Enough cannot be said of Glenn Beck’s urging of people to run from any church that advocates social justice. It’s not because Beck’s statement can be reduced to leaving a church (or even Christianity or religion altogether), but that it is the implicit presumption of capitalism. While most of Beck’s ‘Republitarians’ want to remove government oversight, regulation, and functionality with the implication that private citizens and businesses will handle the ’social justice’ stuff by voluntary giving. Given the predisposition of consumerism to always feed the individualised subject, this will not happen. Beck’s comments show the hideous nature of capitalism: nobody should be doing ’social justice’ because it goes against the evolution of humanity. It is social evolution that Glenn Beck and company promote, not just as something alongside capitalism but as the necessary outlook for capitalism to survive. The poor and the homeless are worthless to capitalism if they are not able to consume the everlasting pit of desire, so why waste time and money? After all, both time and money should be spent on worshiping Capital through consumerism and individualisation. Become yourself for only $99 — and enjoy it too!
Archive for the 'Politics' Category
I want to get rid of the ‘burden of proof’ mentality. If only one side in an contract ‘negotiation’ has a ‘burden of proof’, then it is not a negotiation. Rather, both sides should be seeking to prove their case (which also implies that an invalidation of the other is not always a valid proof). In contracts, both parties have the obligation to settle any foreseeable misunderstandings prior to the actual signing of a contract. We see this when one buys a house: in most circumstances, there are multiple inspections of the house (from both parties) in order to negotiate the contract. However, in the mass-marketed consumer world (e.g. insurance), we don’t see this: the contract is pre-arranged in bulk (sometimes even just fill-in-the-blank forms) and the seller places all responsibility on the buyer. The worst part, however, is that when a buyer requests any kind of negotiation, it is rejected under the excuse of ‘free market’ capital — that there are ‘better’ things the seller can be doing so take it or leave it. That’s a complete failure of negotiation, and it’s not the only case (e.g. we also see this in software EULA as well).
What is the nature of violence? More specifically, what is the benefit of violence as a concept within a set of beliefs (whether that be political, philosophical, theological, etc). It is increasingly becoming my opinion that violence is ultimately a bad reaction to something troubling. Violence itself should result in shock and, in many ways, disbelief.The first world war was once called the war to end all wars. Political and military figures alike argued that the atrocities of that war was enough to discourage any future war. Ironically, the second world war began brewing just over a decade later. The second world war was considered even worse than the first. However, wars were not ended or discouraged; they continued to occur, perhaps even in greater force.
Violence only intensified and turned into an ideological dream. Not only was war the always occurring violence elsewhere, but it also turned inward. World leaders began declaring war on any concept they disliked: drugs, poverty, domestic violence, communism, terror (not just terrorism but terror itself)…and that’s just in the USA! In fact, war has become such a commonplace concept that we have become desensitised to its meaning. We now consume it in our media–in news, film, television, even music. It has become such that in war there is a ‘good’ side and a ‘bad’ side with good generally winning and being the ‘fan favourite’. The boundary between history and fiction are blurred such that we can accept the ‘good guys’ doing horribly ‘bad’ things (e.g. torture) if it is for the ‘greater good’ (e.g. the series 24). In other words, we have been taught to embrace a relative morality when it suits our own purposes. The real irony here is that the people who most readily accept that ideology are the same ones who call for an absolute morality!
A song written in the early 1990s sums up this story nicely. While it is directly about the Troubles in Ireland, the second verse from The Cranberries’ ‘Zombie’ touches on my answer to this fashion nicely:
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistakenIt’s the same old theme since 1916
In your head, in your head, they’re still fighting
Ideology today is only in our heads. The worse part of it is that we’ve accepted it as reality and enjoy it as well. Perhaps Orwell’s most chilling point about Oceania (from 1984) was that not only did the people need to accept Big Brother but that they had to enjoy it as well. The best way to undermine this ideology is not a revolution for that only reinforces the love of violence. Instead, it is to believe it completely, to take it at its word, to watch the most gruesome atrocities and enjoy it. Only when we discover that such violence is not just an unwelcome outsider but something near to our own hearts can we learn to acknowledge the atrocities and violence for what they are: our own reflections.
The debate about healthcare in the US has provoked my thinking about politics in general. I’ll be upfront in case my point gets lost in the mix: political ideologies are consumer products that are marketed, purchased, and consumed like any ‘trendy’ clothing line.
Right after 9/11, the ‘trendy’ thing was to be conservative and ‘patriotic’. When the Dixie Chicks spoke their opinions about President Bush, they wound up committing public suicide because, from one perspective, they were out-of-sync with the ‘trendy’ political stance. At this point, conservatism was marketed as the minority fighting against the overwhelming liberal majority. They were the sane part of the government who were thankfully in power at the time. In the Autumn of 2008, these conservatives joined with their ‘liberal’ counterparts and pumped millions of dollars into large corporations to keep them afloat. Yes, at that moment in time, ’socialism’ was the trendy thing. It was happening throughout developed nations. Now, as Obama and the Democrats (NB: that would be a cool band name) are trying to reform healthcare, the trendy product has been to reject that healthcare because it is ’socialist’ (ignoring that other ’socialist’ thing that happened before the election even took place). Right now, the hot, trendy political ideology is right-wing Republicanism (both traditional conservatism and neoconservatism), probably in part to the consumption of right-wing leaning products such as FoxNews, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times (two of which are owned by Rupert Murdoch).
With ideologies being consumed like products, there is no independent thought even though most would agree one of the hallmarks of modernity was thought independent of any overbearing institution (be it king or church). Perhaps that should read ‘there has never been independent thought’. We have deluded ourselves into thinking that our thoughts are truly independent, even if they reverberate clearly with the marketed political products. These products have been so successful at fading into the background that we have long forgotten they ever existed as products and accept them as our own core beliefs. I am deliberately echoing Nietzsche’s definition of ‘Truth’ here because we take our political products as things based on some unshakeable Truth. We no longer see ourselves as members of a political party towing the party line but as independent observers who happen to agree with the party lines. We’ll argue that if the party were to change a particular set of beliefs, we would disagree with them, but so far no action in any party has been sufficiently large to really provoke this. Even Arlen Specter’s jumping ship to another party was, for all intents, a non-event.
We have succumbed to the siren song of truth in politics. Even politics has its own advertisements–not just for candidates during election but for every ‘major’ issue. These advertisements succeed in the same way Wikipedia does: cite something, give a source, and hope that nobody reads it well enough. The problem with this comparison, however, is that people on Wikipedia do (sometimes) read things well enough to see the forest for the trees and change it. That doesn’t happen in politics. At best, we get more non-events (like David Cameron publicly rebuking Daniel Hannan while also drumming up support for the same things he’s rebuking Hannan) that are always void of substance. That’s because the substance was never there to begin. It’s always been an empty façade hiding an empty void. The ‘Truth’ in politics is that there is no Truth beyond that which is fabricated for the product…and we all have purchased it.
