Time’s Last Kiss

When I reached a river, it was too far below me, and my thirst was unabated.

—Harold Bloom

When one is young…

Time is like a distant cousin that one sees from time to time during some family reunion, a festival of the season like Christmas or Easter, her pretty face smirking and full of mischief she sits across the table known but unknown.

When one is old…

Time presses down on one like a Succubus extracting pleasure from your pain, her eyes glowing fiery with that dark intensity only those who know time is well past absolution would feign suffer. One should have seen coming that which cannot be lightly dismissed, but were too busy forgetting in the daily activities that have always allowed one to be mercifully distracted. Not now that comforting gaze of one’s cousin in her youthful merriment. No. Now is the time of demons and suffering, nights when sleep and death seem not like twins but old enemies who will never be reconciled by touch or care. Falling and failing are one’s lot now, each breath a momentary reprieve from the cold hearth that awaits one in that dank tomb. And, yet, as memory and desire waver over those moments in time, when life seemed so full of grace and vitality, one begins to understand that reconciliation and redemption have already come and gone like old lovers whose last kiss still lingers on the fragrant morning air that carries one forward and downward …

Tom Bland: Time Fucked You Up

 

A poet friend Tom Bland’s poem Time Fucked You Up

that film made me think about the
constantly open
porn cinema that was behind Dean Street

the smell of every type of cum
rising like fumes from the godawful seats
where the men’s elbows had no choice but to touch

their eyes fixated on the screen but the shadows of penises to
the sides: the
vagina projected to a giant proportion on the screen

the very place of their birth     their desire to rush back
inside

The Cybergrim Aesthetic – Precarity and the Neoliberal Endgame

Necroliberal culture has injected into the social brain a constant stimulus towards competition and the technical system of the digital network has rendered possible an intensification of informatic stimuli, transmitted from the social brain to individual brains. —Anon

The Cybergrim City is a place where power makes bodies vulnerable to death and exploitation by limiting time in certain spaces, forcing continual mobility, increasing time in toxic, violent and surveilled spaces, justifying these necro-temporal policies through precarity. The dense city or megalopolis of the near future will be a Necroscape, a site of surveillance capitalism, a factory of death where the furnaces of capital and sex play out their games of sacrifice and eros – the pleasure/pain of an occulture of pure jouissance.

The Necroscapes of the future will be sites of surpassing repetition producing liminal zones of necrotic existence. A libidinal economy of necrotic repetition, a sado-masochistic environ of predatory existence; competition on steroids. The marketization and militarization of these necrofeudal enclaves will harbor the architecture of death, much as the ancient cities of Moloch were built around the never-dying ovens of a sacrificial holocaust of babies, or the Mayan cities of blood where obsidian dreams of knowledge and power sacrificed warriors at the peak of their existence, cannibalizing their hearts in rituals of bloodletting to the gods of time.

The ultimate expression of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to dictate who is able to live and who must die. To kill or to let live thus constitutes sovereignty’s limits, its principal attributes. To be sovereign is to exert one’s control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power. —Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics

As Berardi once suggested we “have to look at the cyberspace of global production as an immense expanse of depersonalized human time” (32 Precarious Rhapsody). In a necroeconomy the human body is excluded. Depersonalized time becomes the real agent of the process of valorization, and depersonalized time has no rights, nor any demands. It can only be either available or unavailable, but the alternative is purely theoretical because the physical body despite not being a legally indexed commodity is the last bastion of the connected. (33 PR) The laborers of the future are mere zombies, the living dead of the precarity, whose only access to the market or life is by way of the neuralink implants now attached to their brains at birth. Like denizens of some nefarious underworld they are called forth from their necrohibernation through the necrolinks of their brain-interface like drones reconnecting their abstract time to the necroticular flux.

Power is the agency that reduces the field of possibility to a prescriptive order; power, therefore, is the actual source of sad passions, and their existence can be seen as an effect of the subjugation of the soul to the force of power. —Francesco Berardi,  Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility

This is a world or neocameral City-States, mini-states, or neostates where the rich and elite gather behind protective macropodic security systems to fend off the excluded, anarchic, and outcase outlaws and renegades of a new dark age of man. Nick Land remarks that the macropod has one law: “the outside must pass by way of the inside”. Where humans are no longer singular and free, but rather are machines in an assemblage of desiring machines, plugged into “segmented and anthropomorphized sectors of assembly circuits as the attribute of a personal being”. (Machinic Desire) In his reading of Anti-Oedipus he observes a philosophy of the machine, one which advances an “anorganic functionalism that dissolves all transcendence,” and “mobilizes a vocabulary of the machine, the mechanic, and machinism” (MD, p. 4). This is a black-box theory of use and pragmatic endeavor that asks the question(s) ‘What are your desiring-machines, what do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work, what are your nonhuman sexes?’ (Anti-Oedipus, p. 322).

Necrodigital slaves of the futural market, fractalized and fragmented, their bodies excluded, only their minds as info-workers co-habit the black circuitry of capital time where their avatar existence is consumed. The Info-slavery is affirmed as a mode of necromantic, precarious and depersonalized, work. The personal has given way to absolute transparency, a cyber-panopticon that is the necrofluidic vitality of this monstrous system of non-life. An economy of death and its production.

In fact this is a dark virtual materialism that names an “ultra-hard antiformalist AI program, engaging with biological intelligence as subprograms of an abstract post-carbon machinic matrix, whilst exceeding any deliberated research project” (MD, p. 5). This is Land’s attack on all those systems of Transcendental logic like the medieval construction kits of the New Prometheans, Brassier and Negarestani, who seek (after Sellars/Brandom) to build navigational systems in the “space of reasons” into command and control centers of the deontological giving and asking of reasons in a normative throwback of an age when ethics and the epistemological world still believed in itself: – a world updated only in its speculative status as hyperfictional philo-fiction. Land instead following in that other tradition of the dark vitalist curve from Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bataille, Freud, Deleuze/Guattari, et. al. brings us the machinic desires at the heart of the Real, where a hidden impulsive, desiring machine flows through the compositional and decompositional realms of economics, politics, and scientific endeavor.

Land would have us enter the death realms of Synthanatos – the terminal productive outcome of human history as a machinic process, yet it is virtually efficient throughout the duration of this process, functioning within a circuit that machines duration itself. In this way virtuality lends its temporality to the unconscious, which escapes specification within extended time series, provoking Freud to describe it as timeless. (MD, p. 5) Much like J.G. Ballard’s Chronotopia, or City of Timeless duration and assemblages of interlocked labyrinthine systems actively pursuing the eternity of desire without end, Land offers an ironic take on Anti-Oedipus as less a philosophy book than “an engineering manual; a package of software implements for hacking into the machinic unconscious, opening invasion channels” (MD, p. 5).

This sense of movement or feed-back loops or self-reflecting short-circuiting ride between the virtual Real of the unconscious Subject, and the actual world of the conscious active negativity and self-relating nothingness (Zizek) of awareness is an immanent process of gift exchange and excess. Following Freud (Death-drives, repetition compulsion, narcissism, solipsism, etc.), and Lyotard (libidinal materialism) he will describe certain issues “…the convergence of cybernetic, economic, and libidinal discourses, virtual materialism has considerable problems with this passage” (MD, p. 6). After explicating in detail the inner problems in the several discourses he will reduce it to a minimal statement, saying, that these machinic processes of desiring machines “are either cyberpositive-nomadic, with a deterritorializing outcome, or cybernegative-sedentary, with a reterritorializing outcome” (MD. p. 6). Again, the sense of a circuit or feedback, but one that works to construct, while the other tears down and deconstructs, composition and decomposition.

Inorganic Thanatos wrecks order, organic Eros preserves it, and as the carbon-dominium is softened-up by machine plague, deterritorializing replicants of nomad-cyberrevolution close in upon the reterritorializing reproducers of the sedentary human security system, hacking into the macropod. (MD, pp. 6-7)

Ours is a traumatic world full of fissures and horror, and “Freud characterizes trauma as an ‘invasion’, ‘a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli’, infiltrating alien desires — xenopulsions – into the organism.” (MD, p. 8)”. We may be entering the moment of a phase transition in which the inhuman death drive is enabling a machinic explosion of intelligence based on quantum mechanics and other NBIC technologies (nanotech, biotech, Information and Communications Tech, etc.) that will lead to a necrotic explosion at the heart of the Real, a release of toxic spoors from the nether regions of a hyperaccelerated future no one could have imagined, and none shall survive. Thanatos is dead, long live Thanatopia!

I keep thinking of a cross between Jeffrey Thomas’s Punktown books and the deathworlds and necroscapes of video games like Doom Eternal; J.G. Ballard’s later novels where the psychopath becomes the new agent of change; or the necrotombs of Gary J. Shipley where the end game of our terminal malaise of a civilization terminates in a zone of pure repetition and death. Pushing Neoliberalism to its ultra end-game as the pure worship of death, and the production of Hell on Earth in a toxic game of precarity and sacrifice to the gods of competition. Ultimately pushing the Grimdark aesthetic to its hypernecrotic finale…

Entangled

A teaser from my Cybergrim Novel in process… opening sequence.

“Precarity, wake up dammit!”

Hell is waking up and realizing you’re a program in someone else’s digital mindware. There is no escape, no exit, and you know the algorithmic truth – that the quantum information in which you find yourself entangled has been scrambled beyond redemption or retrieval. You can only repeat the endless life codes someone else controls, like a puppet in a diabolical engineering plot you roam the electronic void like a mythological agent of an alien mind.

“Ok, ok, give me a sec…” Rubbed my bleary eyes and synced the bioscreen. Green and red LED’s flashed on the folds of the inscape relays, left to right / up and down. Scanned and ported the neuralfeed to on position. The holochron on the the datatab was the only thing glowing in the quantum darkness beyond: 02:30 SMY. If you’d been a CI operative – Competitive Intelligence Division – for as long as I had you learned the hard way to take it all in stride. I sat up, popped a pill, bled the almost empty tumbler dry and queried: “Who the frack is this?”

“Who do you think, Jones?” A voice like a hippo intoned.

I knew who it was, couldn’t mistake that arrogant bastard. Bossman Joe a.k.a. “Joseph R. Greathouse”, or at least his facsimile – twitching on the neurofeed like a neon diamondback ready to strike. My crew and I’d done odd jobs from time to time for Greathouse Enterprises, an InfoCorp Bioweapons firm in Shiva City – Harbinger Quadrant. He has a place on the Lux River, a Light Tower that brought the Three-Worlds together. Headquarters of the Gaian Conclave. Some said the Tower was alive, heart of the Sentient City, a living goddess… but, we knew better it was an AGI that had its hooks in everything, ran splice rhizomes through a trillion sensors that seemed to know your every move and thought before you did. Yea, a real nice place. That is if you liked angels, real decopunk jobs, slick nanobots like hypervalent flyers from a transtemporal universe. But me and my crew? No. We were of the demon clans. Undercity denizens. Wouldn’t have it any other way. Liked our little hideaway in the tunnels below Shibatsu.

“I’ll bite, so what’s the pitch?” I yawned. Hated the bastard but he kept my crew and I in the mix, so I’d suffer his crap till something better came my way. That’s the way of it in the Shibatsu.

“Listen, Precarity… listen hard,” a seriousness I’d not expected. “We’ve got to meet. None of your slipshod excuses either. Got me?”

Dam I hated going up city, but more than that I despised being in his presence. Fat, ugly, smoked those two-bit cigars from a steamcopy catalog, Old Havana biochems, 3D print jobs tasting more like homegrown algae than tobacco. But hey, no one is perfect, right?

“Ok, I’ll fast-track it and slide in tomorrow morning.”

I was about to shut the neurofeed down when he said: “Take the Shev-Train, Precarity. Be here tonight.”

“Frak it if I’ll take that slime train tonight.” Dam, fool, I hated that quant-tube. Who the hell liked being demolecularized? Always left me feeling like a burned-out hypersuit, razed and shredded.

“You’ll do it are be wiped! Kapeesh! And…” he paused.

“Yea?”

“Bring the crew, Precarity, this one’s business… and, I do mean BUSINESS! Got that?”
Well, when he said it that way I had to think hard – nah, even if I was a pawn in a script of coded nausea I’d begun to like our datavillain lifestyle here in the dark zones. It had its perks!

“No problemito… I get it!” I wanted to reach through the neuralnet feed and fry his ass, but knew that wasn’t goin’ to happen.

“Good! And by the way Precarity there’s the matter of Chogan’s Run to clear up, too!” He blinked off.

I felt the back of my mind blink off, too. Why Chogan’s Run? And, why now? Shite! Dam the bastard.
———————————–

©2020 S.C. Hickman

A Post-Democratic World? Or, How We Got Here…

It’s apparent that the USA is undergoing a massive shift in its social, political, and cultural world view. I don’t think we can return to the old two-party system that existed before the Trump era. Both parties that represented the Conservative and Liberal traditions under the auspices of Republican and Democrat offer the solutions we so desperately need to truly unify our nation.

Philosophically the pressure toward alternative solutions of socio-cultural and political mobilizations have moved on already. Even the extremes of political anarchism and libertarianism are dead, and those of socialism and communism are no longer viable. Philosophers have been moving beyond the underpinnings of Enlightenment thought based on disenchantment, secularization, and scientific culture for decades. The first sign of this was the Postmodern critique of analogue culture of cinema, television, and analogue media propaganda and ideological systems of consumerist society. From the Frankfurt school to Fredrick Jameson’s late capitalist reflections there was a slow and methodical deconstruction of the mechanisms that gave rise to what has now been termed Neoliberalism.

At the heart of the Postmodern critique lay the tradition of the liberal humanist Subject, the individual as promoted within the ideology of Western Individualism. The core principals of Neoliberalist tradition were based on the moral economy of life that is configured in its ideals of formal freedom, individualism, and personal responsibility. The core values of the Neoliberal world view are respect for the rule of law, protection of the individual’s right to self-determination, the re-creation of civil society as a place of free exchange (of capital, ideas, culture, etc.), and the limitation of governmental powers were presented as essential conditions for a peaceful and prosperous world order. This was the central motif of the Mount Pelerin society from which the whole complex of Neoliberal free-market ideology would emerge. The atomistic individual was the bedrock of this social control mechanism against the perceived threat of both Fascist and Communist forms of socialism during that era. Hayek and others of this period believed that the individual must be protected from collectivist ideologies of any stripe or persuasion, otherwise they believed the individual tends to become a cypher of political and economic powers that seek to control society as a whole and thereby loses its power of spontaneous self-realization.

In fact Hayek’s basic thesis was that it is the primary responsibility of the developed industrial nations to ensure that the incipient socialism of the New Deal and Welfare State programmes was not allowed to take them back down ‘the road to serfdom.’ The move away from affective politics and a process of rational and existential abstraction would drive a new form of technocapitalist politics based on a culture of scientific experts, economists, and academic-think tanks who would guide the Neoliberal vision of a technocratic State. As Ross Abbinnett will put it in The Neoliberal Imagination:

“What was radically new about the liberal philosophy expounded by Hayek, Friedman, and the rest of the Mont Pelerin Society, therefore, was their determination to defend the idea that the ‘objective’ forms of social life (science, technology, law, religion, etc.) should be conceived as contested sites through which the rational will of private individuals constantly reasserts its transformative spontaneity. The formal, non-contingent right of human beings to dispose of their labour, their bodies, their intellectual gifts, and their artistic talents is the first principle of a free market that constantly expands to accommodate new entrepreneurial strategies and which stands against all forms of collectivist idealism and totalitarian government.”

Ultimately the neoliberal ideology would become implicated in an expanding global class conflict, in which the ‘bourgeois class’ (considered as a loose amalgamation of capitalists, entrepreneurs, technocrats, scientists, etc.) preferred the destruction of human society to the loss of its economic assets and political dominance. The essence of neoliberal ideology, therefore, has emerged as its ability to reconfigure the strictures of financialized capitalism as modes of moral life and personal freedom, and to legitimize the marketization of state welfare institutions and the whole of the public sphere. The deliberate deregulation of markets and the State controlled Welfare mechanisms put in place by Roosevelt’s New Deal gave rise to the inequalities, race relations, and general destruction of both the American economy and its social and political democracy.

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(I’ll continue in another post…)

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Neoliberalism: A Bibliography Short List:

-Brown, Wendy. In the Ruins of Neoliberalism
-Mirowski, Philip. The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective
-Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian, and Philip Mirowski. Nine Lives of Neoliberalism
-Biebricher, Thomas. The Political Theory of Neoliberalism
-Matthew McManus. The Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism Neoliberalism, Post-Modern Culture, and Reactionary Politics
-Quinn Slobodian. Globalists The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism
-Martijn Konings. Capital and Time: For a New Critique of Neoliberal Reason Stanford University Press.
-Spencer, Douglas. The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Contemporary Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance . Bloomsbury Publishing.
-Adam Kotsko. Neoliberalism’s Demons. Stanford University Press.
-David M. Kotz. The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Capitalism.

The Inhuman Core of Reza Negarestani’s Philosophy

Reza Negarestani will elaborate a rationalist inhumanism as a new Humanism. In the second of two essays on the Labor of the Inhuman he will offer us this statement:

“Sufficiently elaborated, humanism – it shall be argued – is the initial condition of inhumanism as a force that travels back from the future to alter, if not to completely discontinue, the command of its origin.”1

Nick Land once told us that there’s “only really been one question, to be honest, that has guided everything I’ve been interested in for the last twenty years, which is: the teleological identity of capitalism and artificial intelligence.”2 For Land Capitalism = AI and it was sent back from the future to alter and shape humanity toward an inhuman Singularity beyond which “nothing human would get out alive.”

Daily Thoughts…

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

It’s still worth realizing that the ‘postmodern mind’ developed in-between two technocapitalist regimes: analogue and digital. From the Frankfurt school onward we gained an apprehension of the analogue culture industry of consumerist capitalism. After the early to mid-90’s the browser wars and the interface to DARPAs networks would be commodified, and the emergence of the digital worldview of the simulated worlds of utopian desire would arise only to be slammed into commercial lockdown at the turn of the century.

Those born after the mid-80’s would emerge from the atomized passivity of TV culture and slowly formulate a global mindset. Yet, the small gap of freedom and creativity gained in desktop computing would give way once again to the passive app worlds of mobile phone culture. Once again people are given the illusion of creativity and freedom, but are guided and controlled with a passive array of mobile apps that offer little or no ability to change, modify, or create; rather one is bound by the coded algorithms of a marketed cash cow that captures your live in avatar data packs feeding it to the very corporate entities that then sell it back to you as entertainment or distraction.

Hardly anyone remembers the analogue world anymore. An unconnected world atomized, distant, and without interactive media. Having lived in both worlds I realize how much more empowered our digital lives are with access to so much more information, and yet like any technological break the old pharmakon of cure and poison inhabit the silent control vectors of this new world in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Our minds shaped by the very algorithms that once offered so much utopian dreams have and or becoming our world’s authoritarian realm of total control and tyranny.

I sometimes think if I pulled the plug, disconnected myself from this digital universe of simulated dreams and nightmares whether the solitude of existence without this system of distraction and capture could be sustained. Almost every aspect of my life is online, connected to shopping venues, social and entertainment venues, virtual friends, legal advice, health and government and banking… everything at my fingertips. Living as I do so far away from major cities I’d be hard put to return to a disconnected life since analogue is obsolesced we are now victims of our own success. Bound to the digital whether we will or not.

I watch those shows of homesteaders in Alaska realizing very few people could ever return to a subsistence world of absolute survival, a life that entails that one organize every minute of one’s existence around food, shelter, and hunting-gathering. Of course if some great cataclysm of war, famine, natural or man-made disaster forced us back into such a life due to a total collapse of economy and networks we’d be back at that stage of human degradation of forced survival protecting our family and loved ones from those who would kill or take without a second thought what is ours. A dog eat dog world.

I’m an old man. I think about such things. Most people are so distracted by their daily lives of struggle such things matter not. I understand that.

A Posthuman Neo-Decadence?

“Neo-Decadent writers will honour the fragmented, the contorted, the unfinished, the unpublished. Realising there is no glory, no reward, no lavish suppers or dancing on tables. Living in obscure lanes and remote canyons, things will be written in unread languages or translated from the language of lizards and snakes, plagiarised from deep wells and signed with hands wet with the dew of rotting fruit.”

—Brendan Connell, First Manifesto of Neo-Decadence

In Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle there’s an essay by Dennis Denisoff ‘A Disembodied Voice’: The Posthuman Formlessness of Decadence. He argues that in the decadent prose of the era one finds attempts to force a shift in perspective that would no longer rely on the human subject as the foundation of ethical value, resulting in an ever-changing plurality of being. The challenge the decadents took on is no less than a nonhumanist reconceptualization of reality.

He goes on to say, and I paraphrase, the posthuman neo-decadent “shift allows what we understand as the human to be recognized instead as ‘fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically “not-human” and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is’. As the decadents themselves had suggested and as Wolfe reiterates, this ever-changing, multi-perspectival world is not an ideal toward which to strive, but a reality that already exists but still needs to be recognized.”

It’s this notion in much of the early decadent literature which broke with mainstream culture and brought forth new forms and formlessness of the noumenal potential of an alterity already blossoming but unrecognized. A posthuman world already cracking through the chinks of bourgeois (middle-class) culture, tearing at its fake overlays revealing new sexualities and occult underworlds escaping the strict codes of Victorian society. Goes with the notion of Neo-Decadence as a black code virus undermining and destroying the fake worlds of neo-passeism culture of our day by allowing the new poisonous blossoms to emerge from the decaying ruins of our dead Civilization.

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1.  Jason David Hall (Author, Editor), Alex Murray (Editor). Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle (Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture) 2013

Death and Zero

“We get lost in the death of death.”
-Gary J. Shipley

The tattoo is a map and trap, it guides death toward absolute zero, and yet in the labyrinthine passages of each step it divides the fateful event into a series of series – a false infinity of dark chambers, pockets of desire. Written in blood and pigment the hounds of death pulsate forward endlessly through the broken, twisted passages lost among the details of its overdetermined stonework. Each step in this infinite sea becomes a non-repeatable event repeated infinitely among its apophatic undoings, the subtraction of a self among its own memories and desires. To name something is to unname its desire, kill its recorded events, tame its wild charms; see it as it is not, so that it can be as it is. The mystery of a thing is its resemblance to its image, a lie that confounds all mysteries. Zero and Death never reach each other, cannot touch; for to do so would undo creation itself. Like those monks who die without dying, whose mummified flesh is a life within death, we roam in-between that which is and is not keeping the distance between nothing and nothingness at bay. We are not so that we can become other than we are. We are condemned never to desist from our infinite task.

On the Cult of Trump

“Make no mistake about it: great spirits are sceptics.” —Fredrich Nietzsche

How can you write about people who live in their own paranoid novel? It’s not possible, instead you’d have to dismantle their universe of delusion and free them from the prison world of their own self-inflicted madness. The time-loops and feedback systems of their fictional universe are like those old vinyl records that when scratched would loop endlessly in the mad interval of an eternal repetition. But unlike the record, there is no one to lift the diamond needle out of the abyss of repetition. Their stuck repeating the insane gestures forever…

“…in a way, paranoia is kind of a machine, it’s an engine for making connections, and for building stories on top of these connections that you’ve made. So, it’s a connection machine, in a way. And in a way, you start going, this is it; he’s actually modeling this looping process, this is eternal return that we’re stuck in.” – Erik Davis

Conspiracy theory is like that, it’s a fiction about fictions, a paranoid quest bound to the errors of a profound misapplication of thought. Facts? There are no facts in conspiracy theories, only the unwinding of an insane positive-feedback loop entwined with a culture based on persecution and shame. Shamed by its own inanity it strikes out against all who would belabor the point of its insane beliefs. Sartre was wrong Hell is not other people, Hell is other peoples insane meta-fictions…

Actually the Trump’s Cult believers have entered P.K. Dick’s Exegesis as temporary visitants of his paranoia without its sublime transformation into art, instead they’ve literalized his dark gnosis as a form of sacrificial violence become all too real and bloody. QAnon once asserted that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as the “Storm”, when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested. Problem is he got it wrong, instead of some deep conspiracy of the Left-as-Cabal it was a self-fulfilling prophecy of the insane Cult of Trump’s Q followers who are now in process of being arrested all over the USA as the FBI slowly unravels the images uploaded by the true believers. A positive feed-back loop that no one could have predicted…

Carl Sagan once said to Charlie Rose: ““We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it.”

Trump began his campaign against the sciences when he first unplugged the CDC as the authority over the COVID-19 pandemic, and has ever since undermined every aspect of the medical and scientific community at every turn. He has suborned the anti-intellectual populists and evangelicals with their already fear of intellectuals, sciences, and political institutions to the point that we have now 75 million people following a perfect storm of absolute irrationalism. I saw Ted Cruz on twitter berating Biden for calling the truth as he sees it, that Tec Cruz and his minions along with these insurrectionists were fascists undermining the institutions of democracy.

One thing we have to face is that there is a Civil War rumbling below the threshold of this nation and no amount of talk of reconciliation is going to overcome the sheer inertia of 4 years of Trumpism. We also have to realize that for the most part the police forces across this nation are on the side of the populist right-wing white Trumpists. Biden’s going to have to take a hard line against both those within government who like Ted Cruz and Hawley are anti-democratic forces of fascism, along with the masses of populist believers in Trump and QAnon. No amount of talk in the press is going to make this go away…

Sadly we may wake up across this nation to a more deadly world in the coming months unless we face the hard issue of reeducating these masses… else we’ll become their victims as they become more and more emboldened and violent.

“There’s a sort of bleak Gnosis that I occasionally contemplate. There is a kind of freedom, but the freedom comes only in this profound acceptance, not only in the determined course through linear history, but in the Nietzschean sense, that it’s just like this again. All you get is a certain kind of spiritual acceptance, or some kind of affirmation. That’s what Nietzsche was on about. Your only way out is to just radically affirm your life, in all of its mess, and all of its confusion, and all of its fear towards mortality, and all the same mistakes you’ve made over and over again in your struggle.” – Erik Davis