Understanding this weird, corporate, cultural revolution all around us
A meditation, in four parts, on our current dystopia
I. Crazy, crazy, everywhere
We are awash in a sea of crazy. Suddenly, instantaneously, like a murmuration of starlings, the powers that be decided as one that chemical and surgical castration of queer, mentally ill, and autistic CHILDREN was the highest form of caring and justice. They all just KNEW, never mind what they may have said before about female genital mutilation in African countries. PRESIDENT Biden invoked his own mother to say that states including Florida that try to prevent the chemical and surgical castration of children are close to committing a SIN. Apparently eugenics is now a religious obligation to the atheistic bougiecrats.
Of course it goes so much further than this. Bougiecrats — who majored in Latin, ethnomusicology, or communications — are certain, just certain, that injecting known neurotoxins into their own kids, starting in utero and continuing 70+ more times before they are 18 years old is the scientifically valid thing to do. Never mind that these people have never read a vaccine safety study in their lives. Never mind that never before in human history has any society launched such an unprecedented chemical assault on their own children. Never mind that this is objectively the sickest generation of children in American history. They just KNOW that this is the correct thing to do and anyone who thinks otherwise is an “extremist” who must be dealt with by the state.
In this article, I will suggest that we have actually seen this sort of crazy before, that it is (perhaps) explainable, and that it is about smashing existing social structures and norms in society to pave the way to the next stage of capitalism.
II. Cultural revolutions then and now
I’m a huge fan of the British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. Prior to Covid, he was among the greatest social theorists in the world (alas, like so many otherwise smart people he has failed to rise to the occasion in response to Covid). In the first episode of the six-part series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World, Curtis takes a deep dive into the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution (from 1966 to 1976) started AFTER the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1960) — China’s disastrous attempt to collectivize agriculture and industrialize the nation, that ended up starving millions of citizens to death. According to Curtis, what’s surprising about the Cultural Revolution is that yes, there was some government involvement and direction — Mao’s wife during that period, Jiang Qing, was a former actress and she was part of the Gang of Four that was particularly keen on the dark pageantry of the Cultural Revolution — but whatever role the state may have played as a catalyst at the beginning of the project, the Cultural Revolution soon become a social phenomenon that was bigger than the state. People JUST KNEW that it was their responsibility to denounce, publicly humiliate, beat, and in some cases kill their teachers and elders as traitors to the revolution.
Why? What was driving this (on the subconscious level)? My theory: people just knew that they had to smash the existing social structures in society in order for China to actually industrialize. The Cultural Revolution was necessary to erase former power structures to allow new ones to take over. And that’s exactly what happened — in the 1970s China began the transition to capitalism and the economy has grown at double digit rates every since.
There is an added twist, supplied by Robert Jay Lifton, that is important for our story. In Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Lifton argues that people have a deep-seated need to feel “symbolic immortality” which is “an inner sense of continuity with what has gone on before and what will go on after his/her own individual existence.”
The sense of immortality may be expressed biologically, by living on through one’s sons and daughters and their sons and daughters; theologically, in the idea of a life after death or of other forms of spiritual conquest of death; creatively, or through “works” and influences persisting beyond biological death; through identification with nature, and with its infinite extension into time and space; or experientially, through a feeling-state — that of experiential transcendence — so intense that, at least temporarily, it eliminates time and death.
The communist revolution destroyed traditional spiritual practice in China. Buddhist temples were smashed and monks were jailed and killed for being relics of feudalism (they were, but that’s a story for another day and no excuse for the harm that was inflicted upon them). Initially the communist revolution provided a sense of symbolic immortality that replaced the role of Buddhism or Confucianism. As the revolution flagged and then failed with the Great Leap Forward, the revolution needed a new way to generate that sense of symbolic immortality — enter the Cultural Revolution that provided people with the ecstasy of a religious revival in service of the aims of the revolution.
III. The New Normal Left
I am haunted by this essay by CJ Hopkins. It’s easily one of the 10 best works of social theory/political economy that I’ve ever read:
There are several beats in CJ’s argument that I’ll try to summarize here (but please click over and read the whole thing because it is so incredibly brilliant):
In the early 20th century, there was a battle of ideas, and then armies, between capitalism, fascism, and communism. Capitalism won.
Capitalism is now global, it has no external adversaries, and it’s going totalitarian. This is a new form of totalitarianism — with all of the censorship, demands of ideological conformity, and persecution of the “other” but without the racist ideology that would give the game away.
This Global Capitalism (GloboCap as he calls it) has no ideology per se. GloboCap is “reality” itself. Anyone who disagrees with GloboCap therefore must be insane.
Here’s the money paragraph:
Capitalism is a values-decoding machine. It decodes [strips] society of despotic values (i.e., religious values, racist values, socialist values, traditional values, any and all values that interfere with the unimpeded flows of capital… capitalism does not distinguish). This is how capitalism (or democracy if you’re squeamish) freed us from a despotic “reality” in which values emanated from the aristocracies, kings, priests, the Church, etc. Basically, it transferred the emanation and enforcement of values from despotic structures to the marketplace, where everything is essentially a commodity.
So, hurrah… capitalism freed us from despotism! I’m grateful. I’m not a big fan of despotism. The problem is, it’s just a machine. And it has no off-switch. And now it dominates the entire planet unopposed or restricted in any meaningful way. So it’s doing what it is designed to do, stripping societies of their despotic values, rendering everything and everyone a commodity, establishing and enforcing ideological uniformity, neutralizing pockets of internal resistance.
And for better or worse, we are the pockets of internal resistance that it seeks to neutralize.
The point in all of this though is that these big sweeping ideas, movements, and stages in history, are all, at the most fundamental level, subconscious processes.
IV. Putting it all together
The Enlightenment, in spite of all of its abundant virtues, killed the felt-sense of the divine in the west. Then the pharmaceutical revolution in the 20th century left us with a mostly atheistic society gasping for a sense of symbolic immortality.
The scientific revolution that (with a wink and a nod) promised immortality, has failed. People are sicker than ever before with the average lifespan declining by several years because of Pharma’s mass poisoning of society.
The powers that be needed a new way to prod the peasants into supporting the aims of the GloboCap machine. Enter our modern cultural revolution — corporate wokeism. Its tenets include Vaccines Über Alles™️, the Trans-ification of Culture™️, We’re All Gonna Die of Climate Change™️, and We Heart Ukraine™️ (especially if one knows nothing about it) — each with their own ecstatic religious practices to restore the sense of symbolic immortality that society so desperately craves. In each case traditional values are stripped from society and replaced with New & Improved™️ transnational corporate values that just happen to transfer upwards of a trillion dollars in wealth (in the case of vaccines, green energy, and Ukraine; trans profits are only in the billions) to corporate shareholders.
The Gang of Four instigating this corporate cultural revolution are Larry Fink (CEO of BlackRock), Mortimer Buckley (CEO of Vanguard), Klaus Schwab (Chairman of the World Economic Forum), and Bill Gates (supervillain extraordinaire).
But the real aim of this corporate cultural revolution is to smash the existing social structures to usher in the next phase of capitalism — which (from everything I can see) is transhumanism. In the last three years the Pandemicists have waged war on our bodies, the family, and the church. It seems that their goal is to make life on this planet miserable so that we will accept their virtual reality headset/implant, abandon our earthly bodies, and upload our memories (and eventually our consciousness) into their digital cloud. People should naturally want to resist this but most don’t because they crave this sense of symbolic immortality and because, for whatever reason, in every era the mainstream seems ready and willing to usher in the next phase of capitalism (like some sort of iron law of history).
Which brings me back to a point I have already made several times before. If we are to survive, we have to win the future by identifying and developing the next phase of capitalism that is NOT this dystopian hellscape that Fink, Buckley, Schwab, and Gates are building. I don’t think it will be enough to just defend traditional values — as is happening already, we are getting trampled in the corporate gold rush to profit from transhumanism (and everything that goes along with that).
What fruitful economic activity can we put forward as the alternative to Global Pharma High Tech Feudalism?
Blessings to the warriors. 🙌
Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏
Huzzah for everyone building the alternative society our hearts know is possible. ✊
In the comments, please let me know your thoughts.
As always, I welcome any corrections.
Most likely it starts by the sane leaving the blue hell holes and heading towards the middle of the country for true freedom. We are almost to the point of building our own alternate space/territory and I look forward to that.
People love parties. I’m not kidding. Parties with real people and food we grow or pick up from our local farmers and playing live music after dinner... this is not the whole answer, but it’s where most of the answers will be found. A combination of divestment from the old and manifestation of local, local, local, local - with some key bridges between local groups, but decentralized. Rejection of mainstream medicine with investment in natural approaches to wellness and health. So much of this is already happening but it takes time.