Tuesday, January 19, 2016
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Compliments of the Affirmative Action Usurper
Doug Ross @ Journal: Is This the Most Terrifying Photo of 2015?: Aside from a terrific economy, the next president of the United States will inherit a delightful global security landscape. Red China is b...
To Survive One Hour Longer Than The Machine
The following is the Foreword to the French edition of Survive—The
Economic Collapse.
The crisis that began in 2008 with the bursting of the
subprime mortgage bubble is no ordinary downturn. All observers understood this
intuitively. Something has gone wrong with our world, something lying at the
very foundation of our way of living, producing, and consuming—and even of our
way of thinking. This something that has just been broken is our faith in the
millenarian mechanism of Progress.
For three centuries, Western man has had the idea that he
does not need God, since he is his own savior. Humanity is the messiah of
humanity: thus proclaimed the new religion. A religion that entered into
Catholicism on tiptoes with Descartes. A religion, also, that ended up
substituting itself everywhere in the place of the ancient faith.
People sometimes laugh at Juche, that ridiculous
North Korean ideology whose only article states that man can transform nature
indefinitely. Wrongly. In more sophisticated forms, all contemporary systems
rest upon the postulate of human omnipotence. China has razed the house of
Confucius and frenetically converted to the religion of growth. Eternal India —yes, even India —has set itself to conceiving
the future as a rising curve.
All mankind has gradually entered into the naïve communion
of the new religion, much less rational than it seems: technology to perform
miracles, banks to serve as temples of the monetary idol. Monetarist
neoliberalism—the last ideology, standing victorious upon the corpses of
Jacobinism, classical liberalism, social democracy, communism, and fascism—would
lead man to the millennium, the long-lost terrestrial paradise soon to be
regained.
It was a false promise and a trap. We ought to have been
suspicious. For the past few decades, the facade of the progressivist temple
has begun to crack. . .
Since the 1970s, various Cassandras have been warning us: a
project of indefinite growth cannot be carried out in a finite world. Their
arguments have been swept under the rug as “not taking account of scientific
perspectives.”
In the 1980s, the collapse of the USSR
following the Chernobyl
catastrophe provided food for thought for anyone willing to think: “so, an
extremely large, over-integrated system can collapse suddenly, once a certain
threshold of fragility is reached?” Here again, we have refused to draw the
lessons from the event, preferring to blame the collapse on communist ideology
without posing the question of over-concentration and over-integration as such.
During the 1990s, the West was giddy with triumph. Those
were the mad years of the Internet bubble. “Who cares that the material world
is finite: capitalism will invade virtual worlds of its own construction!” But
the dream ended abruptly when the model of the new economy revealed its real
nature—it was a mirage, an illusion. If there was a dizzying fall at the turn
of the millennium, it was not that of the Twin Towers
This absurdity could only endure for so long. In the fall of
2008, its time was up.
A great shiver ran down the spine of the
hundred-thousand-headed beast—the ruling class. Amidst the crash, still more
dollars were injected into the system, like so many symbols that concealed
nothing, but which once more, for a few years, perhaps, allowed the neoliberal
propaganda machine to keep grinding away at all costs.
These were just the last, dilatory maneuvers that will not
change anything in the end: it is all an illusion. It hardly matters that
financial indices are artificially maintained by lowering interest rates to
zero. Breaking the thermometer never cured a fever.
Economic rationality alone is not able to provide the
meaning of history. Technology cannot accomplish everything. A project of
infinite development cannot be conducted on a finite planet. Man cannot have
everything he wants; he must want what he is able to get.
We are faced with a return to limits. Mankind
will not be its own messiah—the humanist religion is a failure.
The beast with a hundred thousand heads is, indeed, behaving
like a beast—in particular, it is as dangerous as a wounded animal that feels
its hour has struck. Back from the failure of the credit system that served as
an ideological shelter for their power, the elites and their trustees are now
struggling to save their power, to preserve the messianic fiction, while
gradually restricting it to themselves. On the one hand, a superior humanity
that wants to be a messiah for itself and itself alone; on the other, an
inferior humanity sent back into the symbolic shadows of thought’s absence, the
non- existence of meaning—in fact, into the negation of its status as an
autonomous subject, where it is forbidden to define a mental space free of the
constraints placed upon it. A humanity skinned of its spirit. Such is the
generative schema of the next decades. The future is menacing. We might as well
understand this. The humanist religion is going to transform itself into an
anti-human ideology. This turnabout, the creating of a monster by those who
sought to make an angel, has been underway since the 1970s. But the 2010s will
mark a perceptible acceleration in this process. And life, in consequence, will
soon be very difficult for many of us. In this context, the stakes of the game,
for true men, will soon be to survive. That’s all—to survive.
Going back to the ranks of the powerful madmen is not an
option. You might obtain the intoxicating illusion of superiority, and
certainly easier living conditions, but only at the price of your soul. Resigning
yourself to vegetating among the mass of the ruled is hardly less depressing.
(And amidst that oppressed and impoverished body, violence will be the norm.)
Our contemporaries have too deeply assimilated the perverse logic of the
consumer society to convert suddenly to the voluntary simplicity that might
save them.
Survival will almost certainly play itself out away from
today’s bustle, in refuges we must know how to create and defend. Physical
survival, yes; but also psychological and spiritual survival.
Of course, this is no exalted ideal. But at this stage,
resisting the inhuman machine will often mean passing by it unnoticed, and
above all, being able to do without it.
A modest struggle, but hardly a contemptible one.
For one day, when that machine has exhausted all the
possibilities of its originalélan, it will totter and fall. Then, for
us, it will be enough to be numerous, to maintain solidarity, so as
collectively to regain control of our Earth after we have fiercely defended our
few areas of retreat. It is in order to be there, at that decisive moment, that
we must survive now. So do not be ashamed: let us build our refuges! Remember
that a rebel wins if he can hold out one hour longer than his adversary. Let us
organize ourselves to do so.
So, my friend . . . wipe away that sad, drawn smile. Raise
up those eyes you have kept lowered for so long. Look straight ahead at the
horizon. Hold your chin up. Your life has meaning—to survive one hour longer
than the machine.
Pass the word on: comrade, our children are counting
on you!
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