We, my friends, have been caught up in an era of anguish perpetrated by technics which have grown beyond our capable and rational control. Science has promised strength, but proffers only weaknesses to our disheveled brethren clutching their heads in their hands in the stairwells of abandoned apartment buildings. For what use is an ipad to a mother with three kids who cannot receive health insurance for her brood, what use is the external nexus of communication known as the internet when there is nothing vital to be communicated? We live in a hopelessly occluded world of false wants and desires that are formed in us during our precariously fragile psychic developmental stages. Now, for many, the task lay in undoing the damage and once again returning to facilities of reason and judgement in quest of answers.
Outside the bland world of particulars, the monstrosity of ownership enslaves us to our false and real desires. We are owned by masters at work who would have us labor or starve, we are owned by bank tellers who possess smug looks amid the stench of money, we are owned by the commodities that were supposed to be controlled by us which have occupied the very territory of our souls. And without our wits, this is an acceptable permutation of society, this is the structure of everyday life in which we so willingly find obedience and our distorted reflection, in the patronizing attitude of idiocy that amounts to the corporate office and in the needless toil of service positions created because the Protestant work ethic's tyranny has not been overthrown despite more practical considerations of production which suggest that the United States alone could feed, clothe, and house the world in respect to its wealth. Work has become a pantomime, an act, while real experience lay elsewhere.
Reason and judgement would offer charity by dismantling the materialist dialectic of consumerism in order to become orientated towards a gift or potlatch culture. But buying and selling have been mystified as magical acts in our land, supported by cultural mores and a stifling sense that they are real as opposed to symbolic. There is nothing real about exchanging figures of faith for goods and services, it is a fantasy, propagated by a corporate cartel that sees money for what it really is in terms of people's time. That is why each commodity you buy contains a piece of your own death, you worked for your car and the figure it cost should appear to you in terms of months performing actions for others in your job rather than dollars.
Outside the mystifications of business, we ignore the truly spectacular transcendences such as love and justice with the attitude that these are mere idealistic principles, and not based in reality. However, they are a possible reality, and as such cannot be negated where they break out in wild abandon. Their weakness is the same of capitalist business in that they must be participated in, but the advantage of business is that it does not rely on reflective cognizance to assertain its meaning. Love, justice, peace, community, and ideals are all processes which require conscious discernment from their opposites, while an economy that encompasses the sale of landmines as well as the sale of prosthetic limbs knows no discernment of opposites. These ideals also require a forum of discussion, of which there is no current form in our society.
Through a marriage of science to political radicalism, it should be possible to provide for noble pursuits by using technics and production to dominate the baser motivations of mankind through human projects such as sustainable housing and free medical care. However, this requires that the same science which produced the atom bomb declare itself political, as it has hidden behind a shroud of questionable empiricism in the past while remaining married to the policies of the military establishment. There currently exists enough productive power to meet the real and false needs of every individual while minimizing the amount of labor necessary to sustain automated means of production. And yet we exist in the same fashion as Athenian slaves, debased and ignorant, learning to distance our dreams of possibilities from the expanse of reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment