A brief examination of the 20th and 21st century within capitalism

Frequently on television as I was growing up there was a ticking time bomb, and a hero gained the glory of saving the day and the temporary relief of not dying by defusing it. What does this situation require? Not only a confident hero, but a masochistic one, to use the threat of annihilation to achieve success. His confidence is only generated by his terrible fear.

This is the psychological reality in the minds of people during the Cold War, where the ticking time bomb was averted day after day by the “heroes” who save us all by avoiding pushing the death button.

This theory, or philosophy, of “progress through threat of annihilation” is the basis for industrialization. The technology of the 20th century is often heralded as a success, as a justification for civilization and capitalism. It’s nearly never stated that the reason for the frantic technological development is to save the world, and that industrialization is the root cause of the need to save it.

That’s the core lure of industrialization, the seduction – at the very time it’s causing such utter fear, depression, and despair it’s offering solutions to those very problems. It’s both the disease and the cure in one. It’s annihilating the Native Americans and then “preserving” them. Who knows? Perhaps without their very annihilation they would have gone extinct without being brought under the domineering umbrella of capitalist civilization. So human beings are killed in order to maintain their life – capitalism is the necromancer who gives “undying life” to the very people he kills.

True believers say it will never stop. The Endless Summer so popular in the United States at the height of Cold War terror is the idea that industrial capitalism will always produce the cure to every life-threatening disease, through the magical powers of “innovation” and “entrepreneurial activity”. They point to technological progress as more sign of The Cure, which one day will provide the Final Cure which will render all future diseases moot.

The final stage of reality to true believers is when human beings can do literally anything they want, total license, with zero negative repercussions, because all cures are technologically built-in. Hugh Hefner’s dream vision of sexuality is a metaphor for how the true believers, such as Gene Roddenberry, view capitalism.

The purpose of capitalism is to transform the world into one which produces and maintains the final cure to itself.

Capitalism no longer believes in this “positive” vision of capitalism. Capitalism is no longer seeking to generate the Final Cure for all of humanity. Capitalism is now generating an “escape the earth” model where a few people may escape the earth, “repopulate the human race”, “make the desert of outer space bloom”, and the rest of the people will be “left behind” on earth to die.

This is the core reason for the death of the global middle class. The vision of the Final Cure involves bringing all of humanity into the heart of the system, at least as intimate to the system as patients are in a doctor’s office. But this new vision, that of Escaping the Earth – that involves the rejection of humanity by the escapists. In other words, the Zombification of humanity in order to justify it’s extermination by the “noble humans”.

This is why I often object to the use of “problem” by liberals and progressives when they speak of various capitalist antics. Like, the war in Afghanistan is a “problem”. How is people dying and being terrorized and as a result others being better positioned to escape the earth a problem, exactly? It’s certainly not a problem as far as the current capitalist vision is concerned. How is torturing people in Guantanamo Bay a “problem”? It’s part of the solution.

What I truly object to is not so much deep ignorance on the part of people who believe themselves good but their lack of any alternative vision to the terrible but at least extremely clear and logical capitalist vision. As a hungry man says “I’m eating terrible food, but it’s better than nothing”. It may well be a symptom of humanity that it prefers a terrible vision to no vision at all, and if this is correct then what is desperately needed today is a positive vision of a future. Unlike most “positive visions” offered, a worthwhile one needs to become real if it’s people make it real, so it needs to be founded in reality, just as Escape the Earth is despite it’s seemingly unlikely nature (the low probability of sustaining human life outside of earth).

A followup to “Zombification in the 21st century”

Noone believes what they actually believe, including the rulers. All of human communication and understanding is translated from reality into a socio-political construct which people both believe and communicate to others.

The leaders of the American fossil fuel companies believe that global warming either doesn’t exist or isn’t primarily caused by burning certain fuel sources. That’s what exists consciously inside their minds and is what they communicate to others. They actually believe that global warming does exist and is caused by burning fuel, but this belief is sub-conscious due to their belief that it’s better for them to believe otherwise.

This is the reason why there was a “shift” in white American attitudes from racist to anti-racist following the triumph of global over national capital in the 1960s. It’s not like a person was deeply racist one day and deeply anti-racist the next – his actual beliefs never changed. What changed was the balance of power within capitalism and therefore the dominant hegemonic attitude, with Americans merely shifting to the “winning attitude”. This is why American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are terribly racist toward the people they are dominating and stealing from, but those same soldiers can become anti-racist when they return to the United States and take on a life which doesn’t benefit from their direct racism. This is why there were lots of Nazis in Nazi Germany and not very many Nazis afterward. The same person, wearing the swastika one day and the dove the next (although in both cases the dollar sign is paramount but never worn).

One can detect the actual beliefs of humans from their actions, which underlie their conscious position. The Pentagon for example is preparing for the construction of zombies – but if you read what they say about the zombies they make up a lot of nonsense – like the creation of zombies by occult means and vegetarian zombies. So consciously the Pentagon believes it’s merely being cautious, and if pressed perhaps would say that popular culture influenced the way in which they framed their project. The reality, however, which underlies their actions, is that they themselves actually believe (regardless of their conscious belief) that the 21st century will be dire, and humans can be socio-politically transformed into zombies by the wealthy people of the world in order to justify their mass murder or deep enslavement.

How much more successful would the Nazi Holocaust have been if before sending those people to the gas chambers they had first transformed them into zombies. Then Americans would have cheered – exterminating the monsters to “save the world” for the rest of us, to allow us to “make the desert bloom”, to “repopulate the human race”.

Dehumanization is nothing new – the native Americans were “savages” to the European colonialists. When people with some political goal want to kill someone, dehumanization greases the wheels of the extermination. My point is that these European colonialists never actually believed that the native Americans were savages – their actual belief didn’t really matter. What mattered was getting the land from them – all of their “beliefs” were in service to that goal. This is why now, when the goal has been accomplished, native Americans can be viewed as “noble” and “unfairly treated in the past”. Slaves can be treated well, and pitied, while weak people with oil need to have the revenues from that oil taken from them, and then later they too can be treated well, and pitied.

The NEETs of Japan are a proto-zombie group. Given the right political framework in Japan, these people might become zombies to the “good people” of Japan, and if a persuasive argument was made perhaps these “good people” could convince others of the same.

Whenever someone is fascinated by something that doesn’t exist, that thing actually exists. This can be seen in science fiction, where one day people are fascinated by something that’s “not real”, and the next day it exists.

Zombies are “fictional” – that is to say they don’t exist, but our fascination with them implies that they do exist. So then the question becomes the precise nature of their existence.

Zombification in the 21st century

Over the coming decades environmental and military destruction combined with first world siege mentality will render parts of the world uninhabitable by today’s standards, with the unfortunate humans living (and more frequently, dying) there deemed sub-human by the “bubble dwellers” in protected and wealthy areas. Far from “fictional”, one name for these unfortunate humans outside “civilization” could very well be “zombie”. The Pentagon is preparing for the expected future reality.

We currently live in a largely globalized world, where even people who will shortly be starving to death are living in the same hegemonic system as you and I. At some point in this dying world this will no longer be the case, and the presentation of “zombies” in current culture is ideologically preparing people who hope to be wealthy in the future to dehumanize all humans outside “the system”. People inside the bubble are being trained to see themselves as “humanity’s last hope”, ala Zionists who “make the desert bloom”, while those outside the bubble are to be viewed as zombies for whom death is a blessing, with their protests registering as “gggarrrgggggh” to the keen, amazing, awesome, wealthy creatures holding the guns calling themselves “human”.

If things go well for what might be called the zombification of the world’s most mistreated people, the process for powerful institutions to call upon “bastions of humanity” to take up arms and “exterminate the zombies” will go down as easily as a fruit smoothie. In their minds they will afterwards be “repopulating the human race”, ala making the desert bloom. In reality they too, despite their many guns and much stolen wealth, will die. In the end the full terror of what they wrought will be upon them, so it could very well be a blessing that most humans will be dead by then.

By the end of the century the world will be capable of supporting half a billion people, notwithstanding possible political outcomes that could far reduce that number. So from now to then powerful people need to kill off billions of people, a massive project that they need a lot of help with. Turning poor humans into zombies in the minds of people terrorized into despising them could go a long way toward making such a project a success.

Remember the mottos: “Always shoot ’em in the head”, “Shoot first, ask questions never”, “Don’t get any of them on us”, and perhaps the most important one of all – “They aren’t human”.

And remember the emotion: fear. Always be afraid. Be terrorized, and only after you’ve blown enough of them away take a bit of a rest, until you blow more of them away. Be joyful for every one you kill, because you’re one step closer to “repopulating the human race”, making the desert bloom.

We’ll be saving the world, one corpse at a time, just like our video games teach us.

How Samsung became the new Sony, and South Korea became the new Japan

In the 1980s and 1990s Japan claimed a small amount of revenge for WWII atrocities by capturing the imaginations of Americans, by means of business executives mimicking “just-in-time” and other Japanese business practices and American youth turning to Japanese media, first video games and then anime. America was thought by Americans to be too big, too obnoxious, too arrogant, too abusive, with the remedy being the small, humble, and industrious Japanese (stereotypes of course but readily believed). With “I Think I’m Turning Japanese”, The Cure, and Mario being cute, determined, and industrious playing in the background, America would cure itself of it’s terrible arrogance and become one with the new world order, an alternative vision to the Neoconservative model of global domination.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis (aka the International Monetary Fund crisis) had a profound impact on the region and irrevocable hurt economic relations between Japan and the US, allowing South Korea to replace Japan as the region’s most dynamic economy. Sony’s decline began while Samsung became the new Sony.

There’s a problem here for Americans, one no amount of Starcraft and Starcraft 2 can quite solve. Americans cannot figure out their relationship to South Korea. While Japan was the humble cure for American arrogance, the sheer inhumanity of Flash’s cyborg twitch reflects a lack of meaning at the core of the South Korean project. This has resulted in a dramatically different relationship between Americans (and other Westerners) and the Asian country – from the warm and hopeful embrace of Nintendo and anime to a fearful attempt to catch up to the juggernaut of South Korean gaming, with frequent refrains of variations of “we bow before our South Korean overlords”.

As the glistening metal of South Korea’s high-tech cities climbs to the sky, we’re left wondering just where, beyond transhumanism, androids, and cybernetic sex dolls, the future they envision is going to lead us.

Escaping the Ghetto

It doesn’t matter how big the American government’s debt gets, since the world can’t afford it to default. An American default would decimate the global economy, and wouldn’t be tolerated by pretty much anyone – right-wing American politicians raise the issue as part of a long-term project of corporate domination of the economy.

The “current financial state of the US” has been gradually worsening since the 1970s, due to poor economic policy and terrible economic priorities, such as yearly $1 Trillion military expenditures while schools are being closed, roads are in disrepair, and the health care system (regardless of Obama’s law) is far worse than that of most other industrialized countries.

Remember the Greek government debt crisis a few years ago? Even though the Greek economy is a fraction of the American one, there was no way Europe was going to let Greece default, since it would harm Europe as a whole. The Eurozone and the International Monetary Fund used the threat of Greek default to take control of the Greek economy, so $67.5 Billion of Greek Government assets were corporatized, among other elements of domination. Go ahead and ask the Greek people how their lives have been since these “helpful changes” were implemented there. Then ask the multinational corporations how helpful these changes have truly been.

That’s the model that’s desired for the United States, among other debtor nations – sell off public assets to corporations, take what little control regular people have over their economy away from them and put it into the hands of international banks and multinational corporations. Disempowering people further means their wages and benefits are (further) reduced and powerful institutions further enriched and empowered.

The world is dying, ecologically, at least according to the understanding of those in power (which will come to pass if they have their way). There are no long-term consumers of capitalist products and services. This understanding has transformed the capitalist human into the capitalist dragon, from an investor into a hoarder, from a man into a beast.

In a dying world the entire earth eventually becomes a ghetto, and the ruling idea of the rich is to escape the ghetto. The first step is a siege mentality, where gated communities are built, walls to keep out the unworthy, while wealth and power are amassed and capabilities improved. By the time the ghetto expands to include even them, they’ll be gone, through a combination of nano-tech, computer-tech, and outer-space tech. In a dead world filled with zombies, these last bastions of humanity will take to outer space to “repopulate the human race”, neglecting to understand that unlike the “zombies”, these “human beings” were the precise creatures to have murdered an entire planet in the first place.

But they’ll be super-beautiful, 6-packed, breast-augmented, buffed with their own sense of self-worth, super-knowledgeable, super-intelligent, super-capable, all teched up and ready to go. They’ll be Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, so photogenic and Hollywood and super-awesome. So fuck history, fuck reality, they’ve transcended all of that. They are going to colonize the final frontier and no earth or zombies or human beings are going to stop them. They are the real human beings and there’s no one they’ve left alive to tell them they’re wrong.

The state of the world, part 2

The world is horrific, with millions dying of starvation and easily preventable disease yearly, millions more dying or being raped in armed conflict, massacre, and/or genocide, along with more minor problems like billions living in poverty, nearly universal lack of adequate health care, severe birth defects due to weapon fallout, etc.

It’s going to get much worse, due to not just the ecological effects of global warming but the political effects. Poor people around the world aren’t just going to die quietly as their homes and bodies are ravaged by an overheated dying world, they are going to riot since they have nothing left to lose.

It’s ridiculous to think that the United States is going to reduce it’s military budget, since all of their military bases around the world, all the investment in dominating the internet, etc. only becomes more important once the terrified hordes come crashing through the gated communities. In a dying world even the rich and powerful become insecure, and their lack of security results in their need to control all of human life.

Noone with any sense wants to fight a dragon, but once the choice is between fighting and death, suddenly everyone wants to fight the dragon. So we team up, the final battle between humans and dragons, and IF humans win those of us who are still alive after the war get to build a better world. At least one lesson will be learned – dragons will no longer be allowed to exist. We were foolish and arrogant to let them live and it’s going to cost us dearly.

There are mass protests all around the world to a degree never before in human history, the Arab Spring merely the most famous example. And this is only the beginning. As the world gets worse the people will get far angrier. Many dragons are going to die.

The future is going to be horrific. We’ll either die or perhaps, like in Dante’s works, we’ll find heaven through the deepest most terrible depths of hell.

The dragons call us zombies and say they are justified in their treatment of us as they take human form and blow our heads off with shotguns, but don’t believe it. We are humans, and they are the monsters.

Good luck to us all.