Of Eternal Progress

A Response to "The Great Awokening"

I think it is important to go back much farther to understand The Great Awokening. And we can be more clear about the causes.

A good distinction to make, if we are to see the extent of the various forces involved, is that between the chess board - that is, the rules of the game - and the big moves and small moves.

The Chess Board

Leveling. Otherwise referred to as the creation of a new species. Kierkegaard says that the leveled man lives in the silence and angst of death. And Nietzsche's Last Man is the weakest of spirits, a thoroughly sick man who will, nonetheless, live the longest. More than ideology, one should see progress as a theological form. Even where events appear to unfold biologically, this is only under the weight a new biology. Given this, one should expect mad symptoms to appear – as with the animal carried by winds into new territories. He, alone, is not to be blamed for his strange appearance and actions, rather he is attempting to survive under conditions he does not know.

Technology. The technological society forces a closing of 'gender', and also space – despite the vast new regions of the earth that have opened up. Already in the 1930s Ernst Jünger made clear the androgynous appearance of female workers. There is also a principled masculinity that develops among the engineers; one can even see in it the strict divisions of a patriarchal religious order. And yet, the very dedication to servicing machines is motherly. One must take on the mannerisms and scheduling of a nursemaid. With the closing of the technological order the atmosphere collapses like the two fronts of a storm.

Extreme polarity. The bourgeois man sets out on an 'expedition of the commonplaces.' Further, as Tocqueville points out, the will to equality causes man to go to war over the most insignificant differences. It is a final defense of his humanity and individuality. Perhaps even more than this, it is a defense of his dwindling property and culture. For the man who sets out on an expedition to the end of the earth begins to lose his identity once war and hunting gives way to mere survival. If he is lost there is a limit to the years that law will spend defending his property, and even his wife. The European continent in the 18th century was less distinct than two towns in the 13th. His identity must be able to withstand the force of the closing of continents, and then their return.

A new world order. 9/11 was the delivery system of this new world. Not only has everything been forgotten of the World Wars, but also the occupations and trials. Anti-colonialism, cosmic laws, and industrial aid peak, then become corrupted, and finally end. However, this cannot only be an end, a new order of law begins to form, even if the elements are unmanageable. The madness of progress strikes like a failed planetary mission, with the astronauts still having to adapt to a new planet. One sees the former dreams of space travel reduced to a ridiculous spectacle. The plea for donations to travel corporations appears like the World Vision commercials from the 1980s, the peak age of techno-decadence. Otherwise, the wildest conspiracy theories, of alien invasions and occupations, seem like a comfort compared to the wars of gender and bio-principles.

The Big Moves

Romantic pessimism. As Carl Schmitt notes, the romantic man has no other law than his experience and aesthetic detachment. He will appear as decadent while engaging with the cold sight of a murderer or fraud. He would hope to hold onto this aesthetic picture of the world even after his death – a Narcissus, but only insofar as he has no reason to "Know Thyself". The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In the end, his pessimism and romanticism can only turn inward, against himself.

The Agony of Class. Youth is the primordial class. It speaks to the vitality of a race. Where gender conflict takes the place of class it can only be that the war has entered a final phase, whether as military overextension or civil war.

Without their men, the women are left to fight with nothing more than the meagre means available to them.

Revolutionary capitulation, or confusion. This is not only limited to the Marxists, but is most easily seen in them, and they invoke what might be called a reactionary turn. Where Walter Benjamin identified fascism through war - in his analysis of the Conservative Revolution - he invoked the rules of just war, while expelling all fault of the democratic order. This misstep not only created a defensive, and technically reactive, idea of class, it also prohibited any serious revolutionary involvement. The consequence of this was that leftists had to become the defense forces of the liberal order, while identifying all revolutionary and war forces in the Third World; thus allowing it to fester and grow until an absolute battle became inevitable.

Telecommunications. The great mobilisation force of the worker and new species. All identity is destroyed through distance, a sense of becoming that is entirely technical. It is also what Schmitt refers to as the TV-Democracy, in which the autonomous man receives his orders totally and instantaneously, with the power of cosmic forces. It is a replacement for astrology. In this sense, the development of the computer and mobile technology is nothing new; it is instead an intensifier, the demands of communication increase where crisis deepens. The democratisation of discourse follows this crisis, it is a result rather than a cause. One should always keep in mind that communications development not only appeared in the military, in the permanent civil war state, but was pushed by its intelligence services as a control measure.

Ideology's defeat to kinetics. Ideology cannot explain the delusional turn from strict border measures, even the closing off of a continent, to openness and then back again within mere decades. The only cause here can be the forces and border pressures which follow the world civil war. These are kinetic forces that overwhelm all political and ideological thinking. And technology is only their delivery system. They spread like the radiation from a depleted uranium shell, as dust.

Small moves.

Environmental poisoning. A conspiracy that anyone with common sense knows is true. Poisoning the water supply, food, clothing, bedding, workplaces, and housing increases the general sickness and attacks the natural strengths of man. It is difficukt to speak of weakness, but there is no doubt that environmental poisoning will wear upon man. If he is only partially created gender questions may become an outlet.

Intelligence forces backing. One is insane for mentioning this, yet it is impossible to deny the origins of intelligence operations: control via induced madness and destruction of identity. There is also enough documentation that one should never feel compelled to source the information. We are overburdened with it, and the only remaining industries are in service to intelligence collection and manipulation. Psychological operations are the enforcing agents of the nomos, if one can even call it that. The Man who was Thursday has become a reality, but what is most pervasive is how these operations impel one to become involved, to relieve the agents of their work by becoming one of them. It may even be a mistake to consider this a small move.

Generalized propaganda or the dialectic of giants. Technology generalizes discourse, and considers correctness as a leveling force. In other words, whatever levels and neutralizes becomes truth, and must take on the force equal to the territory faced. At the same time, this task is left to an ever smaller number of people. Hence why intelligence forces and 'exiled' individuals become the forward units of ideas. As Tocqueville theorised, the democratic man, even though he is foremost an individual, can never accept exile (while the aristocratic man may be strengthened by it).

Exile is a fundamental law of democracy, it is essential to his being to know the state of nature – but also to fight against it from his innermost being. To hand over political discourse to the nefarious elements and outsiders, the non-persons, is only to invite them into the inner circle. The more the democratic man is excluded the more he struggles to play a part in the centralizing forces. One of the greatest paradoxes, but it explains why all other aspects of life fall away, become disturbed.