Paul David Adkin's Blog, page 38

THE UNIVERSE AS WILL

WILL

What is will? It is a very vague concept, held up by assumptions and superstitions. Nietzsche called it something complicated. It is certainly a very German obsession: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche … Is it not a trap? Shouldn’t we stay clear?

Superstition or not, whatever we imagine it to be it has a great bearing on our lives. One must pit one’s will against the will of the masses, or against God’s will. We use it as a term to describe how we are driven, where our impulses come from, negative or positive.

There are powerful wills and frustrated ones. In the end, the concept boils down to an ethical one. There are positive wills to do ‘good’ things and negative wills to do ‘bad’. Instead of taking us beyond good and evil, the question of will brings us back to the great dialectic: What must be done if we are to do the right thing? Once we have at least a sketch of an answer for such a question, then we can start to imagine what kind of will we need to have – for will is a lonely word that needs to be determined by its goal if it is to mean anything. We need to define it by establishing where it comes from and where it should go.

Nietzsche understood this. He called will: “a plurality of sensations, namely the sensation of the condition AWAY FROM WHICH we go” … (as well as) … “the sensation of the condition TOWARDS WHICH we go” …. (but also) … “an accompanying muscular sensation which … comes into play through force of habit.

If we accept this definition then there are two main channels flowing from and through it: a) the conscious channel of personal desire, and b) the unconscious channel that we understand as habit. This latter channel has been coded for us and it exists in the likewise coded matrix of the systems that envelop us.

COSMOLOGICAL FINE TUNING

Cosmological Fine Tuning implies that the universe has a determination to create life. This poses problems for science and gives oxygen to theologians for: how can an inanimate thing have determination (without God)?

However, the idea that “the inanimate universe created the animate because it was God’s will”, is not much more revealing than “the inanimate universe created the animate”. Or, in other words, in order to understand what God’s will is we need to understand what physical forces could allow the fine tuning of the universe to take place. Which is also saying that by understanding the fine-tuning of the universe we can understand how the universe is capable of determining its own destiny. Which implies that God is not necessary again. If science can demonstrate how the universe was able to fine tune itself in order to make life possible within itself, then the phrase “the inanimate universe created the animate” is sufficient.

DECODING REALITY AND THE SEARCH FOR COSMIC WILL

A drive does not have to be conscious, but consciousness could be the result of a drive if the idea of consciousness is inherent in the mechanics of the drive itself. If the underlying mechanics of the universe lies in the behaviour of the quantum particles that are the basis of everything, then we must ask ourselves if the mechanical nature of those particles has any relation to consciousness.

Physicists like Vlatko Vedral and James Gleick claim that the universe consists of information. According to Vedral’s thesis, the universe is a massive compilation of quantum information. Information therefore, is the key to understanding what connects the universe and also why existence came into being in the first place. Likewise, it could also be the key to understanding how the universe could fine-tune itself to allow the creation of life within itself. In other words, Vedral’s thesis may point to an explanation of what the cosmic will is in physical, scientific terms.

In the introduction to his book, “Decoding reality”, Vedral says that the universe is made up of bits of information. He argues that the actual evolution of any information gathering and communicating system would be a subjective, self-analysing condition. The kind of thing that we see manifested through consciousness. For Vedral “information is physical”. Information provides the “building blocks of matter and their interactions … on which everything is constructed.”

We believe that if understanding is a logical development of information, and that in fact it is a desired outcome of information, then there is an implicit determination buried in the information-universe that would find its absolute fulfilment in the all-knowing, intuitively gravitating towards such a fulfilment as a teleological end.

Seen from this perspective, the evolution of the information sharing sequence that is the DNA strand is a logical result or reflection of the information system that was already built into the cosmos. It also explains why life would evolve into the information discovering and creating machine that is the homo sapiens.

THE UNBEARABLE FRAGILITY OF FINE TUNING

But before someone gets a notion of bringing God back into the debate, we would like to make another observation about the nature of the universe. If Cosmological Fine Tuning does display a determination to create the animate from the inanimate then the success rate of that determination is depressingly low.

If Ward and Brownlee’s thesis is correct then complex life is an uncommon thing in the universe, which is strange if the whole universe is fine-tuned to the creation of life. In Ward and Brownlee’s investigation, we get a picture of a violent cosmic environment that is adverse to the creation of complex life. So how can the universe be fine-tuned toward life creation and hostile to it at the same time?

In order to answer this question, it is necessary to think about the quality of information (and consciousness) contained in the inanimate universe. It is basically intuitive and blind, lacking in any objective consciousness that perception can give it. It will have learned things through trial and error, trial and error. It is not the all-wise, all-knowing phenomenon that the religious like to imagine their God to be. Fine-tuning is therefore partly an accidental result of trial and error that is inspired by a desire by information to improve its own quality of information through an intuitional will to “know”. Knowledge has to be the desired result of any information system and so, if the universe is based on information that is its intuitive drive. Nevertheless, it is the most fragile of ambitions and the success of its dream may very well totally depend on us, and the evolution of the sapiens species.

Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, #19

Ibid

See Martin Rees JUST SIX NUMBERS (THE DEEP FORCES THAT SHAPE THE UNIVERSE), Perseus, 2000

See Vlatko Vedral, DECODING REALITY, OUP, 2010

Ibid, p.2

Ibid, p.3

Ibid, p.10

Sapiens versus the Homo Economicus

Nietzsche thought that pessimism was a slandering of the most powerful desires of life. This was no doubt true in the 19th century with its puritan, Victorian values. However, now we live in a global culture that embraces the potent life-impulses that Nietzsche loved and yet we are still a pessimistic and cynical society. Freud knew that Eros trickles into Thanatos. The will for life is tainted with the death wish. Life-impulses are not enough to give us a meaningful direction or purposiveness. There needs to be a rational, ethical anchor, an aesthetical positivism to drive our forward looking, future-feeling creative drives.

The future of the homo sapiens has to be Sapiens driven, instead of the mirror-world prison of the homo economicus.

The homo economicus is trapped in a purgatory of market exchange. That exchange system has no ambition other than to perpetuate the same old fantasy game of sacrifice for reward –

my labour for your money so I can purchase your products.

The Sapiens in us needs a stronger motive, a reason for being that is firmly locked into reality itself. Locked into the fresh metaphysical air that seeps out of our firm physical reality. Locked into the positivism that repositions humanity in the centre again.

The homo sapiens has to channel its life-impulses through its sapiens reality. For us, knowledge is inseparable from life. Knowing is the highest expression of human existence. In sapiens terms the homo economicus has been a triumph of mediocrity and the insipid fantasies of that same mediocrity. The homo economicus has no feeling for human greatness and prefers to trample on it, screaming that its own insipid exchange-system reality is stronger than anything else.

In fact, the word noble sounds like a joke now. After all, it was the liberal revolution that beheaded all nobility. Even if only to replace the noble with its own creation – the star system. Good and evil have been transcended, but only to replace it with the winners and losers.

“Nobody any more is able to answer the question ‘for what?’” And Nietzsche’s lucidity continues when he predicts a culture (our culture) in which: “sensitivity to pain, restlessness, haste and hustling grow continually … and that the individual, faced with this tremendous machinery, loses courage and submits.”

But what does cowardice mean for the homo sapiens? Surely it has to be associated with a fear of thinking. Isn’t our lost courage a lost will to do what we do best? It is certainly a submission to the shackling of that sapiens faculty of knowing through discovery and its channelling into the all-consuming world of the market, our ubiquitous exchange system.

See our earlier related blog entries:

https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/our-dependence-and-significance/ ; https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/uboric-will-hegels-spirit-the-godless-purposeful-universe/ ;

https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/11/01/ecology-as-ideology-and-the-uroboric-drive/ ;

https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/the-importance-of-metaphysics/

Nietzsche, WILL TO POWER, #33

Our Dependence and Significance

DEPENDENCE

We might or might not be free, but we are most certainly dependent.

Our existence depends on the air we breathe and on the space and the atmosphere that provides the kind of area in which breathable air can exist. We are dependent on atmosphere to protect us from harmful, cosmic radiation and to help stop us freezing in the frozen wasteland of the cosmos. We are dependent also on the fire within the core of our planet as well as the light that reaches us from the sun in order to provide conditions warm enough for human life to exist. Likewise, we are also dependent on the molecular structure of our body and especially our DNA to allow us to exist, be knowledgeable, reproduce ourselves and think we are free.

These are only a fraction of the things we depend on for our survival. If any one of them fails, our existence will stop. We are held together by forces and enclosed within other forces, and without these powers that ensure our physical construction and make the benevolent environment in which to move, we would not exist at all. But existence also depends on awareness, light, consciousness. Without a consciousness of existence, there is no real existence. Without life there can be no consciousness. If intelligent, conscious life only exists on Earth, then the planet Earth is the most significant point in the universe. We are necessary for the fulfilment of the universe.Everything we are dependent on depends on us for its Being.

SIGNIFICANCE

Cosmologists today talk of a finely tuned cosmos. Finely tuned to create life, as if life were a cosmic ambition. However, if that is so, why would it be? What can life give to the cosmos? But, of course, we have already answered that question – life, especially conscious life, enriches the universe with Being.

This idea implies a kind of anthropocentrism. In a numerical sense we are positioned in the very centre of the cosmos, between the macrocosm (1025) and the microcosm (10-25). However, this is a different kind of anthropocentrism to the traditional arrogant view of man as the most privileged of all creatures, in which the world is a thing put here by God for humankind to freely exploit. This new anthropocentrism doesn’t say that the universe was created for humanity, but rather that humanity was created for the universe. We are significant but also dependent. We are not the owners of the universe but rather the eyes and mind of it.

POSITIVISM

The idea of a humanity, significant in the universe and fundamental to the creation of Being in the universe, is a deeply positive one. It is also a profoundly humanistic one. We are not talking about races or nations, we are talking about humanity: humanity as a species, the homo sapiens. Thinking positively about the role of humanity in the universe is itself a form of self-preservation. And, in a world with a biosphere that is perilously close to becoming irreparably damaged by ruthlessly selfish human activity, positive thinking is vital in order to change that destructive, human behaviour.

Even the seemingly pessimistic idea that we are alone in the universe, has to be, in reality, a deeply positive incentive to ensure the preservation and good health of our biosphere, and of humanity within that biosphere.

VERSUS NIHILISM

Nihilism is constantly dragging humanity down into pessimistic fantasies of apocalyptic end days, prophesised with some degree of desire – as if our extinction would be doing the universe a favour.

Historically, pessimistic cultures have crumbled. The Aztecs and Incas both believed their time was up. Prophecy had ordained it. The Spanish conquest was pretty much assured even before it began.

Nihilism is a decadence, and nihilism and decadence provoke a cultural sense of being unworthy, and a lasses-faire attitude to any Armageddon.

The Revaluation of Value

Since Nietzsche called for the “Revaluation of all values!” we have, in Western Civilisation, seen certain transvaluations take place in areas such as race, gender, sex and violence, but what we have failed to revaluate is value itself.

A revaluation of value would untie its connection with exchange (money) and align it to needs – a thing’s importance would therefore be gauged according to how necessary it was. But in order to do this we would need to remove the stigma of “price”. Progress doesn’t happen because it’s expensive.

So, in order to make the real advances that our technology-rich culture is capable of, we now have to eradicate the barrier of “expense”.

THE TRULY HUMAN CIVILISATION

In a truly human civilisation, needs should be rights. In a truly fair society, everyone should have the opportunity to start the race from the same line. In our societies, sacrifices created by the monetary exchange system place people behind the starting line.

In a truly human civilisation, a person with disabilities should be allowed access to the technology designed to satisfy his or her needs without concern that sacrifices must be made to obtain the necessary barter. A teacher, or an intellectual, needs access to academic texts and should be granted that access; an artisan needs access to certain tools and materials; a gardener needs access to seeds and gardening tools, as well as a patch of land to garden on … etc.

In a society in which needs are understood and catered for by the society itself, on a wide and universal level, those same needs would seep into wants, but without taking over the space of wants. By planting values on authentic needs, civilisation would evolve into societies rich in purposeful-desires as opposed to our current civilisation that is drowning in pulp-waste-wants.

TECHNOLOGY IN A TRULY HUMAN CIVILSATION

Paradoxically, the truly human civilisation will be defined by the fact that it will not be dependent on human labour in order to function or maintain it. It will be a place that is built and maintained by machines, and in which the goods produced by those machines will be distributed by the same machines. As Einstein preached: “Those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings should be produced by the least possible labour of all”.

Of course this implies a loss of jobs, and a loss of menial tasks has tragic consequences in our societies dominated by monetary exchange. There is a vicious circle involved in our conclusion: in order to allow technology to liberate human beings from the drudgery of menial tasks we need to revaluate the value system based on money, and, technological development is the key to transcending the monetary-exchange system.

In order to close this circle, technology needs to be appropriated by the society itself so that it can be removed from the dictatorships of the capitalist corporations.

In our current model of society, the consumer pays repeatedly for goods produced by the money exchange system. Firstly, we pay for the technological research carried out with public money, secondly we pay for the cost of the products created by companies who have appropriated that technology as their own, and thirdly we have to pay each time we want to acquire the updated versions of products that have been deliberately programmed with a short life span. Of course, for the system, the important thing is that we pay, and that the money keeps flowing and moving to the top. It is this assumption that needs a radical revaluation.

In a sense, technology forces us in a direction beyond the monetary exchange. It is the essential function of technology to do what a human being cannot do by himself. To replace humans in terms of labour is to replace our role of being slaves to ourselves. In effect it is our exchange-system culture in its pure, slave-production/slave-maintenance role, that inhibits the development of technology .

While individuals continue to see themselves essentially as  active members of the master-slave, sacrifice-reward exchange system, technology will always be viewed: a) with some suspicion (as an impediment, taking away our own chances of participating successfully in the system); b) as a commodity that can be produced and exchanged for profit, and as such, just another object that enslaves desire rather than liberating humanity.

LEAPING FORWARD

The first leap to a revaluation of technology in a positive way must come about by abandoning the view of technology as commodities to be sold. A revaluation would see machines as something readily available for use without any ultimate aim of making a profit. This attitude places the entire monetary exchange system in question.

Technology can truly liberate us, but it won’t if we need to constantly sacrifice our time and real needs in order to be able to obtain that liberation. The purpose of technology is to liberate us from labour, not to ensure that we are shackled to it.

In order to remove technological development away from the market place and its role as an exchange-value/profit-making tool, we need to control the power of making machines that will be able to make themselves. Which means: a) control of the raw materials needed to make these machines; b) control of universities so that scientists and designers will be encouraged to plan technology in a social direction rather than a profit-making one; and c) control of the use of these machines once they are made.

Of course, these incentives have to come from the grass roots, the demos, the people. The so-called free market cannot be expected to have any inclinations towards implementing a structure which has an aim to abolish the free market.

EPILOGUE

Produce, distribute and maintain itself: there are the three basic functions that a truly human, technological society should be based on. Within production itself there are embedded needs to search for and extract the raw materials needed for that production to be possible. This implies a need for an ecological design for all future technology. A truly human civilisation will need to programme its machines with an ability to recognise excess, to understand the negative idea of over-farming, and to be able to judge the limits of extraction. A truly human civilisation needs, above all, a control of eco-friendly technologies.

ONE STEP BEYOND THE EXCHANGE SYSTEM

“If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value”

(Karl Marx, CAPITAL)

If we could abolish the system of exchange, what would we do with ourselves? Without monetary reward, labour would be useless. If we didn’t need to do things, why do anything? Wouldn’t the human race simply disappear?

However, even in the exchange system as we have it today, a great deal of activity is carried out without any monetary reward. The writing of this entry, for example, attains no other compensation than that someone will eventually read it. That may never happen, but that fact doesn’t dissuade the author from writing it. People spend hours a day toiling in their gardens with no expectations of monetary reward. Likewise, the time and effort spent in cooking a special meal achieves the only recompense of being able to enjoy a dish that you yourself has prepared, or offered to others. Artists will indulge themselves in complex, difficult activities, even dedicate their entire lives to such activities, without necessarily receiving any reward at all. In short, human beings do not need to be paid in order to motivate them to do things. All that needs to be stimulated is our inherent passion for doing things, for keeping ourselves occupied and free from boredom.

The exchange system of sacrifice and reward is designed to encourage us to surrender ourselves in exchange for a power to buy commodities, but instead of being a possible part of existence, as the exchange ritual originally was set up to be, it has become the essence of our existence. Hence the term homo economicus.

The concept of reward and sacrifice via the exchange of money has become so important it seems to be the essence of reality itself. It dominates lives in a dictatorial way, creating spiritual misery not only for those participating in the sacrifice, but also for those who are forcibly removed from participating in it. It is an absurd system based on a perpetual growth that is unsustainable. Essentially it is a dictatorship and, like all dictatorships, freedom can only be achieved by either: a) blindly conforming to the system (freedom through absolute passivity); b) escaping (freedom by removal); or c) by active dissidence (freedom through discrepancy, insubordination and/or revolt).

Of these three alternatives, the first is paradoxically the most dangerous. Although it may eliminate stress and perhaps even ensure a passive state of contentment, the stress generated by the system’s absurdity and ingrained exploitation of its subjects will grow around the passive citizen creating an increasing level of denial. This will only cause deeper guilt feelings. Conforming is a kind of escapism, inferior to real escape which is an active removal from the system.

Real escape can be positive if it can create a different system existing autonomously outside of the exchange system paradigm. Such attempts can be seen in the creation of grass-roots communities that try to reject consumerism without completely abandoning the exchange system. Traditionally this has been associated with hippy-type, back-to-nature movements, but that image is being transformed by the development of new technologies, especially renewable energy technologies, that can create technology-based counter cultures. What such escapes reveal is the profoundly revolutionary aspect of technology once it is applied creatively. But in order for this revolution to take place the existing paradigm must first be overhauled.

The third option (active dissidence) is the least cohesive alternative, and yet, at the same time the most promising and dynamic. The dissident space works from within the system in a cellular way. As a body it is largely unconscious as it has too many different voices to be heard in a legible way. It seems chaotic and confused, and it is in essence directionless. It is based more on discrepancy than any concrete alternative. It complains about lack of direction rather than offering clear solutions.  Nevertheless, its negativity has an eroding effect on the absurd system. Also it reveals the emperor’s nakedness, the system’s lack of possibility in the future, and eventually it will participate in the system’s inevitable collapse.

The main question is: will there be a tangible alternative available when the collapse occurs, or will the system operate as it always has done by pulling itself out of the rubble in a new reinvented form of the same mistakes?

KAFKA AND NECESSITY

In Kafka’s Trial, K. confronts a priest who tells him:

“‘It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’

‘A melancholy conclusion,’ said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.’”

But in between the priest’s observation and K.’s conclusion there is another result of this acceptance – that of turning necessity into a lie. The effect of this, of course, is that real necessities can no longer be trusted. They all become suspicious. Real purpose likewise suffers from this. Action itself becomes suspect to all sorts of vanities based on dishonesty and illusion. When necessity is rendered absurd by no longer representing that which really is, nihilism sets in. From this, we can define nihilism as that which arises when necessity loses its character.

Our Optimism (a clarification)

Nietzsche affirmed that the pessimism of his culture was derived from a feeling that the world no longer had the value that it used to be thought to have had. In the same way, we announce that our new optimism is derived from a feeling that the world is now becoming important again, perhaps more important than it has ever been thought of before. But not only that, humanity itself has also become more important than ever before. So important in fact that we are essential to everything. The initial result of this: everything is worthwhile again.

This is our positivism, inspired by the search for new values derived from authentic needs.

We are not talking about an egotistical anthropocentrism but a realisation of the absolute need for human (sapiens) qualities in order to manifest Being in the universe. As we explained in our article on Uroboric Will: “A need for intelligence is, in the Uroboric universe, an instinctive drive, coming from an instinct for Being and a sense of the most necessary potential.”

What we are pointing to might is a vision of a completely new era in which the anti-historical process that has brought us here will have to be left behind. We will need to sever our ties with our past, but without losing touch with it. Knowing is remembering, it is never forgetting. That which is forgotten becomes the unknown and loses being in time. Permanence is a human virtue.

Nietzsche, WILL TO POWER, #32.

For more on this see our article Uboric Will, Hegel’s Spirit & The Godless, Purposeful Universe: https://pauladkin.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/uboric-will-hegels-spirit-the-godless-purposeful-universe/

The Future System

All systems are designed to dissuade and impede the adoption of any better system. The system will impede change by blocking the ability to conceptualise or understand the alternatives.

Our global, neo-liberal culture unabashedly announces in its deep cynicism that it is the least worst of systems. An announcement made whilst plundering the natural resources of the planet and blindly damaging the ecosystem that all life on earth depends on. Of course, being the least worst is tantamount to announcing that it is the best. By doing so it warns us not to bother to go looking for vain alternatives. These, it says, cannot exist. There is, of course, no true encouragement of freedom here. Only a fool, it says, would look beyond the best thing for something better.

However, this is all an ideological lie. Systemic change is needed. The bubble idea that it is the economy that sustains us (and not the world) has to be burst. However, that bubble can only be burst by transcending the system of exchange. Our lives are currently subject to restraints on any true democratic access to technology and resources. However, the technological emancipation of humanity will only come about by abandoning our will-to-want-more and adopting a will-to-necessity. And this can only come about by developing this positivist and anti-nihilistic idea of human importance in the universe.

The priority of our capitalist economy is to make money. This is done by selling things. In order to sell things one must have something to sell. In order to have things to sell one must be able to obtain things already produced or produce them yourself. In order to produce things you must have people and/or machines that can do it. Given technological development as it is production can be carried out by either exclusively human labour (although this is hardly ever the case anymore), by a mixture of labourers and machines, or by primarily automated machinery. That production is evolving in the direction of the latter option seems to be the most logical perspective. However, if we ever reach an economy whose manufacturing is based solely on truly automated, self-producing and self-reproducing machinery, then … Do we need an exchange system involving production by human beings anymore? And if the answer is “no”: do we need an economy anymore?

If machines can mine resources and farm food, and can reproduce themselves and manufacture other new machines, the importance of labour in production must obviously be greatly diminished. A move towards such self-automated, self-reproducing, intelligent technologies should therefore see an equal trend towards the diminishing of the need for labour. Nevertheless, this is not the case in most societies. In the globalised economy intensified labour in sweatshop conditions in Third World countries is still a normal practice for large multinational corporations.  Slaves it seems are still more economical than high-tech machines. Developed countries have developed labour markets in services, many of which depend on tourism to hold them up. Unemployment can still have tragic consequences and it is one of the major causes of stress in societies. Our traditional wage-based exchange system depends on the incorporation of human beings into the system in order for them to be able to survive. Most survival still depends on people’s ability to procure salaries according to the sacrifice made through selling their time and skills as labour. If the amount of human labour needed is severely diminished so will the opportunities for survival, and so will the viability of the system of exchange that rewards only according to sacrifice.

For Einstein, one of the fundamental goals of civilisation is to make “those instrumental goods which should serve to maintain the life and health of all human beings … produced by the least possible labour of all.”  In other words, let the machines do the physical work and leave it to our sapiens’ minds to be creative and thoughtful. However, the System seems to be continually pushing us in the opposite direction. Ironically, civilisation is increasingly insensitive to human progress as its technological advances make it more and more automated. Instead of allowing technology to liberate humanity, the economy uses it to create ever cheaper labour in order to produce ever greater profits.

If economists were forward thinking they would have to consider the radical consequences of our post-modernity. Technology is a lot more highly developed than the machines in the market place itself. A real technological revolution that would completely transform the world economy is possible. In order for human progress to actually occur and for all human beings to be liberated to develop themselves as human beings, the whole exchange system could be replaced by a human-maintenance system operated by self-reproducing, autonomous machinery.

In a world in which production and services is handled by machines, money is unnecessary. Labour will no longer need to be a sacrifice exchanged for rewards. Humanity will no longer be the homo economicus.

THE MYSTIFICATION

The veils shrouding our civilisation are part system-constructed masks and part mists created by mystifications. Our perception of the system from within the system is created by a complex network of players. Created by the leaders, political and social, legal and economic, and all their cohorts; by the opinion makers, editors and journalists; by the intellectuals who are invited to comment and debate; by the artists and entertainers, critical or otherwise, who want to define as well as reveal. All of them are operating in an interactive way, mystifying each other with their own personal pragmatisms and ideologies, and being mystified themselves simply by being a part of the general mystification.

The decadence of a system resides in the systemic impossibility of judging the system and its problems from any objective standpoint. Once all analysis and any criticism comes from within the system itself, the system is doomed to fall into a hallucinatory state in which problems are impossible to tackle precisely because they are viewing the crisis from deep within instead of from without. Reality becomes a maze of mirrors. However, each mirror, even the dialectical ones, are only reflecting the subject before it. The same change is reflected and distorted in a thousand ways. Of course those within are all lost until they realise that they are being tricked. The maze is not a maze in the strict sense at all, but a vulgar game. One of the mirrors is in fact a door and to get out one simply needs to push each mirror until the mirror that is more than a mirror is found.

Within the maze however, there can be no objective or genius perspective capable of announcing any real hope of escape and salvation, and the maze atmosphere of our civilisation is insipidly suffocating. The libidinal energies of individuals seep into the system, suffusing one another without producing any synthesis, or anything new. There is no new combination just an intensification of the old way. As our civilisation inflates itself it becomes more intense, more extreme, and we mistake this stress-creating intensification with progress. However, it’s not progress at all, but degeneration.

PUSHING THE BRICK FROM THE WALL: EDUCATION IN THE PRAGMATIC DREAM

Pragmatism stands opposed to all Utopias. In place of aspirations for something better and other dreams of human progress, it offers and breeds its own Pragmatic Dream. A fabricated fantasy that is accepted by individuals in the System even though this pragmatism itself does nothing to provide substantial advantages for the majority of the individuals dreaming it, or even protect them. Inculcated with a fear of Utopias, the hopeful individual must depend on the Pragmatic Dream to drive them forward. Even when, in the case of excluded sectors of society like the unemployed or the homeless, where that dream is obviously restricted or even prohibited, the pragmatic ideal will create a self-flagellating tolerance of the oppressors.

Our tolerance of it is needed by the System in order to hold it up. Without it, the Pragmatic Dream System would be unable to maintain its so-called democratic veil. Once it loses the tacit support of any sector, the democratic mask of the system quickly peels away as draconian measures are implemented. Once support wanes, freedoms are reduced and the Pragmatic Dream devolves away from its only good argument into an obviously bad argument, trying to sustain itself through pragmatic acceptance and a fear of bad alternatives.

However, for pragmatism, essentially, all real alternatives are necessarily bad. According to pragmatic ideology, the alternative to the system is the anti-system: chaos and anarchy. Utopias are impossible things from the pragmatic point-of-view, and any alternative to the Pragmatic Dream is a castle in the air. Of course, what this kind of thinking does is stifle political creativity. “The least worse of all systems is the only possible system,” says pragmatism. There is only one possible narrative: our dictatorship.

Underlying the Pragmatic Dream’s power is an unquestioning belief in its legitimacy, what it calls “democracy” – the legitimacy won through the ballot box. However, in actual fact, it is this tacit acceptance of the Pragmatic Dream that sustains not a democracy but a dictatorial system. Bipartisanism seeps through the system’s pragmatism to create a single idea working in favour of power, rendering the democracies of pragmatism to something that is hardly democratic at all. Politics succumbs to economics and the influence of corporations makes the Pragmatic Dream a plutocratic paradise.

When we look beyond the paradigm what we must be focussed on is what can be gained by doing so, and also what will be lost. This double-pronged question must be asked by anyone who wants to achieve something. Through each acquisition and ascension, there must be a sacrifice, and perhaps there can be no greater fear in humanity than throwing it all away for a futile dream.

However, it is precisely this paradox, that is both intellectual and sentimental, that sustains the Pragmatic Dream system. Pragmatism means the end will justify the means. What this really means in the context of the Pragmatic Dream is that that which will be acquired by my efforts will surpass what has been sacrificed to achieve it. Of course, in reality, most of the time one does not realise what one is losing until it has all gone – this is the moral message in Citizen Kane and his infatuation with Rosebud.

At the same time, however, the potential dissident who has very little or nothing to lose will be more likely to become an activist than the one who has plenty to lose. This is true even though the one who has possessions may be more conscious of the corruption and anti-democratic oppression perpetrated by the system. Nevertheless, the nothing-to-lose dissident has no resources to operate effectively and in order to find those means, he or she will have to let themselves be recruited into a group of activists led by an ideology which may well merely be looking for cannon-fodder in their own violent struggle.

In this sense, the victims remain victims no matter which side they join. They are the result of several millennia of violent hiccups that have exploited the needy with the same hypocrisy as the Pragmatic Dream has. This hypocrisy encourages most of the hopeless class to shun the intellectuals and their politics and reject any other dissidence other than the public display of their own wretchedness. The intellectual paradox that the system is favoured by rests in the fact that those who think about and denounce its evil are not the victims of that evil, and those who are its victims very rarely get a chance to think and talk about it. If the Pragmatic Dream is to be exposed and superseded by a more consciously necessary system (or non-system) then the victims must be given more cultural baggage or capital in order to visualise an escape for themselves. But, of course, that would be impossible within the Pragmatic Dream itself. That Dream depends on the existence of an apathetic class that is devoid of intellectual-culture baggage.

Neo-liberalism reacted against that kind of intellectual dissemination that was prevalent in schools and universities in the late 60s and 1970s and there has been a subtle undermining of the culturally creative and intellectually dynamic learning programmes since the 1980s. Now, we can most assuredly claim that universal education in the Western World is in a reactionary process of controlled segregation, anti-humanitarian specialisation and creative-thinking decline. It is this kind of education system that makes the Pragmatic Dream possible even though it offers no real progress for the masses that bolster it up. Pink Floyd summed it up perfectly: “All in all, we’re just another brick in the wall.” The only way to get us out of the wall is through self-education and through teaching what is learned by that autonomous learning independently, outside of the Pragmatic Dream itself. Such spaces beyond the wall exist and can be found. We are in such a space right now.