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.