Sunday, October 29, 2017

The Kamikazetariat

As a long-period resonating culture, the Kamikazetariat seems novel & sui generis every time it recurs. The mechanism of its emergence is a net abundance sufficient to sustain & tolerate the toxic luxury of ego categorically overruling reason to the point of collective self-destruction. Once such a society's operating paradigm becomes sufficiently morbidly divorced from reality its rise becomes virtually automatic as both a psychic firewall against anomie & as a focal point of unity, comfort & pride.

Its core dogma, whether its garb be religious or secular, is mysticism fixated on an apocalypse-utopia narrative ... betting the proverbial mortgage & first-born on the ultimate mulligan: that all that messy icky physics & history can be literally wished away. Sufficiently mindless & heroic spectacles of power, violence & epic waste will compel reality itself to obey the faith so that it too can become another of the Kamikazetariat's adoring slaves.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” 


What are actually created are prefab disasters intended to reap dividends for the usual suspects via the ever-popular yearning to evade unwanted reality, which are then enforced ever more vigorously the worse they malfunction. Obviously every new failure is due to a deficit of zeal or blood-lust on the part of the glorious elite - their sacred Ragnarok can only be betrayed or perverted by nefarious infidels, as it is incapable of failing by definition.

One way or another, every Kamikazetariat always self-aborts. Not hard to understand why there would be a perennial collective blind-spot for a deviant culture too loathsome to cherish & too suicidal to persist.

2 comments:

jim said...

19th century nihilism was the spawn of bourgeois angst at imperialism both failing & flowering.

The "New Nihilism" of the 1970s morphed seamlessly into Gordon Gecko intoning the virtue of greed.

The current idol of the Faith-Based Nihilism project is nationalism. Little wonder that nationalism is being hyped as magic bean of the century right after one that saw nationalism come within one word of ending civilization itself. That human unification needs to replace this lethal memetic hallucinogen is by now literally painfully & personally obvious to a large & growing number of its victims.

Global technology plus national polity equals exciting times.

jim said...

Blessed with my very own Illuminatus Spam?
Someone pinch me!
That I found this treasure on my 55th is just the cherry on top.

chefkiss.gif