It is possible to chart the spread of this civilisation by following the parallel spread of myths which represent or justify the new state of affairs.7 These take the form of a fall from a pre-agricultural garden paradise, or age of gold, into a desacralised, sinful universe of constant toil, presided over by a male sun god (Zeus, Jahweh, Indra, Marduk, etc.) who vanquishes a dark and mysterious female or feminine ‘devil’, usually symbolised by a snake (Typhon, Satan, Vritra, Tiamet, etc.). This Big Boss in the Sky conquered the mythos of the earth as civilised warriors8 and priests conquered and subjugated the freer and far more peaceful populations of Africa, Asia and Europe.
The next stage in the immiseration of mankind comprised two complementary-yet-antagonistic processes; the rise of Judea — the first society to recognise one ‘true’ God — and the rise of Greece — the first rational society, and one of the first in which scepticism of divinity appeared. These two events seem to be, at first glance, quite contrary,9 but the myths and philosophies of the ancient Greek thinkers, and those of the psychopathic old man who ruled over Judea were, in all important points, identical. Jahweh and his Patriarchs, Plato, Aristotle and most of the writers celebrated by classical Greek and Jewish society, hated women, nature, foreigners and ordinary people, and declared that the real world — the earth that is — was devoid of the living mystery which earlier ‘backwards’ people had worshipped. Greek and Jewish myths are both comprised of psychotic child-men rampaging their way around the world, raping and murdering on the flimsiest of pretexts. We call these stories ‘classics’. Greek and Jewish societies also had a veritable obsession with law, which overtook regal — and usually despotic — whim as the means by which society, and by extension, the entire scientific universe, was to be governed. It was through this intensely abstracted view of reality of the Greeks and the Jews — through an abstract rational system, an abstract deity in a distant abstract heaven and an abstract, utterly impersonal, law to which all are equally submitted — that what we understand as ‘science,’ was able to overtake, and then deride, superstition; and what we call ‘democracy’ supplanted monarchy10. That one nightmare had been supplanted by another, essentially identical, was as difficult to perceive then as it is now (see myth 22).
The dismal universe of the Greeks and Jews, conceived in both cases as one of cheerless labour and exclusion from paradise, was founded on the power of severing reality from the primary technique of systemic abstraction. This went hand-in-hand with the creation or development of three secondary techniques of control, exchange and communication which revolutionised the way people related to each other and to the universe. The first technique was usurious debt, first invented by Mesopotamian kings and priests in the third millennium bc to impoverish and enslave their people, but enthusiastically taken up by almost every ‘civilisation’ which followed. So deeply had debt ingrained itself into the fabric of society that the religions of the Middle East began to reposition reality itself as a debtor-creditor relationship; the debtors, or sinners, being us and the creditor being the Bank of God, managed here on earth by his professional servants; accountants, managers and priests.
The second technology of control, invented by the Greeks, was money — an impersonal, indestructible, abstraction which rendered people, objects and, eventually, the entire universe as a collection of homogeneous quantities; things which could be bought and sold. It was thanks to the attitude that money engendered that Greek philosophers began to view the entire universe as a composite of discrete, rationally-apprehended particles (aka ‘atoms’) and ideas (or ‘platonic forms’), chief among them, the tragic atom — cut-off, isolated, alone — we call ‘man’.
The third revolutionary and coercive technology of civilisation, was alphabetic literacy, first developed by the Phoenicians but perfected and worshipped by the Greeks and Jews. This technique, for all its potential use and beauty, stimulated a disastrous change in consciousness amongst those who had access to it, who began to see inspiration not as a direct experience or mysterious flow, but as a function of memory; meaning not as an inherent quality, but as a series of words; and society not as something which man has direct contextual access to, but as something which comes to him through the reading mind. Again — as would be the case with every epochal technology which followed — almost nobody saw that the powers being gained were at the expense of faculties withering; in this case, of sensate inspiration, contextual awareness and the ineffable music of speech.
These three techniques had three combined effects. Firstly they radically enhanced the separation of the individual from his or her context; as money-power requires no relationship to sustain it. Secondly, they intensified the isolated and isolating power of individual possession; as my things are no longer tied by tradition, or reciprocity to others. And thirdly, they created a belief, in all who came under the grip of debt, literacy and money, that reality is, ultimately, a mind-knowable, possessable, thing.
And so, by the time Greece ceded power to Rome (which, with the adoption of Christianity, fused Graeco-Judaism into one empire), all the basic components of a brutally subordinating mechanical civilisation were in place; intense social stratification, hostility towards the unknown, an abstract image of the universe which was taken to be real and a sense that money, mind, language and the cosmos are all similarly structured — and equally significant — entities. All the consequences of such foundational attitudes were also in place; namely law and crime, armed forces and war, spectacle and boredom, religion and scientism, widespread suffering, loneliness, alienation, insanity and ecological ruin. These components, in various forms and combinations, continued to govern the affairs of men and women for the next thousand years in Europe, Asia, large parts of Africa and, eventually, in South America.
Sometimes civilisations fell, such as Rome; an event greeted by relief and an improvement in quality of life for ordinary people.11 Sometimes they were kept in check, such as Japan’s long history of successful independence, and less uncivilised social systems could then reassert themselves. These systems, which we normally call feudal, although encouraging exploitation — sometimes extreme suffering — represented an overall improvement in the lives of ordinary people. The European medieval peasant, for example, was self-sufficient, had abundant access to common land, did non-alienating labour to an extremely high standard, and very often at an exceedingly leisurely pace, had a colossal number of holidays12 and had reasonably healthy social relations with his fellows, even those outside of his class. Subservience to the clock was unknown outside of monasteries, death was viewed as a lifelong companion rather than a time-obsessed ‘reaper’, madness was rarely a pretext for exclusion and even gender relations, despite many horrendous exceptions, were reasonably egalitarian. Medieval men and women were also, particularly in the later middle-ages, an inspiring, heretical and anarchic pain in the feudal arse13. There was, of course, sickness, warfare and the psychological miseries of religion, especially towards the end of the period when something like hell descended on the feudal world in Western Europe, but exploitation such as was practiced before, in Imperial Rome say, or after, in Victorian England, was relatively low; poverty, the kind that, for example, modern Indians are familiar with, was relatively rare and radical rebellion, the kind that twentieth century Spanish anarchists and European hippies could only dream of, was relatively common.14
All this was to change. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a new form of the system arose; capitalism. In all essential aspects capitalism was a continuation and refinement of the civilised project that was conceived at the dawn of superstition, first made manifest in Mesopotamia and Egypt — the first societies to operate as if the people who comprise it were components of a mechanism — and then developed by Judea, Greece, Rome, China, the Abbasids, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Spanish, the Dutch the British and the us. With each successive civilisation the social-machine was refined and improved. The organisation of classical armies, the growth and regimented management of city-states, the repressive institutionalisation and time-keeping of medieval monasteries, the banking systems of the renaissance; each new technique of social control added to the means by which an autonomous, mechanical, and then digital, governing system could be constructed.
From the seventeenth century onwards every step taken by the elites of Europe (particularly the new class of businessmen and technicians) was towards the creation of this self-regulating system. The industrial revolution, the management of a ‘free’ industrial workforce, the hyper-rationalisation of experience, the conversion of time into money, the proliferation and evolution of schools, workhouses, hospitals, factories, banks, armies and the modern nation state, along with their coercive techniques of surveillance and control (imposing common, standard, uniform names, measurements, currencies, religions, legal systems, urban layouts and so on) were and continue to be to this one end, the manufacture of a mechanical world. By the end of the nineteenth century it had become clear that the creation of a ‘perfect’ global system was going to lead to the total annihilation of society in short order, and so measures were taken to, firstly, protect the labour force against its onslaught and, secondly, to appease the many revolutionary movements which had sprung up in an attempt to resist their horrific fate. The series of reforms that spanned the century between 1860 and 1960 succeeded in improving life for many, but with the deep foundations of the system ignored, and the common ground beneath those completely unperceived, the juggernaut of civilisation rolled on, untroubled and undiminished — indeed in many ways strengthened by reform (see myth 31) — until what few brakes men and women had managed to install were, at the end of the twentieth century, ‘rolled back,’ so that the system could finish its business; the amalgamation of the people, ideas, emotions, techniques, tools, objects, behaviours and ‘natural resources’ (i.e. natural life) which comprise civilisation into a single, monolithic and entirely self-directing mechanism.
Until the end of the capitalist phase of civilised progress, which lasted from approximately 1600 to 1900, the various elements of the system were more or less integrated with nature, human nature and the culture that humans in groups naturally create. The advent of capitalism saw land, labour, energy and time commodified15 and assimilated with all the other components of civilisation into a multitude of rational-scientific-technological processes the sole purpose of which was the production of more output (profit, production, efficiency, etc.). These processes, by externalising or ignoring anything not relevant to the task at hand, inevitably distorted, degraded or destroyed everything they came into contact with. Cotton mills produced more cheap cotton, while devastating local communities, schools produced more compliant workers while terminally corrupting their initiative and sensitivity, farms produced more food while stripping the soil of nutrients and eliminating the wild, gadgets produced more ‘saved time’ while multiplying the work required to build them, and so on. Every technological innovation since has solved one set of isolated problems while producing multiple sets of new problems for which more technical processes are developed to solve. Much fanfare accompanies each new solution — plastic, nuclear fission, high-speed travel, genetic engineering, the internet — or each new prospective solution — smart drugs, virtual reality, cybernetics, nanotechnology, nuclear fusion — while the disastrous pollution, boredom, sickness and madness which they cause are excused, ignored or exploited as new possibilities for technological progress.
By the close of the capitalist era the technical approach to life16 had separated itself from human culture and dominated material life on earth. Over the course of the twentieth century this dominance would spread to every aspect of human and natural experience; for the technical approach was not just restricted to the construction of powerful machines, the harnessing of new forms of energy, the refinement of methods of control or the manufacture of merchandise17, but was applied to the full range of natural and human life; indeed it had to be applied to everything because anything which is independent to rational restructuring, impedes or threatens output. Technical development of one aspect of the system, in one place, demands concomitant development in those aspects that supply its inputs and relieve its outputs. A high-tech factory cannot be developed unless there are high-tech supplies, arriving at high-tech speeds and processed by high-tech employees. These employees are no longer allowed to discover their own style of work, train themselves or live the kind of life they want to, but must be entirely integrated into scientific techniques of programming proven to produce the most speed, power, efficiency, accuracy or whatever the desired output happens to be. The same pressures are applied to literally every human endeavour. Whether you are a sportsman, a potter, a programmer, a singer, a road-sweeper or a police-officer, you are not permitted to go at your own pace, to work out for yourself how to work, to create from your own experience or inspiration, to do as you please, when you please or, God-help you, to wonder why you are working as you do, to what end. Independence of thought, action or even feeling is not an option, considering the distant or long-term effects of your activity is not an option, any practice or reality which cannot be assimilated to techniques of maximum control, productivity and efficiency18 is not an option.
This is one reason why it is useless to reform, refuse or even to attempt to understand independent aspects of the system, in isolation from the whole. Politics, communication, transport, medicine, economics, academia, housing, food, entertainment, management and all work are integrated into a single system of interlocking processes. It is ultimately meaningless to speculate on how the internet has changed human life, or analyse the influence of ‘Big Pharma,’ or attempt to diagnose the problems with ‘our education system;’ just as it is ultimately futile to reform prisons, or ban plastic bags, or sign petitions; just as it is ultimately useless to oppose the domination of energy companies, medical professionals or state bureaucracy over human life by powering your house with a wood-stove, self-medicating or deleting your Facebook account and tearing up your passport. This isn’t to say that it is meaningless, useless and futile to investigate or try to solve or circumvent these problems at all. We are, after all, about to look at thirty-three aspects of the system, each addressed individually. What is meaningless, useless and futile is to tackle these aspects without reference to the system as a whole into which each element is inextricably integrated; and those who defend the system understand this. They know, or they unconsciously intuit, that the system is best served by focusing on its isolated elements, which they spend their lives doing. Such people we normally call ‘specialists.’
The system more or less forces everyone to become a specialist, to treat separate parts of the universe as objects for technical manipulation. The teacher, for example, must separate the child from his home, his society, his natural milieu and the extraordinary complexity and subtlety of his own life and character, apply fixed inputs to the child’s attention (the various books, tests and projects of the syllabus, augmented by whatever games, trips and ‘experiences’ the school or teacher can add, either officially or pro bono) in order to obtain a desired output; namely integration into the system. Doctors work in the same way, as do scientists, lawyers, social workers, politicians, managers, designers, plumbers, farmers, kitchen porters… everyone.
A world comprised entirely of such rational specialists inevitably leads to nobody knowing what the effects of their actions are or taking responsibility for them (see myth 16). They aren’t trained to do so, and if they do step beyond their allotted roles, they inevitably tread on the toes of someone [else] whose entire life depends on the power they exert over their specialised task. This results in the generation of a near infinite quantity of stupid jobs, created to manage microscopic details or protect specialised power, without the interference of anyone who might know what they are doing.
The system is not, nor can ever be, ruled by men and women who know what they are doing, who perceive the context or who are prepared to put non-systemic ends above the system’s proliferation of means. In this sense, the system is entirely autonomous and self-directed; its prime directive being the only one which an autonomous machine can conceive of; grow, expand, reproduce. Never die. Men and women own or manage various parts of the system, but the only actions which the system allows them to take are those which promote its ceaseless growth. Likewise only those who instinctively promote these actions, who have been accustomed to the systemic way of life since childhood, are promoted into positions where they can ‘freely’ make the right decisions. The system automatically creates filters to remove ‘trouble-makers’ from the path to positions of influence. If someone who is kindly, well-meaning or intelligent ever gains power, he finds himself completely impotent before the system, which will either do everything it can to expel his useless presence, or just allow him to bash his head against a brick wall until his supporters are disappointed and abandon him.
The pre-modern phase of the system was characterised, then, by the abstracted commodification of space, time and energy. Surveyors divided up the land, clocks divided up the day and the state divided up the people19, and all three were put on the market, where they were integrated into ever more sophisticated technologies of production (or manufacture) and techniques of reproduction (or ‘service’) which we normally call capitalism. This pre-modern phase then evolved, in the first half of the twentieth century, into the modern or postmodern system we are familiar with, which seeks to commodify knowledge (or data), debt (via the process called financialisation, whereby the commodified future is manipulated and traded at hyper-speed), perception and emotion (through the virtualisation of all kinds of social interaction), matter (artificial materials, copyrighted molecules, proprietary genes, etc.) and new forms of hyper-energy (petrochemical and nuclear power); in short, the removal of every barrier between the system and the last recesses of reality. Ultimately even our own conscious experience of our own bodies were to be incorporated (or privatised) into the world-mechanism and forced to conform to its rhythms and laws.
Another notable feature of the post-capitalist world is that it increasingly takes on features of other forms of the system, such as feudalism, socialism and fascism. Financialisation has led to enormous amounts of money sloshing around the higher levels of the system which, in turn, has led to, effectively, a feudal network of favours, kickbacks and sinecures; means to keep friends, family and other allies well remunerated while, effectively, doing nothing:20 Large corporations have long depended on government support via military spending, tax-breaks, tax-credits, favourable legislation, state-sponsored r&d and bailouts during depressions and recessions; which is, effectively, a form of state-sponsored socialism for the rich. And the system frequently demands extreme forms of authoritarianism which, particularly under duress, are indistinguishable from fascism and totalitarianism.
The term ‘capitalism’ might, therefore, be useful shorthand, but it is far from accurate. The ‘capitalism’ of today is radically different to the one dissected by Marx, which is why some of his key predictions did not come to pass. He had no idea that the entire world, up to and including the psyche of everyone in it. would become a ‘means of production,’ nor that, consequently, the working-class would become almost completely subdued and domesticated. This is partly why today’s capitalism is now frequently referred to as late-stage, or sometimes neo-liberal. But if we accept that these terms refer to the latest and greatest stage of a project which has been ongoing for at least ten millennia — if we are to understand the entire process — we need a term which encompasses it. Although, as we shall see, it is also problematic, there is no tool better suited to the task than the system, a term which simultaneously refers to civilisation in toto, and the prevailing, encompassing, hyper-sophisticated, post-capitalist world-order we find ourselves in today.
* * *
As the current (and, as we shall see, final) manifestation of civilisation began to take shape, writers and thinkers began to speculate on what the result would be, of what kind of world was coming into being. Of these nightmarish visions of our present four stand as prototypes, and as extremely useful models for fundamental aspects of the system. These are the dystopias imagined by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka and Philip K. Dick;
Orwellian Rule by autocratic totalitarian people, party or elite group. Limitation of choice, repression of speech and repression of minorities. Belief in order, routine and rational-morality. Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed through violent control of sexual impulse. Constant surveillance and constant censorship. Control of bodies by enclosure, fear, explicit violent, repression of dissent and forced obedience to ‘the party line’ (orwellian fanaticism: All must submit). Control of minds by explicitly policing, limiting and punishing subversive language (orwellian newspeak: state-controlled reduction of vocabulary to limit range of thought). Truth cannot be known (aka hyper-relativism or postmodernism); and therefore we need an external authority to decide what the truth is (kings and priests) and to protect society from chaos and madness (the orwellian them: commies, anarchists, extremists, radicals, infidels, plebs, proles, freaks, criminals, etc.).
Huxleyan Rule by democratic, totalitarian, capitalist, technocratic systems. Super-excess of choice. Limitation of access to speech platforms. Assimilation of minorities (via tokenism: see myth 5), foundational belief in emotional-morality, ‘imagination’ and ‘flexibility’. Control by desire, debt, narcotic, technical necessity and implicit threat of violence. No overt control of dissent21 (system selects for system-friendly voices and unconscious self-censorship). Erotic physicality and sexual freedom suppressed via promotion of pornographic sensuality, promiscuity and dissolution. Control of bodies through pleasure and addiction to pleasure. Control of minds by proliferating information and enclosing language within professional boundaries (illichian newspeak, or uniquack: see myth 28). Truth can be intellectually known (the religion of scientism: see myth 23) and is obvious when understood (huxleyan fanaticism: only the wicked can refuse it) and learnt in the process of setting up an internal authority (aka morality or conscience) called ‘education’.
Kafkaesque Rule by bureaucracy. Control of populace (and of nature) through putting them into writing; fixing names, surveying land, standardising measures, tracking movement, quantifying, measuring and recording everything that happens everywhere, thereby abstracting it and making it manageable, which, in itself, induces tractable stress and the schizoid, self-regulating self-consciousness (anxiety about low marks, unlikes, official judgements and the like) of the bureaucratically surveilled. In addiction, bureaucratic functions and practices in an expanding abstract system are increasingly designed to manage their own abstract output. Having less and less to do with the actual lives of those who engage with it bureaucratic tasks necessarily become frustrating, interminable, dehumanising and pointless; a state of affairs which is permitted, and even encouraged, as it automatically grinds down those who threaten management; the informal, the illiterate, the spontaneous, the shifting, the weird, the local, the private, the embodied and all those who seek to have a direct relationship with their fellows; all of which is intolerable to kafkaesque systems, which promote into power hyper-normal functionaries who seek an indirect relationship with their fellows and who, through fear of life, seek to control it through the flow of paperwork.
Phildickian Rule by replacing reality with an abstract, ersatz virtual image of it (aka the spectacle; see myth 9). This technique of social control began with literacy — and the creation of written symbols, which devalued soft conscious sensuous inspiration, fostered a private (reader-text) interaction with society, created the illusion that language is a thing, that meaning can be stored, owned and perfectly duplicated, that elite-language is standard and so on22 — and ended with virtuality — the conversion of classrooms, offices, prisons, shops and similar social spaces into ‘immersive’ on-line holodecks which control and reward participants through permanent, perfect surveillance, the stimulation of positive and negative emotion, offers of godlike powers, and threats to nonconformists of either narco-withdrawal or banishment to an off-line reality now so degraded by the demands of manufacturing an entire artificial universe, that only hellish production-facilities, shoddy living-units and prisons can materially function there.23
These four visions of hell are all founded upon the civilised system. This foundation, or background, serves as the origin and meeting point of Orwellian, Huxleyan, Kafkaesque and Phildickian worlds, which necessarily overlap and interact at key points; namely the fundamental alienation and misery of civilisation, the commodification and rationalisation of capitalism and the hyper-specialised, hyper-technical approach to life of late-capitalism. From this common root grew those branches of modernity and post-modernity which Orwell, Huxley, Kafka and Dick explored and described, and which it is helpful to bear in mind as we investigate our world further.
All modern societies, for example, are both Kafkaesque and Phildickian (indeed virtual Phildickia can be seen as a modern refinement of the hyper-literate Kafkastan) with either a Huxleyan or Orwellian overarching framework. Modern, western, capitalist societies tend to be basically Huxleyan (hkp) and, on the other side of the slit-thin officially acceptable ‘political spectrum’ (aka the ‘Overton Window’), pre-modern, eastern, ‘communist’ countries tend to be basically Orwellian (okp),24 although within these disparities much diversity prevails. We are, while at work for example, largely in an Orwellian mode, where freedom to choose how and when we work is strictly limited (either explicitly or, for modern professionals and precarious freelancer, implicitly), where spontaneity, sexuality are severely punished and where, essentially, we are treated like chattel. When we leave work, however, we instantly enter a Huxleyan world of transcendent freedom, infinite choice, democracy and pleasure; we can comment, vote, travel, consume to satiety, a panoply of sexual and creative opportunity opens out and everyone everywhere treats us (or is at least supposed to treat us) like the capitalist gods we really are (official term; customer); at least those of us who can pay are. The dirt-poor remain in Airstrip 1.
Ideological managers (academics, film directors, journalists, etc.) prefer to have two (or more) dystopian systems because it makes us seem like the goodies and them the baddies. Communism is to blame for their food-banks and breadlines, but capitalism has nothing to do with ours (or vice versa). Sure, our masses have the same miserable lives as theirs, reel under the same bureaucratic insanity, stumble around the same shoddy unreal worlds, and witness the same catastrophic destruction of nature and beauty as theirs do, but at least we’ve got democracy! / at least our families stick together! / at least the trains run on time! / at least gta 9 is coming out soon / at least the Olympics will cheer us up (delete, or exterminate, as appropriate).
I call this extremely common mental-emotional activity, biastification: To excuse one excess of one’s self or one’s society by comparing it with its opposame / false antonym (see myth 22). Our basically Huxleyan nightmare is excused by pointing the finger at their basically Orwellian nightmare. The cult of optimism is excused by comparing it with that of pessimism, cold rationality is excused by comparing it with hot emotion, being ‘a responsible adult’ is excused by comparing it to being ‘an irresponsible child’, hedonism is excused by comparing it to boredom, corporatism is excused by comparing it to statism, and the implicit violence of modern uncivilisation is excused by comparing it to the explicit violence of the lawless pre-modern cults which gave rise to and sustain it.
That all these apparent differences are essentially aspects of the same reality or pseudo-reality becomes visible during crises. When the Huxleyan world is attacked or, at its apogee, begins to break down, it instantly turns into an Orwellian nightmare. When the ‘law and order’ of capitalism disintegrates, those who uphold it are perfectly happy to take their place at the head of feudal gangs and crime syndicates. When the over-excited optimist loses his status he instantly transforms into a suicidal pessimist. When the fun-lover cannot get her fix of excitement she immediately experiences intense, unbearable boredom. When the truth gets close to the rationalist bone, childish, irrational spleen erupts. When a sophisticated virtual addiction becomes unavailable, the addict switches at once to a cruder antecedent. When a socialist revolution seizes the state, capitalist professionals hardly skip a step in transferring to one-party rhythms. When communism falls, commissars switch to raving capitalists in a heartbeat. At no point is a genuine alternative, much less the source of or solution to what ails us, perceived or acknowledged.
Those who build and maintain the system do not have an organ to sense the source, that which is beyond or prior to the biastified opposames of the emotional-rational world. Uncertainty, mystery, femininity, innocence, nature and the context (aka non-specialist reality) are all sources of anxiety to systemoids, who respond to their presence with irritation, hostility and an irresistible urge to either brush them from awareness, or to bring them under comprehensible control. The mysterious and the immediate are met with violence and — the modern companion of violence — rationalisation; the further reduction of experience to quantifiable things, objects, ideas, facts, figures, commodities, prices, wages and so on. Then, as reality is annihilated and a rational, virtual nightmare spreads over the wasteland where the earth once was, the system proceeds to make a series of extraordinary claims to the effect that because people‘s lives have quantitatively improved — because more land or labour has been commodified, because more output has been produced, because the virtual world is faster or more accurately emulates sensory experience, because people are financially richer, or in possession of more amenities, qualifications, knowledge, security or choice — that they are thereby enjoying a superior ‘quality’ of life.
Radical critiques of the system, such as this one, necessarily focus on this so-called ‘quality,’ and attempt to show that it is actually just a larger quantity of stimulation, movement, security or power (relative to boredom, inertia, insecurity or poverty; see myth 24). We have more jobs, yes, and more money, and more fun, and more comfort, and more power; more things — but our lives are not improving. We are becoming lonelier, sicker, more insane, more bored, and more alienated from a natural world which is on the point of expiring. A few technological innovations may genuinely serve us, but the system as a whole enslaves and ruins us. The earth is not becoming a better place to live. In fact everything on it which we deeply value is being destroyed by amenities, choice, prosperity, jobs and progress.
The response of the system to the threat of such a critique is predictable. The system and those who serve it inevitably respond to qualitative degradation with quantitative demands and rebuttals: show me your proof, give me your evidence, explain to me the details, my life isn’t as bad as all that, look at what the papers say, what does all this even mean? Not that there isn’t a place for the facts that professional systemacrats demand — of course there is — but that the problem with and solution to the unhappy supermind are, ultimately, not a matter that can be resolved in this way, technically, rationally, objectively or scientifically (see myth 23). It is to art we must turn to understand our world; which is why those in command of the world spend an enormous amount of energy in debasing great art25, in stripping it of meaning, or of handing it over exclusively to their quality-immune chums.
What follows is a polemic, or as defenders of the system would have it, a ‘rant’26; a direct attack on the roots of the system. It is not, therefore, as radical or even as truthful as the indirect (‘non-factual’) arts of music, painting or myth can be. But although it is unable to reach the ‘existential depth’ of those forms of expression, it does appeal, ultimately, to the same experience; a shared sense of quality, or truth, or poetry, or love; words, you will notice, which are meaningless to systemic [capitalist, communist, scientific, religious, institutional, postmodern] thought, not to mention somewhat cheesy, fanciful, perhaps even rather unpleasant feeling.
I mention feeling because it is in sense, ultimately, that my case rests. If you do not feel what I have to say as expressing some kind of reality, in your own experience, then, no matter how truthful my account, you’ll already be starting to feel that it is stupid (‘unrealistic,’ ‘amateurish,’ ‘unprofessional’), immature (‘naive’, ‘sixth-form,’ ‘inappropriate’) pretentious (‘edgy,’ ‘naval-gazing, ‘too deep for me!’) or, at best, debatable (‘who are you to say?’ or ‘oh well, I guess that’s your opinion, and we’re all different’); and you’ll already be obviating these unpleasant feelings by focusing on the details of what I am saying, removing them from the context of the entire point (‘what about all the good things the system does,’ ‘what about all the nice journalists and teachers and doctors there are — you must be so angry!’) and objecting to whatever mistakes or inconsistencies you can find. You will, in a word, find it all non-sense (‘I couldn’t get past the first chapter!’).
When I say ‘feeling,’ I am not referring to emotion, which is also (as presented in the sister volume in this series) a quantitative experience, but to the felt quality of life, which you either experience, or you don’t — and which no argument will ever reconcile you to, any more than an essay can persuade you that a song or film you love is naff.
A genuinely different quality of life, to the quantifying self, just sounds wrong. It creates an emotion of ‘don’t like,’ which the mind then justifies by identifying something else in its memory banks which it also doesn’t like. Take for example the proposition ‘love is unconditional; it requires no condition to experience it.’ To those who are dependent on conditions for their love — on fun experiences, familiar people, nice possessions and so on — this statement sounds abstract, unreal, intellectual, religious, insane, boring, stupid, weird or factually ludicrous (‘Oh, so you can feel love if everyone you know dies, can you?’). Or take the proposition ‘civilisation is collapsing.’ This sounds radical, extreme, exaggerated, angry, simplistic, dangerous, delusional, hypocritical, socialist or factually dubious (‘Look at how powerful the government is! Look at all the experts who disagree!’). Or take isolated claims such as ‘murder is worse than rape,’ or ‘the Nazis supported Zionism’ or ‘Prince Harry murdered Afghans’ which sound prejudiced, offensive, distasteful, insensitive or tactically unsound. Or take someone who utters such propositions. He or she sounds like a crank, a weirdo, a fool, a terrorist, a sexist, a racist, a commie, a loser, a nutter, a ‘mystic’, a schizophrenic (see myth 26), a dilettante (see myth 28), a pessimist, a cult-member, a conspiracy theorist or an out-and-out fiend or fraud.
The reason why all these things sound wrong, is because the system-colluding mind cannot bear to be criticised and so it either ignores the criticism entirely or, if that’s not possible, focuses on secondary aspects of it; how it feels (‘Weird!’), the style in which it is delivered (‘Boring,’ ‘unfocused,’ ‘rambling’), what it resembles (‘It’s basically a rehash of Buddhism and Marxism isn’t it?’), what it means divorced from context (‘Racist! Sexist! Madman!’), any isolated errors it might contain (‘Ha ha ha! Misattributed quote!’), who is making the criticism (how he sounds, what he wears, who he sleeps with), and so on and so forth.
These crude reactions are, effectively, unanswerable. You might as well reason with a child shouting ‘no I’m not, you are’ over and over again. But those who own and manage the system are well aware that they are of limited efficacy and, on their own, betray a catastrophic lack of integrity. Hence the existence of an ideology industry to produce and disseminate myths by which the system can protect itself against radical attack; by which owners and managers can live without conscience and workers and outcasts can die without complaint; by which a counterfeit unworld can justifiably replace the earth we once lived on; myths of the benevolence of the system, of its eternal inevitability, of its unquestionable truth, of its glory, beauty, utility and equity.
These are…
