It's even worse for autistic types like me & my wife, because actual reality is our cornerstone. Took us a while to figure out it was the rest of society yodelling off to lala land, not us. I can't believe the detachment of so many people who seem to believe that opinions are fact ...
According to official reports Russia has a massive need of 5 mill workers, actual workers, not busybodies with negative productivity. So up to 5 mill eu citizens could potentially save themselves if they were willing to work, which granted, is highly unlikely.
I think it's likely that many educated people with negotiable skills will eventually migrate to the Russian Federation. Engineers and scientists will lead, and the EU will suffer a 'brain drain' of the sort the West has been accused of inflicting on India and other developing nations.
Consider the energy nexus. The EU is abandoning nuclear and petroleum based energy while Russia is advancing in that domain. The need for qualified engineers in that sector will only be partially filled via the education system, with the balance made up by immigration from nations who've abandoned that approach.
Another driving factor will be Russia's commitment to source all critical technology internally. The resources are there, but the skills needed to achieve that are in high demand and will be for some time to come. Consider the commercial aircraft industry, where the first all-Russian aircraft are only just now rolling off the assembly line. Previously they depended on western avionics and jet engines. Now they're building their own. The same logic applies to the transportation sector, as well as to the electrical distribution system and everything that uses it. Roads and rail lines need to be built, as will the equipment and vehicles that run on them. There's a vast hinterland to be developed, where only the first steps have taken place. That's a lot of construction workers and support services right there.
Russia suffers from a demographic problem that stems from the massive losses incurred during The Great Patriotic War, as well as the despair and poverty inflicted on the nation during the 90's depression. That is being addressed by pro-family pro-natal policies, but it's a long process and will have to be augmented by immigration. Fortunately several factors work in their favour. The language, while difficult, is not impenetrable, and the people arriving will for the most part be physically indistinguishable from the locals. Reports from westerners who've relocated are very positive - similar to the way European immigrants were received in North America during the 50's and 60's when my family moved here.
As you might suspect, I've made a study of this with the intention of moving there myself. I've been learning Russian, studying their economy and culture, and have already picked a location and occupation that matches my living and work needs. The main obstacle is not the immigration process itself, but getting our capital out of Canada. This can't be done directly but requires an intermediary, such as Iran or Turkiye, who have no restrictions on capital transfers to the RF. Our plans were upset by the pandemic and now the war, but Insha'Allah, they will go forward at some point.
Once the carrot of easy office jobs ends (or as it becomes even less appealing and tenable) in the next major economic correction and the legacy cities return the dirty dangerous things (this time with large ethno-religious tension) they have been for a thousand years, intentional communities of competent and forward thinking individuals become a lot more feasible. These will eventually develop into cities themselves given enough time. We're in a weird limbo state right now, but this won't last for long. They never do.
Tribe up then. Lone wolves aren't going to survive, and the government will never go away. Just wither and retreat. Eventually it or some variant or fraction of it will be coming for all of us. Kind of like the Diadochi after Al the G died.
I enjoyed this but remain puzzled by the suggestion that western leaders want to crash their own societies, apparently through war with Russia and China.
Would they do that in order to destroy everything old and replace it with new societies they could totally control?
Would it be because war would allow them to erase their gigantic debt?
I believe that the debt is a secondary issue, although it is a really important one. The main motivation, in my opinion, is ideological. The EU has been forming its societies along ideological lines for a long time and they have a mental image of a "perfect" society they want to create. Regarding the self-destructive tendencies, the EU set up policies, for example regarding energy, which unavoidably would damage its economy. This was done before the debt situation became as critical as it is now. The debt situation in Europe comes mainly from the crash in 2008. The EU has needed to fake the EU economy since then by zero interest rate policy, inflating the debt massively. The covid situation didn't help either. I think that the debt crisis has mostly created the urgency to move things along. It is becoming extremely critical and some measures need to be taken. A war may very well be a good excuse to default and clamp down on EU societies - but the main driver, in my opinion, is ideological.
A lot of the difficulties we face now derive from the 2008 crisis, I think.
Hanging over everything else is the abiding (and valid) anger of millions of ordinary people whose lives were ruined while those responsible evaded responsibility.
Debt itself is not an economic factor, but a control factor. Governments go into debt as a form of corruption, as it is a legal excuse to pay off the 'right' sorts. Kind of like how the Mafia back in the day would force people to take out a loan requiring $X per week payoff. Then never let them pay it back, and if the person complained to the authorities about rough stuff, the loan holder could just say they were trying to collect on a fair debt rather than collecting protection money. Hence laws on the max rate of interest that can now be charged.
Gov debt could be defaulted on with these people for little economic backlash, but of course it is those people who control the gov, so they'll let the whole thing burn down before they give gov permission to default upon it. They'll just confiscate everything but that as needed, as even the US did before during the Great Depression.
The effect of defaulting on the debt, in the US, for example, would be catastrophic for Americans, even if the reason for doing so is launching a war, correct?
Thanks Gaius. This urgency within the EU financial system potentially explains the push to European war this summer, not merely the exhaustion of Ukraine...
With this latest essay, Gaius has completed the circle that started with his original essay about narcissism. I agree with it all. And now for my own narcissistic addendum...
The w(/l)okust form of postmodernism is intent on immanentizing the eschaton of their jihad against reality. Wokusts are eager to sacrifice you, your family, and your entire society on the bloody altar of their holy narratives.
Narcissism is inherent in wokism, more specifically, moral narcissism. It constitutes a secular religion, a suicide cult. Wokust ideology rejects the existence of objective truth. It gives permission for the subjective individual to unleash natural narcissistic tendencies in themselves, then magnifies it a hundredfold. Wokism entices, incites, and exacerbates narcissism. Added to that are techniques of semantic deception, a phenomenology that believes magic words transform the outer world, and zealous progressive faith in an incremental Hegelian dialectic.
Wokusts rush to destruction in the name of FREEDOM! and EQUALITY! These are pristine, absolute concepts of the mind, that depend on being universally applied. Absolute freedom from self-responsibility, from reality itself. Absolute equality in all things, requiring ceaseless revolution to double-down and destroy all boundaries and limits, to equalize, even though such results are impossible to instantiate in the real world which exists only because of boundaries and limits.
Meanwhile a conceptual Trojan horse has been injected into each individual, concealing the four horsemen of equality, racism-antiracism, the validity of hate speech, and nonjudgmentalism. Wokusts have groomed the masses to believe these are elements of superior morality. Instead it's fake morality. It's the stealth pathway to destroy western civilization. But there's no way to convince the masses otherwise, including you dear reader. You are too far gone. Your beliefs have consequences, and erroneous beliefs have bad consequences. The masses are the momentum that keeps society hurtling towards the abyss. Feelings trump the ordered thinking necessary to conceive of truly moral alternatives, because mindless virtue signaling and sanctimony just feel so damned good.
Finally, without the wokust mindset infecting the masses, the globalists could never pull off their Great Reset, they would be immediately perceived, exposed, confronted, and stopped.
(NOTE: I'd prefer that nobody respond, because inevitably it's nothing but disagreement, polite or otherwise. I'm sick of everyone putting their two cents into a mishmash of ostensibly anti-woke ideas. All it does is prove that everyone is a narcissist who undermines all organized efforts against wokism, because each of them is convinced only they have the perfectly fine-tuned answer. There's no real agreement anywhere. There's no attempt at agreement. Everyone would rather disagree, forever. The powers that be don't have to instigate divide-and-conquer, all they have to do is use what's already here. They're winning and you're not, so with respect to me, just shut up.)
In this hypothetical dystopian novel, I think the surprise twist would be for the Western governments to declare war on Russia and China and then have to scramble when rational soldiers refuse to pick up their weapons and follow illegal orders.
Would they be able to fight a war if the people refused to fight?
The way I could see this playing out is that American citizens refuse to sign up for the military and refuse to attack China. The only way they'd fight is if China invaded the continental states.
Any nuclear strike on DC or Ottawa would be greeted as a liberation army, and the citizens would watch as their inept bureaucrats were carted off to face trial for war crimes.
"They are planning a switcheroo, where real things backstopping the debt will be replaced with a concept, or an idea."
One idea I've heard discussed is asteroids. Some asteroids have mineral wealth in the trillions of dollars. Of course, it's not usable until we have far more infrastructure in space, which will likely not happen this time around the yuga cycle. But it could serve the same function as English nobility claiming "lands in France" as the basis for their status. If things continue long enough, I'm sure entire solar systems will be traded and used for collateral.
Mining asteroids is fantasy, far too much weight to get off this gravity well, and no where near possible to get enough fuel there and back with payloads. Let alone impossible to take people there either.
Also, eventually they will be mined. It likely won't be landed on earth, yet our solar system will eventually be mined and settled by humans. Assuming we don't go extinct any time soon, and perhaps not this yuga cycle.
Keep on dreaming! p.s. try reading the link I gave to see just how far into fantasy magic the concept of humans inhabiting anywhere but the surface of this pale blue dot - and if you disagree with the findings of that paper then simply rebut it here!
If "it is irrelevant to my post" then why did you, not only bring it [asteroid mining] up in your post, but 5 of the 7 lines in you post was about it [asteroid mining] further stating that you are " sure entire solar systems will be traded and used for collateral" exposing that you have failed to take into account thermodynamics at the bottom of this gravity well !?
Because you dumb bitch, I was using it as an example of how they will use fake collateral to keep the debt pyramid going. Whether it's feasible or not isn't relevant to them using it as if it is or soon will be.
My only quibble here is that you're supporting, consciously or subconsciously, that there is an 'other' place to escape to. As if there were anywhere that will go unscathed from the fiery holocaust of such a collapse. This too, is perhaps a programmatic response or safety valve; a common vein of self-determination that promises a self-savior response to the projected doomsday. A doomsday that has all but been guaranteed by our own guilt, imagination and calculus. It's a common if not subtle theme in many Hollywood screenings - a strong remnant arm themselves and live on to recreate a better society.
If we would all stay in the present and work on the workable, the unworkable tomorrow will sort itself out.
Great post and a nice surprise for me!! This is the first time that I read about the "End of Reality" in the Substack Universe...
Sorry for my bad English...
Jean Baudrillard (died 2007) was a French thinker erroneously described by many as a defender of the “postmodern.” We could really describe him as a brilliant critic of postmodernism and a “prophet” of what is happening today with “reality” (he wrote especially in the 70s and 80s of the last century). Baudrillard wanted to show that beyond economic interest or the evolution of capitalism itself, what moves the West and in particular its elites is a will for power and control such as has never existed in History: the System (of which capitalism currently is its outdated economic form) it would transcend itself, achieving, with the Integral Reality (an artificial Reality built at will and therefore perfectly manipulable at the convenience of the elites) a World Order of total control and manipulation. The best explicit formulation of this idea is what Ron Suskind, a Bush administration aide, said: “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Baudrillard has analyzed in his works how the West has entered a phase of abolition of its Great Referents (e. g. religion, ideologies, the values of the Enlightenment and classical capitalism -Weber-). Since the end of WWII we have left behind the “industrial” world (what he calls the world of the 2nd Order Simulacra) and have entered the 3rd Order Simulacra, a “semiotic” phase in which Western economy and its consumer society are organized as a system of signs or variables that can be manipulated thanks to technologies, think tanks and departments of organization, research and developement (what Galbraith somehow called the “technostructure”). In more conventional terms we can speak of this era as the transition from industrial capitalism to neoliberalism and financialized capital and the culture that arises with it. From the mid-60s onwards, semiotics, linguistics, cybernetics, computer science, marketing, etc. take control of the capitalist economy. Throughout the 70s and 80s, with the control of demand by supply, of desires by marketing, of the masses by social engineering through sociology, demography, psychology-psychiatry or medicine, every aspect of life becomes manipulable and programmable if it was treated based on “models” implemented by technologies such as computing, virtual reality, etc.
Everything becomes a “sign-value” ordered in an abstract system of differences in which contradiction is suppressed: the Beautiful and the Ugly, the Masculine and the Feminine, the Natural and the Cultural, the Real and the Unreal can lose their essence, substance or irreducibility, in short its reality, to combine and produce new forms in a system that Baudrillard called in different ways: “Political Economy of the Sign”, “Order of Simulacra”, “Code” or “Integral Reality”. Such a level of abstraction made it possible to break any previous way of life or conception, becoming considered “old-fashioned.” The guarantees of the real had to be abolished through the creation of “artificial” spheres, e. g. in economics (creation of “fashion” -circular combination of anything- at all levels of consumption; elimination of the gold standard; transition to financialization and “casino” economic speculation); in the definition of our species (step to general and “creative” combinatorics in the biological order with the genetic code, transsexualism or transhumanism); in ideas and feelings (everything is possible if you want it: the System is omnipotent and can do it reality). The power to combine, create and manipulate at such a level of abstraction, has achieved until now an infinite field of generating economic benefits, and has allowed the domination of people's lives to unsuspected extremes. But logically this de-realization has unleashed a crisis so profound that it has led to the current nihilism of our civilization and its decline and eventual destruction. The future is multipolar, either for good of for bad.
Europe will only be happy when we finally accept our irrelevance in world affairs. We're already a huge, beautiful open-air museum, a nice place to live if only the psychopaths in charge of politics, the economy, and the media get out of the way. The problem is how to make this happen. Any suggestion, before wanton violence ensues?
A couple of days ago I watched a documentary about a flight whose pilots made a grave error and became lost, and as time went by, "get-there-itis", confirmation bias and finally resignation lead to running out of fuel and crashing. Your (excellent) essay Gaius paints a similar picture about the people at the helm of the West. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsT8Q0Fmdcc
It's even worse for autistic types like me & my wife, because actual reality is our cornerstone. Took us a while to figure out it was the rest of society yodelling off to lala land, not us. I can't believe the detachment of so many people who seem to believe that opinions are fact ...
Exactly. People have divorced themselves from reality. This will have devastating effects (it's already having)
Bullseye, you are right on the money about all that. I am an actually diagnosed autistic myself.
You're all making me envious :)
According to official reports Russia has a massive need of 5 mill workers, actual workers, not busybodies with negative productivity. So up to 5 mill eu citizens could potentially save themselves if they were willing to work, which granted, is highly unlikely.
I think it's likely that many educated people with negotiable skills will eventually migrate to the Russian Federation. Engineers and scientists will lead, and the EU will suffer a 'brain drain' of the sort the West has been accused of inflicting on India and other developing nations.
Consider the energy nexus. The EU is abandoning nuclear and petroleum based energy while Russia is advancing in that domain. The need for qualified engineers in that sector will only be partially filled via the education system, with the balance made up by immigration from nations who've abandoned that approach.
Another driving factor will be Russia's commitment to source all critical technology internally. The resources are there, but the skills needed to achieve that are in high demand and will be for some time to come. Consider the commercial aircraft industry, where the first all-Russian aircraft are only just now rolling off the assembly line. Previously they depended on western avionics and jet engines. Now they're building their own. The same logic applies to the transportation sector, as well as to the electrical distribution system and everything that uses it. Roads and rail lines need to be built, as will the equipment and vehicles that run on them. There's a vast hinterland to be developed, where only the first steps have taken place. That's a lot of construction workers and support services right there.
Russia suffers from a demographic problem that stems from the massive losses incurred during The Great Patriotic War, as well as the despair and poverty inflicted on the nation during the 90's depression. That is being addressed by pro-family pro-natal policies, but it's a long process and will have to be augmented by immigration. Fortunately several factors work in their favour. The language, while difficult, is not impenetrable, and the people arriving will for the most part be physically indistinguishable from the locals. Reports from westerners who've relocated are very positive - similar to the way European immigrants were received in North America during the 50's and 60's when my family moved here.
As you might suspect, I've made a study of this with the intention of moving there myself. I've been learning Russian, studying their economy and culture, and have already picked a location and occupation that matches my living and work needs. The main obstacle is not the immigration process itself, but getting our capital out of Canada. This can't be done directly but requires an intermediary, such as Iran or Turkiye, who have no restrictions on capital transfers to the RF. Our plans were upset by the pandemic and now the war, but Insha'Allah, they will go forward at some point.
Great, thoughtful essay but I'm not going anywhere. If I leave now, I'll have no standing to help rebuild.
Same. At some point you have to pick your hill. Running away will only delay the inevitable.
We all gotta die someday. Good luck, friend.
Thanks. I've always been a developer / builder so the idea of organising and starting again appeals to me.
Smart! I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing a lot. Reading Asimov’s Foundation series for inspiration.
We gotta think long term again. Think with the millennia in mind. So few do.
Once the carrot of easy office jobs ends (or as it becomes even less appealing and tenable) in the next major economic correction and the legacy cities return the dirty dangerous things (this time with large ethno-religious tension) they have been for a thousand years, intentional communities of competent and forward thinking individuals become a lot more feasible. These will eventually develop into cities themselves given enough time. We're in a weird limbo state right now, but this won't last for long. They never do.
Exactly! This is not the end of history! Many shifts, twists and turns ahead of us. Only a fool would believe this is the end all be all...
This brought a smile to my face. Remember: French is a ROMANCE language. Europe has been through this before.
Tribe up then. Lone wolves aren't going to survive, and the government will never go away. Just wither and retreat. Eventually it or some variant or fraction of it will be coming for all of us. Kind of like the Diadochi after Al the G died.
Are you presuming I haven't?
I enjoyed this but remain puzzled by the suggestion that western leaders want to crash their own societies, apparently through war with Russia and China.
Would they do that in order to destroy everything old and replace it with new societies they could totally control?
Would it be because war would allow them to erase their gigantic debt?
I believe that the debt is a secondary issue, although it is a really important one. The main motivation, in my opinion, is ideological. The EU has been forming its societies along ideological lines for a long time and they have a mental image of a "perfect" society they want to create. Regarding the self-destructive tendencies, the EU set up policies, for example regarding energy, which unavoidably would damage its economy. This was done before the debt situation became as critical as it is now. The debt situation in Europe comes mainly from the crash in 2008. The EU has needed to fake the EU economy since then by zero interest rate policy, inflating the debt massively. The covid situation didn't help either. I think that the debt crisis has mostly created the urgency to move things along. It is becoming extremely critical and some measures need to be taken. A war may very well be a good excuse to default and clamp down on EU societies - but the main driver, in my opinion, is ideological.
A lot of the difficulties we face now derive from the 2008 crisis, I think.
Hanging over everything else is the abiding (and valid) anger of millions of ordinary people whose lives were ruined while those responsible evaded responsibility.
I lived in a small tourist town in South Africa. It never recovered.
Agreed.
Debt itself is not an economic factor, but a control factor. Governments go into debt as a form of corruption, as it is a legal excuse to pay off the 'right' sorts. Kind of like how the Mafia back in the day would force people to take out a loan requiring $X per week payoff. Then never let them pay it back, and if the person complained to the authorities about rough stuff, the loan holder could just say they were trying to collect on a fair debt rather than collecting protection money. Hence laws on the max rate of interest that can now be charged.
Gov debt could be defaulted on with these people for little economic backlash, but of course it is those people who control the gov, so they'll let the whole thing burn down before they give gov permission to default upon it. They'll just confiscate everything but that as needed, as even the US did before during the Great Depression.
The effect of defaulting on the debt, in the US, for example, would be catastrophic for Americans, even if the reason for doing so is launching a war, correct?
I think so too. I can't see how the US can come back from that in the current "multipolar" environment.
i think fake money is a big part of this, yes... control of the money/power is also the rationale....
They (elites) rule over a ruin but they rule.
New York, Chicago and San Francisco, to name a few once-great cities, are examples of what they want for the whole world.
They saw East Germany not as an evil totalitarian state but as an exemplar of what they want to do to the whole world.
I wish I didn't believe that but the facts compel me to. The drift of events is clear to those with eyes to see.
Our rulers want to put us all behind barbed wire.
Thanks Gaius. This urgency within the EU financial system potentially explains the push to European war this summer, not merely the exhaustion of Ukraine...
So Europe will collapse financially first?
It makes sense...
Join BRICS ASAP?
With this latest essay, Gaius has completed the circle that started with his original essay about narcissism. I agree with it all. And now for my own narcissistic addendum...
The w(/l)okust form of postmodernism is intent on immanentizing the eschaton of their jihad against reality. Wokusts are eager to sacrifice you, your family, and your entire society on the bloody altar of their holy narratives.
Narcissism is inherent in wokism, more specifically, moral narcissism. It constitutes a secular religion, a suicide cult. Wokust ideology rejects the existence of objective truth. It gives permission for the subjective individual to unleash natural narcissistic tendencies in themselves, then magnifies it a hundredfold. Wokism entices, incites, and exacerbates narcissism. Added to that are techniques of semantic deception, a phenomenology that believes magic words transform the outer world, and zealous progressive faith in an incremental Hegelian dialectic.
Wokusts rush to destruction in the name of FREEDOM! and EQUALITY! These are pristine, absolute concepts of the mind, that depend on being universally applied. Absolute freedom from self-responsibility, from reality itself. Absolute equality in all things, requiring ceaseless revolution to double-down and destroy all boundaries and limits, to equalize, even though such results are impossible to instantiate in the real world which exists only because of boundaries and limits.
Meanwhile a conceptual Trojan horse has been injected into each individual, concealing the four horsemen of equality, racism-antiracism, the validity of hate speech, and nonjudgmentalism. Wokusts have groomed the masses to believe these are elements of superior morality. Instead it's fake morality. It's the stealth pathway to destroy western civilization. But there's no way to convince the masses otherwise, including you dear reader. You are too far gone. Your beliefs have consequences, and erroneous beliefs have bad consequences. The masses are the momentum that keeps society hurtling towards the abyss. Feelings trump the ordered thinking necessary to conceive of truly moral alternatives, because mindless virtue signaling and sanctimony just feel so damned good.
Finally, without the wokust mindset infecting the masses, the globalists could never pull off their Great Reset, they would be immediately perceived, exposed, confronted, and stopped.
(NOTE: I'd prefer that nobody respond, because inevitably it's nothing but disagreement, polite or otherwise. I'm sick of everyone putting their two cents into a mishmash of ostensibly anti-woke ideas. All it does is prove that everyone is a narcissist who undermines all organized efforts against wokism, because each of them is convinced only they have the perfectly fine-tuned answer. There's no real agreement anywhere. There's no attempt at agreement. Everyone would rather disagree, forever. The powers that be don't have to instigate divide-and-conquer, all they have to do is use what's already here. They're winning and you're not, so with respect to me, just shut up.)
So the aliens are basically just the Jews. How are they different?
Great analysis. May Slovak, Hungary and Serbia escape from the collapse. If any, then they.
In this hypothetical dystopian novel, I think the surprise twist would be for the Western governments to declare war on Russia and China and then have to scramble when rational soldiers refuse to pick up their weapons and follow illegal orders.
Would they be able to fight a war if the people refused to fight?
The way I could see this playing out is that American citizens refuse to sign up for the military and refuse to attack China. The only way they'd fight is if China invaded the continental states.
Any nuclear strike on DC or Ottawa would be greeted as a liberation army, and the citizens would watch as their inept bureaucrats were carted off to face trial for war crimes.
"They are planning a switcheroo, where real things backstopping the debt will be replaced with a concept, or an idea."
One idea I've heard discussed is asteroids. Some asteroids have mineral wealth in the trillions of dollars. Of course, it's not usable until we have far more infrastructure in space, which will likely not happen this time around the yuga cycle. But it could serve the same function as English nobility claiming "lands in France" as the basis for their status. If things continue long enough, I'm sure entire solar systems will be traded and used for collateral.
Mining asteroids is fantasy, far too much weight to get off this gravity well, and no where near possible to get enough fuel there and back with payloads. Let alone impossible to take people there either.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54012-0
So? Not relevant to my post.
Also, eventually they will be mined. It likely won't be landed on earth, yet our solar system will eventually be mined and settled by humans. Assuming we don't go extinct any time soon, and perhaps not this yuga cycle.
Keep on dreaming! p.s. try reading the link I gave to see just how far into fantasy magic the concept of humans inhabiting anywhere but the surface of this pale blue dot - and if you disagree with the findings of that paper then simply rebut it here!
It doesn't matter if it's true or not, it is irrelevant to my post.
If "it is irrelevant to my post" then why did you, not only bring it [asteroid mining] up in your post, but 5 of the 7 lines in you post was about it [asteroid mining] further stating that you are " sure entire solar systems will be traded and used for collateral" exposing that you have failed to take into account thermodynamics at the bottom of this gravity well !?
Because you dumb bitch, I was using it as an example of how they will use fake collateral to keep the debt pyramid going. Whether it's feasible or not isn't relevant to them using it as if it is or soon will be.
My only quibble here is that you're supporting, consciously or subconsciously, that there is an 'other' place to escape to. As if there were anywhere that will go unscathed from the fiery holocaust of such a collapse. This too, is perhaps a programmatic response or safety valve; a common vein of self-determination that promises a self-savior response to the projected doomsday. A doomsday that has all but been guaranteed by our own guilt, imagination and calculus. It's a common if not subtle theme in many Hollywood screenings - a strong remnant arm themselves and live on to recreate a better society.
If we would all stay in the present and work on the workable, the unworkable tomorrow will sort itself out.
It's jews not aliens.
Great post and a nice surprise for me!! This is the first time that I read about the "End of Reality" in the Substack Universe...
Sorry for my bad English...
Jean Baudrillard (died 2007) was a French thinker erroneously described by many as a defender of the “postmodern.” We could really describe him as a brilliant critic of postmodernism and a “prophet” of what is happening today with “reality” (he wrote especially in the 70s and 80s of the last century). Baudrillard wanted to show that beyond economic interest or the evolution of capitalism itself, what moves the West and in particular its elites is a will for power and control such as has never existed in History: the System (of which capitalism currently is its outdated economic form) it would transcend itself, achieving, with the Integral Reality (an artificial Reality built at will and therefore perfectly manipulable at the convenience of the elites) a World Order of total control and manipulation. The best explicit formulation of this idea is what Ron Suskind, a Bush administration aide, said: “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
Baudrillard has analyzed in his works how the West has entered a phase of abolition of its Great Referents (e. g. religion, ideologies, the values of the Enlightenment and classical capitalism -Weber-). Since the end of WWII we have left behind the “industrial” world (what he calls the world of the 2nd Order Simulacra) and have entered the 3rd Order Simulacra, a “semiotic” phase in which Western economy and its consumer society are organized as a system of signs or variables that can be manipulated thanks to technologies, think tanks and departments of organization, research and developement (what Galbraith somehow called the “technostructure”). In more conventional terms we can speak of this era as the transition from industrial capitalism to neoliberalism and financialized capital and the culture that arises with it. From the mid-60s onwards, semiotics, linguistics, cybernetics, computer science, marketing, etc. take control of the capitalist economy. Throughout the 70s and 80s, with the control of demand by supply, of desires by marketing, of the masses by social engineering through sociology, demography, psychology-psychiatry or medicine, every aspect of life becomes manipulable and programmable if it was treated based on “models” implemented by technologies such as computing, virtual reality, etc.
Everything becomes a “sign-value” ordered in an abstract system of differences in which contradiction is suppressed: the Beautiful and the Ugly, the Masculine and the Feminine, the Natural and the Cultural, the Real and the Unreal can lose their essence, substance or irreducibility, in short its reality, to combine and produce new forms in a system that Baudrillard called in different ways: “Political Economy of the Sign”, “Order of Simulacra”, “Code” or “Integral Reality”. Such a level of abstraction made it possible to break any previous way of life or conception, becoming considered “old-fashioned.” The guarantees of the real had to be abolished through the creation of “artificial” spheres, e. g. in economics (creation of “fashion” -circular combination of anything- at all levels of consumption; elimination of the gold standard; transition to financialization and “casino” economic speculation); in the definition of our species (step to general and “creative” combinatorics in the biological order with the genetic code, transsexualism or transhumanism); in ideas and feelings (everything is possible if you want it: the System is omnipotent and can do it reality). The power to combine, create and manipulate at such a level of abstraction, has achieved until now an infinite field of generating economic benefits, and has allowed the domination of people's lives to unsuspected extremes. But logically this de-realization has unleashed a crisis so profound that it has led to the current nihilism of our civilization and its decline and eventual destruction. The future is multipolar, either for good of for bad.
Europe will only be happy when we finally accept our irrelevance in world affairs. We're already a huge, beautiful open-air museum, a nice place to live if only the psychopaths in charge of politics, the economy, and the media get out of the way. The problem is how to make this happen. Any suggestion, before wanton violence ensues?
Brilliant article.
Especially worth noting in the age of brainless dellusional idiocy of most modern producers of written words.
A couple of days ago I watched a documentary about a flight whose pilots made a grave error and became lost, and as time went by, "get-there-itis", confirmation bias and finally resignation lead to running out of fuel and crashing. Your (excellent) essay Gaius paints a similar picture about the people at the helm of the West. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsT8Q0Fmdcc