Strange Expectations: The Age of Magical Thinking Hits the Wall
An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.
Arthur Miller
Those who are most asleep think they are most awake, being under the power of vivid and fixed visions, so that those who are most ignorant think they know most.
Theodotus (2nd Century C.E.)
There is, I think, a growing, deep, general awareness of a massive systems failure in our way of life. Evidence mounts day by day that unsurpassable thresholds are being blown past, usually at an accelerated pace. These serial catastrophes can be seen as a kind of Russian nesting doll of catastrophe, with personal struggles set inside political strife, which is itself inside socioeconomic disintegration. And all of it is nested inside the outermost shell of the collapse of every major natural support system on the planet.
This situation has loosed the stalking beasts of anxiety, rage, depression, and dread upon the public, with the expected negative effects billiard-balling around every nook and cranny of our society. But in true cognitive dissonance fashion, we desperately latch onto the belief that we can ‘fix’ all these problems by simply electing the right set of leaders, or perhaps even just One right leader.
It is increasingly popular, or maybe it just seems that way, to call for a transcending of political polarization, to find unity and common ground. But this is a misunderstanding of what the Polarization Industrial Complex (PIC) is all about: providing an artificial bloodsport arena for people to battle each other while the government, economy, and society in general are run for the benefit of the plutocrats. So despite all the pleas for finding a creamy nougat center of common-sense moderation and agreement, the actual partisan rhetoric continues to ramp up in its vitriolic content, because actual conditions on the ground for regular people continue to stagnate and deteriorate, no matter who is in power. When the plutocrats run the show, in all its aspects, the plebs get just enough crumbs to keep them out of the streets with torches and pitchforks (usually); not a great state of affairs amidst the garish plenty of the biggest economy in the history of civilization.
This escalation in polarized rhetoric has produced a conservative movement that is pushing all-in on delusional social engineering (see Project 2025), the goal being to fully enact the reign of the righteous on earth, shoving the enemy back into corners and other dark places (graves?), or preferably just out of the country altogether. It is as if the conservatives have beaten the liberals to the end game of political polarization, and that end game project includes, among many other things:
- Complete control of female reproduction
- A dictatorial Presidency (“Unitary Executive Theory)
- A socially-activist judiciary, ensuring that the rights of money and property are paramount in all cases
- Full cultural rejection of alternative forms of gender identity and sexuality
- Open establishment of a Christian nation-state
Trump’s RNC acceptance speech is a good example of the dissonance in current conservatism. The first part was clearly written by someone with relatively adult intentions, calling for unity and an end to partisan violence. This part was almost certainly forced on a reluctant, grumbling Trump, simply because the assassination attempt had just happened, and hard political violence is not really what millions of moderate Trump voters want (unlike the smaller number of true believers). But after that opening obligatory salvo urging unity, Trump quickly flipped back to his usual playbook of outlandish self-aggrandizement and demonization of all things Democratic and liberal. As an Onion headline captured it perfectly a couple days after: “Trump vows to unite nation against common enemy of other Americans.”
It is a bit difficult to call for national unity when your entire political strategy is to trash everything (and I mean everything) your opponents do and stand for, and to assert that only you yourself can fix it all. Trump vowed to end all wars, crush all inflation, make the US the greatest country in the world again, establish the Christian bona fides of the government, etc. This is the false unity of the dictator, where everyone gets on board for the Anointed Leader — or else. The RNC speech was also a perfect crystallization of the Easy Answer fantasy that more and more Americans have: all we need to do is pick the right Savior, and things will magically fall into place and make everything awesome.
Societies that look to messiahs are not living in the realm of reality any more, which means that the US getting into lockstep with all the other Easy Answer countries: theocracies, dictatorships, sham/show democracies, and hyper-nationalist fascist states. If the lights go out on our energy and/or economic systems, these countries and societies will likely inherit the dying, poisoned earth, a new global landscape, a Dark Age garbage heap.
What could possibly shake us out of this obsession with messianic easy answers, especially when we remember that cosmic saviors usually go hand-in-hand with apocalyptic destruction and slaughter? There is currently no workable option being floated by the Left. Liberals are fully enmeshed in the PIC, even if they are not as far along into desperate social engineering as envisioned by the MAGA crowd. Mainstream Democrats and most liberals are still clinging to the illusion that consumer industrial civilization can be greened up, mostly by just flipping fossil fuels to various sustainable alternatives. With this Green New Deal in place, we can then finish up the Civil Rights, Feminist, and LGBTQ projects for economic justice, getting everyone a full seat at the table, with college degrees for everyone (who wants them), free child care, access to startup cash for eco-entrepreneurial endeavors, and career training to get everyone up to snuff with the job skills of the future. To use an analogy I beat to death, the vision of the Left is a kind of green Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average, working interesting, rewarding, and sustainable tech and other sexy jobs. But as mentioned in the last post, people aren’t buying this, which leaves Libs with the uncomfortable, alternate option of trying to match the MAGA crowd’s pitch of dualistic vitriol in order to motivate people.
The pivot from Biden to Kamala Harris (who now seems locked into the nomination) is providing some immediate energy and cash to the Democrats. And with the Trump campaign now looking a little shaky (backing out of debate commitments, second-guessing the glaringly-bad VP choice of Vance, and the uncertainty of how exactly to attack Harris beyond mispronouncing her name and ridiculing her gender and color), there is a good chance that the Dems could pull the election out of the fire and stave off Project 2025 for a few years.
But the fact remains that there is no plausible, workable plan for the future anywhere in the general sphere of popular discourse. With conservatives touting a theocratic, Handmaid’s Tale hellscape, the liberals pushing a greened-up and expanded version of consumer industrial civilization, and plutocrats operating above it all, making sure that none of this stuff truly disrupts corporate returns or international air travel, we are hitting a wall with our magical thinking, increasingly aware that no one is really talking about how we’re going to stop the macro-collapses happening in the natural world, the global economic sphere, and the international political arena.
It’s long past time to face some uncomfortable truths about what the near and long-term future holds. We’re going to need to scrap a lot of ideas that are pretty dear to us, and we’ll need to lean into the collapse narrative that the MAGA peeps are only flirting with.
Perhaps the only real unity we can leverage right now is that everyone knows that things are fucked. The next step is honestly describing how things are fucked, and what ideas we need to jettison in order to begin to see how we might move to clean things up. Next time, we’ll look at some of that conventional wisdom that needs to be tossed overboard.
Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on July 27, 2024.
