Future of a Delusion

summarizing some of our discussions in the reading group and going over the political vibe

Revolution vs. Revelation

Magical thinking is what monotheism hoped to banish. Monotheism tried to rid people of their illusions through a doctrine of sacrifice, submission and acceptance of the mystery and power of the one God. For the Frankfurt School, the monotheistic direction in spirituality led to the Enlightenment, Dark and Light. On the side of the Light, the discovery of the universalism of the scientific method set us up to be free as much as possible of the threat of the natural world. On the dark side, capitalism and industrial modes of production unleashed the world eating expansion of the intenstive logic of exploitation, wage labor, profit extraction. Capitalism and its doctrine of universal self interest: cult of “feelings,” radical subjectivity, the counterculture, hatred and contempt for history and tradition, total embrace of the commodity..

 In premodern times, in agricultural societies - transactionalism with many deities governing rain, harvests, plagues and natural forces that could easily kill frail and hungry human beings looked something like this: I do this for you, you that for me. Sacrifice and submission were the same things. The Abrahamic religions represented a phase of abstraction in transaction and was born of a political economy based on the mastery of writing, recording and long distance trade and exchange. Mastery of irrigation, seafaring and trade with other peoples, the conquest of the plow made people less vulnerable to natural forces. Feeling their new power, people dealt with  gods who were less bloodthirsty, but more demanding of sublimated forms of submission. I guess that’s progress. And then the scientific revolution forced people to acknowledge that the monotheisms were themselves regressive: method and experimentation, knowing and describing the laws that govern a shared objective world/reality led to the idea that technology and science could be but weren’t put to the liberation of workers from the punishing discipline of wage labor.

At this moment, in both public and private aspects of my life, I see the arc of progress in the U.S. stalled out in my lifetime. I see regression everywhere both: narcissism the default position of the progressives. Sadism the default position of conservatives. The cult of feelings, the tyranny of “choice” and sexual voluntarism, the fetishism of vulnerability make the liberals especially delusional about class war.

The cult of the self is the post 68 regressive paganism in which we are all trapped. It goes well with late capital, and its feckless, low key ideologies.  

Libs are the ones uniquely unable to understand the need for strengthening of our collective capacity for reason and negation and critique necessary to fight the forces of monopoly and oligarchical capital. They can’t figure that one out, because of their collective nepo-baby mindset: they don’t want to understand that wage labor is at the core of domination and exploitation. Nancy Fraser once asked the question of Leftists after the defeats of the 1980s: recognition or redistribution?  Every Left/liberal org and person gave up on redistribution in order to pursue different forms of personal and group recognition. Delusions, the liberals of the professional class trade in nothing but.