Cognitive Dissonace Under Presure...

I think that what seems to have changed in the increasingly heated
ideological debate now going on worldwide, is that is that the post
world war democratic consensus is now breaking up under the enormous
pressures of an increasingly totalitarian and radical marketing
system.

The telltale sign of this is when faith and reason cease to meet
in the middle and belief forces itself onto reason, because it cannot
tolerate what reason is saying. But the thing is that the parties
involved in the break up all think that this cognitive dissonance is
the problem of 'the other guy'.

What this means in practice is that everybody is getting blindsided.
The deregulatory free market libertarianism of the neo-cons and and
the deregulatory civil/social libertarianism of the post-Marxist left
do exactly the same kind of damage to their respective environments,
but each side can only see the damage being done by 'the other guy'.

The way the libertarian left is viewing social questions is every bit as
intellectually and morally blind sided as the free marketers are on the
environment. The corrupt nature of much of our welfare system is paralleled
by the almost insane greed of the corporate oligarchy and its administrative
apparatchiks. The behavior of the lumpen proletarian scum who smashed
up parts of working class districts in London 2011 is matched by the
cannibalistic criminal conspiracy of merchant bankers, rogue traders,
money launderers and tax evaders, that led to the GFC in 2008.

All sides to this have a lot to answer for.

This makes for hopelessly unproductive debate, because everyone is
clinging to their respective holy cows, all of which are as
compromised as each other. Each side is totally correct in its
assessment of the almost infantile and corrupted thinking that the
other is engaging in.

The effect of this is for everyone to dig in and
regard the other as an increasingly dangerous enemy who must be
thwarted by any means. And if we cannot get out of this repeating
discourse loop, the result will very possibly lead to war, as the
inevitable shit storm we have been working on now for the best part of
70 years, hits the fan.

The terrible and lamentable effects of deregulating everything and
turning the entire social/ecological environment spectrum into a
free-for-all is the collapse of moral integrity, social governance and
the biosphere, together. Everyone is playing a terrible game where all
the players are half blinded, blundering at each other and upping the
stakes to include everything they respectively value and hold dear.

What everybody is failing to recognize is that the probable final
stage of capitalism and modern times is characterized by an economic
system that is so aggressive it pulps everything it touches, from
social and existential (spiritual) software to the biosphere. And we have all
become victims because much of this has come at us under the
collective radar.

Privatized totalitarianism brought to us by the proud sponsors seems
neutral and even benign, but it is actually more dangerous than the
despotisms of the past. It avoids the ordinary signals that usually
tell people the difference between obedience to a threatening
authority and the 'freedom' to spontaneously obey the always clamoring
voices in their heads.

Privatized totalitarianism entrenches adolescence as the culture of
adult society because consumers must be as children who can be carried
away by the Pied Pipers of Cool to live inside the magic mountain that
is Consumerland. They become Peter Pans and Wendys in Never Never
Land. And their children are just like them, only younger. They live
in sub-chaos, but at the same time, they are disciplined veteran shop
troops who aggressively patrol the planet for buying opportunities created
through the saturation bombing of markets by production war machines,
who must dump civil ordinance in ever increasing quantities and velocities
until the place eventually blows itself to smithereens.

The baleful result will be that by the time everyone is forced by
circumstances to to check out what their critical judgment has failed
to see, we will have lost control of events. The horse will have
bolted. And then there will be no choice but to slug it out and see
who is left standing at the end.

My best guess is that the old time religious fundamentalists will
inherit everything, because modern times will have bankrupted itself,
the toys and diversions will have gone, desperate measures will be in place
and mass populations will find themselves existentially/spiritually damaged,
stark naked, frozen stiff and with nowhere to go. And all they will have left
to cling onto are still floating bits of the wreckage of what once was social
governance

ISIS, Boko Haram and The Tea Party are just the beginning.