Let’s cut to the chase!
Today’s pandemic isn’t Covid, but something called ‘The Chained Elephant Syndrome’
Less and less people own the very roofs that they lay their heads under, the vehicles they drive, their identity. We’ve been made ‘impressionable’ victims of endless facticities, to social contracts we never signed, to authorities we never opted to live under, to powers we don't understand, to emporers we don't see!. The veneer of modernity is so thin that an honest gaze could pierce through it, so light that a breeze of suspicion could blow it away.
We’ve become increasingly designated to crowded, intensely regulated and surveillance cities; the buzzing streets and intersections, traffic, artificial lights, sounds and smells. The modern city and its cacophonous but monotone blares seem especially made to drown out the thoughts, stifle the soul, to stupify the senses. In no other time that we know of have machines spoken louder than people, that the inanimate has become more ‘alive’.
The countryside is being emptied of people, farmers evicted, crops poisoned, resources monopolized, roads taxed, homes rented, travel restricted, people masked. The same stereotyped ‘Terrorists’ in the middle east, it turns out, was our own future reflection staring back at us. And I here quote Jung (not without the risk of taking his words out of context), as he described the world at the height of the ‘cold war’ “Our world is, so to speak, dissociated like a neurotic, with the Iron Curtain marking the symbolic line of division” (Man & His Symbols, p85), the symbolic line, is the proverbial border, that non-existent line that otherizes whoever is standing across it. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not yesterday’s war, but tomorrow’s.
In so confined a place as the modern metropolitan city, why wouldn’t we believe in overpopulation?. Why not believe that we’re running out and are getting poorer if we can’t even own the very houses that we live in, or our means of transportation?. We’re somehow anonymous to each other, yet we’re ‘next door’ to each other, behind borders — I.e barbed fences — I.e behind non-aggression treaties — I.e legal limits and precedents, which more than anything seem to serve only to stop us from violating each other!. Is that really the ‘natural’ state as Hobbes depicted it?, from whence came this attitude?, an attitude that stands behind artistic guilty pleasures like the ‘Purge’ blockbuster joints?.
I describe the 21st century as Arthur Lovejoy describes the 15th-century man, “He lived in a walled universe as well as in walled towns” The Great Chain Of Being, p101
Look at your ‘politicians’ policies. Look carefully, it’s one of those ‘ambiguous images’ that we like to scroll through on social media. Austerity, climate change/environment etc.. are ambiguous images, and remember, if you look closely enough, long enough, you’ll see it.
Montaigne writes, in the cathartic piece ‘Apology For Raymond Sebond’, that earth is the “The filth and mire of the world, the bottom story of the house” an opinion lots of his contemporaries shared.
A few hundred years later, Stephen hawking regurgitates the formulae in the modern diction of science
“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.”
Musk, the modern Copernicus, regurgitates — but with a prescriptive spin — the same formulae, “You can kind of think of humanity as a bootloader for artificial superintelligence”, elaborating, casually, and with what sounds, to me at least, like a spiteful tone, “for those who don’t know what a bootloader is, it’s sort of like the minimal code necessary for a computer to start” here’s a link https://youtu.be/d35Uw3kVGWs. Very unabashed, and the fact that he can say that so casually shows how receptive — to such wicked ideas — we’ve become!
The media shows Musk as this a lone genius who’s fought and persevered against the odds, a sort of modern Tesla who’s found his way to success from the humble, rural stretches of Croatia, or now, a Luther with a new interpretation of the book of nature, with new commandments, only that they’re binary computer combinations. But this is yet another ambiguous image, remember, the chef that’s cooking this whole recipe is ambidextrous. Musk, the working man’s working man is an emissary of the same ideology that brought us the T4 program in the thirties, his job is to make the prospect of ‘human dissolution’ palatable, only that the connoisseurs don’t get to be as explosively honest as Ramsey!. He ‘conquered’ silicon valley, now he wants to implant silicon into you, not sure what to say there.
Look at the emporer’s policies… and you’ll see his philosophy!
This emporer seems particularly fond of policies that involve ‘restriction’ or ‘confining’. They love ‘austerity’, ‘there’s not enough to go around’, ‘there are too many people in the world’, ‘we will soon run out’; a constant sense of danger and menace punctuates — if not enshrines — world politics. Any notions contrary to that are shunned, or caricatured to death. This emporer loves to make the world smaller than it is, poorer than it is, he will go out of his way to forge such a reality and confine us all in it (the city, that is), afterall, to him, we’re ‘filth and overbreeding scum’.
Stability and peace are exceptions!, so be grateful, to me that is, the emporer!. ‘Happiness’ says Mill, is the absence of pain; but why does pain have to be the default state?. Life is a brutish affair, human ‘nature’ is merely how they view ‘nature’ — the same nature they supposedly worship — ‘nature’ as expressed through ‘man’ — ‘nasty’, ‘chaotic’, a ‘struggle’ for survival.
He will promote philosophies that corroborate this view and persistently inculcate them: The world is a fluke, an ‘accident’ because ‘science’ says so — is one such specimen. Truth is, science ‘said so’ when the English and Spanish fleets exterminated the native populations of the new world and Australia, it ‘said so’ when it justified eugenics in Nazi Germany and else where in America, it will ‘say so’ again when the turn is on you (it has by the way), because, guess what?, you’ve been a target all along.
Liberal arts and rhetoric which are used by widely taught practically vanished from schools, we’re unable to ‘think’ about, challenge, and discuss ideas, we simply nod along to whatever ‘ Science says’. We are at the behest of anonymous ideologues, peering images of our own autopsies, and reading our own obituaries in musty tabloids.
We are all chained elephants.
