It is striking to read thoughtful cultural commentators from the 1950s-70s, who are confident that The System - based on materialism and motivated by Leftism - will certainly collapse due to its incoherence and contradictions.
The assumption was that soon many or most people will recognize that 'it isn't working' and will abandon The System for something else.
Of course, The System did not collapse - but instead expanded in power and scope; and has now taken-over the world. Yet The System is indeed incoherent and self-contradictory - so how was this survival possible? Why did and do people fail to perceive the incoherence and self-contradiction when it has been obvious for many decades?
The short answer is that The System captured the procedures and dissemination of evaluation: it captured the 'knowledge-making' processes. Therefore, The System now conceals from itself its own incoherence - and its own colossal failures.
This evaluation-capture by The System did not happen fully until the approach of the millennium; although it can be detected growing from the middle 20th century (given extra impetus by WW II) and expanded rapidly from the middle 1960s. Until it was captured; System policy and analysis was able to be evaluated by (substantially) independent systems of analysis, measurement and interpretation (e.g. research, scholarship and science).
But now the evaluation sub-system will provide whatever 'knowledge' The System-as-a-whole regards as necessary for its own perpetuation, expansion and increase of power.
Therefore; The System is always coherent to itself; and when The System is global and self-evaluates - then there can be no incoherence or negative feedback from 'reality' - because 'reality' is only what The System defines as real; and reality in the public domain (i.e. 'objective' reality) comes only from The System.
Anything else than public discourse is System-defined as merely subjective, personal opinion.
(Because here-and-now only the subjectivity of persons stands fully outside The System.)
The survival of The System far beyond expectation means only that The System has, so far, survived.
Survival means nothing else, than survival - and, since The System recognizes no other reality than that revealed by its own evaluation systems; The System may be so extremely disarticulated from the reality of God's creation that the totality could collapse at any moment - of which moment there would be no warning whatsoever in public discourse.
The System only knows that it survives now; and not that it is representing outside-System 'reality' with any degree of validity whatsoever.
The System might (for instance, from a perspective located outside The System) be surviving by destroying everything that sustains itself: might be destroying every-thing from social order and competence to the capacity to grow food and transport goods.
In other words; The System may have survived up to this moment not only by encouraging long-term damaging parasitic behaviour for immediate gain; The System may have survived by actual cannibalism: by consuming itself; as if a starving man were to satiate hunger by eating his own flesh.
All this could be happening - could already have-happened. And yet - because The System has captured evaluation and knowledge production - there would be zero knowledge of the fact in public discourse.
The global and totalitarian expansion of power and scope of The System means that when it does fail and collapse - that failure and collapse must be globally and totally catastrophic (at the institutional level); but even the actuality such a failure cannot ever be seen by The System as evidence of its incoherence or wrongness.
Therefore, when the world-System actually collapses around us...
Detection and recognition of such a situation Happening Now will still continue to be regarded in mainstream, official, 'objective' public discourse as "just a matter of subjective, personal opinion".
There will be no warning; because - after evaluation-capture - there can be no warning.
I followed 'the stock market' intensely in 2019-2020 as it was ready to collapse and did collapse at the end of February 2020 for reasons other (Saudi-Arabia, Bernie Sanders) than the birdemic lockdowns. We were going to have a world wide stock market crash and recession any way. Then the birdemic lockdowns combined with extreme economic policies removed any connection 'the economy' had with reality.
ReplyDeleteIf it was possible to objectively evaluate the situation, I would guess that we have been at cannibalism for a while. Now it's possible that one day we'll find the store shelves empty and there will be no warning, as you wrote.
I noticed during the early stages of the pandemic that otherwise insightful ppl treated me (for whatever reason) as incapable of being correct. If I presented some fact about how viruses actually work or made some prediction that came true it was treated as... I'm not sure what? Coincidence? But not as understanding or having been correct. I was simply not in the category of ppl who can be correct. In fact, the "experts" were more correct in being wrong than I was correct in being right. Because of some inherent thing I possessed I was not able to ever be correct. So, I experienced exactly what you laid out.
ReplyDeleteA strange situation where I live.... heroic professionals under pressure, saving the lives of people who have experienced a totally safe and effective procedure, but a the same time are quitting en masse and believe in irrational conspiracies. Bumper crops which can’t be harvested because people like the new normal too much and want to take it easy. Pent up demand should cause necessary inflation next year which will align with the new economic fundamentals leading to a restoration of growth. People can’t wait to spend and take a holiday but cannot obtain credit because of a lack of confidence. Am I missing something?
ReplyDelete@H - "Am I missing something?"
ReplyDeleteWell, yes! You are probably missing scores of equally or more important material factors - as well as the underlying spiritual corruption.
But the fact is that there is such a convergence of multiple destructive factors, any few of which might be lethal, that it is not possible to know which of them will by crucial; nor when they will take effect.
Just that sooner or later the compensatory (negative feedback) mechanisms will fail (since they are being actively dismantled) and a positive feedback state be entered - where each failure causes further (and multiple) failures.