O/o
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The construction of a new myth won't work consciously, even if it accidentally leads to a new one it didn't intend.
The metaphysical grounds, on which the myths we are still trying to get over rest (and which are being used to bludgeon us by elites) must exhaust itself in apocalypse - the revelation of a truth immanent within the lie of the old myth but which also reveals the nature of the old as truly ending.
Asking the very question as to whether or not this formula can be evaded is to fall prey to it, because that's part of it.
On the one hand, I'm antagonistic to world distrusting gnostic lore of this kind, and yet I distrust the world in which this is becoming the norm.
The illusion of a horizon is one I am apprehensive to entertain and yet I must be optimistic about a new horizon when I consider the gargantuan, epoch-ending variables at play now and which may take the next century or so to sort themselves out.
To assume a post-historical pragmatism is the most attractive posture when it's agreeable. In 2016, this was not a possible position. Even people who believed in nothing believed in something, regardless of what it was or where they landed.
In 2023, people believe in very little aside from the future.
This is not to say that they have hope for the future.
Quite the contrary.
People believe in the mono-directionality of the future, as though it exists on a single track headed toward death. It exists in the minds of our current generations as a surplus of the given.
The future only looks bright when the ‘present’ announces an apparent surplus of possibility. The future is pregnant with the actualization of a goal.
When the future represents the surplus of the given, it represents the end.
But is there not room to see the simultaneity, the paradoxical coexistence of both of these versions of the future?
Of course the delineation of such a formula can only be grasped/written about in a linear manner which always expresses itself as one age passing over and giving way to another epoch.
At a glance, or attempting to take the wide view, it becomes transparent very quickly what those watching, the thinkers, the philosophers, the analysts and politicians, all reduce history to - a confusing record of agency. Usually, it is only activity that is tracked.
The de-ontologizing of morality (the abstraction of morality with claims to moral authority by managerial institutions) form a perfect habitat for crowd-controlling ‘rules’ to form. The synonymitization of morality with social prescription is the easiest argument for nihilism, as all that needs positing is that a particular expression of arbitrary authority is, in fact, arbitrary and without a ‘higher’ authority beyond its demonstration of being able to enforce prescription and restriction.
History, as we approach the second quarter of the 21st century, is quickly becoming a game of ‘spotting the real agents.’ Conspiracy theory is increasingly similar to how most people approach history itself.
Tracking Rothchild and Rockefeller money, CIA and MI6 dealings, receipts from the East India company - this all comes together and it becomes possible to inherit its final hermeneutic, void of all the various higher callings, manifested destinies and mythopoetic excesses to reveal something raw and visceral, something violent but unspoken, illegible but intelligible.
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The projection of agency onto perceived undeserved parties (with arbitrary authority) is as much an indictment of a mass population whose relationship to agency is categorically one of complicity.
And yet, the very critique of this complicity and with it the power that is being conceded to, can only categorically arise from within the position of one, not only powerless to the whims and directionality of the masses (and thus equally subject to the will of history’s ‘true agents’), but to the very limit of this reduction whose absolute border is a recognition of impotence.
This recognition, where it does not fold into an ostensibly active resistance to agency (reaction), grounded in a sort of necessary resentment acting as a placeholder for a grand reversal or transfer from undeserved power to deserved power, universalises its predicament as an immanent feature of as yet unagitated peers (the unknowing masses).
The prescription becomes a missionary endeavor, the world itself evil, its rulers the antichrist, nature: Satan’s church.
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Communities formed around the myth of the defenestrated ruler become ecstatic. It's perhaps no mistake that all mystical traditions with a soteriological end are born on the spiritual periphery of empire and imperial religion.
A material anthropological assessment of history reduces such questions to cultural fetishization, chance, appropriation and trade.
The temptation toward perennialism in world myth grows strong, as having lost touch with the ground, deposing the head becomes the first order; No longer ‘God is dead and we have killed him,’ but ‘God must die so that God may be reborn.’ A retrieval of something lost or a memory of a potentiality inherent to the becoming of history.
The very act of waiting for the new age - whether in hopes that new agents which represent ones ideal for oneself will replace corrupt ones or waiting without hope for ultimate death - can already be taken as a form of corruption, as one's complicity in a supposed shared state of degradation can not be but what it is and, being in the very state of recognized fragmentation which gives rise to this impotence, must continue to reassert the agency of the agents of the world and of history if only to explain the story of one's hope or lack of such. One who recognizes evil and does nothing is complicit, but one who recognizes evil and can do nothing is to be acted upon.
The question of an agency deserving of its worldly authority becomes a mute point when the only criteria one has to depose the standing authority is that one rejects it in favor of one's own. An objective criteria for justice has been imagined through ‘class consciousness’ and even this requires a hope of, not only a maximum point of class agitation, but a highly specific reduction of its solidarity to a unitary principle of being.
Hope for justice is projected into the future just as the revelation of impotence is projected into a past frought with injustice. A hope birthed from resentment.
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The point of power transfer is not truly ‘revolutionary’ in any real sense, is not a true transvaluation of values, and is thus not an overcoming of bourgeois values and modern political consciousness if one group who resented the last group merely deposes the current authority on some new equally abstracted parliamentary, bureaucratic, representative grounds - ‘putting good people’ in charge.
No one is good if everyone is complicit until the viral point of action, in mass movement, spectacle, grand emotional gestures meant to satisfy socio-historical cravings and energies.
What is accomplished in this kind of historical laboratory, at best, is a changing set of contingencies which amount to the same ultimate end.
Resentful complicity doesn't challenge the underlying foundation of undeserved authority because it is produced by it and in turn produces the authority in question, as the line of demarcation between ruler and ruled is purely an abstraction meant to facilitate the flows of social pressure.
If modern mass media was originally implemented as a measure of surveillance and social control, political constituency and mass resistance in an accelerated form acts as a valve to self regulate toward the inner algorithmic goals of the greater control system, which not only selects and exploits those features of society which are most vulnerable to social manipulation, but which are themselves automotons generated through the negative advancement of consumption.
In other words, those who ostensibly created the control system are created by it too. ‘They know not what they do.’
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To ‘think outside of this’ is to think the resentment of the surplus-given in hope of a future agency.
Perhaps the most radical act of complicity is the recognition of one's impotence. It is precisely in this moment that an implicit handing over of a greater historical task is conceded.
A task that is, at once, a rupture in time, a surplus of possibility that can only be inherited from the internal contradictions of this resentment spectacle and it's control system.
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The prius of a true transvaluation would have to arrive, I believe, at the moment in which a surplus of the possible opens into being, and the path forward becomes coextensive with the possible, the possible born as a natural surplus of an action which was, itself, not a choice and, thus, not ‘possible.’
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At the risk of uttering an only apparent tautology, freedom, ultimately, only becomes possible when non-freedom is itself completely impossible.
The enclosure of the given, its very nature a discursive excess, if you will, of what ‘is,’ is only recognized by fully free consciousness, which is itself the very act of self distinction and othering of the given. Its self distinction and the otherness of the given arise simultaneously and interdependently, but their joint nature is a sort of proof of a subject capable of distinguishing a fundamental turning point embedded within the given.
The truth becomes not a matter of what is but what must be, and what one must do is done insofar as one has ascertained the becoming of the given and a potential future given.
Fatalism becomes impossible.
Action becomes the law.
A great cosmic siren rings out.
The time for thinking is over.
The time for strategy is a matter of indifference.
A moment arrives which one was aware would come but whose signs one had to learn to read, not in some theory or even in history, but in one's nature as one destined to be free, and called to a time and moment when that freedom would need to make its decisive demonstration by forging it's way into being, consuming nothingness in the fire of creation.