Today's world operates on the principle that everything we once held to be certain - our laws, our professions, our government - has been exposed as fraudulent. Nowadays we are all caught up in an endless exercise of chasing the top spots with little regard for decorum or morality. This image of the world is not new, in fact it has a great deal in common with the apocalyptic vision described by Thomas Hobbes. He called it the Leviathan.
Today's New Leviathan shares many of the characteristics identified by Hobbes, but is different in one particular respect: where Hobbes saw a society in decline as the inescapable culmination of a naturally occurring chain of events, our Leviathan is created by design. Our society comprises a matrix of producers and consumers hypnotised into an endless cycle of self-promotion and consumption in an environment which is narcissistic, inflexible and defined by a linear way of viewing the world.
With the dominance of narcissism, instead of being seen as an unfolding of possibilities, life is reduced to zero - sum games in which there are only two outcomes - winning and losing. The conditions, which sustained the previous order, trust in our neighbor's communal interest, no longer holds. Those of us who cling to this old belief are the new dinosaurs, completely non-adaptive to the new reality and destined for extinction. Instead of a brotherhood of man, we have a free-for-all in which it is each man for himself in a fight to the finish. The winning strategy becomes one of doing it to them before they do it to us. The distinction from Hobbes' variation is that here all actions, no matter how blatantly self-serving, are veiled by extravagant proclamations of sentiment. In other words, everyone feels compelled to appear nice before others and themselves. The result is that it becomes impossible to sustain anything but the most superficial form of relationships, with human interaction being reduced to a series of isolated transactions.
A case in point is that of the investment bankers whose machinations led to the artificial inflation of the sub-prime bubble. Despite their self-serving philosophy, these individuals deluded themselves that they were acting out of pure motives to the benefit of not only themselves but their families, their professions and the society of which they were a part. It would be easy to dismiss the bankers as monstrous, but the reality is that they are a product of their environment, corrupted by the system and trained to conform to the vices perpetuated by our society. They are the winners in the great Game, and we, the losers, are equally culpable for having let them get away with it.
A population of voracious consumers only superficially connected to one another is one which can be relied upon to greedily consume the outputs produced by the economy. Believing in little other than their own entitlement implies that they are unlikely to balk at society's transgressions against their neighbor. The distrust those in the narcissistic paradigm feel towards one another means there is little likelihood of their banding together to create an organized opposition to the status quo. Lacking the collective will to be defiant; those in power can rely upon their mute compliance. This makes them relatively easy to manage. In this sense, the capitalist system is far more efficient than communism or autocracy, requiring a much smaller investment in a police apparatus - here the sheep can be relied upon to herd themselves. Gradually the government can remove their freedoms safe in the knowledge that whatever resistance they may offer will only be temporary. If this process is sufficiently gradual, the majority will never even notice.
If you need proof of this process, look at the Patriot Act passed into the law in the US following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Justified on the principle of national security, this document provided for the arrest and indefinite detention without charge of any individual deemed to pose a threat by central government. What form this "threat" might take was left unexplained, a deliberate vagueness allowing for the legislation to be adapted to suit the needs of the government of the day. As terrorism can never be defeated, but is rather endemic, the justification for such a law will never disappear, and having it repealed is thus difficult to achieve.
This problem is far greater than being confined to the dominance of one political faction or another. It is not exclusive to either the right wing or the left wing. Each has their own variation on the theme cloaked in their own rhetoric. The only way out of this is for each one of us as individuals to stand up and say an emphatic No!!! What happens next- who knows? But, wouldn't it be wonderful to find out?
Today's New Leviathan shares many of the characteristics identified by Hobbes, but is different in one particular respect: where Hobbes saw a society in decline as the inescapable culmination of a naturally occurring chain of events, our Leviathan is created by design. Our society comprises a matrix of producers and consumers hypnotised into an endless cycle of self-promotion and consumption in an environment which is narcissistic, inflexible and defined by a linear way of viewing the world.
With the dominance of narcissism, instead of being seen as an unfolding of possibilities, life is reduced to zero - sum games in which there are only two outcomes - winning and losing. The conditions, which sustained the previous order, trust in our neighbor's communal interest, no longer holds. Those of us who cling to this old belief are the new dinosaurs, completely non-adaptive to the new reality and destined for extinction. Instead of a brotherhood of man, we have a free-for-all in which it is each man for himself in a fight to the finish. The winning strategy becomes one of doing it to them before they do it to us. The distinction from Hobbes' variation is that here all actions, no matter how blatantly self-serving, are veiled by extravagant proclamations of sentiment. In other words, everyone feels compelled to appear nice before others and themselves. The result is that it becomes impossible to sustain anything but the most superficial form of relationships, with human interaction being reduced to a series of isolated transactions.
A case in point is that of the investment bankers whose machinations led to the artificial inflation of the sub-prime bubble. Despite their self-serving philosophy, these individuals deluded themselves that they were acting out of pure motives to the benefit of not only themselves but their families, their professions and the society of which they were a part. It would be easy to dismiss the bankers as monstrous, but the reality is that they are a product of their environment, corrupted by the system and trained to conform to the vices perpetuated by our society. They are the winners in the great Game, and we, the losers, are equally culpable for having let them get away with it.
A population of voracious consumers only superficially connected to one another is one which can be relied upon to greedily consume the outputs produced by the economy. Believing in little other than their own entitlement implies that they are unlikely to balk at society's transgressions against their neighbor. The distrust those in the narcissistic paradigm feel towards one another means there is little likelihood of their banding together to create an organized opposition to the status quo. Lacking the collective will to be defiant; those in power can rely upon their mute compliance. This makes them relatively easy to manage. In this sense, the capitalist system is far more efficient than communism or autocracy, requiring a much smaller investment in a police apparatus - here the sheep can be relied upon to herd themselves. Gradually the government can remove their freedoms safe in the knowledge that whatever resistance they may offer will only be temporary. If this process is sufficiently gradual, the majority will never even notice.
If you need proof of this process, look at the Patriot Act passed into the law in the US following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre in 2001. Justified on the principle of national security, this document provided for the arrest and indefinite detention without charge of any individual deemed to pose a threat by central government. What form this "threat" might take was left unexplained, a deliberate vagueness allowing for the legislation to be adapted to suit the needs of the government of the day. As terrorism can never be defeated, but is rather endemic, the justification for such a law will never disappear, and having it repealed is thus difficult to achieve.
This problem is far greater than being confined to the dominance of one political faction or another. It is not exclusive to either the right wing or the left wing. Each has their own variation on the theme cloaked in their own rhetoric. The only way out of this is for each one of us as individuals to stand up and say an emphatic No!!! What happens next- who knows? But, wouldn't it be wonderful to find out?
About the Author:
John Berling Hardy is dedicated to exposing the scam which brought us as a society to where we are today. For more of his writings please visit www.playingtheplayers.com
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire