The Age Demanded
The Age Demanded
The age demanded that we sing
And cut away our tongue.
The age demanded that we flow
And hammered in the bung
The age demanded that we danced
And jammed us into iron pants
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded
— Ernest M. Hemingway – 1922
Boko Haram, ISIS, Charlie Hebdo, Taliban, Al Qaida, 9-11, 7-7, 11-M, ….
Our globe has again returned to a bipolar world. Bipolar disorder seems the order of the day! 1991 saw the end of a bipolar world order – The Cold War – which framed international relations from 1947 until the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR – Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Berlin marked the Iron Curtain, the division between East and West, separating the civilised democratic west, from the autocratic, communist east. This collapse of the other – the enemy – upon which the psychology of The Modern West was constructed saw a civilisation floundering for another counter-point to replace the incredibly profitable enemy it had lost. This resurrection happened within a decade, by 2001 a new war had begun, more profitable than the previous one; the new formless ever present enemy would be Islam. The extremist movement, raised to successfully defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which was trained, funded and armed by the United States would re-emerge as the new counter-point in a bipolar world. As before the division between East and West was the framework, the Islamic, barbarous, terrorist, misogynistic East against the civilised, enlightened, free, liberating of women West. The perfect bipolar world order had re-emerged – Jekyll and Hyde; and this war would be a hot perpetual one of technological surveillance, advanced weaponry and a crusade of civilisation, which would of course be pursued by prolonged incarceration without charge or recourse to justice, torture, bombing, slaughter by remote control and propaganda due to the enemy being barbarous, terrorist and terribly misogynistic. How different they both are! The war had been started by a Christian American President who claimed to speak to God, and a ‘born again’ Catholic British Prime Minister. They had both knowingly lied about the Weapons of Mass Destruction that had been the pretext for the war that would unleash hell upon the peoples of the Middle-East, Libya, Indonesia, Europe and America (in that order). The path to war turned out to be a serial path of lies, deception and hypocrisy which ensconced us in a terribly profitable war or crusade of civilisation. The money however did not end up in the pocket of the West’s masses (how terribly Christian of these two crusading leaders, for the poor shall inherit the earth, with not a penny in their pockets). We have now been jammed into a world of iron pants, and funneled into a macabre dance, the media cut out the tongue of those who wished to sing the gruesome song of history, and hammered in the bung that would seal the flow into an orgy of slaughter. Bipolar disorder is once again the state of international relations!
And in the end the age was handed,
the sort of shit that it demanded.
How did we accept this farce? Why do both protagonists seem so similar beneath the shallow surface? How on earth did we get jammed into to this impasse and how on earth do we get out?
Looking Back to Go Forward
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies‚ all this is indispensably necessary.
Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
— 1984, George Orwell
It seems that George Orwell understood our contemporary world too well. For this hot war is being fought in the media spotlight, and since a war can never be fought in the media spotlight what we get is a narrative of diabolically contradictory nonsense; cobbled together not on the battlefield but in the studio. 24 hour news has become a hypnotic diet of diabetic nonsense in which the absurd is repeatedly squirmed into our conscious/unconscious to become Double-Thinked fact. The bombardment by news item upon news item rendering thinking suspended by attritive repitition swinging open the psychology of Doublethink. Such is the psychological grasp of the media elite that they have surpassed Orwell’s vision. Doublethink is now Mass-think; it is not reserved for the elite. Men have been reduced to genuinely believe in their deliberately told lies, forgetting inconvenient facts and whilst remembering them from oblivion. A war for freedom of the democratic West led by an Anglo-American alliance which saw the British population march the capital in millions to protest this war, now forgotten now remembered facts, drawn into oblivion. By what democratic mandate was it fought and did a single son of our leaders die?
How could our mass populations accept this, perhaps it is best to let the Austrian genius Karl Kraus speak to us. Read his Last Days of Mankind For he saw clearly how media had become power before during and after WWI, he in disgust wrote his opus on the disjointed, farcical, deceitful, betrayal that was that war, which turned European Governments into Bankers’ whores, turned the fields of France into an abattoir of human flesh and drove Germany endebted by reparations eventually to the Third Reich, WWII and the end of Germany and Britain as world powers, leading to the irreplaceable loss of Germany as cultural heart of Europe. WWII would see the birth of the American Empire as she waited hyena-like until Europe had spent her energy and sons in an orgy of slaughter, to enter as the American Hyena liberator. Broken Europe would accept anything, and the Bretton-Woods agreement is a capitulation, humiliation and enslavement into an order of American Empire, reducing Imperial Britain and Europe into a Golden Retriever at the behest of their American master. What on earth is NATO? She tore open the protected markets of European empires to American goods, enslaved the globe to her usurious New York financial order and enthralled the world with a new spiritual centre of arts – Hollywood – for the German, Hapsburg one had been decisively smashed and Hollywood-New York was now the new Vienna by the 1950’s she – Hollywood – had collapsed unable to bear the conscious moral strain of a spiritual, and cultural centre. The love of money literally tore her heart out and the world her consort was reduced to a spiritual whore. And In 1961 Hemingway broken, frustrated and disillusioned committed suicide; his spirit broken by the betrayal. Here lies the psychological link! For the Hollywood global culture from James Dean would continue to produce angry, disillusion and frustrated men and the trait serially apparent is suicide played out across a wide permutating range. Always anger, disillusion, frustration and suicide of men! Hemingway, Arthur Miller, Mark Rothko, Vladamir Mayakovsky, Hunter S. Thompson, the school serial killer male phenomenon and the unspeakable truth, that so called Islamic Terrorism and suicide bombing does not reveal difference from the West but reveals the underlying unity of global civilisation and psychology. Professor John Gray explores the theme of underlying civilisational and psychological unity in his book Al Qaida and What It Means To Be Modern. The intercourse with European Modernity by Muslim thinkers resulted in the Frankenstein-ian monster of Islamic Modernism, its philosophical core European, the baby had washed in with the bath water. The thinkers, philosophically juvenile, father rejecting, defeated, frustrated and angry, drank into their psychological core, what seemed to them an elixir but was in fact a deathly-toxic potion, giving voice to an unspeakable rage that could only be quenched by destruction and suicide. The Muslim Brotherhood serially ends always in its destruction and political suicide, and every modernist movement that ensues collapses in an idealistic orgy of slaughter or poetic suicidal psychological martyrdom! The global collective of malformed nafs!
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded!
Bipolar it seems we look at ourselves and in the mirror staring back in confusion we find ourselves and call it our counterpoint. Then we mutually slaughter our counterpoints with arms supplied by whom? Only the mirror holding minions of mass media possibly know! Or do they? How can they not? But heck, what does it matter? Aren’t we killing ourselves? Don’t worry we’ll wash off the blood with Arab oil! And we’d better be quick before the oil itself becomes so blood stained that the petrol pumps pump blood! But whoever heard of Fallujah and her caramelised human flesh? Turn off the lights, the central heating, the television, stop driving the car, nylon, plastic bags and water bottles? Before I have to change, those Arabs better keep dying!
Are you surprised now that there are also angry, disillusion and frustrated young men amongst muslims and particularly Arabs?
Educational Collapses
The nineteenth century was the bourgeois century, industrial power drove their meteoric drive, their fabulous wealth fueled their hubris and they created a high-culture, beautiful elegant and tragically determined. They replaced church and religion with a spirituality of the Arts, whose high temples were, theatre, opera, ballet and art gallery; they celebrated their civilisation with museums enthroning their mythology of progress; their religion was positivist-scientism; and the inductor to their dazzling pantheon was the university. 3% to 5% of the population of Europe was privileged to enter into this rarefied class, who drove the chariot of industrial civilisation. The other part of that elite, functionally educated, pragmatic, workaholic, wealthy and driven maintained a steady alliance with the other part by funding the arts, they could scarcely appreciate, for prestige. Power always has its conventions, without which it cannot be power. The doctrine of perpetual growth, greed for perpetual profit and the certainty of genetic right to dominate the earth egged them on. Usury was the unspoken engine to their industrial machine and usury always demands perpetual growth the bipolar counterpoint of expanding usurious poverty. Their wealth grew, fortunes created dynastic logic and their meritocratic doctrine drove the chariot upon its tragic – in the Greek sense – race. Their technological civilisation required technological minds and they were forced to expand education, and education was the basis of their elite, to expand it they had to functionalise it and increasingly they stripped out the non-pragmatic – in profit terms – aspects of that education. The educated elite expanded lost its cultural and spiritual centre and descended, plummeting into the cesspit of the human spirit deprived of its desire for ascent into heaven. By the end of the 1800’s the high-culture that gave spiritual centre to bourgeois civilisation was in utter collapse. The expanding elite leapt hedonistically into the waterfall of profit, desire and abandonment of rule by governance. By the 1950’s they would become an elite of wealth and not of governance and rule, the model of rule would increasingly become administration and management. Bourgeois Civilisation had reached its spiritual endpoint, its educated found themselves now unable to think themselves out of their educated critically thinking malaise and cul-de-sac, with mass-education the whole society was engulfed in this titanic descent from nursery to university and beyond. The nafs of all raised under its malforming sway utterly twisted, throttled and withered spirits; their education/malformation and bourgeois family dynamics had slammed shut the door upon their human possibilities. What follows in our ensuing decades is titanic descent, with certainty of the voyage, directionless hopeless certainty, spiritual desperation and emptiness. The ship is sinking and who on earth is thinking? Moscow to Cape Town and Beijing to New York mass education has engulfed the globe. The Islamic Universities submitted to the bourgeois methodology a long time ago. They spread the virus and the patient drank happily, willingly and excitedly. The banking hyena enthroned itself there too dressed in Islamic Banking clothes! Citibank donned a burka and batted her pretty eyelids in the boardroom and the Ulema – Islamic Scholars – got down and slept with her too. Here Shia and Sunni really don’t matter, the real secret of modernist Islamic Unity.
Boko Haram, ISIS, Charlie Hebdo, Anders Breivik, Taliban, [school serial killers], Al Qaida, 9-11, 7-7, 11-M, …. Hell now we are all the same!
And in the end the age was handed
The sort of shit that it demanded!