.’
Honest scientists, outside the established world-view, understand that everything based on scientific fact — all theories and scientific beliefs — are, ultimately, based on faith. They know that science is founded on metaphor, that it is inherently superficial, that it has inherent limits which can never be superseded, that it can never penetrate the thing-in-itself, that it can never grasp the context — only extrapolate from it, that nothing can ever be proved,8 that technophilia is an infantile disorder, that all scientific theories are subject to revision, that the reflexive appeal to rationalism is a political manoeuvre (the deep politics of the system; worship of the legible, the literal, the graspable and the thinkable9), and that science has nothing meaningful to say about the creation of the universe, the creation of life, the nature (i.e. the quality) of consciousness and, therefore, about love, death, beauty and truth; words which scientists very rarely utter. Intelligent scientists are aware of the primary role that vague — sometimes thoughtless — counter-inductive, counter-intuitive and even counter-rational passions and hunches play, not just in life generally, but in scientific discovery. They are aware of the catastrophic limits of scientific hyper-specialisation;10 the inherent limitation of obsessive focus on tinier and tinier compartments of knowledge, and the consequent fear that specialists, like all institutionalised people, have when faced with totalities, contexts or any kind of experience outside their narrow domain of expertise; the importance of which they tend to inflate to comic proportions. None of this means that science, abstract thought or intellectual specialisation are useless — they are the very essence of use, and only a fool discounts the technical knowledge science and the specialised mind provide us with — nor does ‘based on faith’ mean entirely arbitrary and illusory — if reality were not somehow relative, mind-knowable and ‘factual,’ nothing that the mind understands would have any meaning. Clearly facts do exist and clearly the scientific mind can determine what they are; something which fools and liars (religionists, postmodernists, monogendroids, climate-change deniers, flat-earthers, revisionists, corporate employees, economists, politicians and other believers in absurd conspiracy theories) are keen to deny or ignore. But facts, ultimately, have nothing to do with quality, with truth and with consciousness; and truthful scientists know this, which is why they turn to art, and to experience, and to guts, and to mum, for instruction on matters which cannot be dealt with by the mind alone.
Institutional scientists on the other hand — which form the majority — are paid to prostitute their intelligence to the technical needs of the system, to ignore the rightful subservience of science to the experience of consciousness, and to adhere to the insane belief that reality is a mind knowable thing; in short, to uphold the dismal religion of scientism.
‘…the remarkable development of machinery becomes, for most of the working population, the source not of freedom, but of enslavement, not of mastery but of helplessness, and not of the broadening of the horizon of labor but the confinement of the worker within a blind round of servile duties in which the machine appears as the embodiment of science and the worker as little or nothing.’ Harry Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capital.
Ted Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future.
‘The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values’. Ibid.
Political and institutional reforms have the same effect, nearly always producing consequences that are at least unintended and, very frequently, disastrous. See myth 31.
See Against Method, by Paul Feyerabend for the classic critique on the spurious neatness of science, and how it is much better served by anarchic systems and practices.
See John Zerzan, Numb and Number, in Why Hope? for a good overview of how early scientific developments, specifically number, were used primarily as techniques of control.
All Western philosophers before the nineteenth century believed that consciousness was synonymous with thought. After the nineteenth century they began to believe a different, but equally false idea; that consciousness was synonymous with emotion. Finally, postmodern thought introduced the idea that consciousness (along with quality, truth, love, meaning and so on) doesn’t really exist (see myth 24).
‘I doubt that there is any experiment that could be done to prove my claim’. Richard Dawkins
‘Just as a well-trained pet will obey his master no matter how great the confusion in which he finds himself, and no matter how urgent the need to adopt new patterns of behaviour, so in the very same way a well-trained rationalist will obey the mental image of his master, he will conform to the standards of argumentation he has learned, he will adhere to these standards no matter how great the confusion in which he finds himself, and he will be quite incapable of realizing that what he regards as the ‘voice of reason’ is but a causal after-effect of the training he had received. He will be quite unable to discover that the appeal to reason to which he succumbs so readily is nothing but a political manoeuvre’. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method.
Or as Zijderveld’s has it, intellectual taylorism.
24. The Myth of Relativism
Not only does [postmodernism] echo Beckett’s comment in Endgame, ‘there’s no more nature,’ but it also denies that there ever was any recognizable space outside of language and culture. ‘Nature’, declared Derrida… ‘has never existed.’
The Catastrophe of Postmodernism, John Zerzan
The system is threatened by meaning; quality, goodness, morality, truth and beauty, which are meaningless in the system · · · Meaning is intellectually extinguished by the ideology of relativism, the assumption that meaning does not exist · · · Relativism is used every day by liars, thieves, murderers and madmen to pretend their lies, theft, murder and madness do not really exist. It is also used, under the elevated title of post-modernism, by talentless and ambitious artists, journalists and philosophers to pretend their mediocre output is really genius.
Scientism is the application of the scientific method to all of life, to questions which scientific objectification, conceptualisation and systematisation can never illuminate. There is, for the hyper-rational scientist, no experience which cannot be objectified, conceptualised and systematised. If mind cannot know it, it does not and cannot exist. It is all relative. Good and bad, beauty and ugliness, art and porn, truth and falsehood, right and wrong, meaning and meaninglessness, love and hate, sanity and insanity… all such matters, to rational scientism, are either objective — inhering in conceptualised neurones, or genes, or atoms ‘out there’ — or subjective — created by the [largely deluded] individual. That they are real — and therefore not subjective illusions — but, at the same time, cannot be objectified by priests or scientists — is the quintessential taboo of both theistic religion and atheistic scientism.1
Although traditional religion is not incompatible with capitalism, it has, for the most part, been ditched. Too many educated technicians control the organs of academic power for the transparent absurdities of donkey-age dogma to gain any traction, and science is just too useful to capital to be ignored. But this use doesn’t just extend to its role in technique, it also has a duel purpose in the formation of men and women’s attitudes. An ideology which positions truth, beauty, justice, goodness, consciousness and so on either as objective matters which can be centrally measured and managed, or as subjective fantasies which can be ignored, is ideal for justifying the dominating role of technocratic management in people’s lives while, at the same time, completely dismissing their ‘assertions’ that, for example, drilling into shale is wrong, that paying bankers inflated bonuses is unfair, that office work is meaningless, that an unmade bed is not art, that love is going out of the world, that the body is conscious or that the universe is an organism; none of which can be verified in the lab.
This isn’t to say that the ideologues of the system don’t speak of love, death, justice, beauty, quality, the sacred and the profane — they do, constantly — but scratch below the surface of the liberal newspaper column, the sacred thought for the day, the modern art catalogue, the alternative manifesto, the pop-science tract (which regularly hijack words that science cannot understand, like ‘beauty,’ ‘god’ and ‘reality’), the detox yoga-retreat brochure or the middle-class green philosophy of mystic doom and you’ll discover that, although there are manifold verbal references to absolutes, or to ‘non-materialism’, they are all, ultimately, understood relatively — intellectually or emotionally — an approach which, conveniently, just happens to also be the approach of their employers. If the essence of the opinion piece were not essentially relativist, if it took responsibility for love and truth, it would never be published. It would be too weird, too extreme, too political or just not what the punter wants. If the author were conscious, if she directly addressed the reality of love, she would never be allowed to speak.2
So what is the truth? What is beauty? What is love? What is justice? What is consciousness? What kind of experience is neither objective nor subject? How the relativist loves to ask such questions! How he rubs his hands, and clenches his mind, waiting for an idea to be produced3. To actually face the truth, to actually endeavour to create beauty, to actually be conscious, to actually love… Nope. Don’t get it.
The relativistic philosophy of the non-existence of truth, beauty, love, quality, meaning, justice, responsibility and reality has its roots in classical Greek thought and the modern scientific movement laughably known as ‘the enlightenment4’. The most extreme ideological form that relativism takes, however, is post-modernism5. While scientism — the objective wing of enlightened capitalism — busies itself with converting reality and quality into concepts, theories, brain-scans, genes, particles, structures, ‘narratives’ and the like, post-modernism simply asserts that they do not exist; only ‘de-structured’ or ‘de-constructed’ ‘representation’ does. Thus the inane, the pointless and the ugly have just as much right to be included in the art gallery, the weekend supplement or the discussion show as the finely crafted, the socially useful, the transcendently beautiful and the actually true.6 Actual truth, for the post-modern thinker, is conflated with abstract truth and shown to be either nonsense or inherently authoritarian (the authority of the Huxleyan system). In attacking such concealed systems of coercion, the control of knowledge, the lies of the enlightenment and so on, one or two pomo thinkers (notably Foucault, Deleuze, Fisher and occasionally Lyotard) made some important contributions to radical scepticism, but they had nothing to replace them with; just capricious, egoic emotion7 and a kaleidoscope’s nightmare of abstract ‘viewpoints’ unconnected to each other, or to any kind of social, natural or conscious whole.
This is, at least partly, how intellectual frauds such as Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida and Žižek, can present their ideas with a straight face and be received as if they have uttered profound truths; ultimately there is no such thing as a profound truth, so wordy bullshit can effortlessly flow into the void. It is also how purveyors of artistic snake-oil, such as Hockney, Anselmo, Richter, Warhol, Ryman, Emin and all the other charlatans of the corrupt ‘Modern Art’ scene, can present a canvas sprayed with child vomit or a bra stuffed with spinach to the Serious Minds of the high-brow media world, and nobody falls about laughing.
Actually though there are some qualities which the professional artist and critic must learn to create and detect — irony, formality, irrelevance, titillation and bleakness — but ultimately all a cultural creation needs to gain access to the Tate Modern or the moma is for its creator to be well-connected. Politics, media and business work in the same way, which is why they all endlessly replicate a cultural reality which is prefaced on the complete destruction of nature and the natural self,8 leaving nothing but an illusory or ‘hyper’ reality — in truth a schizoid intellectual horror-show — in which we are impotent to act, to think, to speak or to judge9.
This ‘reality’ is the unspoken ‘truth’ of the truthless world. Postmodernism and scientism make much of the absence of gods and supernatural ‘meta-narratives’ (which is to say, any kind of meaning in human affairs) while serving the most powerful myth the world has ever known; the late-capitalist system, to which everyone on earth must submit. The stories and rituals presented by the servants of the system — the origin myths, the tales of heroes, the spectacles, the scholastic debates, the beatific visions of success and the tractates on the secret order of things10 — coalesce into the creed and ethic of the one world religion, preached everywhere at all times by those who maintain that no such thing exists.
