LOL, you really know how to get under the skin of a Trotskyist.
I see a Trotskyist in 2016 is sort of like a Seventh Day Adventist; the SDA's originated with the Millerites, who believed that the World was going to end in October 1844, in the following months, years, and decades, made various changes and apologies for the same, and are now a fairly mainstream if rather conservative Evangelical Christian group with a few of their own political eccentricities. On the other hand, I have a fair bit of sympathy for the poor Trots, because both of our
original "moments" are gone, and, while on our movements have on a number of points been proven prescient, the world has failed to collapse around both of us and the shitshow that is postcapitalism/late capitalism/the post-modern global new world order of Liberal Capitalism and until then all we have is navel-gazing and entryism (stateside, that's settling for Bernie or Trump, or cheering for various parties and politicians abroad who still don't quite fit our bill) and because Trots tend to be smarter than the average hard-leftist and miles smarter than the average left-liberal. And if I could have a Bernie or, for that matter, an off-the-street Trotskyite in the White House before Hillary, I would, perhaps even favoring the latter, strictly as a lessser-of-two-weasels proposition. In the present political condition of the U.S., I think that entryism is a viable position (relative to my past position of abstention from the ballot-box) based upon the remote, but more realisable than in the past, possibility of shaking shit up a bit.
Haha, we used to be up the same alley. Now it's just you and Psox on the right.
Funny, how a bunch of Trots went to the Right and we got the neocon movement. Guess we have some conservatives going Trot too. Horseshoe theory stuff I guess. I think we are sort of millenarian in natur e and that helps.
SKL you are a weird guy... I cannot stand you for your political views and your ideas about society but on the other hand you seem like a very educated and reasonable guy. well I guess it's just refreshing to see that not every conservative / rightwing is an incoherent mess like most of those trolling cep
Weird, I won't argue with, though I'd consider the following:
There's a saying in conservative circles that goes, using the standard American senses of both words, that "conservatives think liberals are wrong [some versions have it as 'stupid'] but liberals think conservatives are evil," I'd amplify the addition of "…and dumb," perhaps on both sides, as I state above, I don't think that everyone on the left is stupid, just wrong, and usually this as a matter of fundamental epistemological prejudices learned from the home and in the classroom (particularly in high education in the liberal arts
a.) I really do believe that a lot of you really believe that you are doing the honest and morally upstanding thing to do your part in making the world a better place, I just think that the blinders you have on regarding your ability to do this, how, and why, make you incredibly dangerous.
Although, as famously put by the immortal G.K. Chesterton:
The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types -- the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins.
G.K. Chesterton
Chesterton would have considered himself a traditionalist or a Traditionalist (which are not one in the same), and advocated a now somewhat obscure philosophy called
Distributism, which basically holds that the equitable
distribution of the means of production, and of property, is the ideal political state (this is quite different from socialism both broadly sketched and in the detials.) Distributism is grounded in Catholic social teaching and ignorance of misunderstanding of it may have a large role in the media's gross misunderstanding of Pope Francis—the liberal (in the U.S.) sense has not as much of a friend in His Holiness as he thinks; nor does the conservative (religiously speaking) Catholic, for the most part (the mainstream media both in the U.S. and in Europe, even in Italy, has done an extremely poor job analyzing various of his remarks on issues such as homosexuality; although he has done little to endear himself to strict liturgical traditionalists, not that he has the obligation to, he is, after all, their (our) Pope.) The economic Liberal, though, in the strict sense of the word (which encompasses both the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States,) does not have an ally on St. Peter's chair, nor does he in traditional Catholic teaching
ab initio; Pope Saint John Paul II was widely known for his heroic opposition to communism, but that did not make him a friend of the excesses of capitalism, and in the struggles among the "new things" (literally,
Rerum Novarum, the encyclical letter on social issues issued by Leo XIII PP, speaking of industrialization, labor strife, socialism, and so on), the Church always viewed herself as a Mother to all, neither only to the laborer nor to the factory-owner. Catholicism has had it's allies on the Far Right, including Franco, but never Hitler (despite popularly disseminated libel about Pius XII, who, far from being "Hitler's Pope," ordered denunciations of Nazism read at pulpits and sheltered Jews in the Vatican), but has always offered a third way
b, although never an explicitly enunciated political programme.
Similarly, I don't identify myself with any particular political movement (which, in some way, is taking a (the?) easy way out, by not aligning myself with anything that involves systemic consistency not to mention the possibility of embarrasment by leaders or other actors in a political party or movement, etc.) Like the lyric in
Heroin, I really
do "wish I was born 1,000 years ago." Life would be simpler, certainly; most of the things that preoccupy my mind negatively would not do so, and I'd lose few of those which preoccupy mine positively. As I mentioned before, in the classic terminology of the Old/Hard Left, I would be an "impossibilist," meaning that I believe that the changes that I would like to see are not possible within the constraints of the system in which we currently live; furthermore, I believe that this is getting worse by the day with technological changes. You find many naïve people on both the Right and the Left who believe that their political views are going to, are are gaining a better chance to, prevail, because of the possibility of expressing them to a global platform via social media, or even "going viral." I'll further elaborate on this,
infra, in response to some of
Xorkoth's points.
Another interesting thing here is "I cannot stand you for your political views…" If not a figure of speech, it's a human instinct, but one that I find better avoided; there are a great many political views that I find utterly reprehensible from out of the gate, but I don't consciously, and in fact sometimes must make a conscious effort not to, extend that reprehension to people who honestly hold this views as I said as part of an honest desire to, in their own minds, make the world a better place. As is implied in the earlier adage I quoted, I seldom see the same courtesy extended from Left to Right. Political
tactics can certainly be considiered reprehensible, from lying on the stand or on TV to mudslinging about adultery, etc. to duking it out with fists on the streets
c, and I find "playing the race card" reprehensible, and you might find my "finding playing the race card reprehensible" in and of itself reprehensible, which goes to another important point: the limits on what is acceptable in political discourse, something like the so-called
Overton window. In U.S. political terms, many "liberals" might consider anything like discussing the (well-documented) correlations between race and IQ, aggression, crime, etc. outside of the window while many "conservatives" refuse to even discuss new taxes—although, in today's society, they won't discuss the former either, which returns us to the issues of "political correctness," i.e. adjustments of the Overton window relating to political correctness, transgressions of which many of your apparent political persuasion view as not only political but
moral wrongs, with even such extreme cases as that of
David Howard, who was forced not only to resign from office, but to
apologize for the ignorance of others as to the origins and meaning of the word "niggardly."
Anyway, your comments seem surprised that there are well-read, reasonable, and interesting conservatives out there. This leads met to suspect you have not been exposed to many political viewpoints outside of your own (see
infra, note
a.) I think being exposed to a variety of political and religious viewpoints is essential to being a well-rounded person.With a view to the former, I'd suggest you start doing a little of that. As I've said Protestant Bible commentaries, the
Qu'ran and the
Bhagavad Gita, even Jewish counter-exegeses to the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament and arguments for Zionism; politically I've read my Marx and Engels through to Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao, or at least the highlights, read
The New York Times,
The Atlantic, and a number of other (U.S.-sense) liberal-leaning publications, and look forward to daily reading
CounterPunch, although a lot of it's contents infuriates (or
downright confuses) me—ironically rather less frequently than the editorial page of the
Times or their blatant biases on a number of issues (to say nothing of the daily histrionics of the
New York Daily News on guns, although on this issue they only play
Stürmer to the more internationally reputable city daily's
Beobachter.)
I'd suggest you go for a little light reading of your own. I won't go so far as to suggest you go out and buy books, but one of my favorite electronic publications to recommend to people in your situation is
The American Conservative, and, perhaps more likely to offend, the blog of
John Derbyshire (start with some of his older
opinion work and
literary criticism), as well as a few other blogs, etc., of course; I'd avoid the
National Review, formerly a worthy publication now systemically infected with the noxious bacilli of neoconservatism and Zionism. But check them all out. If open-mindedness is a virtue, as someone alluded to earlier, these are things to be open minded too; even if not,
know thy enemy, or, not even, I wouldn't really consider myself a well-educated person or at least a politically well-round one if I didn't have, e.g., the basics of Marxian theory (my favorite introduction to which is Bukharin and Preobrazhensky's
ABC of Communism, written before the Rise of Stalin, in whose purges both writers fell victims to political murder.)
The incoherent mess that trolls CE&P, /pol/, comments sections in news stories, other forums, etc., is an entirely different thing. They aren't even representative of a reasonably coherent and intellectual case made for current (neo-)conservative thinking in the United States, which is made within the editorial pages of
The Wall Street Journal (who's news coverage, on the other hand, leans rather to the left,)
The National Review, the writings of people like George F. Will, or, in the case of the neoconservatives, Irving Kristol and his entire circle (ex-Trotskyite, as it would have it, and at least in terms of foreign policy very much united by Jewish ancestry or influence and an Israel-First agenda, with a more or less generically center-right stances on domestic affairs, tellingly, these sorts of people are often malleable on some of the issues more important to the populist right, c.f "guns, gays, and God.") But anyhow, the trolls, who's left-wing counterparts (more often to be found on tumblr, the Democratic Underground, and same forums and comments sections in which both species of ignorant—faked to be so by trollish design, willingly self-deceived, or plain ignorant—troll is easily found are no better), are basically about expressing repeatedly one opinion or set of opinions, with little backing, introduction, conclusion, evidence, basis in history, whatever. CE&P leans left and there is a contigent of people who like to post "up with the flag, down with the fag," or whatever, repeatedly, to irk the powers that be. Don't mistake that for an intelligent discussion or representation of any ideology whatsoever other than trolling for it's own sake.
__________________________________
aMost of the conservatives you'll find teaching in undergraduate classrooms, where you'll find them self-identifying at all, are indeed in the hard sciences; as an aside, there are surprising number of fundamentalist Christians in the engineering fields, perhaps because their hermeneutic approach to the Bible as a coherent, self-referential, self-contained and integrated message fits well with that discipline, see the interesting case of the very bright Chuck Missler, former navy man, literal rocket scientist, and promulgator of very questionable eschatological Biblical exegeses. I have a undergraduate degree in International Relations with a minor in European History, and there was a detectable leftward slant in both, but more so in History classes than Political Science classes, which is fairly typical, actual. At my alma mater, our Political Science department made a conscious although not very explicit effort to maintain at least the appearance of "balance" in their presentation of particularly American politics, in the same sense that the media often tries to appear "balanced" by hearing from relatively mainstream Democratic and Republican perspectives on various controversial issues. This claim could be made simultaneously as a subtler and more insidious form of leftist bias was introduced in other departments which did not have "Political" in their name but nonetheless stood to have profound effects on the political formation of the student body.
bA "third way" between capitalism and socialism, a label claimed by many movements, the most mainstream of which is "Washington consensus" neoliberalism of the Clintonian strand. The first "third way" was probably Distributism, now practically forgotten in mainstream distance, then (Italian) fascism came to claim the title (Mussoloni being originally a Socialist), making neoliberalism possibly the "fifth way," if that. "Third positionism," by contrast, as in the American Third Position (A3P) party/gropuscule, usually denotes a sort of moderate fascism, originally the far right in the Russian revolution (National Bolshevism) and the far left in Nazism (Strasserism,) and is something on which I'll have more to say later.
cA lot of the political tactics undertaken on the Left on the "street" level (now expanded to compose the Internet) are thuggish and despicable, like disruption of conferences and lectures by individuals holding dissenting viewpoints on racial and cultural issues, Zionism and what was but now cannot be called "the Jewish Question," etc., by tactics from standing up and shouting to physical violence. The thugs and bullies of the 'antifas' force even fairly moderate voices like Jared Taylor, David Irving, and David Duke (who has even held elected office) to go through hoops in publicizing their speaking engagements similar to those that some of our older members may recall from old school raves. Internet extensions of this are hacking and "doxxing." Now deplorable political tactics occur also on the Right, and more especially online, where the ground is a bit more level, e.g. the epidemic of "doxxing" in the so-called "GamerGate" controversy, which I do not understand, except that ideologies that I dislike are on one side and individuals who, by dint of stereotype, I imagine I'd tend to dislike are on the other, with opportunistic appropriation of the issues and terminology ("SJW") in the broader "culture wars."
took another 2c-e microdose today and went running immediately after. I think I am taking a liking to this :D
[SIZE=-1]Sounds intriguing. I never liked 2C-E, but enjoyed microdosing DOC and DOM (not to mention LSD.) Small or infra-psychedelic doses of phenethylamines like 2C-I—but I'm talking here I'm sure of large doses than you are—however, always used to make me feel the bodily unpleasantness without much reward. I didn't care that much for 2C-I, though, but had a significant amount of experience with it as it was cheap and plentiful at a time where I had little access to 2C-B; once 2C-B was readily sourced for me, although I didn't find it a particularly interesting or profound drug and found 2C-I to be far more psychedelic (although coming with an almost corresponding increase in body load), still nonetheless I preferred to do 2C-B (in stratospheric doses that I would hesitate to mention here for the possible risk of inviting imitators) sometimes in combination with LSD, MDMA, speed (MA, AMP, or d-AMP) or others, largely because 2C-I had too many negative bodily effects for me (while 2C-E had the worst of all, such that I couldn't even focus on or enjoy tripping the two times I tried it—"try anything twice" being my rule at the time.) My love among these compounds is, as I've often mentioned in this forum, 2C-D; and 2C-D has explicitly been investigated as a low-dose nootropic
starting quite a while ago, and while I believe that it has potential there, the linked piece should perhaps be read with a good old grain of Lot's wife as even the Erowids warn, "the following booklet is a little overly positive because it fails to detail any negative reactions, negative health effects, or any other negative elements of any of the compounds discussed." I think you might be on a worthwhile track though.[/SIZE]
"Every reality is an opinion. You create your own reality." This is the prime cause of much social pathology, alienation and anomie in the modern world, and is a great enabling factor for how as Xorkoth says sociopathic, power hungry people come to dominate the world: they can do so by manipulating people's supposedly self-created reality to match their own. A thousand years ago, nobody believed that they created their own reality, their own religion, their own government, or anything or the sort; they were more "free" than we are today in their ability to live out their human lives without all the excess bullshit.
I actually do resonate with a few things you're saying in your most recent post, but I fully disagree with this point. I think that people being able to create their own reality makes it MORE difficult for the power hungry people to control you, though on the other hand it creates more disorder in a way because you're going to have people going many different ways.
Disagree and find this naïve in a similar way to the more idealistic forms of anarchism (either of the Leftist or the Right) variety. We can read "people being able to creating their own reality" in a few different ways—
Each person can create their own reality. Solipsism, essentially, but as the old saw goes, even solipsists look both ways before crossing the street. We do, of course, see a lot of rather sophomoric use of this in informal debate ("well, that's just your
opinion, man. We can have opinions on sports, our favorite meal, Dead show, or psychedelic drug, these sorts of opinions more or less by definition cannot be wrong (Yankees/Jets/Knicks/Rangers/Syracuse; veal picatta; 3/1/69; 5-MeO-DMT); we can also have opinions on questions of a social, political, or religious nature or with implications in these and similar ones with culture– or even species–wide consequences. These are a bit different. It might be pleasant diversion to argue about whether the Mets should trade Harvey, whether 5/8/77 is better or comes from a more interesting era than 3/1/69 or whether Keith was better than Pigpen, or even if the former was a “
a HOAX perpetrated through a joint effort of the US Department of Defense and the CIA,” although the latter might tell us something about
you of a rather different character than whether you're a Keith-and-Donna fan or not. It might even tell us something useful about our own neurochemistry to know that I like codeine and dislike DXM (the importance of this should need know explanation here), and it might even be a point of moral/ethical debate whether I had ought to slaughter young cattle in order to enjoy them thinly sliced, pounded, and sautéed with butter, lemon, white wine, parsley, and capers. This moves us slightly into a different category. If you're a vegetarian/vegan, and one out of conviction rather than faddishness, taste, or the insistence of your girlfriend, then you think that I'm [size=-1]WRONG[/size] for liking (or at least eating) veal picatta. At which point, you're creating you're own reality, as am I, but yours is wrong (because animals are tasty to eat, contain essential nutrients, and were put on this Earth for that purpose.) Of course then, you think my meal has rights (and, by correlation, are more likely to think that 'Caitlyn' Jenner is ontologically female.)
Which leads us to another reading of the phrase,
the people create their own consensus reality. This is a democratic statement, and we can see all around us how well democracy has turned out. I think it was Churchill who said it is the "worst form of government, but better than all the others," but I'm not quite sure that he's right.
Republic—Authority is derived through election by the people of public officials best fitted to represent them. Attitude toward property is respect for laws and individual rights, and a sensible economic procedure. Attitude toward law is the administration of justice in accord with fixed principles, and established evidence, with a strict regard to consequences. A greater number of citizens and extent of territory may be brought within its compass. Avoids the dangerous extreme of either tyranny or mobocracy. Results in statesmanship, liberty, reason, justice, contentment, and progress.
Democracy—A government of the masses. Authority is derived through mass meeting or any other form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic, negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the people shall regulate, whether it be based upon deliberation, or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard to consequences. Results in demagoguery, license, agitation, discontent, and anarchy.
U.S. Army Training Manual Training Manual No. 2000-25 (1928)
You'll often find this quote with only the latter half given, it was popularly circulated in New Left Circles (from whereby it even found it's way into the (BSD) UNIX
fortune(1) database, which actually has a lot of countercultural influence.) For obvious reasons this version has been claimed to have been a fraud but as far as I can tell it actually is not—when in unexpurgated form, the quote is not denigrating democracy
per se, presumably in favor of tyranny, but is favorably comparing a balanced system of government as supposedly enjoyed by the United States to chaotic and unstable rule by sheer force of public whim. The latter clearly involves a degree of élitism but the latter is, outside small and heterogenous societies (primitive tribes, the old New England town meeting) in relatively peaceable circumstances is impracticable and, as being prone inevitably to degeneration into chaos, is highly dangerous. Ironically, our present "pickle," as you put it, has come about from the confluence of these two evils, from pressures from both above and below.
On a similar theme, M. de Tocqueville is alleged to have said, "a democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury," but this is a misattribution (as is pseudo-Voltaire's "to know who truly rules over you, look for whom you are afraid to criticize", both of which contain a great deal of truth despite being misattributed to more famous than the (apparently anonymous) men who created them
d.
Thing is, that individuals are by and large to weak to individually "create their own reality," to think otherwise is to give the "mob" too much credit. The average person does
not create his own reality, even if we might grant that he has the potential to; he delegates this potential to thet media, and all the more so in the 21st century, where we see such phenomena as the phenomenon of self-reinforcing bias in Google search results (when I make searches typical of, and click on results relating to, for instance, Catholicism or paleoconservatism or Euro-skepticism or whatever else, then Google will present me with more of the same, reinforcing my own biases; so too for people of the opposite political persuasio), and the selection of people who you "follow" or "friend" on Twitter, Facebook, etc. which all tend towards the creation of self-reinforcing "bubbles" of small consensus–realities created not by a single person but simultaneously organically and artificially (all the more so when we consider that paid advertisements, including paid advertisements of a political nature, also influence these results) created simulacrum consensus reality.
This is not a good thing. Even if we accept that democracy is necessarily a good thing (which I do not, for a variety of reasons that I will elaborate upon later,) these influences are not good for democracy. The essential problem here is this—the informal, floridly opinionated, and audience-catering nature of social media and a lot of the content generated online and now even in "old media" by "new media" influence lets us feel as if we are making use of it to "create our own reality," but in reality, it is "creating [our] reality"
for us. Which makes it not a tool for freedom, but a tool for totalitarianism. Here we can insert arguments about net neutrality, etc. which is
not really as simple an issue as it's advocates would have it.
__________________________________
d Such practice has existed since antiquity and only came into serious ill repute since the invention of the printing press, nonetheless, such literary fictions or misattributions often contain much truth and attain great influence. What has become known as the work of "Pseudo-Dionysius the Æreopagite" (7th century or so) was attributed to that rather obscure Biblical figure more or less without question until the beginnings of modern textual criticism, for instance, was and remains hugely influential on Christian theology, it's authorship having either been concealed as an ancient form of false advertising, or, because his name really was Dionysus (still not uncommon among Christians in that era), and within a generation or two of his text, written on papyrus, being passed around, optimistic and pious monks thought him to be the Biblical figure.
I believe religion and dogma (there certainly exists nonreligious dogma as well though religion is by far the primary method of delivering it) are the most powerful and frequently used tools to control the masses. If you set up a system where there are certain "truths" and no way to ever question them, and these truths center around the fate of your soul, it's incredibly easy for anyone with a mind to gain control and the drive to actualize such to control the beliefs and behaviors of the people. On the other hand, people who believe as they see fit are much more likely to not buy into that controller's agenda. Time and time again religion has been the vehicle for corruption, and I think that's unlikely to change.
Every mode of power has been a vehicle for corruption. The Church certainly has had it's share of corrupt clergy up to and including various popes, although
Alexander VI, of ill fame including at least three separate TV series called some variation of
The Borgias, while unchaste and not particulaly attendant to religious matters, was not particuarly among them; in fact, he would probably gain praise today for his attention to the social problems in Rome and the Papal States, the secular government of which was in his purview at the time. More importantly, the Church owned a great deal of property during the medieval era, giving even abbots of orders pledged to poverty a profit-motive, a lot of this was problematic, but it was the nature of the system at the time, and arguably the Church was a better custodian of these assets than the various warring petty states and nobles. A common criticism of the Catholic church is "why is not all the gold in the churches and liturgical instruments, the priceless works of art, etc. held by the Vatican and the Church elsewhere to feed the poor?" The answer being that these serve a higher purpose, religiously, to elevate people's hearts and minds as they worship God, and moreover to connect people to 5he "unbroken chain" of Church history."
But I digress (yet again.) As to claims to absolute truth—this is a feature of all coherent ideological systems including left-liberalism, the social justice movement, etc. While the Bible holds that the unforgiveable sin is "blasphemy against the Holy Ghost," the former holds that the unforgiveable sin is the expression of contrarian views about Blacks, Jews, homosexuals, etc. The individual who feels free to "believe as they see fit" is a rarity, and the fallacy of liberal democracy is to believe that such individuals are found in such abundance as to be entrusted with the government of a nation; particularly one as large and heterogenous as the United States, where the electorate will inevitably fracture into various groups based on ideology, identity, etc. and vote more according to the reality created by these groups and their self-reinforcing memes than according to the reality that they create
for themselves; hence my earlier comments about democracy being tenable perhaps at the level of an old New England town meeting—in a small, homogenous community. At a national or an international level, it is an impractical and failed system and one which has been proven to have baleful results as it is all to easy to manipulate the electorate into believing, or more particularly fearing, this or that, and to fracture it into various groups which can be aligned with one another to the advantage of the powers that be. In the game behind the game, the "flag vs. fag" controversies are exploited by international capitalists who care little for either, and instead rely upon the public histrionics generated by these battles to distract the public from issues of real import (I used earlier the example of the transatlantic free trade treaty, or, twenty or so years before, NAFTA; these were opposed by the far left and far right, while the mainstream left and right quarreled over dog whistle identity issues and the same.)
Regarding globalization, as you put it, "Liberal Capitalism" (but I mean it in more than just a capitalistic sense, I also mean in terms of culture), I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I love the vibrant differences between cultures, the fact that things can be drastically different elsewhere.
This has always been the case, of course; the vibrant differences in cultures are more being eliminated by globalization, though, than they are being highlighted. They are only being made more available to the uncultured tourist. A trivial, even silly, example of globalization that I like to cite took place within my first hour in Sri Lanka, looking for something to eat in the airport. The options were more or less the same as they would be in America—Burger King, Pizza Hut, some
faux-Chinese place, as this airport clearly catered to Western businessmen and diplomats who had come to deal with the "free trade zone" (more on this later), but I opted with Pizza Hut, and ate some very delicious chicken curry pizza, which I'd never find in the U.S., but was Pizza Hut's concession to Sri Lankan culture, I suppose. Silly. More distressing was the "free trade zone," about which I wrote elsewhere:
We did a bit of the usual sightseeing, but a lot of time spent in Colombo talking with government/military people (and staying at the Cinnamon Grand, a legitimate 5 star hotel and the classiest place I've ever stayed at, cheaper than a motel on the outskirts of NYC!) and in the border regions around where the A-9 highway was bombed to shit. Heavy stuff. Another student who I stayed with was doing her thesis on globalization, the "free trade zone" and labor conditions there, mostly for women, who lived in not quite squalid but quite poor conditions within the "zone," basically a company town. Clearly this is not a place they show tourists so we made up some letterheads and nametags and bullshitted our way in there posing as a delegation from an American corporation! That was fun if a bit nerve-wracking at times. I still have somewhere a shitload of photos of the women who lived there at home and at work. Home is probably comparable to the villages they came from but much more densely packed with the consequences of sanitation, etc. and there was a lot of risk of violence [*especially sexual violence], etc. Working conditions weren't as bad as you might imagine.
This is the fruit of globalization for those on the receiving end. We get cheap consumer goods and the ability to gawk at cultural differences, and the conditions experienced by the women in the "free trade zone" were quite honestly probably better than those in their home villages, but their way of life is greatly disrupted and overall we upset a delicate balance over there. This is not too different from colonialism, and in many places it is worse—most of the horrors experienced in the Third World in the latter half of the past century are directly attributable to botched decolonizations (under which heading I would include the formation of the Jewish state in 1948, a concession by the British to an unusual alliance of war crime victims, terrorists and global financiers.)
And the current culture spreading across the globe has done a whole lot of bad in the world, both to other cultures/its own people and to the environment. Most frighteningly, it provides an excellent framework for the power mongers to be able to utterly control the planet. And in fact that's probably the force that's going on behind it, or at least, a big part of it (I also think it's inevitable that technologies such as cell phones, satellites and primarily the Internet will cause such a trend to emerge).
See my remarks above on the Google-search-bias effect. The surveillance aspect of the Internet and cell phones has been done to death elsewhere, so I won't even touch up on it, but yes, technology allows an almost insurmountable advantage to the powers that be, both in terms of shaping the narrative, and thus, in democracies or nominal democracies, the 'Overton window' and political possibilities, and in terms of controlling the populace by surveillance and fear of it's effects.
1984 is always cited as being prescient to our current predicament, and it is, particularly as regarding to the manipulation of language by élites. For instance, to borrow from a post I made elsewhere, in polite mainstream discourse, criticism of things like Zionism, Jewish political-economic-social influence, #BlackLivesMatter, migrants, etc. is off limits. Simultaneously, indigenous cultures should be preserved. These types of identitarianism are above criticism, sometimes even protected by law; every other kind of identitarianism is hate speech and criticizing the aforementioned types of identitarianism is hate speech.
[The Newspeak word 'blackwhite'] has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.
Orwell, 1984
However, as has also been remarked variously, Huxley's
Brave New World is just as, if not more, prescient. Since we're a drug forum, we'll return to drugs for a moment. My day job is as a cog in the wheel of the carceral mechanism of the state as relates to the mentally ill. We treat them with medications which have an array of unpleasant and dangerous side effects, but which are ideally able to control symptoms, which is not as common as one might hope—more often they merely control
deviant behavior, and when they don't, we are forced to apply violence (ideally in a controlled manner) in order to control the situation and to administer medications to control behavior or to sedate persons against their will. There has been a lot of radical criticism of psychiatry, most famously from psychiatrists
cum 'anti-psychiatrists' like Szasz and Laing, but also from critical theorists who point out that psychiatric diagnoses are used inequitably and as a mechanism of control in minority, especially African-American, communities, and this is true, but my answer to all criticisms of psychiatry is that while they are generally correct on general principles, they are lacking in presentation of viable alternatives. I'd love to attempt to set up, with an unlimited budget, some kind of program in a large swath of farmland somewhere upstate where my patients would live in small homelike settings, milk cows, have therapy sessions, take meds as they need and chose, etc., but that's impossibly idealistic. It's not happening, although I wish it would.
But anyway, psychiatric medications, also spreading globally (and being, like many other pharmaceuticals, tested on sometimes unwitting Third World populations as guinea pigs) and have a great potential to be used as an instrument for implementing "pharmaco-totalitarianism," as they are capable of producing something of an apathetic and compliant state. However, let's return for a moment to the original question, as relates to psychedelics and politics. In Huxley's
World, people weren't controlled with Thorazine but with something maybe a bit more like MDMA. I'd argue that psychedelics have as much if not more a possibility of being tools for social control than neuroleptics, for what makes a person in a more pliable and subjective state than a high dose of a psychedelic or empathogen? This is why, in the hands of a good therapist, they may provide therapeutic potential; this is also why they tend to produce people who become walking 'hippie/New Age' stereotypes, as this is often associated with psychedelics and becomes a self-reinforcing 'strange loop.' Imagine the possibilities in the hands of a government.
But, I also think it may be our only chance of ever coming to a productive peace as a race. If we rid ourselves of nationalism, it may be possible to eliminate the us vs them mentality that causes hatreds based on race and other differences. And if we could set up a benevolent distribution of resources and energy, we might be able to figure out how to provide a better life for more people, and a cleaner planet (imagine for example a global electrical grid, we could put a bunch of unclear power plants in places far away from the ocean and earthquakes and tornadoes and such, where it would be extremely safe, and get rid of them in places like Japan and the American west coast, but still have power for everyone). I realize this is quite idealistic, I suppose it relies on eliminating the power monger aspect of humanity, as does any solution of government or religion. Hence our pickle.
Your solution necessitates global totalitarianism. ("Eco-fascism" and the "green–brown alliance" are, in fact, political phenomena, albeit in the fringe.) And global totalitarianism that begins as eco-totalitarianism wil inevitably extend far beyond that. "Eliminating the power-monger aspect of humanity" is the problem. The anarchist/libertarian/minarchist says, eliminate government inasmuch as is possible, but this allows private power-mongers to take over; the monarchist says, an underrated argument these days, let one who is trained to rule and has a personal stake and personal ownership of the realm have the power, but this allows for a bad apple to take all the power; the democrat says, let the people decide, but the people are easily malleable. So the cynic says, we're fucked. All I can wish for is to dial back a lot of social and political changes that have taken place of late as much as possible, and make life simpler. Proposals beyond that wind up being pretty radical. I suppose I'd favor a moderate sort of fascism but with a distributist rather than corporatist economic system, international isolationism, a moderate focus on identitatrianism, and self-sufficiency, and an emphasis on local communities, but how likely are we to achieve this democratically or by any other means in my lifetime? Not very. So the best that I can hope for, or really that any radical can hope for, is to shake things up and get the
status quo challenged. Go Donald, go Bernie. Let's see chaos. Burn it all down, and see what rises, phoenix-like, from the ashes; perhaps it will be the global totalitarianism we are already well on our way towards, but the trends are against this–the #Brexit, the realignment of power away from the "unipolar moment" after the breakup of the Soviet Union, the resurgance of right-wing, identitarian and nationalistic movements the world order. All of this gives me hope, wihle it stikes fear into the hearts of my ideological opposites. All that one can really say is that we live in interesting times.
