The spectre of covid and the ritual of victory

On worldviews and ritual pt. 2

Feb 3

We were supposed to have flying cars by now, right? To have colonized the solar system. There would at the very least be a couple of bases on the moon and one on Mars.

I think it’s hard for most people to really and thoroughly reject the myth of progress, and especially its subtle salvific promises of some sort of redemptive future utopia.

This idea is hardly ever explicit outside of science fiction, but nonetheless makes up a fundamental theme in the background of society. Be it in the form of an artificial prolongation of life, transhumanist uploading of your consciousness to the ethereal digital “cloud”, or the human seed spreading far and wide through a potentially infinite cosmos.

(image from Ellis, Transmetropolitan 7, 1998. The birth of a “foglet”, an agglomeration of microscopic machines that used to be a human person, and serves as a new vessel for the person’s consciousness.)

Something like this vague notion of deliverance is probably the only tangible hope present in the worldview of many Westerners. And since this hope is fully anchored in the overarching myth of progress and modernity, it follows that these latter can only be jettisoned at a significant and often traumatic cost.

The covid event is both a controlled ritual challenge to said myth of modernity, as well as a pseudo-religious psychodrama, replete with simulated sacramentals, which renews and entrenches adherence to the myth and the social order it supports.

The very notion of a global pandemic eluding the grasp of progress, science and technology, is all by itself a disquieting challenge to the basic belief structure of modernity. Not least because this social imaginary is so frail - it has no space for actual failure or prolonged regress, since that immediately contradicts the core idea of existential advancement. On a related note, Oswald Spengler spoke of the West as “Faustian”, a civilization driven by the devil’s bargain, exchanging its soul for ostensibly unlimited knowledge and material gain, singularly focused on this narrow linear development towards the Omega point of evolutionary momentum.

So the pandemic story in a quite immediate and fundamental sense clashed with people’s existential security, tightly intertwined with physical health and the technological order’s omnipotence as it is.

And now, the pandemic is being called off and victory declared. A year of inoculation rituals is capped off with a sort of ticker tape parade celebrating the expertocracy’s triumph over their own covid-spectre. They won. They were right all along. We can now feel safe again, thanks to their occult knowledge and superhuman talents.

(last headline: “After the announcement: joy and relief in the streets.” Quote below, “[I] feel that I trust the government and the experts”)

Someone else recently said this too, I think it might have been Gato Malo, but what we’re seeing now is exactly the same thing as this old trope on how the calculated solar eclipse would allow the pagan priests to synchronize their rituals with the sunlight’s return. They lock you in the basement to protect you from the zombie horde, and when they finally let you out of there, you’re immensely grateful for them having slayed all the undead. Why else would you have been released from your prison?

Trust in the system, which was in shambles long before event covid, is being ritually re-knit.

And this process is really crucial at this particular point in time. The momentum of the global protests had just reached a point where the pivot was necessary, dissent had penetrated the mainstream to such an extent that it was time to declare victory and consolidate the territory gained. What’s more, the opposition will find it extraordinarily difficult to contend with the actual end of lockdowns and the liberating rituals of victory, which can in principle legitimize any amount of draconian legislation hidden beneath the surface. Most people will not be able to see why there should be anything left to make a fuss about.

Yet inoculations will indeed continue. An annual matter of fact. The legal foundations of the incipient global surveillance apparatus remain in place all over the world. A few days ago, the Swedish tax agency announced its demand for a digital biometric identity “to prevent crime”, and as I stated a few days ago, it was just announced that a majority in the parliament is supporting the cross-sharing of private data on citizens throughout the entire government apparatus and its NGO auxiliaries.

But most of us don’t mind. We’re too enamoured with the spectacular triumph of technological progress, reassuring us that everything was right with the world all along, that our secular priesthood diligently and humbly working in secret finally came through.

And for the above reasons, a global corporate state replete with digital surveillance isn’t really that much of a problem for a great deal of secular moderns. It’s progress. It’s the future. Friendly and benevolent AI is mainly enticing and inspirational.

Redemptive scientism, as Mikael Stenmark termed this fundamental thematic, is key not only to the entrenchment of the social imaginary upon which the societal hierarchy rests, it’s also the pivotal force underlying the recuperation of the left, presently visible in the latter’s support for the status quo and active blackwashing of the global covid protest movement. In its astonishing disparagement of the only real radicalism for several generations.

Through this multi-faceted mythology and its spectacular reproduction, capitalism and the political order is so normalized, so naturalized, that most of the self-identified left has really been reduced to something like the conscience of the system, simply attracting and neutralizing the people and movements that are moved by progressive and humanitarian ideals.

It's like people don't even get that there is a system, left-wing or not. That one cannot really, truly fathom that capitalism is an actual set of tangible institutions and that another world is possible. They seem to think industrial society is some sort of inevitable, almost natural framework, which in turn renders actual resistance inconceivable, and all proper challenges of established authority are manifest as a threat to everyone.

By whatever name you call it, industrial capitalism is just the way things are. The inevitable framework of social evolution. No meaningful political activity can given that premise even in principle transcend reform or management within the system.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

And incidentally, the formal heresy of the anti-vaxxers thus, in the eyes of many, amounts to one of the worst crimes conceivable, since it directly attacks the basic precepts of progress. It threatens the conceptual foundations of the social order in an immediate way, and that's probably why so many people are quite emotional about this peculiar sort of blasphemy.

It's "our society" after all. It’s our progress, and our future home among the innumerable stars.

We are the Faustian spirit of the earth.