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Stranger Registered: 01/31/22 Posts: 194 Last seen: 1 month, 13 days |
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Introduction; From Culture War to Consciousness War:
“At no time in Western Civilization has man accepted so willingly contrivances calculated to weaken and destroy him.” Anton LaVey, The Devil's Notebook There is a specter haunting the Western World, and it is the specter of the Culture War. Ever since roughly the mid 2010’s, this non-event threatens to exert itself on our common reality at every point. It has no substance, yet has the power to warp our whole social reality. As a result, an entire industry has grown up around political and cultural conflict in a way never seen before: the profiteers of this conflict we know as “Culture Warriors,” and they have been working tirelessly for the past decade or so to maintain their illusions of self significance by perpetuating this farcical conflict. How have they done this? The vast majority of people have no use for hyper-political or hyper-ideological gibberish outside of their function as entertainment and as justifications for mock events such as political debates or elections. The average American [voter] hates the politicians in their own party more than they hate those who vote for the other party. This being the case, how does such a pseudo-conflict as the so-called “Culture War” manage to perpetuate itself? The only people who would actually be invested and have a stake in the Culture War are, on the one hand, that handful of rich fucks who already have immense sums of money with which to blow on cultural engineering (people such as George Soros or Bill Gates), and, on the other hand, those who (like Jordan Peterson) have found a way to monetize the SJWs and Wokeist Ideology. Everyone else could care less about the Culture War except on a handful of unique occasions in which it seems to spill over into Lamestream Consciousness. However, as the spectral Culture War has intensified and threatened to develop into a spectral Civil War, more and more things have become political and ideological and the development of narratives and counternarratives has become more and more important to more and more people as the occasions in which the Culture War has spilled over into Lamestream Culture have become more frequent and intense. Every developed country in the world has had their public consciousness become infected, one way or another, with an unhealthy obsession with this grandiose pseudo-conflict which we call the “Culture War'' (a farce maintained by the contrivances and narratives that are cooked up by a relatively small handful of ideologically-driven lunatics). This spectacle has been perpetuated by a stream of media events, big and small, both grassroots and top-down, but no series of past events can maintain it continuously: The Culture Warriors cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of meme making, and thereby the relations of meme-making, and with them the whole relations of internet troll subculture. Media rage-baiting being amplified by the rise of the internet may explain a certain portion of this phenomenon, but in the last analysis we must understand it as a manifestation of already latent contradictions in our society. In order to trace back the origins of the current Culture War, I have done extensive research into history, sociology, psychology and political philosophy in order to provide the best critique of the Culture War available. So far in my research, so far as I can tell, the current Culture War developed out of the previous culture war, and seems to have developed in a series of stages: The First Stage, which lasted from about 2004-2012, was centered around New Atheism and fueled by their capacity to spark the outrage of evangelocons everywhere. Unfortunately for them, this entire enterprise seems to have been single handedly held together by Christopher Hitchens, so that when he died in 2012, the New Atheist Movement died with him, causing the various profiteers of the movement to schism. In a desperate attempt to cling to relevance, many of these profiteers resorted to ideological fervor, incorporating Intersectional Feminist talking points into their content in an attempt to attract a wider base. “Although it had since become less influential, one geeky online subculture that started to move to the right and shared many characteristics of the contemporary alt-right was ‘new atheism’. It was one of the predecessors to the alt-light, with an underlying Christopher Hitchens style of hitting out at the irrational and the faithful. All the ‘Milo OWNS stupid feminist’ type of videos today are made with much the same style as the new atheist videos that were equally numerous on YouTube a few years before with titles like ‘HITCHSLAP. Hitchens OWNS stupid Christian woman’. It also had the same Nietzschean, anti-mainstream, non-conformist sensibility running through it.” Kill all Normies The Second Stage began immediately after and as a direct result of this schism. It was during this time that YouTubers such as the Amazing Atheist or Sargon of Akkad began producing “anti-sjw” content. But soon enough the grifters came to exploit that market by saturating it with sub-par content. The Third Stage began when Trump declared that he was running for President in 2015. Immediately after this happened, the Mainstream News outlets began to take it up as an event, which they tried to perpetuate by exaggerating every nonissue that sprung up around him. On “left wing” “news” outlets, ‘OK’ hand gestures and Tostadas became the new political hot topics (at least for the day) while on “right wing” “news” outlets Trump came to take on an all-important (almost messianic) larger than life persona. Eventually, a positive feedback loop was established whereby Trump would make “outrageous” comments designed to be entertaining to those who would vote for him and infuriating to those who would oppose him. In this way he exploited the growing American Political divide to get free advertising for his campaign in the form of media outlets covering every insignificant statement he made. This was when the current Culture War began to intensify and take on something resembling its current form. The Trump Campaign represents the single largest spill-over of Culture War Politics into Lamestream Society, and ever since its success everyone else who has become invested in it has been desperately grasping at the last semblances of the credibility they enjoyed during that time frame. The Fourth Stage began with the election of Donald Trump and ended with the beginning of the COVID Plandemic. It was characterized by a perpetual attempt on the part of media outlets, culture warriors, politicians and activists to keep their pseudo-conflict going and their veneer of self importance afloat by making Trump out to be some incredibly powerful being of ultimate significance, in one way or another: the media promoted Trump, Trump promoted the media, and advertising competed with Trump. The Fifth Stage began with the COVID Plandemic and ended with the election of Joe Biden, and featured a splitting up of the Republicans and a faux comeback by the Democrats, who had significantly toned their woke rhetoric down by then. During this time, Trump's base both shrank and became more paranoid and devout, culminating in the storming of the capitol building on January 6 2021. The Sixth Stage (the one we are in right now) began with the election of Joe Biden, and has so far been defined by a persistent attempt on the part of politicians, media outlets and culture warriors to perpetuate the Culture War to maintain a veneer of significance. This produces a kind of ideological stasis whereby everything that can be subsumed in the Culture War is, and this seems to be maintained by continued mass involvement, functioning as a sort of positive feedback loop. However, absolutely no one even expects Biden to run again, and Trump being reelected is far from likely, so that we may expect this stage to very quickly develop and accelerate into a seventh stage come 2024. From the beginning, we knew that this Culture War would never happen. After the hot culture war (The Counterculture), after the cold culture war (the Satanic Panic), here comes the dead culture war- the unfrozen cold Culture War - which leaves us to grapple with the corpse of culture war and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing corpse which nobody on the internet has managed to revive. The Intersectional Feminists, Alt-Right and Alt-Left are fighting over the corpse of Culture War. The Culture War has entered into a definitive crisis. It is too late for the (hot) Civil War: this has already taken place, distilled down the years into the Satanic Panic. There will be no other. It might have been supposed that the defection of the MAGA-ists would have opened up new spaces of freedom for Culture War by unlocking deterrence. Nothing of the sort. Since it never began, this Culture War is therefore interminable. By dint of dreaming of pure Culture War, of an orbital Culture War purged of all local and political peripeteias, we have fallen into soft Culture War, into the virtual impossibility of Culture War which translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in de-escalation, as though the eruption of the event of Culture War had become obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse. Culture War has not escaped this virtualization which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted Culture War, the cosmetically treated specter of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge. Even 4chan has lost the privilege of use-value, the privilege of real Cultural Conflict. This confusing information-driven milieu poses a number of questions for us, such as: how did we wind up in this situation? What are the factors that led to and/or perpetuate the current “Culture War?” What will happen when those engaged in it are forced to return to the real world and live with the grim realities of the collapsing Neoliberal world economy and the morbid socio-psychological symptoms associated with Late Capitalism? Is there still any way to avoid hyper-reality and the spectacle and escape into the unmediated reality of directly experienced events? To do this would mean stepping outside of the Culture War and enter the horizon of Consciousness War, requiring us to recognize the entire Culture War, together with all of the adjacent pseudo-conflicts with which the bulk of people have been attempting to make sense of their lives (everything from the “Cis-White-Hetero-Normative-Capi Part 1; Postmodernity: Section 1; The End of Fukuyamaism: “For the first time in this century, for the first time in perhaps all history, man does not have to invent a system by which to live. We don't have to talk late into the night about which form of government is better. We don't have to wrest justice from the kings. We only have to summon it from within ourselves. We must act on what we know.” Bush Sr Inauguration Speech, 1989 “It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope. Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon. Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man—and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz! I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you. Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN. “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”—so asketh the last man and blinketh. The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest. “We have discovered happiness”—say the last men, and blink thereby.” -Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra In his 1989 essay “The End of History?” (which was later expounded on in a book entitled “The end of history and the last man” in 1991), Francis Fukuyama predicted that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead not only to political restructurings in the former Soviet Union, but also a restructuring of our minds. For Fukuyama, the collapse of the Soviet Union signified the End of History, forever establishing Neoliberal Capitalism as the ultimate manifestation of historical progress, writing that: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government… the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world… it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.” However, as he later expounded, with no grand historical conflicts of world-ending proportions to give our lives gravity, our society would attempt to fill this Soviet Union shaped hole in our minds with an endless string of smaller, petty conflicts and delusions of personal exceptionalism (as opposed to its ideological predecessor, “American Exceptionalism”). As a result, we would run the risk of becoming “self absorbed last men,” limp-wristed wimps with no sense of self or purpose in our lives. As he explains: “The end of history would mean the end of wars and bloody revolutions. Agreeing on ends, men would have no large causes for which to fight. They would satisfy their needs through economic activity, but they would no longer have to risk their lives in battle. They would, in other words, become animals again, as they were before the bloody battle that began history. A dog is content to sleep in the sun all day provided he is fed, because he is not dissatisfied with what he is. He does not worry that other dogs are doing better than him, or that his career as a dog has stagnated, or that dogs are being oppressed in a distant part of the world. If man reaches a society in which he has succeeded in abolishing injustice, his life will come to resemble that of the dog… The end of history meant also the end of Unfortunately for us Fukuyama gives no definitive plan as to how this situation could be progressed beyond and no assurances that these problems will not compound to a point which demands action. In fact, he admits repeatedly that there isn’t really any guarantee that Neoliberal Capitalism and its Ideology will both win out in the end and resolve all of our current social ills in the process, establishing themselves as the ultimate manifestations of human progress, but regardless of that he still encourages us to believe as such. But we shouldn’t toss aside Fukuyama's theory upon such a superficial analysis. Clearly history has not ended, but in many ways history has slowed down its pace of development since: a lot has changed between 1989 and 2023, but not quite as much as between 1955 and 1989, or 1921 and 1955. There are even a few concrete phenomena that could be pointed to, such as our voting machines (which are stuck in the 1990s), the speed of commercial airlines (which peaked in 1967), the convenience of our microwaves (which peaked in 1997), and the novelty of our media (which has almost completely disappeared except in B films) Phenomenon like these are the reason why Fukuyama isn’t the only social theorist to develop a theory of the “End of History.” In fact, the very concept of an “End of History,” has developed historically throughout time, so much so that Historyand its End might verywell turn out to be the same thing. As far as the Modern Era is concerned, the concept of an “End of History” as it concerns Modern and Postmodern Philosophy was first developed by Hegel when he declared that History hjad ended in 1806. Not only has this claim been controversial ever since, it’s actually even more controversial than it is often given credit for, having immense philosophical and political implications. The distinction between right and left (a distinction which has in recent years almost completely commandeered Culture and Society themselves) itself in part originated in differing interpretations of Hegel, with “Right Hegelians” agreeing with Hegel that History had ended in 1806, and “Left Hegelians” disagreeing with him. This fact further compounds the paradoxical nature of Fukuyama’s declaration. Like Fukuyama, Baudrillard theorized that we had reached the end of history, and agreed that the collapse of the Soviet Union would lead to a restructuring of consciousness as all reminders of the Cold War disappeared. The result of this would be an era of stagnation and repetition because without a conception of progress we lose the ability to eliminate bad ideas. As Baudrillard points out, the concept of the end of history is itself somewhat contradictory: with the end of history comes the end of the future, and with no future, there can be no ends, and therefore no end of history. In Baudrillard;s theories, “the end of history” is really the inability of history to end, which manifests itself as an inability to dispose of bad ideas: “The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.” The Illusion of the End Frederic Jameson probably believes in a literal “end to history” even less than the average person, describing our current social situation as dominated by a tendency he calls “the suppression of history” and claiming that all that has ended is a more direct experience of history as “world-historical subjects,” the result of which has been that it has become progressively harder to situate ourselves in history. In Jamesons theory of Postmodernity, the end of history ultimately amounts to a disruption in the function of time which he refers to as “the end of Temporality” to describe how in contemporary society the moments in time which make up our lives have begun to lose their coherence and significance as components of meaningful timelines and narratives. As Jameson writes in the very beginning of his book “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:” “It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place. In that case, it either "expresses" some deeper irrepressible historical impulse (in however distorted a fashion) or effectively "represses" and diverts it, depending on the side of the ambiguity you happen to favor. Postmodernism, postmodern consciousness, may then amount to not much more than theorizing its own condition of possibility, which consists primarily in the sheer enumeration of changes and modifications.” But if this is in fact the current trajectory of our society, what caused this situation? What are the factors which facilitate it and make it possible? What is the significance of this transformation? Is there any way to render our thoughts and our relation to the world historical (or dialectical) again? The cultural vacuum in which this Counterculture will develop is currently attempting to fill itself with a myriad of insane ideologies, religious apologeticism, conspiracy theories and online meme culture, but this cannot last. Eventually the more radical and well developed theories will win out, but not before a long process of confusion and disorientation in which the production of the narratives with which people make sense out of their lives itself becomes a major industry, as evidenced by the success of Jordan Peterson.
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