Saturday 22 March 2014

Could anything happen to cause The West to lose faith in Political Correctness and abandon it?

*

1. No. Leftism/ Liberalism is capable of absorbing anything that could happen - not instantly, but over the space of not many days.

For instance it might have been expected that something as big as 9/11 would have made some difference of some kind to the trajectory of the USA - but the societal trend graph continues unabated, with only the slightest of wobbles perceptible in retrospect.

If not 9/11 - then nothing that happens could ever make any significant difference - certainly not the sheer insanity (lies, anti-truths, self-policed blindness) of everyday life in the public sphere.

*

2. Yes. If the Mass Media collapses for any reason - Political Correctness will collapse very quickly and very completely - because it is only the pervasive 24/7 influence of a Mass Media on a Mass Media-addicted population which enables the continuing insanity that is Left/ Liberalism.

And the Left are clearly not aware of this fact of their absolute dependence on the Mass Media - that it is actually the centre and source of modern Leftism - therefore the MM may well be destroyed (or rather, the chain-reacting process of destruction initiated) by Leftists, as a self-inflicted act.

*

3. Yes. Because - if such things were susceptible of quantitative measurement - it looks as if Left-Liberalism is an exponential process - and all exponential processes must stop: their very success is lethal to the prerequisites of that success.

And, when Leftism does stop expanding exponentially, Political Correctness will die; because it certainly seems to behave like the proverbial shark that must keep moving-forwards or die. 

*

I should point-out that while I am 100 percent certain that Leftism is unsustainable, and will collapse very fully when the Mass Media collapses - I am not at all optimistic about the short to medium term consequences of that collapse.

In fact I am very pessimistic. Leftism has by now so thoroughly destroyed our social infrastructure, that the results of the collapse of Leftism are almost sure to be social chaos, disorganization and mutual predation in most places (as with the past 25 years of chaos in Russia) - and due to the unprecedented degree of economic inter-dependence, Western society is very brittle - damage will ramify very swiftly.

*

So: I have some Good News and some Bad News.

The Good News is that the people will, en masse, lose faith in Leftism very swiftly, very fully, very comprehensively.

The Bad News is that the post-PC population en masse are not likely to agree and cohere on anything much better than PC, indeed are likely to disagree about almost everything and (lacking a legitimate institutional basis) be unable to cooperate.

*

If you merely want to see the end of PC, then you can be optimistic that this will happen - maybe this afternoon or tomorrow, maybe this summer or in a decade or two - but for sure.

But if you want to live in a society better than this one, then you probably will not live long enough; and when the better society eventually arrives, there may not be many people remaining on earth to enjoy it.

*

6 comments:

David said...

This is really frightening stuff Bruce but I'm afraid your pessimism is probably realistic. I have only really began to appreciate how dire the situation is recently when I have realised just how helplessly subordinate we are en masse due to the ascending level of madness and lack of common sense decision making within institutions and organisations. It feels like a totalitarian state has developed around us and hardly anyone has noticed. When someone notices it or senses their is something deeply wrong/futile with the way we are trying to do things and the systemisation of 'evidence-based' practice, a middle manager gives us the 'iron fist in a velvet glove' pep talk that we are all trying to do the right thing for ourselves and patients but must comply with thw top-down course of action. Senior managers don't even engage in discussion about practice and use the middle manager as an effective buffer. Spontaneous 'common sense' suggestions at how to improve what we do in working practice are quickly torn down and evaporate quickly in the face of a requirement to evidence *everything*
If it cant be measured it doesnt exist and since anything that is of true value in human relationships is qualitative and not quantitative it is not regarded to exist. This insistence on reconstucting common sense as requiring an 'evidence base' is so rife it has almost mechanised any potentially valuable spontaneous interaction between humans.

I caught a snippet on radio 4 yesterday about installing cameras and other tracking devices in clothes and everyday products. The tech advocate waxed lyrical about the wonderous possibilities of buying clothes that let google or Facebook know where you are, what you are doing and how you can consume more, and have every moment of your life uploaded on the Internet and revolutionise social media. The advocate extolled the virtue of measuring everything to enhance/personalise the consumer experience. He worried/pondered that society might not accept this intrusion to their personal realm and anonimity; undoubtedly yes. Will we recognise the totaliarian slavery we are assenting to en masse as Western societies before it really turns nasty and the elite have unprecedented surveillance and control over our behaviour? Undoubtedly no. Actually, as I write, I think it is already here. The instruments of control are just being sharpened and we regard these weapons as 'lifestyle' toys -for now.

I wonder whether Stephen King's novel 'the stand' is an increasinglu realistic narrative for the coming apocalypse. Perhaps when the nice toys of social media and surveillance are spontaneously identified as actually being a weapon and there is a 'chain reaction' to this,a weapon to be used against us by the current/future elite; this will prompt spontaneous attempts to destroy it."Terrorism" directed at media infrastructure and not people per se. When this happens the collapse of western civilisation will ensue as you describe it; with the resulting recapitulation of a medieval 'dark age' and all the consequences of this catastrophic failure of mass media.

Bruce Charlton said...

@David "Spontaneous 'common sense' suggestions at how to improve what we do in working practice are quickly torn down and evaporate quickly in the face of a requirement to evidence *everything* "

But this focus on 'evidence' is a fake and a lie - because the bureaucratic definition of evidence is at best irrational and in practice arbitrary and discarded whenever inconvenient - for example in personnel decisions, use of examinations and tests, use of therapies... oh, all the time.

What is more, the great majority of people involved in 'evidence based practice' are almost always over-promoted sub-mediocrities too stupid even to understand why they are so very wrong.

The situation is unreformable - the whole thing would have to collapse or be destroyed - and rebuilt from the few islands of effectiveness and decency.

jabberwocky said...

@BGC "The situation is unreformable"

I have, sadly, reached this conclusion. For me, the question in the temporal world, is whether the collapse will be rapid, as for the USSR, or gradual, and stair step fashion, ala John Michael Greer, etc.
It seems to me that thermodynamic constraints, and the grand experiment in radical economic globalism of neoliberalism, suggest collapse, in some form, seems the most likely. I hope I am blind and wrong!

baduin said...

All those "collapse" posts seem to me to show unjustified optimism.

The essence of that view is that we are very wise, and the rulers of the modern society are very stupid. They do not have any idea what is going on etc.

It would be plausible, but for two facts:
1) The rulers keep ruling
2) The current situation is described quite accurately in books more than 50 years old.

The really rich rule, and wealth is inherited. The really rich people of today are the descendants of the really rich people of the pasts. Of course,there are some changes, but it is a process of cooptation. In modern econonic system you cannot get really rich without at least tolerance of some faction of already existing really rich. (Eg nobody can be rich without support of the financial industry).

And I would presume that the ancestors of the modern ruling class left them not only wealth and power, but also some pointers on what is going on. We are trying to reconstruct it, but we are starting from nearly nothing, while they had at the start some quite good notions about what is going on.

Many of the crucial aspects of the current situation were known around the Second World War. Eg Eric Juenger in Heliopolis quite precisely described the importance of control of the energy for government. Charles Williams in the Shadow of Extasy described the use of Blacks as tools of social disorganisation, including Black riot in LOndon.

That is why, despite their presumed and advertised (by them) stupidity, the rulers continue to rule.

The current collapse is being purposefully accelerated and managed. They are not even hiding it: Soros wrote an article about the beneficial crisis as the usual model of advancing integration of EU. According to him, euro must necessarily lead to economic collapse, unless it is followed by the introduction of the common European government.

http://www.infowars.com/soros-embrace-mass-centralization-of-power-in-europe-or-face-another-great-depression/

The economic collapse is accelerated not only by the disfunctional financial systems, but also by the restrictions on energy production.

Mass media are already collapsing - and are being replaced by newer, more advanced, Internet based tools of social control.

We have some early attempts to formulate the ideology of the new phase: The Dark Enlightenment - an Internet based phenomenon, with nearly all participants anonymous - designed for ease of manipulation.

Therefore I conclude that the rulers have some idea what reforms to introduce after the collapse. That is what I am afraid of: not the collapse, but the Saviour who will appear to lead us out of it.

Bruce Charlton said...

@b - I think we agree that Leftism is, and has been stage managed, by Satanic motivation for the Satanic purpose of destruction.

So the human persons and ideologies of Left/ Liberal Political Correctness will collapse - but evil be triumphant.

We can see this because the really rich people of modern times are objectively committing reproductive suicide - and destroying the preconditions for their own existence in multiple ways.

On the other hand, evil often defeats itself, from its mutual destructive hatred. And this is in the nature of evil - however, it cannot be depended on at any specific time.

baduin said...

I do not see any mutual destructive hatred. I see the ruling class acting unanimously, with no important internal conflict.

Right and Left wing parties are only play-acting a conflict, in a confined area and according to fixed rules. Important changes are done without conflict.

All history of civilisations shows that in the future the internal conflict of the ruling class must grow intense and change into a civil war. However, at present we are very far from such a situation. This shows that the collapse is real, but it has been planned and is managed.

As for children - I do not think we know many names of the real elite. It is so small that statistics are meaningless. The ruling class can perpetuate themselves by cooptation, anyway.

Considine in Shadow of the Extasy had no children, and the London riots show that he is ruling now.