Likewise Utopian thought must be limited to superficially tinkering with capitalism. A radical alternative to the market-system, which naturally, effortlessly and completely returns power, freedom, conviviality, complementarity, responsibility, autonomy and the natural world to ordinary men and women; which seeks to revolutionise consciousness from the dominating ideologies of the system and the dominating influence of the so-called civilised world; which allows labour and land to form themselves into the miraculous playground they could easily be; which sources its inspiration from the scenius and genius of Utopias and Utopians past and present; all of this must be confined to the vaguely amusing fantasies of unrealistic dreamers.
The standard means of disposing of such dreams is, firstly, to brush them off instantly, without reflection (‘I threw the book across the room!’); secondly to laugh at them (‘hahaha, no cars!’) or at the person who expresses them (‘hahaha, ridiculous shoes!’ or ‘hahaha, he’s criticising society and here he is participating in society!’) or at the first nutcase that can be found who agrees with them (‘hahaha, one of his followers is a fruitarian!’) or at the style in which the ideas are presented (‘unfocused word salad!’); thirdly to pay hasty, unreflecting, but highly reactive attention to them (freaking out at trigger words); fourthly, related to this, to focus laser-like on isolated utterances divorced from their context (the entire point), basing fantastic misrepresentations upon them (‘you’re criticising the left, therefore you are an ally of the right’) or highlighting irrelevant errors (‘he understands nothing; look, he got a number wrong’); and finally, as we have seen, to continually demand rational details. To ask, for example, how a functioning Utopian system would handle selfishness, the distribution of surplus and nuclear weapons. Most questions like this can, as we shall see, be answered (people, as opposed to systems and institutions, would handle them), but the point is that a move from qualitative critique to quantitative detailing, removes the quality — the point, the context and the ring of truth. Imagine talking to an intelligent and learned seventeenth century English farmer about his unhappiness with feudalism, or this ‘capitalism’ thing he was suggesting, and then asking him how an international high-tech debt-economy which depends on infinite ‘growth’ is supposed to function. Imagine presenting to him the image of a modern computer processor factory plonked in the middle of Stuart Hampshire and asking him what he would do with it, how he would propose to run it, how would it integrate with the economy. Imagine protesting that ‘people would never understand’ or that ‘the gentry aren’t going to like it.’
All ridiculous; and capitalism is something which is, in essence, based on fact (it is describable, quantitative) and egoic emotion (it demands anxiety, craving and violence to function). How much more ridiculous to ask such questions of a critique which comes from a source which is prior to, or greater than, such facts and fears: an ultimately unmanageable reality; the quality of life and our innate sense of it.
But of course quality — the intelligence that precedes ego — is what the system was built to annihilate and supplant. This is why we have the nightmarish sense that love is going out of the world. We do not have direct relations with our fellows, or with our environment — everything goes via the system — which provides a constant water-tight excuse for treating everyone in the world as an object, as entries on the books; as clients, staff, patients, punters, the population and the people. And as the totalising system replaces all direct relations, so it takes on the status of reality itself, aka ‘the real world,’ a ‘realistic’ realm of necessity and normality, where ‘tough decisions’ have to be made, to be sure, where impressive share dividends necessitate scorching the planet bare, sadly, tragically. But that’s just how it is. Get real!
It is, says the system, ‘unrealistic’ to feed the poor, to redistribute wealth, to let the wild flourish or to dramatically reduce energy consumption. It is unrealistic, in other words, to improve reality. This is like saying it is unclean to clean a dirty floor, because by cleaning it you are removing its current level of cleanliness. The current level of reality in the system is no reality at all, but that is ‘the real world’. Do you see? It doesn’t matter if you do or if you don’t, because, as we have seen, the alternatives to unreality cannot even be perceived, let alone imagined. You may believe that there is something wrong with ‘capitalism’ and we need this thing called ‘socialism,’ you might protest, you might hate Trump and Tommy Robinson and other baddies, you might even riot; but Thatcher spoke true, unwittingly of course; no alternative can be imagined. Imagination within the system is the system. It has always been so, since ego took control of consciousness, but now the system has colonised every last corner of experience. Precarity, technophilic addiction, a constant diet of drugs, unnatural diet (of food and information), lack of meaningful activity, loneliness, total estrangement from the wild, being forced to consume a dead culture, relentless monitoring, assessing, training and testing, and the diffuse background anxiety of living in a portacabin which is hanging over the edge of a cliff combine to block out the light completely. The system now constantly reproduces itself, in the mind of system man and system woman, as the system. Any genuinely revolutionary movement, any great art, any natural expression of humanity which comes from outside of this waking nightmare, even an accidental moment of honesty, strikes the system mind as non-sense, non-truth, non-reality; unrealistic.
‘Oh yes, money is evil, but we all need money don’t you know — without it we’d starve!’‘Oh yes, the law is an ass, but without law there would be anarchy!’ ‘Oh yes, capitalism, awful isn’t it? but look at Stalin. Socialism doesn’t work, does it?’ ‘Oh yes, sounds lovely your Utopia, but who’s going to organise it? How can we vote for them?’ ‘Oh yes, I know, there is absolutely no hope that politics can make the slightest difference to your life, but what else are you going to do?’ ‘Oh yes, overcoming my self, I did that once. Did nothing for me.’ Such objections appeal to objective facts, objective realism2, the illusion of reality produced by the system mind and, over ten millennia of history, projected into reality as the world. And how can you oppose the world? You’d have to be off your rocker! Don’t you realise that without the system — the state, capitalism, socialism, whatever — we would all be murdering, raping and exploiting each other? There would be anarchy!
This word, ‘anarchy’ can only indicate the nightmares of hell for those who rule. Nevermind that enormous societies have existed without states,3 nevermind that we have been murdering, raping and exploiting each other only since the beginning of the system and the invention of states and that the perfected corporate-state is the most exploitative there has ever been, nevermind that we know in our hearts we do not need the system and its laws to rule over us and, finally, nevermind that cooperation, not competition, predominates in free nature — that only a madman could find nature fundamentally, or even mostly, violent4. Nevermind all that. ‘We need the system’ say those who know full well that this is the precise opposite of the truth. The system needs us, and it always has.
Only glimpses and suggestions — for a few nano-seconds here and there in Spain, Chile, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and the Ukraine looked like they might be able to offer the shade of an alternative.
Mark Fisher calls this Capitalist Realism, although, like most people who use words like ‘contingent’ and ‘interrogate,’ he misses the all-embracing nature of the civilised system.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain.
A madman or someone who has never really spent time in the wild; in the ocean, in the woods, on the mountainside, where stillness reigns, just as it does in free men’s hearts. Storms of violence — even, yes, of selfishness — these there certainly are — and pain; but only in the system do they rule. In the early system that is — the system of gangs and lords. After that, all is suppressed, the peaceful and the violent, under a desert of civility and wealth. For a while.
a. A Brief Account ofthe Future
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
Frank Zappa
An account, not a prediction. Nobody knows what will happen and nobody has ever known, but it is possible to describe where this civilisation is leading; the same place as every other before it.
The system is an enormous machine, built from humans1, for the dual purpose of excluding reality from conscious experience and pumping power into the hands of a few rulers, owners and managers. The civilisations which comprise the system all originate in the unnatural2 insanity of the ego, from which they grow, with unnatural insensitivity, violence and speed, ignoring all natural limits, becoming larger and larger, and more and more complex3, until they take on a frightening, momentum of their own which cannot be comprehended, much less controlled. In the beginning, when the civilisation is young and manageable, all is restraint, foresight and heroic energy. As the power and extent of the civilisation is consolidated, this energy is redirected to management, commerce and intellectual and artistic pursuits. Complexity grows, and bureaucracy (and more management) grows to deal with it. More and more people are subjugated to the needs of the system, and techniques of coercion and discipline (including reform, welfare and so on), grow to deal with rapidly expanding inequality and revolutionary ire. Eventually the civilisation enters a period of terminal decline and inevitable fall.
The fall of every civilisation is greeted with epidemics of suicide and murder, every imaginable form of perversion and misery, riots and civil unrest, warfare, drug addiction, gambling, weird religions, preposterous superstitions, widespread insanity, ecological exhaustion, withering of structure, disease, contention, intense materialism, hyper-perverse groupthink, and the production of pus: these aren’t ‘bad luck’, any more than liver-failure, bone-disease, degenerating physical power and whatnot are ‘bad-luck’ when a diseased individual body reaches the end of its life. Not that there is anything natural about the body of the world, any more than there is about the cells which comprise it, all of which are inherently unstable, wasteful and ruinously destructive of the ground they depend upon.
As the end draws near the usurping head employs a series of predictable and increasingly desperate measures to keep the disintegrating body together. These include extreme violence and brutally punitive legal practices (including outrageous rents and taxes), escalating super-production of bureaucracy, frantic technical development (to manage out-of-control complexity), intense hostility towards genuine culture, serious reflection and honesty (which are correctly perceived to be more threatening than any terrorist or barbarian group), hyper-stimulating displays of distraction (to keep revolutionary frustration pacified), frantic monument building, financial bubbles and insane speculation,4 total insensitivity to what is actually happening in the world and an ever more desperate and pathetic reliance on imported labour and far-away supplies, which gradually dwindle to naught. Such painful symptoms and deleterious solutions — along with all the misery, fear, violence, confusion, boredom and lack of vitality that they create5 — were present, in varying degrees, at the decline and fall of every civilisation before ours,6 but this being the first total and totalising world civilisation we find ourselves faced with the epitome and pinnacle of sick — and exponential — decay.
We have now reached a point where humanity is pretty much surplus to requirements. The system has never wanted it, and now, with the advent of artificial ‘intelligence,’ robotics, cybernetics and so on, it doesn’t need it. Many social interactions already occur in the automated-digital world brain, and this, despite some resistance, will increase as all market transactions — which includes participation in education, access to health services, benefits, tax registration, shopping and so on — will be forced to pass entirely through Phildickian virtual channels.
And now this. The gap between intelligence and artificial intelligence will narrow and close. Not because computers are becoming more intelligent (they are merely becoming smarter) but because humans are becoming less conscious. We regularly hear the question ‘can machines be conscious?’ from people who could not possibly tell. When computers are widely ‘understood’ to be conscious, there will be no way to tell the difference between artificial intelligence and those who cannot tell the difference between artificial intelligence and their own disembodied, hyperactive minds.
And now this: The hardware to access society — personal computers and smartphones — will become mandatory. They are already de facto necessities and they are already set up for face-recognition, voice-recognition, thumb-prints and so on. Smart drugs, emotion-recognition and body-sensors will be the next means by which information is captured and recorded; about blood, hormones, brain activity, dna, etc. These will combine with various other institutional records, including records of everything you buy, everything you read, everything you say and everywhere you go, to provide the artificially-intelligent kafkaesque corporate-state with a complete database of every manifest aspect of every citizen (not to mention every particle of the planet).
And now this: The hospital, the prison, the asylum, the bank, the corporate-state and the school will blend into one artificially ‘intelligent’ mono-institution, that is indistinguishable from virtual society. Permanent and continual medical, ‘mental health’ and ‘social care’ interventions; permanent and continual ‘education’, training, assessment and advancement through the ranks of credentialisation; permanent and continual surveillance, tracking, recording, monitoring and measurement.
And now this: The autonomous virtual system, or worldbrain, will completely domesticate, discipline, coerce and punish everyone on earth, instantly. There will be four stages of this orwellian intervention. Firstly, the anxiety and obsessive perfectionism engendered by existing in a constantly surveilled, nuance-free, hyper-literal, electronic spectacle will massively intensify, subduing the population further. Secondly, non-standard ideas, acts, facial expressions and emotions, along with a decline in work enthusiasm, will be instantly recorded and implicitly punished — first you’ll get upbeat messages on your phone to cheer up, then access to resources and opportunities for advancement will magically dry up (doors, both literal and figurative, will not open), then you’ll magically dry up too. Thirdly, overt rejection of the system will be instantly diagnosed as mental illness and tranquillised with mental health drones programmed to identify, target and neutralise any and all ‘sickness,’ which can then be dealt with in the maximum-security hospital system. Finally, severe revolutionary threat will be wiped out by security drones programmed to swiftly track down and eliminate dissenters. All of this will happen automatically, which is to say, quickly, completely, coldly and with continual, innumerable, horrendous and freakishly weird errors.
And now this: With every subversive word, deed, gesture and emotion — every rejection of literalism, relativism, conformity and up-beat obedience — monitored and punished and with society, nature, reality itself obliterated, what damp sparks of life left in the inner world will be extinguished. Model citizens will then be indistinguishable from androids; courteous, flexible, plausible, hard-working, team-players with no recognisable conscience or consciousness. Perfectly unempathic madmen. You may already know a few? In fact you might have seen this personality — the social mask — forming over your own character? Suffocating your innate joy and peace of mind and replacing your uniquely, creative human being with a caricature, a mask, a persona?
Model, masked, citizens are also, necessarily, tense, hyper-anxious, prone to catastrophic overreaction, needy and dependent on consumption, narco-stimulation, spectacle, attention and constant institutional intervention; but these will all be supplied, for a price. Smart drugs, fantastic immersive video games, epic virtual porn, daily hits of micro-fame, titillating tech-updates, superhero epics, horrifying news and shopping are provided to fill the hole where ‘I’ used to be. Eventually these will coalesce into a totalising pan-pornographic narco-spectacle, a ceaseless horror-show of apocalyptic news, live-cams, sex, violence, lurid fantasy and hideous weirdness, beamed 24-7, into everyone, everywhere, all the time. It will be impossible — perhaps even illegal — to ignore this spectacle. Ever faster, and ever madder it will be. reality apathy will set in — people will stop caring about what is real or not — accompanied by a massive intensification of the symptoms of living in an intensely surveilled solipsistic pseudo-reality. No past, no future, no present; an unnatural hypervivid, hyperawake sense of cultureless untime, crippling, insane self-consciousness, paranoia, extreme emotional agitation, ultra-violence unmediated by the slightest sense of empathy, frightening weirdness, catatonic living-death and complete psychological breakdown. We will soon be out of our minds. The young will be most severely afflicted — they are already showing signs of cracking up — and will terrorise and dismay their elders, who, as ever, will blame everything but the system, and everyone but themselves.
And not this: For four decades the system has been in a state of terminal decline, the parlous, macabre and mind-numbingly boring state of affairs we know as late capitalism. The self-reinforcing economic cycle of ever slower growth, ever more private and public indebtedness, ever more inequality and the magical creation of ever more money in a futile attempt to deal with the earth-bound plummet is about reached critical mass and smash capitalism to the chaotic bits it was formed from7; which is to say annihilate the system it represents the perfection of. Nothing can prevent this from happening.
And now this: Corporate power will drop its mask. As energy runs out, and debt bubbles can no longer be paid off with their own interest, the system will start to crash, openly consuming itself as it falls, cannibalising itself, government, public services, nature and even the misery and madness of collapse. As the body of the world dies, private power (often using ecological collapse as a pretext) will brutally crush all dissent, all consciousness, all humour, all ‘offence’, all character. Millions upon millions will be exterminated, or just left to rot as infrastructures break down and absolutely everything ceases to work.
And now this: Bizarre new religions will arise, death cults, mad, horrific extremism (extraordinarily violent forms of nationalism, feminism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and so on), complete insanity on the streets, in the fields and factories — everywhere will become a ceaseless sleepless nightmare.
And now this: As heating oceans and melting permafrost release vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere the temperature of the earth will soar towards life-obliterating levels. Oceans will continue to rise, flooding coastal cities and lowlands. Highly erratic weather patterns will combine with species extinction and soil erosion, leading to crop-failure on an unimaginable scale. Billions will be on the move; an onslaught that will completely overwhelm the rich.
Global warming, the death of the wild and the exodus of half the planet will all occur at the same time as extreme water shortages, a super-rapid spread of the diseases of poverty (and possibly a few horrifying new viruses released from long-frozen glaciers), bacterial immunity to antibiotics, colossal financial crashes, earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, horrendous war and the horror, the horror, will be everywhere.
Why!? We have now seen why all this is going to happen, but why must it happen? The question is ludicrous for the rationalist, who sees no purpose in life, and thus, nothing but perversity in death. Here we have created a global civilisation, and for what? So the whole thing can come crashing down, bringing unimaginable misery upon the earth? You wot? What purpose could such suffering possibly serve? The answer — in truth, the solution — is simple. Only suffering changes man. Only loss, despair, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignity, profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust and the wretchedness of the vanquished8 change ordinary men and women. Extraordinary people change through the good thing, and through the self-mastery that yokes them to it; the joyous source of the world. But such types are few and far between. For the masses, there is no hope; because all they have is hope, and habit, and expectation, and desire, and possession, and progress, and business, and money, and all the other illusions of the system.
That man must be disillusioned is not, I am aware, a message which is likely to find very much popular support, but then no message worth hearing ever does. The individual knows that the pain and suffering she has gone through has not been for naught. Being sensitive and kind — those rarest of qualities in the civilised system — the individual finds no pleasure in the idea that everyone has to go through hell to reach heaven.9 But pleasure is besides the point. Indeed ‘why must suffering occur?’ is besides the point. The point, the eternal point, is only ever and always, after hope has been taken away; what.
As civilisation falls, more and more people are going to see what is in front of their eyes. This seeing, they will be astonished to discover, is why it had to happen at all.
And, of course, from the nature that humans are part of.
The system would have it that there is and can be no such thing as ‘unnatural’ (or any of its synonyms; see myth 24), as all created things exist in a natural universe or are arbitrary inventions of individual minds. The unnatural systems-man cannot perceive the principle of nature because he has no access to it, and so can only recognise appropriations, imitations or impersonations of natural quality, which is why utility, beauty, intelligence and honesty always strike him — instantly, viscerally — as useless, ugly, stupid and dishonest, and why he can only perceive the value of greatness once it has died.
More institutionalisation, more specialisation, more stratification and greater scale.
Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.
‘Awareness of what is happening’ is not on this list. When people begin to be aware that the show’s over the exponentially replicating horror of utter ruin is one minute away.
See, for example, Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Arial and Will Durant, The Lessons of History, John Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival, Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Clive Ponting, A New Green History of the World, Eric C. Cline, 1177 bc: The Year Civilization Collapsed, William Orphuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, Jared Diamond, Collapse, and William Kötke, The Final Empire.
Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?
