What happens here, the most pernicious development in all of this, is that rational coherence itself actually becomes a source of cognitive dissonance.
I've been thinking along almost exactly these same lines the last few months. From other angles, obviously, but the core issue is the same. One insight came to me, oddly, from professional sports. (being american I was following the NBA). And sports , team sports, football or baseball (US again) or basketball are now huge HUGE economic entities, but the original appeal of sports was utterly tribal. Teams wear certain colors, certain uniforms, and very far back represented geographic regions. That soon disappeared and players were 'hired' from all over. This weakened the tribal attachment but so deep is the need for this that it didnt matter. But surprisingly the corporations and billionaires who run big time sports seem not to realize the reason their fans watch these events. And so they further erode the appeal to the point now where agents and shoe companies have their players change teams every year. And the attachment to teams is ever weaker. And i see how there is now less and less enthusiasm for these big pro league sports. This is like the allegory of society in microcosm, actually. The other aspect is (given Im a freudian) that (in short form) whatever the Oedipal narrative is exactly, its no longer existent in a patriarchy (of a hundred years ago) and nobody works through this narrative, and hence you see a society (sic) of children stuck in various stages of underdevelopment. (Philip Rieff wrote about this, and i covered his stuff here( https://john-steppling.com/2024/11/the-tortured-present/ ) . This illusion of a 'society' is increasingly threadbare. Coupled to (and this seems a logical progression) eroded education, where even basic cognitive skills are no longer taught (i just wrote about the loss of a book culture) and people literally cannot cursively write their own names anymore. Intersecting with all this is technology ( https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ai-art-winning-young-collectors?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial-roundup&utm_term=Sunday-Editorial-04-06-25&utm_content=yes-affinity ). And bolson had an interesting rant suggesting he listens to the podcast (https://youtu.be/AmFUcajDZCU?si=XxGTjyJlqW6cAYJq ). The facsimile society we live in has indeed lost all connection to meaningfull experience -- i dont think one can escape childhood here -- children enter schools that are designed to fragment identity and diffuse tribal instincts. One aspect is probably progressive, but the more significant sets the groundwork for this loss of purpose and/or meaningful signposts for life. And i think the result (along with alll other things noted) is the infantilism we see.
i must have exceeded word limit. ___ enter schools that diffuse a sense of belonging. And liberalism in some weird way sees this as good (they see it from another angle) and belonging, the idea of home and exile are ideas that have been profoundly eroded. (Kafka is important ...see my most recent post in fact). Society writes its own allegory, as it were, with a crisis of homelessness, with forced migration and a constant obfuscation of who is behind this or that government policy. The wizard behind the curtain is behind 12 curtains. There is no chance to get to him.
Been totally swamped with work over here, I think I had five deadlines the last two weeks, and was also finishing up a class this week, but now things seem to ease up for at least a handful of days.
We seem to often converge in terms of these reflections -- I guess we simply are cognizant of similar patterns in the maelstrom around us, but you express them in ways that I think are much less limiting than my analytical-philosophical approach.
The illusion of a society is increasingly threadbare. Yes. This is my point exactly, and it stands out to me pretty starkly here in Japan in comparison to the Swedish context. Here, there still is an illusion of a society which provides some semblance of meaning and belonging, which even if there are huge problems over here (an immense repression, alienation and widespread racism and a soul-crushing conformism, the weirdest kinds of commodity fetishism, and I could go on) does serve as a basic tribal nexus that provides a semi-stable existential foundation for the majority.
It's eroding, for sure -- but it has decayed much further in most parts of the West. I suppose that Bly's Sibling Society maps this process in depth and detail, and it could be that this fear of rational coherence (since it implies the risky potential for insurrection and self-reliance and the responsibility that comes with it) is simply the infantilism or enforced adolesence that he attempts to describe.
But the notion of actual cognitive dissonance when one is faced with rational coherence? I think this is what really bothers me here. This implies a potential for an utter, voluntary and and complete surrender of rational sovereignty in this historical moment. Especially in how the processes of existential fragmentation synergize with digitized mass surveillance and hyper-individualized propaganda and consent manufacturing. A rational super-ego that paradoxically enforces the a-rational surrender?
That could bring to life some infernal machine that just runs and runs for a thousand years.
i think we both have enough background in philosophy that we seem to arrive at similar sites of focus, often simultaneously. Im writing a lot about this in my next blog post...nearly done. But i think how you describe japan is telling. And how we both experience scandinavia. And my sense is that people have in general become dulled, their lives lack peak experiences (or they think the taylor swift concert was a peak experience) . I have noticed (this is a bit related to what michael, below, says about his midwestern town and church) that young people if they marry and have children, even one, will stop seeing other friends. Parenthood is exhausting and alienating. Their former friends dont want to be reminded of life's exhaustions. But even family, even cousins say, that a hundred years ago would always visit on holidays, would write or call. Even if they didnt like each other. It was a part of the social fabric. And this connection was also served by local churches at one time. And further back, of courrse, the Church provided all social structure and additionally educated and taught customs and rituals. And speaking of Bly, this was indeed his take on a society without meaningful rituals. A number of early 20th century thinkers had already recognized the loss of ritual. And then nations got too big. I think people have trouble creating mental maps for society. What does society look like? That's part of the appeal of fascism I suppose. They give you a picture.
Anyway this is a great piece. Drop into AR if you ever have timeø
"It’s not just that Debord, McLuhan and Ellul were right — that kids today no longer expect things to make sense anymore because nothing communicated to them really does."
This didn't just happen now. I recall growing up being upset at things happening in the world in the 80s. The explanations that I got were illogical, whether it be politics, economics, or religion. School didn't help either as they too had this history that felt devoid of honesty. That's why they're still able to stir the pot about the JFK assassination.
It was never logical and it always depended on the us vs them war like mentality in order to justify little and big atrocities.
We are and we were insane for a long time. After all, Orwell wrote 1984 about his time.
Iain McGilchrist sees it as a result of being left hemisphere biased.
No, I think that's true, but this conditioned rejection of complex rational coherence? If this really is something emerging, I think that's at least partly new. I mean, Orwell saw it coming, Robert Bly talks around it extensively, but when citizens are actually uncomfortable in the face of complex truth and decisively favor the simplistic authoritarian fiat? I don't think that's something we've really seen before, and it has such ominous potential.
I think that's right. There is something new about what’s happening. What strikes me is the apathy, the quiet surrender, the way people no longer even try to use logic. Connections to reality seem tenuous as people attach to any slogan.
It’s like the desire to understand, learn and seek meaning has been hollowed out. I can’t think of another time in history when those impulses felt so absent. It feels like a rupture, some break in the human spirit we haven’t yet reckoned with, and maybe no longer even have the tools to repair.
I can relate to Michael because here as spring blossoms, we all share gardening. The buzz of weedwhackers and chainsaws come alive and we look forward to the work and then the harvest.
Last weekend we had our seed exchange and many showed up to learn new things and swap seeds and tips. Local farms brought many starts, seeds and there were young people who are homesteading with their kids who need work and we older people can give it to them when we need help. Anyway, there was food and African music.
Although at the university 37 miles away people, students and teachers, are steeped in cognitive dissonance. They became COVID Nazis and are staunch upholders of pronoun selection. During the recent protests that even spread to the small townships along our Trinity River some mentioned GAZA genocide but most called for a halt to what they described as a “billionaire takeover” of federal programs and policies. Hands off NATO, hands off our democracy and our 401Ks, Dump Trump . WTF?
Thanks for the thoughts. It helped me put together why it will fail. In the past, manipulation was decentralized. What EastAsia went through was different than Oceania and Eurasia went through.
Before then, it was Spartans vs Athenians and so on.
Now we have this global manipulation "lock step" as we saw with COVID, the East went along with it and didn't call out the West big pharma DOD sham.
Now it's becoming global, everyone is a slave to the same master. How did they divert good change before? By pointing out the other guy is bad.
But if the whole world is run by one system like "science" or "economics", what can they use to blame for the mess?
The question is still on the table as to what happened with COVID and why pretty much the whole world went along with it. We can also apply that to 911. How is it that Russia or China didn't challenge the crazy story?
I appreciate the depth of your analysis - so good to read you again!
Reading your description of cognitive dissonance as concomitant with being confronted with the need for rational effort, covid-era experiences came to mind. It happened twice at least that when I mentioned to people that I was unvaxxed, I saw a subtle but visible tremor express itself through their nervous systems. In that moment, they could not process the competing perceptions of me as someone they trusted and me as someone who (according to unquestioned authorities) would choose to be a danger to them and society at large. And they literally shook with dissonance.
While often criticized in some circles for her shortcomings, Hannah Arendt did delve pretty deeply into the weirdness of the territory you are exploring. Doesn't the end of 1984 also lay it out pretty clearly?
As an organic farmhand most of the year, for nearly a decade, I continue to shout it from the rooftops: Grow a Garden! As an antidote for having "almost no control of the necessitites for our own survival and are fully if implicitly aware that faceless powers beholden to nothing and nobody determine whether we live or die," it provides a small but significant step to reclaiming robustness, adaptation, and coping.
Thank you for the reminder of why I put up with the oft-insufferable parochialism of Midwestern US small town living. The church I attend has little to do with my belief system, but does offer spacious time each service to share joys and concerns with one another. Members also delivered over two tons of produce to the local food pantry last year, bring water to a nearby community with toxic wells, and survival kits to their rebuilding ministries in tornado-ravaged zones. We are considering becoming a sanctuary space for immigrants, and one member is trying to get into Palestine for a gardening project. Note this is a church with a regular attendance of about 30 people. So to read your account of hyper-alienated norms, I am comparatively enamored with the ongoing BS of my ordinary life.
Thanks for the kind words and interesting reflections. I also recognize this almost physical repugnance associated with a cognitive dissonance at the very notion of entertaining ideas that go counter to the prevailing orthodoxy (in this state of high anxiety where everyone seems to have persisted for the last five years).
But a gardening movement seems to "take root" again, at least in Europe. More than a million people in Sweden are apparently growing their own food, and even though the media is leveraging this towards war-mongering, it's nonetheless positive.
I should be growing something too, but can't decide what exactly. Maybe some fancy potato cultivar. I've been thinking about peanuts, but the yield is so small.
Great to hear that you're actually part of building an immediate face-to-face community. I don't know how to get there at the moment, but I think that's the only way forward in the long run.
Yes, thanks! It's pretty close I think, but he comes at it from an entirely different angle, and I can't abide his basic Kantian non-realist assumptions which I think are misguided and dangerous, and his epistemology kind of amounts to a coherentist view of truth which ultimately reproduces the reduction of knowledge and truth to authority (whether or not he admits this), and this is probably why he was pissed off at Foucault
BUT I'll read up on his stuff and see if I might be wrong
huh. even so -- Baudrillard seems crucial BECAUSE he assumes and critically engages this ontology in-depth (since our contemporary digitized mass society is fundamentally predicated on the very same ontology and epistemology).
it doesn't matter if he on some level also reproduces the same notions, his reflections are incredibly revealing even so
This was an interesting read, and very apropos that immediately after finishing it a meme juxtaposing the dystopian views of Huxley and Orwell appeared in my feed.
Very insightful article. Since reading this a week or two ago, that "rational coherence actually becomes a source of cognitive dissonance" has come to mind a few times, and I find the length a piece of writing stays in mind is often a reliable test of value.
It is noticeable once you start to consider it, that sort of insight leaving one to wonder how it went unseen before. The more I think about it, the more pervasive it seems.
The war on reality has really led to the ontological disintegration of the younger generations. The cognitive dissonance toward coherency and its consequences are everywhere.
The Internet divides people among oft-warring tribes, and the cyberbalkanisation is great enough that they are, at times, scarcely even capable of communication with each other. This is much easier to understand when considering not only the obvious social needs (of belonging, etc) being fulfilled, but that they all offer competing versions of reality and fact on which one can, as you write, latch onto as a port in the storm; yet a loose tether offers no consolation, and for it to be severed is to sink. It is no wonder the reaction to those on land.
Fantasy comes naturally to the kind of “ghost world” that capitalism creates. For all the reactionary sentiments of those Right Wing conservative notions of the old days, there was a shared community then that created real bonds because it was formed from people living face-to-face. But this atomised society we have now is vulnerable to the kind of whimsical projections of the various “communities” and “subcultures” – many of which consist of the most superficial “brand recognition” devices.
I worry that pornography also has a pernicious effect here in that, although fantasy is a natural part of everyone’s sex lives, early exposure to the reality of sexual relationships should serve to ground everyone in realistic and compassionate reciprocal formations. Porn on the other hand only serves to magnify the original fantasy and to present a kind of erotic analogue to the infinite theoretical expansion of capital.
Thus capitalism naturally tends to ever expanding notions with no ground. Psychosis is the inevitable result.
I have seen this move into "kink" being normalized. When I read about Queer Theory I could see an evolution to a groundless lack of any morality - and not in the puritanical sense. But there's a thread running through Queer Theory—especially as it has been taken up in popular discourse—that challenges foundational meaning altogether. Entangled with consumer culture and the digital world where people now live, it begins to feel like commodified identity is engaging endlessly in self-referential performances. People have lost their mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6LlpU7csRk
Consenting adults can do what they want in private but I can categorically state that porn is an overwhelmingly male fixation and that the above link details one of the more questionable acts from the point of view of health. I've heard that many of the young women in porn find that their bodies "can't take the punishment" as someone so aptly put it. And yet that wiki article doesn't mention any problems at all. When a supposedly feminist author is named, the only point is to say that this act may have homo erotic overtones! I.e. everything is being assessed purely from the male point of view!
My friend is working on a book (not 100% sure of her angle) that touches on the trans phenomenon and the male gaze. Our discussions have focused on how porn and prostitution, no matter much they are normalized, are debasement of women and controlled by men's fantasies. I don't know any women who sit in front of their computers and watch porn. That women who call themselves feminists are supporting the idea that men can become women and think that they should be accepted by society and the law as women is an example of what I think Johan is speaking to in this piece. I think something new is happening.
That these "feminists" are supporting the trans movement is another example of a phenomenon I keep seeing I.e. such absurdity that I sometimes wonder if the ones involved are agents being paid. Surely no-one could be that dumb?
I've been thinking along almost exactly these same lines the last few months. From other angles, obviously, but the core issue is the same. One insight came to me, oddly, from professional sports. (being american I was following the NBA). And sports , team sports, football or baseball (US again) or basketball are now huge HUGE economic entities, but the original appeal of sports was utterly tribal. Teams wear certain colors, certain uniforms, and very far back represented geographic regions. That soon disappeared and players were 'hired' from all over. This weakened the tribal attachment but so deep is the need for this that it didnt matter. But surprisingly the corporations and billionaires who run big time sports seem not to realize the reason their fans watch these events. And so they further erode the appeal to the point now where agents and shoe companies have their players change teams every year. And the attachment to teams is ever weaker. And i see how there is now less and less enthusiasm for these big pro league sports. This is like the allegory of society in microcosm, actually. The other aspect is (given Im a freudian) that (in short form) whatever the Oedipal narrative is exactly, its no longer existent in a patriarchy (of a hundred years ago) and nobody works through this narrative, and hence you see a society (sic) of children stuck in various stages of underdevelopment. (Philip Rieff wrote about this, and i covered his stuff here( https://john-steppling.com/2024/11/the-tortured-present/ ) . This illusion of a 'society' is increasingly threadbare. Coupled to (and this seems a logical progression) eroded education, where even basic cognitive skills are no longer taught (i just wrote about the loss of a book culture) and people literally cannot cursively write their own names anymore. Intersecting with all this is technology ( https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-ai-art-winning-young-collectors?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial-roundup&utm_term=Sunday-Editorial-04-06-25&utm_content=yes-affinity ). And bolson had an interesting rant suggesting he listens to the podcast (https://youtu.be/AmFUcajDZCU?si=XxGTjyJlqW6cAYJq ). The facsimile society we live in has indeed lost all connection to meaningfull experience -- i dont think one can escape childhood here -- children enter schools that are designed to fragment identity and diffuse tribal instincts. One aspect is probably progressive, but the more significant sets the groundwork for this loss of purpose and/or meaningful signposts for life. And i think the result (along with alll other things noted) is the infantilism we see.
i must have exceeded word limit. ___ enter schools that diffuse a sense of belonging. And liberalism in some weird way sees this as good (they see it from another angle) and belonging, the idea of home and exile are ideas that have been profoundly eroded. (Kafka is important ...see my most recent post in fact). Society writes its own allegory, as it were, with a crisis of homelessness, with forced migration and a constant obfuscation of who is behind this or that government policy. The wizard behind the curtain is behind 12 curtains. There is no chance to get to him.
Great to hear from you, it's been a while!
Been totally swamped with work over here, I think I had five deadlines the last two weeks, and was also finishing up a class this week, but now things seem to ease up for at least a handful of days.
We seem to often converge in terms of these reflections -- I guess we simply are cognizant of similar patterns in the maelstrom around us, but you express them in ways that I think are much less limiting than my analytical-philosophical approach.
The illusion of a society is increasingly threadbare. Yes. This is my point exactly, and it stands out to me pretty starkly here in Japan in comparison to the Swedish context. Here, there still is an illusion of a society which provides some semblance of meaning and belonging, which even if there are huge problems over here (an immense repression, alienation and widespread racism and a soul-crushing conformism, the weirdest kinds of commodity fetishism, and I could go on) does serve as a basic tribal nexus that provides a semi-stable existential foundation for the majority.
It's eroding, for sure -- but it has decayed much further in most parts of the West. I suppose that Bly's Sibling Society maps this process in depth and detail, and it could be that this fear of rational coherence (since it implies the risky potential for insurrection and self-reliance and the responsibility that comes with it) is simply the infantilism or enforced adolesence that he attempts to describe.
But the notion of actual cognitive dissonance when one is faced with rational coherence? I think this is what really bothers me here. This implies a potential for an utter, voluntary and and complete surrender of rational sovereignty in this historical moment. Especially in how the processes of existential fragmentation synergize with digitized mass surveillance and hyper-individualized propaganda and consent manufacturing. A rational super-ego that paradoxically enforces the a-rational surrender?
That could bring to life some infernal machine that just runs and runs for a thousand years.
i think we both have enough background in philosophy that we seem to arrive at similar sites of focus, often simultaneously. Im writing a lot about this in my next blog post...nearly done. But i think how you describe japan is telling. And how we both experience scandinavia. And my sense is that people have in general become dulled, their lives lack peak experiences (or they think the taylor swift concert was a peak experience) . I have noticed (this is a bit related to what michael, below, says about his midwestern town and church) that young people if they marry and have children, even one, will stop seeing other friends. Parenthood is exhausting and alienating. Their former friends dont want to be reminded of life's exhaustions. But even family, even cousins say, that a hundred years ago would always visit on holidays, would write or call. Even if they didnt like each other. It was a part of the social fabric. And this connection was also served by local churches at one time. And further back, of courrse, the Church provided all social structure and additionally educated and taught customs and rituals. And speaking of Bly, this was indeed his take on a society without meaningful rituals. A number of early 20th century thinkers had already recognized the loss of ritual. And then nations got too big. I think people have trouble creating mental maps for society. What does society look like? That's part of the appeal of fascism I suppose. They give you a picture.
Anyway this is a great piece. Drop into AR if you ever have timeø
Might amuse you https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1913410202176725425?t=WLgEmAHgxrWD66-DD3cW1Q&s=19
"It’s not just that Debord, McLuhan and Ellul were right — that kids today no longer expect things to make sense anymore because nothing communicated to them really does."
This didn't just happen now. I recall growing up being upset at things happening in the world in the 80s. The explanations that I got were illogical, whether it be politics, economics, or religion. School didn't help either as they too had this history that felt devoid of honesty. That's why they're still able to stir the pot about the JFK assassination.
It was never logical and it always depended on the us vs them war like mentality in order to justify little and big atrocities.
We are and we were insane for a long time. After all, Orwell wrote 1984 about his time.
Iain McGilchrist sees it as a result of being left hemisphere biased.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/left-brain-vs-whole-brain-in-battlestar
No, I think that's true, but this conditioned rejection of complex rational coherence? If this really is something emerging, I think that's at least partly new. I mean, Orwell saw it coming, Robert Bly talks around it extensively, but when citizens are actually uncomfortable in the face of complex truth and decisively favor the simplistic authoritarian fiat? I don't think that's something we've really seen before, and it has such ominous potential.
I think that's right. There is something new about what’s happening. What strikes me is the apathy, the quiet surrender, the way people no longer even try to use logic. Connections to reality seem tenuous as people attach to any slogan.
It’s like the desire to understand, learn and seek meaning has been hollowed out. I can’t think of another time in history when those impulses felt so absent. It feels like a rupture, some break in the human spirit we haven’t yet reckoned with, and maybe no longer even have the tools to repair.
I can relate to Michael because here as spring blossoms, we all share gardening. The buzz of weedwhackers and chainsaws come alive and we look forward to the work and then the harvest.
Last weekend we had our seed exchange and many showed up to learn new things and swap seeds and tips. Local farms brought many starts, seeds and there were young people who are homesteading with their kids who need work and we older people can give it to them when we need help. Anyway, there was food and African music.
Although at the university 37 miles away people, students and teachers, are steeped in cognitive dissonance. They became COVID Nazis and are staunch upholders of pronoun selection. During the recent protests that even spread to the small townships along our Trinity River some mentioned GAZA genocide but most called for a halt to what they described as a “billionaire takeover” of federal programs and policies. Hands off NATO, hands off our democracy and our 401Ks, Dump Trump . WTF?
Thanks for the thoughts. It helped me put together why it will fail. In the past, manipulation was decentralized. What EastAsia went through was different than Oceania and Eurasia went through.
Before then, it was Spartans vs Athenians and so on.
Now we have this global manipulation "lock step" as we saw with COVID, the East went along with it and didn't call out the West big pharma DOD sham.
Now it's becoming global, everyone is a slave to the same master. How did they divert good change before? By pointing out the other guy is bad.
But if the whole world is run by one system like "science" or "economics", what can they use to blame for the mess?
The question is still on the table as to what happened with COVID and why pretty much the whole world went along with it. We can also apply that to 911. How is it that Russia or China didn't challenge the crazy story?
Now we will see the man behind the curtain.
https://robc137.substack.com/p/looking-behind-the-curtain-of-oz
I appreciate the depth of your analysis - so good to read you again!
Reading your description of cognitive dissonance as concomitant with being confronted with the need for rational effort, covid-era experiences came to mind. It happened twice at least that when I mentioned to people that I was unvaxxed, I saw a subtle but visible tremor express itself through their nervous systems. In that moment, they could not process the competing perceptions of me as someone they trusted and me as someone who (according to unquestioned authorities) would choose to be a danger to them and society at large. And they literally shook with dissonance.
While often criticized in some circles for her shortcomings, Hannah Arendt did delve pretty deeply into the weirdness of the territory you are exploring. Doesn't the end of 1984 also lay it out pretty clearly?
As an organic farmhand most of the year, for nearly a decade, I continue to shout it from the rooftops: Grow a Garden! As an antidote for having "almost no control of the necessitites for our own survival and are fully if implicitly aware that faceless powers beholden to nothing and nobody determine whether we live or die," it provides a small but significant step to reclaiming robustness, adaptation, and coping.
Thank you for the reminder of why I put up with the oft-insufferable parochialism of Midwestern US small town living. The church I attend has little to do with my belief system, but does offer spacious time each service to share joys and concerns with one another. Members also delivered over two tons of produce to the local food pantry last year, bring water to a nearby community with toxic wells, and survival kits to their rebuilding ministries in tornado-ravaged zones. We are considering becoming a sanctuary space for immigrants, and one member is trying to get into Palestine for a gardening project. Note this is a church with a regular attendance of about 30 people. So to read your account of hyper-alienated norms, I am comparatively enamored with the ongoing BS of my ordinary life.
I hope to read more of your work again soon!
Thanks for the kind words and interesting reflections. I also recognize this almost physical repugnance associated with a cognitive dissonance at the very notion of entertaining ideas that go counter to the prevailing orthodoxy (in this state of high anxiety where everyone seems to have persisted for the last five years).
But a gardening movement seems to "take root" again, at least in Europe. More than a million people in Sweden are apparently growing their own food, and even though the media is leveraging this towards war-mongering, it's nonetheless positive.
I should be growing something too, but can't decide what exactly. Maybe some fancy potato cultivar. I've been thinking about peanuts, but the yield is so small.
Great to hear that you're actually part of building an immediate face-to-face community. I don't know how to get there at the moment, but I think that's the only way forward in the long run.
Hi Johan, isn't what you're describing Baudrillian hyperreality? It's basically like this, but applied to every aspect of society now: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b975474-1a03-4da8-bfbf-055378b209bb_640x853.jpeg
Yes, thanks! It's pretty close I think, but he comes at it from an entirely different angle, and I can't abide his basic Kantian non-realist assumptions which I think are misguided and dangerous, and his epistemology kind of amounts to a coherentist view of truth which ultimately reproduces the reduction of knowledge and truth to authority (whether or not he admits this), and this is probably why he was pissed off at Foucault
BUT I'll read up on his stuff and see if I might be wrong
huh. even so -- Baudrillard seems crucial BECAUSE he assumes and critically engages this ontology in-depth (since our contemporary digitized mass society is fundamentally predicated on the very same ontology and epistemology).
it doesn't matter if he on some level also reproduces the same notions, his reflections are incredibly revealing even so
takes one to know one I guess
This was an interesting read, and very apropos that immediately after finishing it a meme juxtaposing the dystopian views of Huxley and Orwell appeared in my feed.
I got a girlfriend she's better than that
And nothing is better than this (is it?)
- David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz
"Girlfriend is Better" aka Stop Making Sense
Brilliant 👏
Very insightful article. Since reading this a week or two ago, that "rational coherence actually becomes a source of cognitive dissonance" has come to mind a few times, and I find the length a piece of writing stays in mind is often a reliable test of value.
It is noticeable once you start to consider it, that sort of insight leaving one to wonder how it went unseen before. The more I think about it, the more pervasive it seems.
The war on reality has really led to the ontological disintegration of the younger generations. The cognitive dissonance toward coherency and its consequences are everywhere.
The Internet divides people among oft-warring tribes, and the cyberbalkanisation is great enough that they are, at times, scarcely even capable of communication with each other. This is much easier to understand when considering not only the obvious social needs (of belonging, etc) being fulfilled, but that they all offer competing versions of reality and fact on which one can, as you write, latch onto as a port in the storm; yet a loose tether offers no consolation, and for it to be severed is to sink. It is no wonder the reaction to those on land.
Fantasy comes naturally to the kind of “ghost world” that capitalism creates. For all the reactionary sentiments of those Right Wing conservative notions of the old days, there was a shared community then that created real bonds because it was formed from people living face-to-face. But this atomised society we have now is vulnerable to the kind of whimsical projections of the various “communities” and “subcultures” – many of which consist of the most superficial “brand recognition” devices.
I worry that pornography also has a pernicious effect here in that, although fantasy is a natural part of everyone’s sex lives, early exposure to the reality of sexual relationships should serve to ground everyone in realistic and compassionate reciprocal formations. Porn on the other hand only serves to magnify the original fantasy and to present a kind of erotic analogue to the infinite theoretical expansion of capital.
Thus capitalism naturally tends to ever expanding notions with no ground. Psychosis is the inevitable result.
I have seen this move into "kink" being normalized. When I read about Queer Theory I could see an evolution to a groundless lack of any morality - and not in the puritanical sense. But there's a thread running through Queer Theory—especially as it has been taken up in popular discourse—that challenges foundational meaning altogether. Entangled with consumer culture and the digital world where people now live, it begins to feel like commodified identity is engaging endlessly in self-referential performances. People have lost their mind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6LlpU7csRk
And Wikipedia has normalised this kink material. See here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_penetration
Consenting adults can do what they want in private but I can categorically state that porn is an overwhelmingly male fixation and that the above link details one of the more questionable acts from the point of view of health. I've heard that many of the young women in porn find that their bodies "can't take the punishment" as someone so aptly put it. And yet that wiki article doesn't mention any problems at all. When a supposedly feminist author is named, the only point is to say that this act may have homo erotic overtones! I.e. everything is being assessed purely from the male point of view!
There is indeed a new misogyny around.
My friend is working on a book (not 100% sure of her angle) that touches on the trans phenomenon and the male gaze. Our discussions have focused on how porn and prostitution, no matter much they are normalized, are debasement of women and controlled by men's fantasies. I don't know any women who sit in front of their computers and watch porn. That women who call themselves feminists are supporting the idea that men can become women and think that they should be accepted by society and the law as women is an example of what I think Johan is speaking to in this piece. I think something new is happening.
That these "feminists" are supporting the trans movement is another example of a phenomenon I keep seeing I.e. such absurdity that I sometimes wonder if the ones involved are agents being paid. Surely no-one could be that dumb?
That is a good question