Dear Humanity,
We all have a Soul Thesis. Mine’s on my sleeve. Don’t care what you think. You have yours. Hopefully you’re smart enough to know what it is and why. Marcuse’s Soul-Thesis he expressed in the penultimate chapter of One-Dimensional Man. The non-dialectical man. An age of such oppression and spirit stagnation that tension and alternatives are missing from consciousness. The absorption is nearly total. Late capitalist man can only think one-dimensionally - all is well in this system of decent standards of living and relative prosperity. Shh, watch the Premier League this weekend and all will be well. So what that May lost the Brexit vote in the Commons, and the struggle to divorce from Europe continues. What is this post-war liberal order, anyway? The fight remains. Sanity, people!
Dear Humanity, please calmly study the problem and quickly solve. Beware the road to (actual) serfdom! Watch out the devil GOP, they’re happy to kill America for their own power!
Our states exist for the ordered rationality of the struggle to survive. The Department of Agriculture, the Department of Commerce, the Ministry of Finance - these huge mega-institutions exist rhetorically and practically to satisfy the invention of ordered, rational survival. “A new standard of living, adapted to the pacification of existence, also presupposes a reduction in the future population. It is understandable, even reasonable,” Marcuse wrote about our monster-societies, “that industrial civilization considers legitimate the slaughter of millions of people in war, and the daily sacrifices of all those who have no adequate care and protection, but discovers its moral and religious scruples if it is the question of avoiding the production of more life in a society which is still geared to the planned annihilation of life in the National Interest.” Let this stand as a universal definition of madness. This if fucking insane! That we build our societies on nuclear weapons and are ready for omnicide for the defense of an Idea only partially expressed in any adequate form in this thing called the Nation. And so to scream! “Geared to the planned annihilation of life in the National Interest, and to the unplanned deprivation of life on behalf of private interests. These moral scruples are understandable and reasonable because such a society needs an ever-increasing number of customers and supporters; the constantly regenerated excess capacity must be managed.”
Marcuse argues, as should we, that critiquing this so-called given, natural and normal society is a necessary and political life duty. “However, the requirements of profitable mass production are not necessarily identical with those of mankind.” And how is this not the case? And what is freedom or liberty in a consumer society? Or, better, how free are you in a free society? Marcuse drops dope beats:
We do live in a noisy, ugly age. Our so-called leaders - corporate and political - lead us astray. The beast holds us down by our necks. “To the denial of freedom, even the possibility of freedom, corresponds the granting of liberties where they strengthen the repression. The degree to which the population is allowed to break the peace wherever there still is peace and silence, to be ugly and to uglify things, to ooze familiarity, to offend against good form is frightening. It is frightening because it expresses the lawful and even organized effort to reject the Other in his own right, to prevent autonomy even in a small, reserved sphere of existence. In the overdeveloped countries, an ever-larger part of the population becomes one huge captive audience - captured not by a totalitarian regime but by the liberties of the citizens whose media of amusement and elevation compel the Other to partake of their songs, sights, and smells.”
From nuclear-induced omnicide (and the many books and films that have played to this Reality, including the excellent Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which, to a father of two boys, and a knower of the absolute insanity of our current existence, and the unpredictability of so-called leaders, scared the effy shite out of me) and “avoiding the production of more life in a society which is still geared to the planned annihilation of life in the National Interest” to the market society, a world in which our bodies are entrapped within “the requirements of profitable mass production are not necessarily identical with those of mankind,” the Worst Madness Ever settles into our DNA, our minds closed to possibilities. If what you see red-alerts as structurally, morally, ethically, politically, culturally, Insane, then you have to say the seeing. Simplicity rules. I see this thing. I know the thing that is the thing. Have to sing the say the see. I see the saying thing knowing me. Why do you live in such madness, Humanity? Dear Humanity, why such, I mean, fucking madness? Love, Dr. Dopeness.
NOTE: If you like this Precarious Birch hit about omnicide and global madness, know that Mr. Birch loves this Dr. Knapp dude who wrote about total privatization and the apocalypse in The Biggest Business in the World. Check out a sample by clicking on the link to the left!