Fear in an Empty World, Part One
There is no Yesterday, no Tomorrow, only the Endless, Empty, and Eternal Now with Mammon as Our Lord and Savior.
(My apologies for the disorderliness of this post. I will be clearer in my writing in the coming weeks as I reacquire my old skills. My thoughts and feelings are much, much more difficult to pin-down, exam, and organize enough to write clearly for others to read and understand, which is another point for this post, I think.)
Let me start this post with an exegesis12 that is perhaps too self referential or egotistical. As I think about how to actually do what I claim to be doing on this substack, emotionally, I traveled from excitement to worry that then changed into fear, but became dread, if not outright horror. At first, I was focused on how to change my project from less of a fantasy to more of an informative reality both for myself and for everyone else. I was worried that I had created for myself too big of an endeavor, perhaps because of hubris, as to do it rightly, it would require years, maybe even decades of constant work. I still worry about being hubristic and turning this into my personal nemesis or using a more modern, American example, my White Whale. However, the more that I saw, thought, and felt, the more I became terribly aware of just how awful our collective situation is.
I know it sounds extremely corny, but I feel that my project will destroy and then consume me with its horror. I admit that reading this last sentence seems to show egotistical grandiosity. “OMG, The Horror, the Horror, Life is a HORROR, that will drive me just insaaaanne!!” This is especially true when I compare my life to the homeless34, the starving in the Sudan5, or whole families in Gaza. Really, I am very comfortable and safe. I still feel that I am living in this surreal combination of the movies The Truman Show6 and Brazil7 like world.
I have complained about the rampant shallowness of what people claim to be thinking, but I also see the same shallowness in myself. A glibness, a facileness of thought, oft copied from others, that is now always present in me. To be fair to all, thinking well, thinking not only logically, but deeply as well, which requires linking truth, reason, and emotion into a coherent and cohesive whole is real, hard work. It takes constant practice, which most of us and certainly myself, have been slacking off on. Work of that kind requires constant disciplined practice, which is constantly, deliberately hindered in our sickened society8; a healthy society is one full of rituals, holidays(holy days) like Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Eve, and customs that track changes overtime, a healthy society is one composed of individuals who can reason logically and is connected with his or her emotions, which is often just as important as one’s thoughts; a healthy individual, a healthy human being, is almost always enmeshed in a community of other, often very different, interdependent individuals preferably, but not exclusively of his own family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers; a healthy society is a weird, simple, yet complex one. Yet, just what are we losing in our lives9101112?
The problems that our increasingly unhealthy and collapsing world13 has are many, complex, interrelated, even interlocking, like the proverbial Gordian Knot, and yet, what I think of as the the core cause, which is the love of power and money, with the process being simple14 despite the many separate parts across the whole world during a century. The imposition of the ideology of Neoliberalism15 including the Washington Consensus16 by the Elites, Postmodernism17, and massive society-wide corruption18, which has hollowed out every single institution and ideologies or system of belief including government19, business, education, the military, religion, science, politics, the law, nonprofits, and political economics20. The process has created the lawlessness, power-seeking, and violence of all kinds needed to subvert, control, and exploit everything21. This includes a process of blaming the victims22 for their victimization by the system.
Here are quick examples of how our institutions, all of them in all areas, including public, private, government23, business, nonprofit24, scientific2526, educational27, and religious2829, have been twisted into grifts masquerading from what they were or just emptied out3031:
The central federal government32 to start, but it really goes through all of government, all the way down to the local dogcatcher. Congress has cut its support staff, the people that enable the Congresscritters the ability to understand issues, run committees, and write its own legislation33. The FDA,3435 FAA, and most other agencies aside from the security state’s agencies such as the CIA36, FBI, NSA, suffer not only from budget cuts, they suffer from regulatory capture37 especially as the companies supposedly being regulated also pay much of the agencies’ budget, not Congress.
The military, while being an overfed monster, cannot fight wars anymore. Indeed, it lacks the ammunition needed for sustained combat, nor can it get those hypersonic missiles that both Russia and China have38, but it is still good at pillaging smaller, weaker countries such as Syria for their resources39.
Boeing and Intel both cannot make products that are not lethal because it is more profitable to make deadly merchandise. Food makers, bought by the tobacco industry40, make foodlike products that are poisonous, deadly in the long term, that are responsible for the obesity, fertility, and the physical, mental, and emotional health crises in the United States, but very profitable41.
We need to reform, to rebuild what was lost, partly by shifting that spending, while cutting from overly fed security state. However, since everything is hollow, empty of meaning or of their original purpose, with even the vocabulary of economic, social, religion, business, and scientific, terms needed for the conversations we need just to begin, twisted into near uselessness, how do we start?
I would add that the older among us, and this includes me, are trapped in the past. We still think, but what is more insidiously pernicious, emotionally feel as if our previous experiences reflect current reality. Yet, as a benefit, we know that what we had existed, while many younger people are ignorant of what is possible, because they lack the experiences of what was. All they see is the wasteland of lies and the nonexistent abilities. Adding the postmodernist denial, including of objective reality, of anything true or real that is threaded throughout our entire society worldwide, makes the whole project of understanding and perhaps rebuilding look just impossible. It is not true, this impossibility, but the project is difficult both in size, but in the growing distortions of both information and thought.
All of us have to fight this constant failures of everything, trying to peer past the façades that everything has to see if they are even real in any functional sense. And we have to do this while learning or relearning the skills needed to do so42, while the collapse of everything is accelerating, it is terrifyingly exhausting, isn’t? That is the point of the whole system ultimately; a victim terrified into exhaustion is easy prey.
I still intend to see this project to completion even if it drives me to drink again. To start, this means posts like this to explain the problems and hopefully remove the blocks to the understanding we all need just to be able to even start to solve them. The posts might appear polemical, tendentious, and just too wordy, they might even be so, but they are necessary as they will show the extent, seriousness, and sheer tenacity of our crises. Crises that seem destine to kill us all, unless we see them as they are, then effectively organize to deal with them, and I say this without hyperbole.
Please, please leave a comment. We all need to have a conversation about what did, is, and will happen to our collective world.
However, it must be a polite conversation, so no insulting one’s mother. I am a wimp, but I will ban trolls.
I find that I am copying the writer David Foster Wallace’s habit of endless footnotes.
I do like the sight of my own words, not to mention my inability to decide just what I am trying to say!
This post as well as the entire site is part of a long, long effort to understand just what I have been seeing for the past forty years, and then to be able to explain it to others using evidence beyond “trust me.” Aside the insanity that is life, this has not been helped by the, often deliberately provoked, growing propagandization and insanity caused by the very thing I am describing. “I am actually seeing what I think I am seeing or am I being just as batshit crazy and delusional as so many others?”
It really has been a long strange trip, but on that downbound train, which really seems to describe the whole damn American nation.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/05/31/golden-gate-park-homeless-population-seeks-privacy/
Hello, San Francisco, the City of Saint Francis, the city of my birth. The homeless crisis has been getting worse for over forty years. As far as I can tell, the undercount is about half and has been for decades. No, I refuse to believe that going to almost no homelessness at all to roughly 2% of the total population of the City in less than a lifetime is due to a massive increase of the deliberate cultivation of poverty by San Franciscans or by many Americans elsewhere. Of course, people are drunks, losers, and fools, but the problem has gotten so severe, it appears to be a lazy excuse. Someone is making bank off of the cost of housing and the homelessness it causes.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/article/2024/aug/01/sudan-el-fasher-darfur-famine-starvation-declared-fews-net
The Washington Post: Dying Early, American life expectancy crisis.
I suggest reading Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam. It is an easy albeit worrisome read.
New York Times: The Interview: Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely
I have an image of a mob of whirling dervishes. A group of people frenetically dancing, looking like they are doing something, but nothing constructive is actually being done. Mindless dancers thinking that they are actually doing something. a large square dance with everyone following the orders of the leader, but still, nothing constructive is being done. Endless tempests in teapots.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
For Americans, I can point to a single year where it all starting to go wrong for the bottom 80-90 percent.
Neoliberalism comes from the ideology developed from the efforts of the Mont Pèlerin Society*, and is an economic ideology of Free Market Capitalism, reduced government regulation, taxation, and spending as well as open borders and the completely free moment of capital, people, and goods; Elites have fused to it socially "liberal” policies that one could label an enhanced, weaponized modernity, an anti-Classical Liberalism, that is purposefully designed to destroy countries, nations, communities, families, and ultimately the individual human being. Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of either Classical Liberalism or Modernity, those were not the intents. I would call the current version of neoliberalism nihilistic, and if I was religious, I would have no problem calling satanic or demonic at all.
*Please note that the Mont Pèlerin Society’s original members and their efforts come from people, primarily Austro-Hungarian economists, who had the misfortune of surviving the destruction of their home empire and then the Second World War; the organization mostly coalesced late in the Second World War, not in 1947 when it got funding; the society’s goal was the effective recreation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s internal economic system on a worldwide scale. They assumed that it would create a moderately prosperous world, not as prosperous as possible, that possibility being sacrificed to stability, but due to the assumed creation of an interlocking system of economic and political international institutions, it would be generally comfortable enough for most people as well as having no major wars, such had twice destroyed Europe in their lifetimes.
The Vanquished by Robert Gerwarth
Times Literary Supplement : “In The Vanquished, a highly original and gripping work of history, Robert Gerwarth asks us to think again about the true legacy of the First World War. In large part it was not the fighting on the Western Front that proved so ruinous to Europe's future, but the devastating aftermath, as countries on both sides of the original conflict were savaged by revolutions, pogroms, mass expulsions, and further major military clashes. In the years immediately after the armistice, millions would die across central, eastern, and southeastern Europe before the Soviet Union and a series of rickety and exhausted small new states would come into being. It was here, in the ruins of Europe, that extreme ideologies such as fascism would take shape and ultimately emerge triumphant.”
One can easily argue about the methods, even the goals, but they really were trying to have the lesser of two evils in place. The takeover by powerful and corrupt economic interests of the newly formed postwar institutions via the United States’ control of them to pillage the world’s population as well as using the American security state and military to enable and maintain the pillage was not accounted for. You could call it a road to hell paved by good intentions.
The Washington Consensus is the American Establishment version of neoliberalism with the bonus of all war, all the time.
Postmodernism. You can also look at Stanford’s entry. As with the idea of Critical Theory and the idea of Intersectionality, it went from a tool of understanding to a tool of destruction in a deliberate effort. Restated, over the decades, people repurposed these ideas from constructive to destructive use for personal, political, and economic gain.
Thelevernews.com: The Master Plan
Corruption In America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuffbox to Citizen’s United by Zephyr Teachout
I have not read the whole book, but lord, it is truly an eyeopening to see the difference from the Founders’ ideas about corruption to today’s (almost) anything goes
BlackAgendaReport.com: Theory 101: Common, Gaddafi, and the Global Significance of the Black Misleadership Class
Like Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Food, the Military-Congressional-Industrial Complex, and so much more.
Lapham’s Quarterly: Mr. Clean: Edwin Chadwick and the movement to blame the poor for being sick.
(A good magazine, but Mr. Lapham died in 2024 and the board is already neoliberalizing it. So beware.)
Death of the Liberal Class by Chris Hedges
Propublica: The Red Cross’ Secret Disaster
Naked Capitalism: The Rat Race for Research Funding Delays Scientific Progress
The Chronicle of Higher Education: A Poet Becomes a Pariah
Harvard Education: The Prosperity Gospel
American Fascists by Chris Hedges
Friendly Fascism by Bertram Gross
American fascism is different than German, Italian, Spanish,and Japanese fascisms. When it comes, it wears the skin of its victims, which in the United States tends to be, but is not exclusive to, the Christian Nationalists. They are distinct from other Christians, just as the prosperity con artists.
This has been an extremely long process lasting, which if including the federal government, started no earlier than 1947. Really, the process of autocannibalism by the United States, began with the pillaging by it, often using the military, of other countries during the 19th century. As the empire always comes home, this eventually lead to the pillaging of ourselves by our ruling class. I will eventually be covering a vast amount of ground.
Covert Action Magazine: For Over 150 Years, Democratic Party Operatives Have Infiltrated, Coopted and Destroyed Independent Political Movements in the U.S.
Naked Capitalism: Former Ambassador Chas Freeman: Possible Disintegration of Civilian Government at Year End
What me worry? No, but I am fucking terrified. However, let me plug the blog Naked Capitalism once again. They really are good people putting out excellent, daily source of truth, and therefore, terror.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/vital-stats-congress-has-a-staffing-problem-too/
“Notably, the staffs of three support agencies – Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, and the Congressional Budget Office, have lost 45 percent of their combined staffs from 1975 to 2015.”
Tucker Carlson Show: Calley & Casey Means: How Big Pharma Keeps You Sick
The American Prospect: Who Strangled the FDA?
For instance,
Wikipedia: Operation Mockingbird.
The New York: A Friend of the Devil
Finks: how the CIA tricked the world's best writers by Joel Whitney
The Mighty Wurlitzer: how the CIA Played America by Hugh Wilford
Regulatory Capture: In politics, regulatory capture (also called agency capture) is a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency, such as a particular geographic area, industry, profession, or ideological group.[1][2]
The Diplomat: Hurdles in the Hypersonic Race: The United States’ Failed ARRW Program
The Cradle: Washington steals over 80 percent of Syria's oil output per day
Thank You for Smoking:“How on earth would Big Tobacco profit off of the loss of this young man?” asks Nick, in a masterly display of twisted logic. “I hate to think in such callous terms, but if anything, we'd be losing a customer... it's in our best interest to keep Robin alive and smoking.” Nick steals victory in the debate, reducing the audience to tears when he announces that the Academy of Tobacco Studies will spend an impressive $50m on an anti-teen smoking campaign.
Washington Post: Many of today’s unhealthy foods were brought to you by Big Tobacco
I note this loss of abilities in myself. It is scary enough to note the lack of use, as with any skill, that causes its lost, but the environment I live in is like an acid, eating away my brain, mind, and sanity. However, I had it before, and I have enough of my own health and sanity to regain it. I hope!
But what of someone who has never had the skills taught? Even an idiot can be taught the skills while there a few who can learn on his own, but most people must be shown the existence and the use of such skills. How many people can teach themselves how to read and write after all?
Such skills are foundational, with them almost anything can be done, without them, almost nothing can be. The individual, the whole nation, becomes pitiable, biddable, nothing more than a resource, a thing, to be used, abused, and discarded by those with power. Please note that this includes all the skills that a functioning adult has including relating to and having relationships with other people in all their messiness.
This last, this dehumanization, is what I damn The Powers That Be the most.