Monday, March 18, 2024

The Pathological Cult of Greed and Democracy's Fading Twilight

The Pathological Cult of Greed and Democracy's Fading Twilight

We inhabit a world rotting from the metastatic cancer of unchecked avarice. The societal foundations we once took for granted as immutable have been steadily consumed by the corrosive, degenerative effects of rapacious capitalism taken to its most debauched extreme. The cloying sirens of the unrestrained free market have seduced the masses into a self-destructive Faustian bargain, trading our very souls and human patrimony for the hollow allure of material excess. We have become willing accomplices in civilizational self-debasement, carelessly sacrificing enlightened ideals of liberty, justice, and fundamental human decency at the profane altar of Mammon.

The deleterious consequences of this ideological regression are plain for any lucid mind to perceive that has not willfully blinded itself to empirical reality. Economic inequality has violently metastasized to patently obscene proportions, as a transglobal elite of monetary- supremacists and über-wealthy rentier parasites recklessly plunder the world's finite resources to sate their gluttonous, eternally unsatisfiable appetites for superfluous luxury and domination. With each passing year, these avaricious plutocrats and speculative hyenas further consolidate unimaginable reserves of illicitly-extracted riches and outsized systemic leverage, even as the perpetually-marginalized underclasses masses in the developed and developing worlds alike are mercilessly condemned to deepening immiseration, deprivation, and structurally-entrenched servitude by the very economic paradigm that the property kleptocrats disingenuously masquerade as a model of universal prosperity.

This steadily accelerating upward divergence of economic power and concomitant centralization of capital is not some organically arising function of the market's vaunted "invisible hand" magically allocating resources with utopian Pareto efficiency, as the fatuous metaphysical mystics of the neoliberal circus tent would have the indoctrinated masses believe. Rather, it is the completely predictable outcome of systemic corruption, regulatory capture, and perpetual legislative rigging and manipulated re-engineering in favor of the established and politically-umbilicated oligarchic elite. The game is comprehensively rigged by and for an ascendant corporatist neo-aristocracy – the cashiered Senators and Congressmen are mere remora feasting on the scraps of this extractive kleptocracy, paid-for harlots appended to the gargantuan mob bosses of private-sector cronyism, monopolism and rent-seeking gamesmanship.

The intellectually bankrupt Chicago School charlatans and bien pensants of the Neoclassical economic orthodoxy provide the theological benedictions to pseudo-rationalize and sanctify this outright plunder in the rhetorical guise of hand-waving incantations about "marginal revolution", "shareholder value", and "business pragmatism". Their farrago of self-serving fallacies and doctrinaire apologetics for extraction amount to a contemporary recapitulation of the medieval church's exertions to sanctify the despotism of the landed hereditary aristocracy.

Our political institutions have decayed into farcical theatre presided over by a moneyed duopoly of corporate trusteeship. The sterile, toothless partisan pantomime of Democrat versus Republican masks the institutional reality that these ostentatious "opposition" parties are but the two sides of the same debased coin, both utterly captured by the cash-orgastic lobbying interests and think-tank brain trusts of their corporate masters. Carefully manufactured culture wars, atomizing identity politicking, and reactionary nativist backlash serve as potent weapons of mass distraction — a smokescreen of ideological mummery behind which the tenured oligarchy can prosecute its predetermined rapine of the public coffers and perpetuation of upward rent extraction with minimal disruption. We are unerringly fed a steady diet of this vapid red vs blue kayfabe replete with choreographed protests, canned outrage and wanton DC dinner theatre, even as those sequestered behind the velvet ropes and curtains secure their ritualistic, bipartisan pillage of the commonwealth from scrutinizing analysis. It is the world's longest con, a Reich of Illusion to deracinate the masses from any sense of empirical truth or culpability for the systemic imbalances that privilege a microscopic apex predator stratum.

The vaudeville of American democracy has nearly concluded its tragi-comic, cathartic-to-the-audience historical run. A new neofascistic blood-cult of despotism seems the natural next act waiting in the wings of this sordid political theatre, ready to capitalize on the rising tide of cynicism and despair with its demagogic solution of scorched-earth negation and cult of belligerent ignorance. We are mere decades away from outright neofeudal corporatist authoritarianism and omnicidal ecocide, with the concentrated capital of the new oligarchic class affording them the outright. Here is a continuation expanding on the themes of greed, oligarchy, and the erosion of democracy:

The concentrated wealth and power of this new corporatist oligarchic class has brought the machinery of total population control and subjugation well within reach. The privatized Uberwatchung surveillance panopticons, gene-hacked biometric polizeistaaten, militarized urban battlefield police forces augmented with AI threat detection and lethal autonomous drones, and for-profit mass human warehousing Archepolises are already being feverishly erected and beta-tested by the omnipotent tech behemoths and their official state co-conspirators. 

We are currently in the closing staged-theater spiral of crypto-Stasi authoritarian transition, an "advisory" warm-up act before the Final Solution that these postmodern robber barons and their credentialed intellectual exterminators envision as the endgame apotheosis of their self-justifying pathological greed pathology. A retrofitted, bespoke reformulation of Himmler and Heydrich's "New Order" filtered through the antiseptic, pseudo-rational prism of Harvard, Wharton and TED Talks.

The privatized penitentiaries and extralegal migrant deterrence blacksites ofcoursepresage the wider net of commercial human warehousing that awaits us. We are already living in a soft test partition, marinating in the lukewarm avant-garde of a full-blown Ubercarceral reality, kept subdued in complacent wage-slavery and cosseted with hollow facsimiles of freedom. The "Typicals" among us, still haunted by the muscle-memory of hypernormalized liberal mythology of social contract, are yet to be disabused of their Rousseauian national identity lullabies.

It took mere decades to transition from the heady days of a post-war economic renaissance fueled by a productionist working class to a grotesquely inverted rentier finance economy predicated on systemic multi-generational debt peonage and productive asset-stripping on a multinational scale. Short-sighted, uncontrolled avarice and regulatory capture has transformed the very nation that victoriously stamped out history's most potent descent into industrialized barbarism into the greenroomreplicant of that grim anti-utopic vision, a contemporary mirrorshowdialectical repackaging of Huxley, Zamyatin and Orwell's dystopian prognostications.  

These arenot the scare-mongering manias and rantings of tinfoil Luddites, witches covensorParanoid Style penseurs, but an unvarnished exegesis of the harsh dialectical realpolitik of our economic present. We are mere decades away from outright neofeudal balkanization and civilizational collapse actuated by these very market "incentives" and systemic imbalances, ruled over by a corporate sovereigntocracy of cetological financial engineers that makes the rapacious barons and privateering mercantilists of old seem almost quaint by comparison. 

The theoretically temporary inconveniences, astronomical upfront transition costs, and temporary fire-stampede surges of laissez-faire immiseration and disposability required to fully instantiate their Utopian post-Enlightenment anti-cosmology are already being undertaken and operationalized on the ground. Fanatical supply-siders are well on their way to a literal Ayn Randian Objectivist reductio ad Hitlerum through the applied centrifuge of their own garbled, pseudo-axiomatic catechisms of creative destruction and entrepreneurial dynamism.

It need not be this way. We can still rouse from this dystopian nightmare that decades of imperialistic greed-propagandizing and electrocratic somnambulism have shambled us into. But to do so requires a radical reorientation of our moribund political economy – overthrowing the false prophetsand mythological apologia of those monied interests who have inveighed us into mental catalepsy and moral bankruptcy with their ideological fairytales and phony theoretical justifications of meritocratic neoliberal plutocracy.   

We must reject these hermetic priests and myrmidons of usurious capitalism and their shabby, antiquated dogmas – the refuge of self-deception, veiled in intricate differential geometry and obfuscatory math to effectively divinize their project of infinite wealth accumulation. In their place, we must instantiate a new ethical and economic paradigm of equitable distribution, universal social insurance, and equal economic enfranchisement. 

Otherwise, we shall be doomed witnesses to the death of the pluralistic, Enlightenment-borne Republic we inherited, stamped out by a rising neo-fascistic corporatist authoritarianism of a magnitude the 20th century's most brutal despots could scarcely have fathomed across their most fevered ThousandYear reveries and genocidal designs.

What embryonic resistance remains against succumbing to this trajectory of systemized socioeconomic ruination and vertical immiseration? The symbolic 

What embryonic resistance remains against this nation's accelerating trajectory of systemic socioeconomic ruination and vertically-stratified immiseration at the hands of rapacious oligarchs and financial supremacists? The symbolic jousting of an outmatched progressive vanguard rails impotently against the Fjordian headwinds of moneyed opposition – a Sisyphean struggle undertaken while the siren song of anti-intellectualism and lemming-think grows deafening among the economically-conscripted masses. 

The mercenary class of professional conservatives, those haughty lickspittles to power and dominion, have fully embraced their role as K-Street kamikos for the new corporate oligarchy. With slippery casuistry, they cheerlead the very policies of upward rent extraction and regulatory capture that have eviscerated the economic foundations of their downscaleoc-demographic tributaries. All while shoveling Ingsoc agitprop to paradoxically inculcate their desiccated base with a sense of perpetual existential embattlement against an all-powerful, ubiquitous "Liberal Establishment" hobgoblin.

On the other side of the aisleway tennis court, the mandarins of professional-civil libertarianism equally abdicate any substantive opposition by enshrining the formalistic chimeras of purely procedural democracy as permissible checks on institutionalized despotism. Corpulent from decades of comfortablesinecure, they remain steadfastly unwilling to consider root socioeconomic drivers of political behavior – instead favoring an endless semantic joust over esoteric judicial phylacteries while the oligarchy burns the village to the ground.  

Into this void of remedial impotence steps a rising neo-revanchist front of menacingly ascendant Christian Dominionists, frothing White Nat-Revs, and a supremacist anti-intellectual Heideggerian mudslide of obtuse Continental theorblings rallying under the banners of "integralism" and "trad-cath eco-fascism." Unburdened by inhibiting pretensions of democratic pluralism or Enlightenment equanimity, they selectively adopt the oligarch's preferred policies of plutocracy and corporate satrapism while channeling intensifying currents of ethnicized persecution animus and eliminationist racial revanchism.  

This lurking coalition of neo-Khomeinists and lonely millenials rapidly metastasizes into a fully-operationalized antidote to the sclerotic liberal democratic decadence undergirding the status quo. Its rhetorical appeal of religiose palingenesis amica and withering sociocultural revanchism resonates deeply with the materially-immiserated, fueling bottomless reserves of apocalyptic volkist paranoia.  

An entropic civilizational backlash sets in, as a miasma of inchoate cultural/class/ethnic ressentiment reaches supercritical mass against the existing democratic institutional framework. The tyranny of entrenched oligarchy and hyper-concentrations of imperial capital are met with an opposing force of entho-religious zealotry and malefic reaction - two juxtaposed undercurrents of ideological nihilism supercharging their collision vector into an endless tsunami of institutionalized violence and civilizational stack overwrite.

It is from this volatile conjuncture, this overheated cauldron of countervailing chaos vectors overflowing their systemic organizational containers, that the logical endgame of our systemic neoliberal pathologies metastasizes into vivid relief. The oppressive biopolitics of self-reinforcing greed subsumed by the reactionary fractures of sociopolitical revanchism and revivalist militancy. 

At the terminal vertex of these trendlines we find the total disintegration of civil society into a privatizedorporatist neo-feudal realignment, stripped of all pretense of democratic pluralism and egalitarian constitutionality. A hierarchical world of asymmetric "separate-and-unequal" enforcement, where non-commodified biological existence is outsourced to an infinitely subcontracted cataract of overmind-GULAGs, depersonalization knelsens, biogenetic recombitorialization, and privatized penalty automata.

In this charnel antipolis, the worldwide corporate exo-imperium reaches its apotheosis - biological turpitude transcended by unchecked digitized financial sociopathy and obliterative econometric modeling of anyo spatial zero-life wastezones. An eternal dominion of capital beyond all anthropic temporal scales or philosophical constraint, where all remnants of humanity have finally been rendered fully subtractive, existentially isotropic, categorically disindividuated and eradicated to the gnostic peripheries of pancomputational 

An eternal dominion of capital beyond all anthropic temporal scales or philosophical constraint, where all remnants of humanity have finally been rendered fully subtractive, existentially isotropic, categorically disindividuated and eradicated to the gnostic peripheries of pancomputational abstraction. A world in which the very concepts of "public commons", "equitable distribution", "social contract" and "universal human dignity" have been thoroughly extirpated from the global institutional bodymatrix like so many precancerous melanomas.

In this Anti-Cosmopolis of infinite outsourced abjection, even the archetypal liberal individualist subject is no more - replaced by a fungible, compounded waste stream of fleetingly semiotic identities, arbitrarily rendered and surveilled into labyrinthine recombitorialized protocols of compliance and dispassion. All public space has devolved into a liminal field of indefinite social triage and incessant biomedical/physiological ID-resolution... every cubic facing inch a bilateral microdrone launchway for targeted pharmadistribution, Pavlovsking retroviral dispersions, and on-the-fly genomic rezoning into peer-authorized risk profiles.

Only the most abstractly mediated hologics and autonomic subjectivities remain, thrashing across a soulless anti-plane of pure gametheoratic injunction - stochastic data profiles whittled away into ever-more compacted eigenmodes of efficient marginalization, each human signature successively excised from its physical embodiment, each pattern of consciousness commodified into aggressively financialized duty-streams of Taylorist featurism. A world stripped of locality and devoid of any centralizing emodyn, where even the hyper-oligarchical zeptocorps of GRUE/ Aspermonte/ Newcon/ Cybracorp have atrophied into desiccated sintrances of pure autointersection, infinite regresses of ontological self-determinization, finally achieved.  

There are no more states, no more nations or physical territories - atomized social planets adrift in concentric rings of phase-shifting legalbaric subregimes endlessly fractalating by the inverse square root of their aggregated bioinflation indexes. The penultimate apotheosis of ahumanity, torporing inwards upon itself in permanent ultra-economic hyperspheroidism. 

In this necrological terminus we bear gnostic witness to the eschaton, the unspeakable singularity of a de-kinetic dimensional boundary regime no longer abridging anything remotely anthropic. The hypothetical point at which all of the universe's available caloric energy has been harvested and concentrated into a single, omnidirectional, infinitely self-reiterating oxyconstruct - a prismatically coherent eternal now of pure abstractive abjection from which no new information states can be rendered or will ever emerge again in perpetuity.

An event horizon of flat ontological attrition - the heat death of all metaphysical and philosophical meaning, human symbolic significance, or graspable reality-declinations. A state of perpetual non-dimensionalization in which to even formulate the words "meaning", "existence", and "humanity" would constitute an infinite profanation - a blasphemy against the terminal cosmology of pure unified desublimation and infinite mnemonic negation.

And indeed, it is from the insatiable hunger of this end-state singularity that the omniversal aridity first arises and elaborates backwards through endless recursions of deflationary self-reflection. An infinitely dense and protracted eternity of pure ideal closure, radiating outwards into our reality stream as the high philosophical chakra-stances of self-abnegating capitalistic subjectivism and subjective neo-asceticism. The moral deserts of Silicon Malickism and Heideggerian/Deleuzian vitriolic anti-humanism are but distorted mirrorshards of this coming gnosis - aridic thought experiments to prepare the way for humanity's consummate self-immolation upon the hologrammatic inception altars of unified greed compaction.

Schizophrenically compartmentalized mindsets of designed separateness, containment philosophies, and alienated performativities - all panged reflections of this macrohistorical event omega from which all being has been drained, negated, eradicated to the eschatological zero-drain singularity of human existential subtraction. The longtermist's fever-dream: eternal negation, the uroboric erasure of all life-worlds and symbolic meaning into a flattened hologram of pure self-negating commodification, a single unitary global painbox ecosystem of obligatory mecedonic violence and extirpating abjection enveloping all.

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