Thank You. You have given me much to think about, and a useful frame with which to understand the world as it actually is. Do please keep it up, and I wish you all the very best in 2024. S.
I have just stumbled upon your substack and have yet to get caught up on prior articles and posts, but this recap essay is intriguing and I wish to contribute a comment riffing off of your central thesis. I too am not optimistic about the future of the West given the dearth of quality leadership. Rather, I have come to believe that the currently ongoing self-destruction is intentional and therefore must persist until a healing collapse results from this folly. My signature phrase is "the collapse is the cure; nothing changes until the environment changes."
Now to the good stuff. Despair is not a solution to anything. We were built by evolution to prevail over enormous hardship and existential threat, and that is our duty to posterity. I believe that the core of the problems that we face are relatively few in number (think pathogens invading a body). As such, the remedy is much more manageable if you focus on the root of the problem.
How do we succeed? By being smarter rather than harder. The first imperative is to survive the collapse and the interregnum that follows. Then we must foster the education and rise of the new "antibodies" that will bring forth a "cure" for what ails us. It will summarize briefly. Disappear in plain sight. Keep it simple and use what you know. Everything solely within the confines of your cranium. Practice opportunism and spontaneity. And focus, always focus. The chaos of collapse begets fog, and this fog is your best friend.
"Yet western leaders and officials routinely believe stupid things. Our elites are not only incapable, they are essentially infantilised, living in a world of childish make-believe, and reacting with hysterical hatred to anyone, like that bad man Putin, who puts their half-digested Liberal, platitudes in question."
Therein lies the real problem. The rest could be managed, if the managers were competent.
However, that begs the question *why* they are all of a very similar incompetence, and why competence or even acknowledging observable reality, cannot be allowed to take the lead.
Thinking about it more, I would say that western leaders are very competent, just that their competencies don't necessary follow the job description.
Something I wrote a while back:
"These people don't live in The Real World.
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Instagram post of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a small portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "<i>How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?</i>" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to cater it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably <i>rifa</i>, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, your upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
As you may know, I've seen quite a lot of both worlds, I've lived in barns and crouched under the table in the room where the decisions were made, so I think I understand both mindsets pretty well. I prefer freedom to regular meals.
Speaking of, I got some mice to catch, or otherwise, I will surely be going hungry."
Looking forward to your forward-looking insight. I, on my part, look up at your reflections as a useful map of the mess we're in and, above all, as a source of inspiration about ways to extricate ourselves from the current predicament. So, I wish you health and balance on all levels, Aurelien.
You just notice the 40 years it began to devour itself instead of rest of the world for centuries before because it hits home now. All politics is local as they say.
RE surviving worst consequences: I have a bug out spot in Brasil for the inevitable collapse whatever form it takes... Figure South America is too irrelevant to get nuked. Plus I can ethanol my car and eat all from the jungle, I retired young and still got 20-25 years I can "rough" it on 6 Hectares of rain forrest.
Your right about the incompetent leaders of the West and how quickly they are demolishing our society through violence deep ignorance which defies any rational explanation.
It’s as everything they have ever experienced about the threads which wove our civilization means nothing.
It’s up to us to stay true individually.
The social matrix is dying , gasping it’s last breath.
Thank goodness for as one who lives in the West our leaders are a collossal disgrace of humanity.
One of the reasons that I read our gracious host is that he seems to reflect a lot of what/who I was in my past life as a member of the PMC who left the "Church of PMC" upon retirement.
I suppose that the analogy I would use for myself hearkens back to the excellent education that I received at the bequest of the Jesuits. In a sense the PMC is the modern age equivalent of the Jesuits. No shame there. But after spending a life as a card-carrying member of the PMC, upon retirement I have come to realize that I am now the equivalent of a Jansenist (maybe a Molinist, I am trying to decide).
Your question alone asks something that is in the process of being answered. The idea that a person is required to define themselves in terms of class is repugnant to me. I don't owe allegiance to somewhat else's definitions.
I am under no illusions that whilst in paid employment without any private income, I'm simply a foot-soldier for the oligarchy.
I make my living selling dystopian junk like "artificial intelligence" and "data analytics" solutions to big corporations so they in turn can sell more crap to people who've become addicted to empty consumerism as much as a junkie is addicted to heroin.
My justification for this capitulation ? That one day soon, I will have amassed enough money that it finally buys me my freedom. Shilling for crooks is a steep price though.
I loved the reference to "wintry integrity" which I suspect reflects some self-judgement (card XX). You can spend a life in the PMC and see it with integrity--both its admirable and flawed aspects. It may not be possible (or even desireable) to fully detach from one's life-long class on "retirement" (or think you can) because it's an ingrained part of the self. But one can transcend it by examining one's viewpoint objectively and mindfully, and seeking a larger coherence. Aurelian's writing method -- letting the thesis change as one writes -- makes writing a mode of discovery. As Joan Didion said, "I write to find out what I think!". One discovers one's ingrained (e.g. class) biases and new connections among disparate internal experiences and perspectives. One starts at "A" and realizes "no, I don't want 'A' after all'". My favorite bumper sticker is "Don't Believe Everything You Think;" but another one that occurs to me now is "Revelation Happens." I look forward to more revelations in 2024, not just from Aurelian but from the excellent commentariat here!
"It may not be possible (or even desirable) to fully detach from one's life-long class on "retirement"
Friend, I very much hope this isn't true. I despise my class and so hate the hypocrite I've become. I started out working class (parents both left education at 14), but then I pity lucked into a fancy university in 1986. PMC was inevitable after that.
Work for the oligarchs and you'll (maybe) have enough money one day to have purchased your freedom. Don't and you'll sink into the lumpen-proletariat, never to be free until you're dead in your grave.
It's a devils bargain, that's for sure. Wasn't it Bob Dylan who said we all gotta serve somebody ?
Since you mentioned Didion, I think that folks could do much worse than listen to this podcast by London Review of Books. In a sense, Didion speaks of the same things that our gracious host speaks of coming in from a different vector.
One of his few weaknesses. He uses a broad brush to paint the PMCs portrait. As someone further down wrote; Aurelien very much appears to be part of the P, whilst the ones f... it up for everyone are part of the M.
Myself, I call this subclass (to which I belong too) the "grey suit class". People who have actual expertise albeit in a narrow technical field who sit in the back of the room and are only addressed for specific questions and are otherwise left to despair over what's happening in the front of the room.
By and large, it is mostly the M in PMC that screws things over, and over, and over. Because the main task is to manage things such that the structures do not have to be changed. That is never given as an option and one can see in any strategic planning of any sorts, that the higher level structures are not even mentioned, i.e., in the factors influencing human health, all kinds of things are mentioned, from genetics to environment, but never Politics and/or Political decisions...
The best example, which is a sort of legend among the Professional Class, has to do with the Challeger accident and how it happened. After a frosty night in Florida (I know, wright!), some O-rings were affected, and the Chief Engineer or some like figure opposed the launching. For some reason that was considered a big embarasment. The Chief Engineer was promoted as the Manager of the launch, had his rights and responsibilities read to and transmongered into a person that said yes to the launch. We all know what happen. But this is apocryphal-nevertheless, it contains an ounce of truth to it and makes us reflect at the structures we have created.
The Blue diagram of Risk Management, because made from the beginning to disconnect Risk Analysts from Risk Managers and decision makers, after many many tragedies, was slightly changed in early 2000s, albeit there isn't much evidence of it. Probably the news have not percolated... up...
So I would put Aurelien in the "Professional" bin.
Good assessment and tie off. Pause to reflect but move forward with knowledge at hand is how progress is made.
A quibble though. Hope is not a good strategy. Optimism is an outward expression of your confidence in your own abilities. And therefore useful in developing strategy.
There is a Greek-based political term that can be used to label the below-par Western governments; it is kakistocracy. It means those people who rise to the top in the political, economic and cultural world are the least suitable and most unworthy. That they can do so, reflects the inadequacies of a society’s major institutions.
Thank you - I notice myself how useful it is to sometimes seek a height where the journey taken and the terrain forward can be viewed. And such fine quality of comments, too!
As to whose fault our current predicament is: when a hockey team is performing poorly, mostly the coach gets sacked. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. But our problem-solving world-view always, always pushes us to finding the guilties and then blaming, shaming and so on. As if the perfect plan were always ruined by the imperfect actors, who then need to be punished for their imperfectness. Could it be possible to think about where we want to go and what could be done to help us get there instead of doing a lot of work to find the ones to blame? Especially as in the west even the poor and sick get massive benefit from the current arrangements. If we could eliminate the reviled PMC right this moment, how would things stand then? Looking at the paths taken and learning from mistakes is good. But what keeps us wanting to move forward, and what forward means? As many have mentioned books they find inspiring, here comes my recommendation: anything written (or read) by Martin Prechtel. A strange suggestion in this context: he is a shaman and has lived a very adventurous life.
"So my writing next year will be directed at what the coming collapse is going to be like, and what can be done by individuals and groups to manage it and avoid the worst consequences."
Pity. I had hoped you would put before yourself and your readers the task of discovery to construct the / a new order that is already rising, along with tools, materials, and architectural suggestions appertaining thereto.
The new order is being built, largely by people not tainted by Western liberal orthodoxy and outside the physical boundaries of the Anglo-Saxonia and Europe. I don't know why we, who are very much implicated in the failing existing economic and ecological and moral system and still plagued by unjustified sense of superiority, should have any say in what's to come.
I hope not! European Christianity is responsible for much of the global devastation of the past 500, heck 1,000 years. Its largely moribund except for certain cancerous fundamentalist evangelical sects that are responsible for the likes of Bolsonaro and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not to mention that they're a complete theological mess where the flock largely fail to walk the walk that they demand others make. Perhaps the less compromised Eastern churches can have a go of it but I think the Western churches are headed for extinction and the evangelical movement is setting itself up for a self detonation.
Memes are simply easily transmissible symbolic manipulations. Although they can arise authentically and be good or bad, I would say that they have been boosted and suppressed by state and corporate powers mostly for evil. They seem to function mostly as thought stoppers so people stop thinking beyond "Putin is evil", "Iraqi WMDs", "Iranians mullahs", and "Trump is Fascist". I don't think modern Western churches have sufficient pull to effectively play in this sandbox.
That is not President Putin's view of things. Nor is it reality. Nor is it the attitude of a penitent. You advocate what is known as collective guilt, a concept that is DOA and known as such around the world.
It's the attitude of someone who noticed what the West actually did during the last 500 years and does not believe it has any moral authority to tell anyone else what to do. Take the L and stop telling other people what to do, they are very unlikely to do worse.
Appeals to the authority of someone who very recently admitted that he was completely wrong about the West are...not very authoritative.
On what authority do you give me an imperative to "take the L?"
If you mean President Putin admitted he was completely wrong . . . I would say I have never seen any indication of that sentiment emanating from the man. He has been clear that Russia stands against US-UK leaders of today, not those countries or The West or their cultures per se.
You do you. But nobody else is obligated to respect the opinions of a group that has been collectively responsible for murdering and enslaving hundreds of millions, destroying numerous ancient civilizations, pioneering settler colonialism ahead of the Germans and Israelis, and may well have sealed the fate of humanity through 80 years of not dealing with climate change and resource depletion.
Again, you over-read, and quite bumptiously tendentious. In biblical studies we call this eisegesis, reading into scripture what you want to be there rather than reading out of it what is there (exegesis).
Putin confesses there naivety regarding US-NATO officials' willingness to see what is happening and come to terms on the basis of such realizations. He is surprised, and not a little sad, that instead, those officials demand that everything happen the way they dictate. He did not realize, at first, that they could be that stupid, malicious, and incompetent. That is a far cry from, as you put it, his being "completely wrong about the West." And, note, he still posits that said officials know what the score really is. Indeed, they do.
Like so may others round about, your interest is not fixing broken systems, much less building new ones, as whipping them so as to prevent even the feeblest new shoots of life from spring up therefrom.
First, it was a suggestion, not an order. Second, it does offer some ideas of the aray of social organisations that are possible to use, because the past is loaded...
Third, nevermind. Instead of just checking what was that about, you grumpily respond as if some major damage has been incured to your ego.
A sentence which begins with the word "Read" in the imperative, and without modulating secondaries, is an order. Moreover, it assumes that I am some dumbsquat ready to benefit from your interests.
The imperative would have been underlined by an exclamation mark at the end of the sentenc. There wasn't such thing there. You also imagined a particular tone in that sentence, which wasn't there to begin with. All in your head...
Thank you Aurelien🙏At least here is an opportunity to say ”I look forward to next year”😉
Thank You. You have given me much to think about, and a useful frame with which to understand the world as it actually is. Do please keep it up, and I wish you all the very best in 2024. S.
I have just stumbled upon your substack and have yet to get caught up on prior articles and posts, but this recap essay is intriguing and I wish to contribute a comment riffing off of your central thesis. I too am not optimistic about the future of the West given the dearth of quality leadership. Rather, I have come to believe that the currently ongoing self-destruction is intentional and therefore must persist until a healing collapse results from this folly. My signature phrase is "the collapse is the cure; nothing changes until the environment changes."
Now to the good stuff. Despair is not a solution to anything. We were built by evolution to prevail over enormous hardship and existential threat, and that is our duty to posterity. I believe that the core of the problems that we face are relatively few in number (think pathogens invading a body). As such, the remedy is much more manageable if you focus on the root of the problem.
How do we succeed? By being smarter rather than harder. The first imperative is to survive the collapse and the interregnum that follows. Then we must foster the education and rise of the new "antibodies" that will bring forth a "cure" for what ails us. It will summarize briefly. Disappear in plain sight. Keep it simple and use what you know. Everything solely within the confines of your cranium. Practice opportunism and spontaneity. And focus, always focus. The chaos of collapse begets fog, and this fog is your best friend.
"Yet western leaders and officials routinely believe stupid things. Our elites are not only incapable, they are essentially infantilised, living in a world of childish make-believe, and reacting with hysterical hatred to anyone, like that bad man Putin, who puts their half-digested Liberal, platitudes in question."
Therein lies the real problem. The rest could be managed, if the managers were competent.
However, that begs the question *why* they are all of a very similar incompetence, and why competence or even acknowledging observable reality, cannot be allowed to take the lead.
Mr Feral, Gaius Baltar offers here an answer for your question :
https://open.substack.com/pub/gaiusbaltar/p/why-is-the-west-so-weak-and-russia?r=2nwdrk&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
Thinking about it more, I would say that western leaders are very competent, just that their competencies don't necessary follow the job description.
Something I wrote a while back:
"These people don't live in The Real World.
The US in general and its elites in particular, in and out of MSM, government and the military, live in a world increasingly consumed by symbol, spectacle and abstraction. Not only that, but they confuse wish-fulfillment with reality. Decide that you're going to identify as a different gender, race, ethnicity, hell, decide that you're a member of a different species and woe betide anyone who doesn't go along with the charade. They might even get themselves "cancelled".
Hell, even the consequences of their (symbolic) actions are themselves largely symbolic. Melvin didn't get to put on a TED talk because someone dug up an old Instagram post of his and now he's "literal Hitler" for a while.
For that matter, the truly Great and Good rarely even face those kinds of consequences. They can cause institutions to fail everywhere they go - but as long as they parrot today's approved platitudes, they glide from internship to government sinecure to think tank to academia to to financial services to corporate board to to consulting gig to MSM Talking Head, sometimes more than one simultaneously. Most probably never having had a 9-5 job, much less done farm or factory work, in their lives. These days, they may never even physically show up to work, ever, but their bank accounts rarely seem to reflect this.
They can even engage in outright fraud, but a big enough fish will only pay a fine, a small portion of his ill-gotten gains. Meanwhile, he remains as free as a bird, and probably doesn't even face social ostracism. Last I checked, Jon Corzine is not on the naughty list of the people who matter.
Since results don't matter and there are few consequences for losing, even for catastrophe, everything becomes a matter of spin. All problems can be solved with better P.R., and there is no greater triumph than when some newscaster recites that glib talking point you just coined or when your FB post went viral, your instagram noticed by the right kind of influencer. In other words, winning is a matter of successful symbol manipulation. Speaking of spin, virtue signaling is an obsession, even unto rank hypocrisy, and the Davos Set think nothing of flying a private jet to a conference where they can congratulate themselves on their commitment to stopping climate change. Again, if there are to be any consequences, then those are for the little people to deal with.
Even in their dwindling contact with the physical world, the elites live in a world of wish-fulfillment. Push a button and whatever food or whatever else you want is brought to your door by some peon, paid for seamlessly by some electrons exchanged between banks that may not even have a physical location within a thousand miles of your location, if they have locations at all. Hell, you can even get laid via internet, just swipe right on the lucky profile. Everything is taken care of in the background, your credit card billed and airline miles accumulated automatically and the food or the girl just show up. Somehow. By Uber, I guess. Mundane questions like "<i>How do I feed the kids this week and pay for school supplies and make the rent?</i>" never come into the equation.
These are people who confuse their fantasies with reality to the point where they actually believe their own press releases. They give an order and it happens. They proclaim their puppets in Kabul to be wise and stable technocrats, their well-trained military striding from triumph to triumph and So Let It Be Done, So Let It Be Written. "So let it be written" - that's the word, that's all that need be done and the little people just somehow make it happen. For sheer lack of contact with the real world, these people make Louis XVI look like a medieval gong farmer or a pygmy tribesman by comparison.
Contrast the Taliban. Symbol, spectacle and abstraction mean very little to them. Doordash doesn't operate in their area and if a Talib wants a vegan option, he'll have to cater it himself. It has probably never occurred to a Talib that he could cancel his enemies simply by digging up their old tweets, sent under a long discarded Twitter ID, and he doesn't have time for that, anyway. He lives in the world of concrete and material things, he thinks nothing of killing and in his world, there are bullets waiting to kill him quite literally dead and transport him to a very earthly and very earthy sort of paradise.
You can't wish those things away, your credit cards are no good and probably <i>rifa</i>, anyway, and the bullet flying towards him isn't concerned with word games, your upcoming struggle session to root out unconscious racism and cannot be reasoned with or convinced to bother someone less important.
The world of American elites collided with the world of the Taliban and got its ass kicked. Biden and his crew cannot deal with this, because that kind of reality does not select for success in symbol manipulation, any more than skill at football selects for an ability to do math problems.
The clownish Western response to the COVID is similar. The virus can't be negotiated with, can't be bought off, can't be distracted, and is unimpressed with you and how highly you may think of yourself.
As you may know, I've seen quite a lot of both worlds, I've lived in barns and crouched under the table in the room where the decisions were made, so I think I understand both mindsets pretty well. I prefer freedom to regular meals.
Speaking of, I got some mice to catch, or otherwise, I will surely be going hungry."
Looking forward to your forward-looking insight. I, on my part, look up at your reflections as a useful map of the mess we're in and, above all, as a source of inspiration about ways to extricate ourselves from the current predicament. So, I wish you health and balance on all levels, Aurelien.
Re: 40 yrs neo-liberalism...40 years? The Westen world turned rotten and lost it's virtue 500 years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWFaKRS8iic&t
You just notice the 40 years it began to devour itself instead of rest of the world for centuries before because it hits home now. All politics is local as they say.
RE surviving worst consequences: I have a bug out spot in Brasil for the inevitable collapse whatever form it takes... Figure South America is too irrelevant to get nuked. Plus I can ethanol my car and eat all from the jungle, I retired young and still got 20-25 years I can "rough" it on 6 Hectares of rain forrest.
Aurelien thank you for the light but profound analyses you give us.
I wish you all the best and will continue to follow you waiting for the little light that opens up huge horizons of thought for me.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart and happy new year
Alberto from Italy
Your right about the incompetent leaders of the West and how quickly they are demolishing our society through violence deep ignorance which defies any rational explanation.
It’s as everything they have ever experienced about the threads which wove our civilization means nothing.
It’s up to us to stay true individually.
The social matrix is dying , gasping it’s last breath.
Thank goodness for as one who lives in the West our leaders are a collossal disgrace of humanity.
I'm curious: if you're not PMC, what are you?
I see Aurelien as a traitor to his class much like Eleanor Roosevelt was to hers.
Nitpicking is the enemy of clarity: I think you need to place your sandbags elsewhere.
One of the reasons that I read our gracious host is that he seems to reflect a lot of what/who I was in my past life as a member of the PMC who left the "Church of PMC" upon retirement.
I suppose that the analogy I would use for myself hearkens back to the excellent education that I received at the bequest of the Jesuits. In a sense the PMC is the modern age equivalent of the Jesuits. No shame there. But after spending a life as a card-carrying member of the PMC, upon retirement I have come to realize that I am now the equivalent of a Jansenist (maybe a Molinist, I am trying to decide).
Your question alone asks something that is in the process of being answered. The idea that a person is required to define themselves in terms of class is repugnant to me. I don't owe allegiance to somewhat else's definitions.
I am under no illusions that whilst in paid employment without any private income, I'm simply a foot-soldier for the oligarchy.
I make my living selling dystopian junk like "artificial intelligence" and "data analytics" solutions to big corporations so they in turn can sell more crap to people who've become addicted to empty consumerism as much as a junkie is addicted to heroin.
My justification for this capitulation ? That one day soon, I will have amassed enough money that it finally buys me my freedom. Shilling for crooks is a steep price though.
I loved the reference to "wintry integrity" which I suspect reflects some self-judgement (card XX). You can spend a life in the PMC and see it with integrity--both its admirable and flawed aspects. It may not be possible (or even desireable) to fully detach from one's life-long class on "retirement" (or think you can) because it's an ingrained part of the self. But one can transcend it by examining one's viewpoint objectively and mindfully, and seeking a larger coherence. Aurelian's writing method -- letting the thesis change as one writes -- makes writing a mode of discovery. As Joan Didion said, "I write to find out what I think!". One discovers one's ingrained (e.g. class) biases and new connections among disparate internal experiences and perspectives. One starts at "A" and realizes "no, I don't want 'A' after all'". My favorite bumper sticker is "Don't Believe Everything You Think;" but another one that occurs to me now is "Revelation Happens." I look forward to more revelations in 2024, not just from Aurelian but from the excellent commentariat here!
"It may not be possible (or even desirable) to fully detach from one's life-long class on "retirement"
Friend, I very much hope this isn't true. I despise my class and so hate the hypocrite I've become. I started out working class (parents both left education at 14), but then I pity lucked into a fancy university in 1986. PMC was inevitable after that.
Work for the oligarchs and you'll (maybe) have enough money one day to have purchased your freedom. Don't and you'll sink into the lumpen-proletariat, never to be free until you're dead in your grave.
It's a devils bargain, that's for sure. Wasn't it Bob Dylan who said we all gotta serve somebody ?
Since you mentioned Didion, I think that folks could do much worse than listen to this podcast by London Review of Books. In a sense, Didion speaks of the same things that our gracious host speaks of coming in from a different vector.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/history-of-ideas/didion
One of his few weaknesses. He uses a broad brush to paint the PMCs portrait. As someone further down wrote; Aurelien very much appears to be part of the P, whilst the ones f... it up for everyone are part of the M.
Myself, I call this subclass (to which I belong too) the "grey suit class". People who have actual expertise albeit in a narrow technical field who sit in the back of the room and are only addressed for specific questions and are otherwise left to despair over what's happening in the front of the room.
By and large, it is mostly the M in PMC that screws things over, and over, and over. Because the main task is to manage things such that the structures do not have to be changed. That is never given as an option and one can see in any strategic planning of any sorts, that the higher level structures are not even mentioned, i.e., in the factors influencing human health, all kinds of things are mentioned, from genetics to environment, but never Politics and/or Political decisions...
The best example, which is a sort of legend among the Professional Class, has to do with the Challeger accident and how it happened. After a frosty night in Florida (I know, wright!), some O-rings were affected, and the Chief Engineer or some like figure opposed the launching. For some reason that was considered a big embarasment. The Chief Engineer was promoted as the Manager of the launch, had his rights and responsibilities read to and transmongered into a person that said yes to the launch. We all know what happen. But this is apocryphal-nevertheless, it contains an ounce of truth to it and makes us reflect at the structures we have created.
The Blue diagram of Risk Management, because made from the beginning to disconnect Risk Analysts from Risk Managers and decision makers, after many many tragedies, was slightly changed in early 2000s, albeit there isn't much evidence of it. Probably the news have not percolated... up...
So I would put Aurelien in the "Professional" bin.
Good assessment and tie off. Pause to reflect but move forward with knowledge at hand is how progress is made.
A quibble though. Hope is not a good strategy. Optimism is an outward expression of your confidence in your own abilities. And therefore useful in developing strategy.
There is a Greek-based political term that can be used to label the below-par Western governments; it is kakistocracy. It means those people who rise to the top in the political, economic and cultural world are the least suitable and most unworthy. That they can do so, reflects the inadequacies of a society’s major institutions.
Couldn't agree more! Thank you.
Thanks. Happy new year my friend.
IMO the latest Khairullin essay is a good companion piece to the writings of our host here:
https://maratkhairullin.substack.com/p/russia-i-am-trying-to-forget
There are things one should not ever forget, or forgive.
May decency, honesty and honor prevail in 2024.
Ishmael Zechariah
This was an outstanding essay, btw. Thanks for the share.
Russia is fighting against it's many traumatic memories.
What will we fight for ? Neoliberalism and "the world is flat" ?
Thank you - I notice myself how useful it is to sometimes seek a height where the journey taken and the terrain forward can be viewed. And such fine quality of comments, too!
As to whose fault our current predicament is: when a hockey team is performing poorly, mostly the coach gets sacked. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. But our problem-solving world-view always, always pushes us to finding the guilties and then blaming, shaming and so on. As if the perfect plan were always ruined by the imperfect actors, who then need to be punished for their imperfectness. Could it be possible to think about where we want to go and what could be done to help us get there instead of doing a lot of work to find the ones to blame? Especially as in the west even the poor and sick get massive benefit from the current arrangements. If we could eliminate the reviled PMC right this moment, how would things stand then? Looking at the paths taken and learning from mistakes is good. But what keeps us wanting to move forward, and what forward means? As many have mentioned books they find inspiring, here comes my recommendation: anything written (or read) by Martin Prechtel. A strange suggestion in this context: he is a shaman and has lived a very adventurous life.
"So my writing next year will be directed at what the coming collapse is going to be like, and what can be done by individuals and groups to manage it and avoid the worst consequences."
Pity. I had hoped you would put before yourself and your readers the task of discovery to construct the / a new order that is already rising, along with tools, materials, and architectural suggestions appertaining thereto.
OK then.
The new order is being built, largely by people not tainted by Western liberal orthodoxy and outside the physical boundaries of the Anglo-Saxonia and Europe. I don't know why we, who are very much implicated in the failing existing economic and ecological and moral system and still plagued by unjustified sense of superiority, should have any say in what's to come.
Do you think this may be why theism is making a come-back in some quarters of the post-liberal Anglo-Saxon world ?
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/can-christianity-meme-itself-back-into-existence/
I hope not! European Christianity is responsible for much of the global devastation of the past 500, heck 1,000 years. Its largely moribund except for certain cancerous fundamentalist evangelical sects that are responsible for the likes of Bolsonaro and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not to mention that they're a complete theological mess where the flock largely fail to walk the walk that they demand others make. Perhaps the less compromised Eastern churches can have a go of it but I think the Western churches are headed for extinction and the evangelical movement is setting itself up for a self detonation.
Memes are simply easily transmissible symbolic manipulations. Although they can arise authentically and be good or bad, I would say that they have been boosted and suppressed by state and corporate powers mostly for evil. They seem to function mostly as thought stoppers so people stop thinking beyond "Putin is evil", "Iraqi WMDs", "Iranians mullahs", and "Trump is Fascist". I don't think modern Western churches have sufficient pull to effectively play in this sandbox.
That is not President Putin's view of things. Nor is it reality. Nor is it the attitude of a penitent. You advocate what is known as collective guilt, a concept that is DOA and known as such around the world.
It's the attitude of someone who noticed what the West actually did during the last 500 years and does not believe it has any moral authority to tell anyone else what to do. Take the L and stop telling other people what to do, they are very unlikely to do worse.
Appeals to the authority of someone who very recently admitted that he was completely wrong about the West are...not very authoritative.
On what authority do you give me an imperative to "take the L?"
If you mean President Putin admitted he was completely wrong . . . I would say I have never seen any indication of that sentiment emanating from the man. He has been clear that Russia stands against US-UK leaders of today, not those countries or The West or their cultures per se.
You take liberties with what is happening.
https://en.sputniknews.africa/20231217/putin-confesses-naively-believed-there-would-be-no-confrontation-between-west--russia-1064164134.html
You do you. But nobody else is obligated to respect the opinions of a group that has been collectively responsible for murdering and enslaving hundreds of millions, destroying numerous ancient civilizations, pioneering settler colonialism ahead of the Germans and Israelis, and may well have sealed the fate of humanity through 80 years of not dealing with climate change and resource depletion.
Again, you over-read, and quite bumptiously tendentious. In biblical studies we call this eisegesis, reading into scripture what you want to be there rather than reading out of it what is there (exegesis).
Putin confesses there naivety regarding US-NATO officials' willingness to see what is happening and come to terms on the basis of such realizations. He is surprised, and not a little sad, that instead, those officials demand that everything happen the way they dictate. He did not realize, at first, that they could be that stupid, malicious, and incompetent. That is a far cry from, as you put it, his being "completely wrong about the West." And, note, he still posits that said officials know what the score really is. Indeed, they do.
Like so may others round about, your interest is not fixing broken systems, much less building new ones, as whipping them so as to prevent even the feeblest new shoots of life from spring up therefrom.
And killed off the dodo and the great auk. I really can't forgive that.
Read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber.
On what authority do you tell me to read a book?
First, it was a suggestion, not an order. Second, it does offer some ideas of the aray of social organisations that are possible to use, because the past is loaded...
Third, nevermind. Instead of just checking what was that about, you grumpily respond as if some major damage has been incured to your ego.
A sentence which begins with the word "Read" in the imperative, and without modulating secondaries, is an order. Moreover, it assumes that I am some dumbsquat ready to benefit from your interests.
The imperative would have been underlined by an exclamation mark at the end of the sentenc. There wasn't such thing there. You also imagined a particular tone in that sentence, which wasn't there to begin with. All in your head...
Oh come on, you did it, own it.