Likewise the long project of the system to ‘free’ local communities of their power to feed, educate, care for, entertain and protect their members, reached its ‘natural’ conclusion as armies of scientifically ‘educated’ professionals took over the business of communal administration and with it the silly belief that ordinary people can take care of themselves. ‘Education’ came to mean compulsory attendance in a small room where children are inflicted with a centrally administered syllabus for ten to twenty years, ‘health’ came to mean access to jealously guarded diagnostic equipment and narcotics, ‘locomotion’ began to be understood as the need to own a car, and ‘development’ was simply unthinkable without systematic dependence on massive, massive quanta of energy. That stupidity might result from being forced to ‘learn’ in an unpleasant environment divorced from ordinary society, and consume therein intensely abstracted market-friendly techniques; that ill-health arises from an unhealthy environment1; that it is changes to the environment that improve health — which the medical profession has resisted since its inception2; that crime, suicide and madness are all consequences of systemic alienation, atomisation and inequality; that it might be possible to live within reach of our needs, to use tools that we can fix ourselves, to power our lives with the sun or wind; all such ideas are unacceptable to the capitalist professional class, for whom professionalism is synonymous with existence.
In the real world: Hospitals make the world sicker. They deprive ordinary people of the means of diagnosing and treating themselves (even denying them, in many cases, the freedom to give birth or to die) and their privileged employees systematically ignore the cause of sickness, which is the very system that grants them power. The medical system pushes narcotic fixes in lieu of cure, eliminates or denigrates meaningful responses to pain, medicalises personal and social problems and proliferates oppressive lock-ups (official terms: care-homes and mental-health clinics) in order to deal with the social jetsam that nobody has time to care for — all at massive profit to their providers. The idea that sickness comes from the unconscious, monocultural system (see myth 22), and health from independence from it, forms no part of medical training, nor can it.
Roads slow people down. High speed transport, under the pressures of capitalist expansion, inevitably places the necessities of life unnecessarily further and further away. Feet become a burden or, at best, a means by which to reach a car which, aside from its fetishistic powers of consumer enticement, becomes a necessity for every form of material transaction. With more and more people being forced to travel further and further away journey times inevitably increase until the productive population are spending two or three hours a day crawling along at half the speed of a bicycle.
Power stations exhaust us. The system’s appetite for energy is insatiable. It uses everything available and then demands more. Social-relations in a society which is completely dependent on energy-hungry machines, are inevitably dictated by the technocratic stress of fuelling and maintaining them, along with the unimaginable power of those who control (and will do everything in their power to control) energy sources. When well-being is yoked to the capacity to consume oceans of energy, those who have access to the central management such a system demands increase their power, speed and comfort at the expense of society as a whole, which is forced to subsume human needs to the demands of technocratic education, the consumption of mechanical slaves, constant warfare over energy supplies and the hyper-growth of kafkaesque bureaucracy.3
Security forces make us insecure. A world that relies on professional law-enforcers external to the community is one that is unable to deal with its own problems. When these law-enforcers are in the pay of the system, justice must take second place to defending the needs of the system. Individual policemen and army personnel, like any other professional, may well be decent folk (see myth 15), but they are employed by the system, to protect the system. There are two inevitable consequences of this. Firstly, the process of realising justice becomes slow, expensive, burdened with middle-men and, ultimately, unjust (see myth 14), and, secondly, human-beings become completely incapable of dealing with disagreements and differences; infants, effectively, who are forced to go crying to mummy and daddy when problems occur. The fear of ‘disorder,’ and the alternations between violence and apathy, produced by ‘law and order,’ are also inevitably fomented by other professional activities which subordinate human beings to entirely passive — and highly ordered — roles,4 such as providing municipal housing to poor people5 rather than giving away land and building materials, or allowing the homeless to occupy unused buildings; unthinkable to both capitalists and socialists6.
Management annihilates meaning. Management serves itself. Many people claim to understand this yet, at work, or in dealings with the state, ask themselves over and over again why ‘they’ have made such and such a preposterous decision. ‘Why have they…? Why don’t they just…? I don’t get why they would…? But why can’t they…?’ Stop right there! Large hierarchical organisations whose prime directive is to grow more and more powerful by controlling more and more life, necessarily proliferate bureaucratic functions and functionaries which exist solely to convert life into data7. Only by naming (and fixing names), measuring (and standardising measurements) and recording (everything that happens, forever) can nature and people be completely controlled; the objective of the perfect management system. If the data do not exist, or there is not enough of it, no matter, the manager either creates tests, laws, benchmarks, targets, indices, reviews, meetings, presentations, surveys and portfolios to produce more or, very often, she simply does next to nothing but cling to a privileged but wholly pointless administrative position8. That such ‘practices’ greatly impede the activity of the managed — and create even more frustration, violence, alienation, apathy, anxiety and anomie — is not just irrelevant; it is the entire point.
Naturally, in an intensely managed world — in which everything, including language, which is to say, thought, is under specialised control — none of the realities of professional life can be seriously considered, or even mentioned9. They appear astonishing, ludicrous, ‘utopian,’ or, if it looks like enough people are taking them seriously, a grave threat which must be brutally extinguished by the international professional priesthood, which will stop at nothing to protect its vast power over human life.
Professionals, it is easy to forget, wield extraordinary control over ordinary people, who can do nothing of social value without professional validation and who find that everywhere they turn to grasp reality — in art, in justice, in consciously inhabiting the body, in love-making, in spontaneous innocence, in self-knowledge and even in death — the self-serving authority of the expert stands before them. The reason it is easy to forget the immense and pervasive power of the educated middle-man, is because professionals, who dominate education and media, never mention it. They know that their authority rests on illusory credibility, on quasi-addictive dependency and on inculturated irresponsibility (the belief that nothing can be done without professional intercession; that it is teachers who educate us, doctors who dispense health, lawyers who solve problems, politicians who run the country — not us), and they know that the beliefs they indoctrinate us with,10 despite being drummed into children from moment one of their ‘socialisation,’ and despite being more widely accepted than any religious belief in history, are actually more fragile than snowflakes. And so even the suggestion that people are not born to be passive consumers of professional services, that they do not need successively more complex tools by which to live or a cadre of intensely institutionalised mono-maniacs to determine their needs, must be treated as outrageous heresy.11
As we enter the final stages of the system the ancient professionalism of the priest, the classic professionalism of the enlightenment, and the modern professionalism of industrialisation, give way to an even more pervasive and oppressive form of management; the post-modern professionalism of post-industrial society. Institutions — closed, bordered, slow, rigid — are not well suited to immaterial, networked forms of production, surveillance and control,12 and so many tasks previously managed by institutionalised professionals become automated and ‘distributed’. This automation process combines the artificial intelligence of powerful computers with the artificial stupidity of powerless people, forced to watch, teach and discipline themselves in order to engage with online work (including ‘job-seeking’) and ‘society’ (talk to friends, pay bills, consume culture, etc.). Automated and semi-automated surveillance, data-gathering, classification, rating and performance management systems demand constant self-management (and self-censorship) to successfully engage with. Productive units in modern economies must now master techniques of time-management, anger-management, self-branding, self-control and emotional labour which formerly a professional expert imposed. Modern people, motivated by anxiety, precarity and rootless momentum, must construct the corporation of the self and launch it alone upon the high seas of the late capitalist market. They must be their own workers, supervisors, ceos and share-holders (see myth 4), which allows actual elites and upper management to fade into the background while the tasks of lesser professionals (teachers, journalists, designers, pilots etc.) get absorbed by ai, dumping their bewildered practitioners into the mass of precarity.
The ongoing death of the middle class is much bewailed — by the middle class. It would be funny, were it not that the halfmen once employed to oversee the school, the barracks, the church, the office and the asylum are to be vaporised, diffused through the worldbrain and then installed in your mind.
Cancer, heart disease and diabetes hardly existed two hundred years ago. Those diseases that did exist (tb, smallpox, etc.) were not merely reduced but totally [albeit temporarily] eradicated and not by professional technique or specialised understanding of aetiology but by environmental improvements. The environment also causes cancer, heart disease, diabetes and all other modern illnesses. Improve the world we live in and they will vanish. Until then doctors can tinker and ‘improve’ all they like, but nothing, essentially, will change.
Smallpox vaccination became effective when it became part of wider culture and was applied independently of professional delivery. The doctors involved in developing and promoting these vaccines were considered quacks by the established professional hegemony of the time. tb was already on the decline when the vaccine was developed and had almost vanished by the time the first sanatorium opened. Cholera, dysentery and others also peaked and declined completely independently of clinician’s control.
In addition improvements in antiseptic hygiene which helped eradicate the ailments of industrial modernity were actively resisted by the medical profession of the time. The two men behind it, Joseph Lister and Ignaz Semmelweis were actively persecuted; the latter even giving his name to the widespread tendency of medical institutions to reject new paradigms in health.
See Ivan Illich; Medical Nemesis, Energy and Equity, Celebration of Awareness.
See Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder.
Designed by professional architects who wouldn’t be seen dead in them.
Colin Ward, Cotters and Squatters, the Hidden History of Housing.
James C. Scott, Seeing like a State.
David Graeber calls this managerial feudalism; the multiplication of what are essentially idle earls and barons within the court of the corporation. The huge influx of these useless, but incredibly well-paid administrators was due largely to the colossal influx of empty cash-power that financialisation injected into capitalist institutions.
Such facts also include; that law generates crime, schools make us more stupid, social media destroys society and the news media prevents us from understanding the world. These are addressed in myths 9, 17 and 32.
Unconsciously of course. Professionals, like parents, don’t believe they are ‘brainwashing’ those they ‘care’ for. They just think they are ‘doing the right thing’, teaching us, healing us, helping us.
Ivan Illich, Disabling Professions.
Byung-Chul Han, quoting Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control.
29. The Myths of Pseudogender & Monogender
A thoughtfully strategic feminism should therefore eventuate in anarchism, not in fantasies of matriarchal table-turning; and in the abolition of work, not in caterwauling for equal pay for equal work. The only mathematically certain way to equalize, gender-wise, government and work is to get rid of both of them.
Bob Black
The self-mastery of masculinity and the mystery of femininity are both existential threats to the system, which cannot allow men to be men or women to be women · · · The first consequence of living in the system is pseudogender; gender as a sexist fact, which leads, in turn, to violence, as the sexes no longer understand each other · · · The second consequence of living in the system is monogender; gender as a ‘feminishist’ spectrum. This leads to boredom, as the sexes can only understand each other.
Man is born split from a conscious, contextual reality which woman never really leaves. This split — the division of an absolute experience of reality into a relative emotional-conceptual lattice of this and that, here and there, me and you — is what we mistakenly call ‘intelligence’. Woman is also capable of cutting herself off of course, and susceptible to being split too, but her intelligence is ultimately more immediate, spontaneous, apt, selfless, creative and absolute; all qualities which the system denigrates or actively punishes. The world refuses to recognise female-type intelligence, in women or in men, as intelligence for the simple reason that the world was made by insane men.
In a sane world man strives to reintegrate his cut-offness into an embodied reality that most women never entirely abandon. This mission, which takes man thirty or forty years to realise, is what we understand as ‘becoming a man’. Women do not become women in the same way.1 She embodies a primary intelligence which he, merely clever, strives, for much of his life, to realise. When he ceases to strive in this way, she loses her respect for him and eventually, as his attention becomes corrupted by its rootless self-referentiality, she begins instinctively — often unconsciously — to hate him for his inveterate selfishness; a hatred, or distrust, that lodges deep within her psyche; reappearing once a month. All this wounds man, and, if he has any integrity — if he is what we might call ‘a real man’ — inspires him to raise his game, the two of them working together towards a mutual state of embodied dignity and psychological freedom manifesting as gendered sanity, complementarity or togetherness.
In an insane world such reintegration is denied man. His self, and its cleverness, are the be-all and end-all. He still strives, but not now to consciously master his self and integrate it into the context, but to control his self and, through this control, subordinate the context to his will, his fucking will that is; to impregnate every woman on earth. To achieve, in other words, extrinsic, worldly, cock-power.
A widespread premium on extrinsic male power leads to a society formed of male hierarchies, which is to say, warfare for top positions in a pyramid of sexual selection filtered by the approval of women who desire extrinsically powerful men and who use their own extrinsic cunt-power (using youth, beauty, fertility and the vague promise of sex) to acquire top cock. Men and women, in such a society, come to resemble self-informed caricatures of maleness and femaleness; the men being openly aggressive, hyper-rational, sexist, filthy and obsessed with domination and the women being vain, bitchy, utterly unreasonable, masochistic, physically feeble and obsessed with manipulation. These identities, sometimes known as ‘traditional gender roles’ are not gender. They are pseudo-gender; clichés built on a pre-modern civilised system that rewarded such exaggerations.
As the system progresses, those within it become more and more cut off from their innate, natural, conscious and gendered connection to the natural or social context. All that is innate, natural, conscious and gendered is then completely ignored or actively (albeit unconsciously) perceived as a threat, and exterminated. Man is denied all opportunities to engage in his odyssey and woman is denied the capacity to embody, or to recognise, her inborn intelligence, let alone express it. A new form of madness begins to develop in which the entirely unnatural, or disembodied, thrives; the monogender.
Initially, as only a small group of elites can cut themselves off from reality, gender begins to dissipate in only the highest classes of society. As power spreads, and more and more people can afford to live an entirely egoic life, so monogendered characteristics and priorities begin to spread down to the middle classes; the middle men who organise the expanding system. In the most decadent phases of societies such as Greece and Rome such middle-men were still very few. In the modern world, they represent an enormous number of people. Most people in the West have almost nothing to do with nature, with society or with their own bodies. Everything they do and perceive comes through the mediated market, which is incapable of recognising, valuing or promoting any kind of genuine difference, complementarity, self-mastery or mystery.
What the advanced market recognises is an insane form of maleness — abstraction, egoism and explicit violence — blended with certain market-friendly attributes of depraved femaleness — subservience, passivity and implicit aggression. These attributes are, ideally, to be found in every ‘body’ on earth. This it calls ‘diversity.’
Note that the term monogender does not refer to a breakdown of ‘traditional gender-roles.’ Such sexist, pseudo-gendered, pairings do get roundly — and correctly — rejected, but along with these our innate gendered dispositions and sensitivities are also effaced. Natural, innate gender and unnatural system-friendly pseudogender are then indistinguishable. Gender, complementarity and all forms of innate maleness and femaleness appear ‘sexist’. The monogendered woman begins to ambitiously fight her way up through male hierarchies to ‘battle sexism’, while her ally, the monogendered man, denigrates all hierarchies as sexist (an integral part of postmodernism: see myth 24) while, allied to increasingly powerful pseudo-male women, creating independent hierarchies of his own.
Two apparently opposing cultural forces turn out once again to be essentially the [oppo]same. The pseudogendered are motivated by a desire to crawl up established rankings in order to gain access to a maximum number of female automatons addicted to men who possess power over the flesh pyramid; while the monogendered are motivated by a desire to create their own hierarchies predicated on the fantastic idea that gender does not really exist. The rejection of ‘sexism’ by monogendered feminists is made to appear revolutionary and progressive, but turns out to be the same sad fear of fundamental difference and shoddy lust for extrinsic power; the only kind that pseudogendered sexists and monogendered feminists understand. The innate need for men to master themselves, to achieve or be worthy of a state which women — sane women — never leave, the miraculous complementarity of gendered domain (his extrinsic genius and her intrinsic genius) which has united lovers for millennia2 and love, a state which, for obvious reasons, is never intelligently addressed or expressed by either monogendroids or their sexist counterparts; all this is invisible or reduced to cliché and sentiment.
I mention ‘monogendered feminists’. Note that we are not talking here about women who help out other women, or who value femininity, or who are repulsed by the insensitive, self-loving, power-hungry, partially aware, hyper-abstract children who call themselves ‘men’. Nor are we talking about so-called ‘first-wave’ feminists, who fought for the vote. Despite being misguided (as democracy is misguided: see myth 16) this clearly made some kind of sense (as, indeed, voting occasionally does). There are all sorts of feminism, just as there are all sorts of democracy. When I say ‘monogendered feminists’ (or feminishists) I am referring to women who are estranged from nature, from society, from their own bodies and, most tragically of all, from their own mysterious, innate, terrifying and loving femininity. I am referring to women, and men, who belong to a club which is founded on gaining power within the civilised system and on justifying the appalling gender-deformities that the modern system creates. This is pretty much mainstream, or ‘third-wave’ feminism, the kind you read about in the Guardian or the New Statesman; although many of the views of second-wave feminists, such as Germaine Greer, radical (‘fourth-wave’?) transgender activists and many other unhappy folk also fall under the term as I use it here.
Returning to pseudo-gender. Sexists deform gender by caricaturing it, by focusing only on those qualities, feelings and ideas which reinforce extrinsic power. Man is a man, says the sexist, and woman is a woman, and we all know what that means; he protects his gal, pays her rent, hurtles round the world on magic carpets fucking other women and never cries; while she gabbles on, takes care of the kids, gets emotional and frets about her shoes. He cannot perceive her competence, her intelligence or, most terrifying of all, her depth without turning his entire world on its head, and so he keeps her in what he deceitfully thinks of as ‘her’ place while immersing himself entirely in his own cut-off play-palace.
The ally of the sexist man, the doormat woman, is terrified of standing on her own two feet. She is dependent on his power and his attention — what dwindling morsels he offers after the honeymoon — and she is hypnotised by the fantastic belief that one day her love will change him,3 that he will love her again like he used to. Meanwhile she contents herself with artfully directing his priorities, buying shit she doesn’t need, over-eating, day-dreaming her life away, fussing over her instagram account or taking what love she can get from children and animals (her substitutes for true love; just as business and sport are his).
The sexist world-view is consecrated in all ‘fallen’ ideologies (see introduction), which are founded on the assumption that women are, with the notable exception of mummy, whores; essentially interested in nothing nobler than protection for their unweaned child and ever-ready to deceive men to slope off with a more powerful penis. No sooner had man formed his first civilisations than myths damning diabolical woman appeared to justify his fear and consequent subjugation of the strange, wild intelligence she embodies. Over the course of ten millennia superstitions evolved into religions which evolved into science (specifically evolutionary psychology), but the sexist attitude to women remained essentially the same; men are superior to women or, in the case of modern, monogendered feminism, the male mind is superior.
