When the World Died…

Every breath we take…

The current state of our Edifice of Thought during this, our, moment of Contempt.

“…the capacity and willingness to identify with one another had been erased. There is no such thing as society once that capacity ceases to exist. And rather than pandemic policies being manufactured by the Deep State, they were first and foremost a response to the extinction anxieties brought upon by the pandemic and, even if more unspoken, climate change.”

Bruno Boccara

This is a very harsh, albeit truthful. Yet I would like to contribute what I believe is a fundamental point. In psychosocial analysis (think psychoanalysis applied to entire societies), early indicators, at times even seemingly (but wrongly) insignificant, can reveal with an acute precision where we collectively are at psychosocially. As such, the manufactured yet accepted willingness of individuals everywhere to let go of public health during the pandemic was actually (and not in hindsight) when the world died (notice that I even abstracted from using old). Compassion and empathy, even for one’s own children not to mention oneself, disappeared then. This implies that the capacity and willingness to identify with one another had been erased. There is no such thing as society once that capacity ceases to exist. And rather than pandemic policies being manufactured by the Deep State, they were first and foremost a response to the extinction anxieties brought upon by the pandemic and, even if more unspoken, climate change. The pandemic is the fatal deed, our collective ground zero, in the sense that it revealed and exacerbated the psychosocial dynamics that became the backbone to the Age of Contempt that is now upon us. I agree that the costs of the horrors we are witnessing today exceeds our imagination. I agree about the likelihood of chaos and warfare. I also agree that major changes are urgently needed. However, as I have argued often, these will require a profound modification of our psychosocial environments. This implies working through collectively the myriad of societal level, largely unconscious, collective defenses mobilized that have led us where we are at right now. This goes beyond the power structure and the obvious depravity that can come with it. While it may be too late in what are likely now pre-extinction ages, a good place to start – while of course stopping the genocide immediately – remains public health. If we are unable to work through collectively on an issue that affects us all directly, there is no hope to successfully address at the level of entire societies issues such as genuine capacity for identification which has been eroded by primary narcissism and grandiose fantasies fueled by consumerism and social media.

Bruno Boccara @SocioAnalytic@bsky.social

@SocioAnalytic

I’ve been looking for a way to begin writing about the confluence of the changes we are going through in this moment of Genocide, Ecocide, and Democide. My recent conversation with Jeppe Graugaard has helped clarify things. This post I just read, 3.1.23, provides enormous clarity as well as corroboration that it’s not just all in my head….

I’ve just discovered Bruno Boccara via tern @1goodtern. Someone I’ve been following and reading for the past six months or so. One of the few voices out there chronicling the ongoing pandemic.

I’ve long felt that a key element in our paralysis; the utter lack of response to any aspect of Our Predicament; has something to do with the atrophy of our sense of self-preservation. We’ve long confused self-preservation with ego-self-defense. We think and say that a billionaire, say, building a private bunker, say, in Hawaii, as one prominent psychopath is currently planning to do; is done out of a desire for self-preservation; or, more prosaically, when we choose to maintain an ecocidal portfolio of investments that this is for our self-preservation. Put this way it may seem questionable, but when do we ever consider these desires/actions in this light? “Pragmatism!™” The mental bunker of “rational prudence” defends our Egos, insisting that what’s good for our Narcissistic self-image is good for us….

We can’t “afford” to maintain a basic instinct like self-preservation. The slide from occasionally bumping into a double-bind transitioning into this total assault on our sense of self, our sense of how “the World works” that we have assimilated throughout our lives as we’ve been housed within the Edifice of Thought leaves us with a stark choice. That is, it presents us with a deep and profound quandary. As Jeff Shampnois has been exploring, to claim choice as anything but an illusion is highly problematic; but the way we use the word in this kind of context still does have a rough validity. We say we face a choice when our attention notices what Yogi Berra called, “a fork in the road.” The sense of pause we feel can be roughly described as the moment for making a choice. What we actually do next tends to be to rush for the nearest re-entry ramp back to the familiar patterns of habit within the perceptual boundaries proscribed by Thought. In the rare occurrences when we pause long enough to be changed as Krishnamurti described it, we realize that what’s happened wasn’t a choice at all. We could not do other than reject the destructive path once we recognize the demands of life and creation.

What is the unique challenge imposed by the pandemic? After all, it’s been obvious for a long time that the Perfect Storm of virtually instantaneous, unrestricted mass intercontinental traffic, the disruptions of foundational ecosystems throughout the world, and “for profit health care” have been bound to find an Apotheosis in at least one major Pandemic. Why have we not only been surprised by this fact, but have almost all of us rushed from the reeling edge of this acknowledgement straight into a deep denialism? A denialism that; unlike Climate Disruption or Ecocidal destruction, even Democide, so long as its victims are far away and not “white…;” pits any semblance of self-preservation starkly against our greater felt desire for Ego-defense.

What came to me during a recent conversation with Jeppe was that what makes this different; even for many of us who have been able to look at other dangers without immediately replacing our blinders; is the very fact that this aspect of our Predicament is not in any way removed from our existence in this moment. Everything else, except for those already caught up in the maw of the Juggernaut, can be rationalized away as a hypothetical, as perhaps an imminent threat to us as an individual, but these are not viscerally felt as immediate dangers. Covid is here with us wherever we go and we risk exposure with every breath we take.

What does it feel like to read that last statement? Is there a moment’s pause before the rise of indignation? Before the equivocations we’ve been so copiously handed by those without any compunction; those who would rather see us all dead than have to change their desires; rushes in to compel us to reject such finality? Does your mind fill up instantly with a bullet point list of plausible rebuttals? Does “sophistication” rise-up to distance you from the kind of bald sincerity it would take to consider such a statement before returning to all of your important business?

These same reactions are in play with every assault on our self-identification this moment of revelation assaults us with. It’s there when we equivocate over recognizing the horrors of the Genocide being done in our name. It’s there when we distinguish between our private “choices” and the apparent and desperate need for systemic changes in the way our lives have been channeled into our present, ecocidal path. But, in this case the cause, the trigger for those reactions is not far away. It’s not going to be a “problem someday….” It’s present and with us with every breath we take.

Ecocide and Genocide are occurring. They are being committed with our complicity, along a gradation from explicit to tacit. Many of us have been realizing these facts for a long or short while. These revelations have been making inroads on our awareness. It is becoming commonplace to hear or say that, “No one can any longer claim that they did not know….”

Why is this not equally true of the Pandemic which has killed somewhere around twenty million people so far? That it is condemning so many of us to chronic illnesses and premature “morbidity,” to use this term of art preferred by those who’ve turned the care for our fellows into a business over the cruder and more accurate word, deaths.

Today’s heuristic:

If you find yourself putting any emotional energy and time and effort into defending equivocations, replacing accurate usages such as “massacre,” or “killed,” with any of the disgusting euphemisms preferred by mass-media outlets and other defenders of mechanized death and destruction you are just fooling yourselves at this point. “Deciding” to defend the Bunker builders won’t earn you a place beside them as they attempt to hide from the inevitable Nemesis they await.

What Bruno Boccara adds to this understanding is that by making the connection between the death of compassion and how this has brought about this moment of Contempt….

I must say,

We need to acknowledge the way in which even as we contemplate the severity and the speed at which we are enduring Democide we continue to insist on naming these ephemeral instants in historical or Geological time, “Ages….” Neither the Anthropocene nor the Age of Contempt will last much longer than the Thousand Year Reich managed to do. Even the shortest of our geological eras, the Holocene, lasted only eight to ten thousand years. The “age of dinosaurs lasted a hundred million years. Within recorded history, a much shorter time frame, the “age of Reason” lasted three hundred years. The Anthropopause will leave a long tail, but it won’t outlive those of us alive today. The Age of Contempt will consume itself as quickly as an Australian or Texas mega-”wild” fire….

Most find the digressive aspect of my writing exasperating. You may be wishing we could, “Just move on!” “Get to The Point!” and wish I would “Get on with it!” The trouble with this impatience is that its main function is to allow us to remain within our familiar Habits of Thought. Unless we are willing to peel the onion. Look at how each tear-inducing layer of presuppositions and their defenses-of-Ego work to maintain our prison we will soon fall back into reactive patterns and maintain this state of frustrated paralysis we find ourselves trapped within.

“The Point,” if there can ever be such a thing, is that unless we break the habits of “Positivism,” our insistence that the only time it is acceptable to speak of the unspeakable is when we already have a solution at hand. We need to recognize and absorb the lesson that such a “strategy” can, and will only, end badly.

We insist on continuing to misunderstand what intelligence is. What imagination could be. Within the Edifice of Thought; now systematically destroying itself just as assuredly as the Zionists are destroying themselves with each new horror they commit, each new lie they insist we accept. Our insistence that intelligence is something that can be collected and amassed. Data to be dropped into some electronic hopper somehow magically creating AI!™ A strategy to shorten the route from a living planet to dead profits for bunker-loving billionaires. Imagination seen only as a source of distraction to be exploited, funneling attention into blockbuster franchises, keeping us “entertained” while the world collapses before our Apple™ en-goggled eyes….

There is no way we’ll ever have any clue of what intelligence is, what imagination might be, so long as we refuse the creature-hood of truly alien intelligences like birds or octopus and refuse ourselves the time and unfettered attention it takes to open ourselves to what imagination could illuminate.

The immediacy and incontrovertibly of the pandemic provides us with one of the unique opportunities we have as the people who are alive during this moment of revelation. This may sound as meager as wishing someone that they may live in interesting times, as the old Chinese proverb implies. However this may be, it is one of the few advantages we have available. We cannot afford to pass it up.

In 1929 they didn’t call what happened in the stock markets and its effects on the world, the Era of Devaluation. They rightly saw it as a moment, a crash. We need to recognize that every bankruptcy is a crash, although its repercussions echo and reverberate down the ages. We live amidst the ruins as the implicit bankruptcies of the entire Edifice of Thought take place around us and inside us. We need to recognize that the only thing we might maintain that has any intrinsic value will be a capacity to see as clearly as we might manage while holding onto the only certainty we can be sure of, that we are constantly in danger of succumbing to Contempt, stripping us of our humanity, our creature-hood, to force us into remaining pawns in the destruction of everything now taking place.

The pandemic is our guide. Nemesis does provide the opportunity for insight to those it condemns for the crimes they commit against all. We need to accept this meager-seeming chance. It’s the only one we have on offer.