A bit repetitive, but you are doing the work, Slick; you are thrashing this out. Congratulations. And thank you.
I agree with one of the comments that feminism is a pretty easy response to throw at this episteme. But also Walter Benjamin, Foucault, a correct reading of Gramsci... And then my shtick, speaking of hermeneutics: liberation theology. That gets all your symbolism and mythology, but sets it right. Makes sure the Christian Nationalism gets tapped down as well. Throw in some blues — both written and sung, Jimmy Baldwin and Blind Blake — and you’ve got a humdinger.
And yes: the responses, the alternatives exist. And it's their time to shine, to shed light on this "all dark, no enlightenment" project that has sadly gained enough steam to tumble out of the basement...
The death throes … the millennias-old patriarchal system thrashing violently as it finally dies.
“If we understand a little bit of what we’re doing, maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we have created around ourselves.”
It's either that, an "extinction burst" as I've heard it be called... or a cultural revolution on the right we'll be dealing with for the next 25 years.
Needless to say, I truly hope you're right. These people aren't very fun, and the project is quite dismal.
A great quote. I’m also reminded of R.A. Wilson’s words he said “most people live in a myth when you point that out to them they get violent pretty quickly”. That violence is all around moment;
Essentially they are identifying the correct problem but are being recuperated back into the system instead of building an alternative. It is almost as if they were being engineered.
You had me at the Neil Postman reference. I read Teaching as a Subversive Activity when I was considering obtaining a teaching credential. Reading it sealed the deal. Thank you for this profoundly thought provoking essay. You weave wonder into words, and vice versa.
Postman was so articulate and prescient, it’s scary. And he wasn’t the only one; beyond Technopoly for instance, there’s Weizenbaum, Ellul, Illich, Marcuse, and others.
It’s almost as if we were warned, but didn’t listen… Not all of us though; you did. Well done!
Let’s hope forty years later, the warnings stop falling on deaf ears…
I think the social media vector is important here. Paul Virilios concept of every new technology having a built in concomitant disaster is an excellent lens with which to examine the spread of mis- , dis- and just plain old information. He warned us all that the opening of the web would have unknown but disastrous consequences for society and democracy. Consequences which no-one wanted to think about - it didn’t occur to anyone that there just might be a disaster looming on the horizon, nothing g was done to mitigate that and look where we are. The same is likely to happen with the gold rush to AI.
Thank you for the kind reply. Marcuse and David Riesman were social philosophers I remember reading and discussing in Western Civ class at UC Santa Cruz. Now I have others to add, thanks. Some day ears will be open....
"Maybe women are biologically programmed to avoid unfortunate fashion choices." as a caption to that dweeb Yarvin---lol, haha pure gold! Great column!! Thank you!
Excellent points in your article. People forget that intelligence and knowledge, ai even more so, has very little to do with wisdom. Wisdom can only be touched by the trully innocent and the ones who dare reach the depths and hights of human existence. There is little more dangerous than mistaking a half truth for a whole. Understanding the whole picture is vastly different from compreheding one or two pixels. People crave love in reality but pursue everything but, like headless chickens.
An excellent point. I like to think that knowledge multiplied by time equals wisdom. (K*T=W it ifgr even be K**T=W). It seems to me that the velocity of the internet and even more so social media shrinks time coefficient and I don’t think I need to say information is not knowledge!
This may be way off base but I wonder/believe/suspect that the terrible cognitive dissonance between watching and knowing that the planet is failing and our collective refusal to seriously address the issue are not related to the infantilization of which you write.
Not necessarily off base, maybe a slightly different topic but I'm here for it.
At the collective level, refusing to acknowledge or contend with consequences is almost a definition of childish. I don't think the lack of moral ambition and virtue is entirely unrelated to infantilization, and if we wait for everyone to do good before we start ourselves, we'll get nowhere.
But there's only so much each of us can do to tackle collective problems if the solutions / systems are just not there.
The feeling of powerlessness itself is infantilizing too, and might even fuel despair and cynicism.
So what do we do? I think we need to contend with reality, and accept that it will take many things. Trade-offs, 100%. Different systems and ways of doing things, 100%.
But mostly, if there is ONE thing we need to do, it's to eliminate one concept, one idea from our ways of thinking: externalities. We just can't keep whisking away consequences we don't like or don't know how to deal with. We can't live in ecosystems and think in systems (and I mean ecosystems more broadly than a strict environmentalist concept).
This applies to any way you mean 'the planet is failing', though I'd say *we* are failing--the planet, if anything, has been very forgiving so far.
Yes about failing the planet. There is a maxim to the effect of if one does not design something then we suffer design by default. Akin to your observation about externalities
Thank you for liking my comment. I think about the jobs, the innovation, and the reward of tackling the most pressing issue of our time head on and the good that could be done. Drives me batty
So much to love about this piece! Yes, kindness is definitely much, much harder. And I do believe women are biologically programmed to avoid men who make unfortunate fashion choices, though this doesn't seem to extend to a prohibition on sometimes making these bad fashion choices ourselves!
If you believe more people need to hear it, please do me a favour and share it widely; I may never make a living from this, but if it can prevent some from falling for the red pill temptation or dim their unearned "saw through it all" aura, it's absolutely worth it.
It feels like you identify the core issues, and the idea of disillusion becoming an identify seems visible. But perhaps what is missing is a broader perspective on why this happened. Instead of growth, we get petty kingdoms of resentment, and that's because neither generational transfers of wealth or culture occured, but instead these were sequestered and handed over from the boomers and straight into the hands of new technocratic governments. No maturity can occur when no responsibility is handed down, no building can happen when there is nothing to build upon.
This material and values limbo then pushes the whole frame of redpill into a dark corner, where those feelings of anger and moral deficits fester without any growth.
This might sound counterintuitive, but perhaps it all has to turn ugly, so ugly that the old system is altogether shattered, and only then the Overman can start building new values, unburdened by the past morals.
I'm wary of the apocalyptical narrative, this "It has to get worse before it gets better".
That's exactly what the post-liberal techno-right is peddling: "collapse is inevitable, and we're the only ones holding back the apocalypse (katechon Christians / apocalyptic integralists) or preparing for the world after (neoreactionaries)."
And of course they're the Übermenschen in that story, having seen through the lies and defined new values the herd cannot accept.
Our sci-fi is either dystopian or post-apocalyptic, and maybe that's where and why we get stuck. There's a failure of responsibility, yes, but also of imagination; we don't have a good vision for how we get from here to a desirable future.
Or we do, but we refuse to accept it (Kierkegaard).
I will agree on the dearth of positive vision, and that is part of the problem. If we all wish to move into the post-Liberal world, we need to at least envision what it will be. At the moment we are feeling our way in the dark, however I am not necessarily talking about the apocalyptic narratives thrown up, but a genuine question of how a new set of values will be transmitted - hence my "perhaps" in there. Ideally we can swap out current leadership caste for one that is more aligned with a positive vison for the world, but how likely is that to happen without some transformation of our current societies and without disruption?
I myself don't know, but I still would like to posit the question, if only to be thorough in our exploration of the way forward.
And I do appreciate that perhaps; I don't have a crystal ball either, and am far from having all the answers.
I do have hope though.
Whether or not collapse comes, the return of meaning, soul, and orientation would be disruptive. Living with depth in an age of spectacle is already rebellion.
But disruption is not the same as destruction.
We talk about “the elite,” but maybe the word itself needs rescuing. Nobility, in its original sense, wasn’t about power anointed from above. It was about virtue in service of the good. A noble wasn’t someone at the top of a hierarchy--they were someone who modeled what a human could be at their best, or strived for that at least.
Yes, we need a better vision than nihilism, neoreaction, or more-or-less soft theocracy. One that reconciles freedom with meaning--which by the way never had to be incompatible.
If collapse comes before we remember what we stand for, before we live it, then we’re left in the ruins with no compass. So we can’t afford to wait. The time to live those values is now.
If liberalism truly offers only freedom, then the question becomes: What do we do with that freedom?
Put aside the elite capture, the market metastasis, and other niceties that came with it. Strip it all back. What remains is us, and the freedom to shape our lives in service of something higher.
We must become what we long for.
We must be the light we think is missing.
And it begins, always, in the quiet and sometimes painful decision to live as if the world could still be beautiful, as if something could still matter, as if soul could return.
In French West Africa (I was there in the Peace Corps), the highest compliment that you could give about a man would to say that he was "tellement gentile." To my American ear, i interpreted this as "he is truly a gentleman." It is just like what you say about nobility.
As i write about them, i have come ton hink that "true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy" is written in the krder of meaningfulness. The strongest essays are about true, noble, and/or lovely things.
A bit repetitive, but you are doing the work, Slick; you are thrashing this out. Congratulations. And thank you.
I agree with one of the comments that feminism is a pretty easy response to throw at this episteme. But also Walter Benjamin, Foucault, a correct reading of Gramsci... And then my shtick, speaking of hermeneutics: liberation theology. That gets all your symbolism and mythology, but sets it right. Makes sure the Christian Nationalism gets tapped down as well. Throw in some blues — both written and sung, Jimmy Baldwin and Blind Blake — and you’ve got a humdinger.
Thank you!
And yes: the responses, the alternatives exist. And it's their time to shine, to shed light on this "all dark, no enlightenment" project that has sadly gained enough steam to tumble out of the basement...
Even better if we have a soundtrack :)
That’s my substack project: searching a music for this time. A prophetic voice in an urban wilderness.
One that resonates these days: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNvPVBaRVx0
*And me, you know,
It’s not complicated:
I’m for the birds,
Not for the cages.*
Oops. Nicolas Jaar. Had not heard before. Thx!
I like it. I have heard of Nico but had not heard it. Check out my weekly post. I just dropped it. I go full jeremiad. With music.
Amazing post. The thought process to produce this must have been intense.
Thank you! Indeed, it took time to articulate, but you seem to say it was worth it 😉
The death throes … the millennias-old patriarchal system thrashing violently as it finally dies.
“If we understand a little bit of what we’re doing, maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we have created around ourselves.”
• Gregory Bateson,
“Steps to an Ecology of Mind”
It's either that, an "extinction burst" as I've heard it be called... or a cultural revolution on the right we'll be dealing with for the next 25 years.
Needless to say, I truly hope you're right. These people aren't very fun, and the project is quite dismal.
I think extinction burst is as likely as the alternative.
The difference between the two? Us!
A great quote. I’m also reminded of R.A. Wilson’s words he said “most people live in a myth when you point that out to them they get violent pretty quickly”. That violence is all around moment;
Othering, punching down, deportation , genocide, labelling , racism , misogyny…
This because the myth of Neoliberalism is now visible to many and some simply cannot cope with that. They fear the rupture which is upon us.
Essentially they are identifying the correct problem but are being recuperated back into the system instead of building an alternative. It is almost as if they were being engineered.
Good job on this essay.
Engineered, controlled opposition is my conclusion.
You had me at the Neil Postman reference. I read Teaching as a Subversive Activity when I was considering obtaining a teaching credential. Reading it sealed the deal. Thank you for this profoundly thought provoking essay. You weave wonder into words, and vice versa.
Postman was so articulate and prescient, it’s scary. And he wasn’t the only one; beyond Technopoly for instance, there’s Weizenbaum, Ellul, Illich, Marcuse, and others.
It’s almost as if we were warned, but didn’t listen… Not all of us though; you did. Well done!
Let’s hope forty years later, the warnings stop falling on deaf ears…
It's the Siren Song. Lash me tonthe mast, mates.
I think the social media vector is important here. Paul Virilios concept of every new technology having a built in concomitant disaster is an excellent lens with which to examine the spread of mis- , dis- and just plain old information. He warned us all that the opening of the web would have unknown but disastrous consequences for society and democracy. Consequences which no-one wanted to think about - it didn’t occur to anyone that there just might be a disaster looming on the horizon, nothing g was done to mitigate that and look where we are. The same is likely to happen with the gold rush to AI.
Weizenbaum did warn us about the dangers of AI... in 1976.
After creating ELIZA, the first natural language processing program, and seeing the dangers of even a rudimentary chatbot.
A level of self-reflection sadly unseen in today's AI architects.
Thank you for the kind reply. Marcuse and David Riesman were social philosophers I remember reading and discussing in Western Civ class at UC Santa Cruz. Now I have others to add, thanks. Some day ears will be open....
I’ve note read Postman yet but he’s on my list!
The prophetic horror and dehumanisation in Brave New World leapt out of the pages when I read it…
Two other dystopian novels which don’t get mentioned so often are Zemyatins “We” and Katherine Burdekins “Swastika Night”.
The latter an horrific novel , the brutal misogyny aspect of which I think tie into the Red Pill faux Ubermensch vision.
Too long; read anyway!
THAT'S the spirit!!
"Maybe women are biologically programmed to avoid unfortunate fashion choices." as a caption to that dweeb Yarvin---lol, haha pure gold! Great column!! Thank you!
Excellent points in your article. People forget that intelligence and knowledge, ai even more so, has very little to do with wisdom. Wisdom can only be touched by the trully innocent and the ones who dare reach the depths and hights of human existence. There is little more dangerous than mistaking a half truth for a whole. Understanding the whole picture is vastly different from compreheding one or two pixels. People crave love in reality but pursue everything but, like headless chickens.
10/10, no notes!
Maybe one note actually: they're more heartless than headless. Even more dangerous...
An excellent point. I like to think that knowledge multiplied by time equals wisdom. (K*T=W it ifgr even be K**T=W). It seems to me that the velocity of the internet and even more so social media shrinks time coefficient and I don’t think I need to say information is not knowledge!
deep.
This may be way off base but I wonder/believe/suspect that the terrible cognitive dissonance between watching and knowing that the planet is failing and our collective refusal to seriously address the issue are not related to the infantilization of which you write.
Not necessarily off base, maybe a slightly different topic but I'm here for it.
At the collective level, refusing to acknowledge or contend with consequences is almost a definition of childish. I don't think the lack of moral ambition and virtue is entirely unrelated to infantilization, and if we wait for everyone to do good before we start ourselves, we'll get nowhere.
But there's only so much each of us can do to tackle collective problems if the solutions / systems are just not there.
The feeling of powerlessness itself is infantilizing too, and might even fuel despair and cynicism.
So what do we do? I think we need to contend with reality, and accept that it will take many things. Trade-offs, 100%. Different systems and ways of doing things, 100%.
But mostly, if there is ONE thing we need to do, it's to eliminate one concept, one idea from our ways of thinking: externalities. We just can't keep whisking away consequences we don't like or don't know how to deal with. We can't live in ecosystems and think in systems (and I mean ecosystems more broadly than a strict environmentalist concept).
This applies to any way you mean 'the planet is failing', though I'd say *we* are failing--the planet, if anything, has been very forgiving so far.
Yes about failing the planet. There is a maxim to the effect of if one does not design something then we suffer design by default. Akin to your observation about externalities
Thank you for liking my comment. I think about the jobs, the innovation, and the reward of tackling the most pressing issue of our time head on and the good that could be done. Drives me batty
The consequences of doing nothing are also something to consider...
Also, thank YOU for engaging and trying!
So much to love about this piece! Yes, kindness is definitely much, much harder. And I do believe women are biologically programmed to avoid men who make unfortunate fashion choices, though this doesn't seem to extend to a prohibition on sometimes making these bad fashion choices ourselves!
🙏 Thank you!
If you believe more people need to hear it, please do me a favour and share it widely; I may never make a living from this, but if it can prevent some from falling for the red pill temptation or dim their unearned "saw through it all" aura, it's absolutely worth it.
It feels like you identify the core issues, and the idea of disillusion becoming an identify seems visible. But perhaps what is missing is a broader perspective on why this happened. Instead of growth, we get petty kingdoms of resentment, and that's because neither generational transfers of wealth or culture occured, but instead these were sequestered and handed over from the boomers and straight into the hands of new technocratic governments. No maturity can occur when no responsibility is handed down, no building can happen when there is nothing to build upon.
This material and values limbo then pushes the whole frame of redpill into a dark corner, where those feelings of anger and moral deficits fester without any growth.
This might sound counterintuitive, but perhaps it all has to turn ugly, so ugly that the old system is altogether shattered, and only then the Overman can start building new values, unburdened by the past morals.
I'm wary of the apocalyptical narrative, this "It has to get worse before it gets better".
That's exactly what the post-liberal techno-right is peddling: "collapse is inevitable, and we're the only ones holding back the apocalypse (katechon Christians / apocalyptic integralists) or preparing for the world after (neoreactionaries)."
And of course they're the Übermenschen in that story, having seen through the lies and defined new values the herd cannot accept.
Our sci-fi is either dystopian or post-apocalyptic, and maybe that's where and why we get stuck. There's a failure of responsibility, yes, but also of imagination; we don't have a good vision for how we get from here to a desirable future.
Or we do, but we refuse to accept it (Kierkegaard).
I will agree on the dearth of positive vision, and that is part of the problem. If we all wish to move into the post-Liberal world, we need to at least envision what it will be. At the moment we are feeling our way in the dark, however I am not necessarily talking about the apocalyptic narratives thrown up, but a genuine question of how a new set of values will be transmitted - hence my "perhaps" in there. Ideally we can swap out current leadership caste for one that is more aligned with a positive vison for the world, but how likely is that to happen without some transformation of our current societies and without disruption?
I myself don't know, but I still would like to posit the question, if only to be thorough in our exploration of the way forward.
And I do appreciate that perhaps; I don't have a crystal ball either, and am far from having all the answers.
I do have hope though.
Whether or not collapse comes, the return of meaning, soul, and orientation would be disruptive. Living with depth in an age of spectacle is already rebellion.
But disruption is not the same as destruction.
We talk about “the elite,” but maybe the word itself needs rescuing. Nobility, in its original sense, wasn’t about power anointed from above. It was about virtue in service of the good. A noble wasn’t someone at the top of a hierarchy--they were someone who modeled what a human could be at their best, or strived for that at least.
Yes, we need a better vision than nihilism, neoreaction, or more-or-less soft theocracy. One that reconciles freedom with meaning--which by the way never had to be incompatible.
If collapse comes before we remember what we stand for, before we live it, then we’re left in the ruins with no compass. So we can’t afford to wait. The time to live those values is now.
If liberalism truly offers only freedom, then the question becomes: What do we do with that freedom?
Put aside the elite capture, the market metastasis, and other niceties that came with it. Strip it all back. What remains is us, and the freedom to shape our lives in service of something higher.
We must become what we long for.
We must be the light we think is missing.
And it begins, always, in the quiet and sometimes painful decision to live as if the world could still be beautiful, as if something could still matter, as if soul could return.
Because if it can, it will begin with us.
Here are a few things I wrote on this:
https://open.substack.com/pub/heyslick/p/how-to-train-a-superhuman-the-battle-for-your-consciousness
https://open.substack.com/pub/heyslick/p/the-poet-of-becoming
In French West Africa (I was there in the Peace Corps), the highest compliment that you could give about a man would to say that he was "tellement gentile." To my American ear, i interpreted this as "he is truly a gentleman." It is just like what you say about nobility.
As i write about them, i have come ton hink that "true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy" is written in the krder of meaningfulness. The strongest essays are about true, noble, and/or lovely things.
Well thought through and delivered!
Why did you have to start like that?! 😂
Sony Walkman, electric blue reeboks…hahaha
Love, healing (salvation), at-one-ment... It's the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The one (and only) Jesus the Messiah.
Bro typed this like he escaped the red pill temple but kept the robes and chants “just in case.”
😂