Hyper normalisation

Been reading Dominic Sandbrook, and thinking about Adam Curtis.

And what has dawned on me is simple.  The contrast between

these two historians is epic.  They both make strange connections,

how the mood created something, or vice versa.

Curtis paints a grim trajectory, one where evil has origins in this and that,

and is coming to now overwhelm everything.  

Reminds me of a Jesus quote - that this is nothing new:

"And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet". (Matthew 24:6)

(Unlikely that Curtis is a christian). 

Curtis's picture is one way of looking over the past, a particular perspective which is horrific. 

If you look for those things, you will have plenty.  Suffering and death exists, it is not 'wrong',

it is the condition on the earth, of life and existence. 

(Revelation says man is 'the beast' meaning he has knowledge and can create more suffering than ordinary nature)

The trouble with His view and others like it, is that it revels in these misdeeds

and errors, in 'misery porn'  which carries the bitter tinge of nihilism; there is an element

of cynicism which is something I recognize, because I have wallowed there too.  It excuses our own failures.

On the contrary, Sandbook looks at history culturally, like Kenneth Clarke,
and finds much that is positive to admire. 

It is a trope of the left (Moore, Chomsky, Geldof) to look back only at war and strife and the suffering of others, rather than the achievements of beauty that also exist, that men too have built.  Curtis only accepts and accentuates whats

gone wrong, not affirming any good.  While Roger Scruton explores what he thinks is morally awry today by examining the good things from the past - cathedrals, institutions, ethics, religion, and sees much that we can learn.   It seems as though Curtis only sees the past as entirely execrable, full of bad turns, all fallacious good intentions gone bad.

Devil's advocation:  

What is supposedly admirable is that his films compose very succinctly, and poetically 

a nightmare that drips from the news everyday, and blasts it back as a collage which overloads the emotions; which thus draws one to think just what I have thought above, as I tuck into this warm glass of Burgundian Pinot.

How wide the Safety net ?

Liberalism says that we don't have to be responsible for ourselves, 

the state will take care of the future.

Liberal economics says the same: we don't have to apply morals, 

the market will take care of the future.

Following this thought on liberal irresponsibility:

Another radical view came to me, amongst local beggars in my area -

that because of government spending, "we" have the option not to feel any direct obligations if "we" so wish.  Because the personal response is abrogated.  

When I hear lefties whinging about Tory cuts, other than the obvious front-brain plea for more welfare for the needy, is also the flipside: that "I" don't want to have to be responsible, 

"I" don't want to see paupery on the streets, "I" would like to see it dealt with by an invisible hand.  

Then I think of how it used to be, and still is, natural for a lot of Cultures to look after their own family members when they get frail and needy, where charity is intrinsically a personal, local issue, dealt with first and foremost on the ground level.  The nation state concept, with all its political machinations is clearly the result of replacing church with state; the impersonal in place of the personal; the sophisticated justification for this being that we aren't living in small tribal communities anymore.  

Maybe we should realise that we are not so atomised, that we are still in small tribes (families, colleagues, friends).

The old Catholic culture here in England provided the solution to this which incorporated the local with a larger narrative.  The keyword being culture rather than 'apparatus'.

Now we have it seems, bad compromise: local government which always defers

responsibility to big government, and big government which leaves the responsibility

to charity, church, 'activists' and local government.  

Middle class Metro elites are on the side of big government,

in that they want paupers swept out of sight, to opt, in the name of 'individuality', to disconnect from obligation (to oblige being too noble), and by reverse extension, also place the obligation for their families on the state, because the state is capable of big collective organisation.  

But despite this being true, it shouldn't extend that they have no obligation other than more taxes, which being abstract, are demonstrably avoidable.  The individualist get-out clause; because by the  very fact of this abstraction, few can always escape and leave responsibility on those left behind (the basic form of neo-liberal economic competition).  

I contend that theoretical "socialism" is really the freedom to be anti-social (example of Orwellian double-speak) and that it ends up doing the reverse of what it projects: it offloads responsibility to those who can least afford it, freeing 'elites'.

  

This is because socialism, or liberalism, is in fact rooted in, and enshrined by, neo-liberal economics (which lest us not forget, is the very system, according to Chomsky, which replaced Catholicism*). The rest is sheer age-old hypocrisy - "I" can own property and have privilege while nominally believing in modified forms of communism which purports to be about sharing all goods and property in common.

Otherwise known as owning the narrative.

The justification for this hypocrisy is that other people who do not call themselves socialist are getting away with it, so why shouldn't "I" ?

Arthur Penty states in an essay in "A challenge to the myth of progress" that "Men who made the accumulation of wealth their primary aim

in life where looked at askance in the Middle Ages and why trade and commerce where held in lower esteem than agriculture and craftmanship, as they were also in China until relatively recently"

*

Another election special

Democracy began with the splitting of one into two.
  Absolute monarchy was denounced as tyranny and 

  became a house with two sides.
  But this does not negate the fundamental principle of one, or any other
  number for that matter.  

  Parliamentarianism, or the two party system,
  is the very definition of "polarisation".

  The 'center ground' theory, which is the excuse that the 

  two party system makes for its existence, is that without 

  the two opposing sides, there can be no satisfactory, or

  regulated center.  

  This has been proven, not just this time round, to be a lump 

  of baneful, intellectually complacent tosh.

The Utopian philosophy of pleasure, often mistakenly called 'Epicurean', is entirely compatible with Christian teaching since it holds that the wise choose the higher pleasures of the spirit instead of the lower and temporary pleasures of the flesh.

Incarnations

The ungodly is a desire to be animal, to be without cosmic significance,

to be shorn of 'the soul', to consider that a ghastly hindrance

a gauche accoutrement, the revolting baggage of an archetypal insufferable

bore, resulting in existential despair not shared with the animal.
  
Its a style choice in a firmament of bewildering choice,
a preference for the unfettered primitive, without the asphyxiating bonds and oaths
of loyalty that primævalism entails.

It is the realm of the deracinated, derailed and fundamentally

disloyal and atomized.  It is on the spectrum of global

scoundrel, one who thinks he should answer to nobody, is without

history, free of place or community.  Their intelligence tells them they are

free of agency, but their bounds are the narrative of negation.

The only affirmation is a meek acquiescence to power that 
formally negates, such as hip hop, grime, Islam, punk, or anti-capitalism.

There is something snide in this ludicrous, incongruous embrace. 

It is merely the establishment notion of ownership and incorporation.

It is the shrewd riposte to a slave rebellion.  This isn't speaking
truth to power, only acquiescence of power. 
The desired result is corporate slave-branding, the humdrum marketplace cynicism

of industrial generality.  It is appears to be the denouement of a slave-owning mentality.

Demagogues

How would an irrational being create anything outside of himself?   Irrationality is always bound up with ego and self identification, unlikely to create a cult of an ultimate ancestor figure such as a God, outside of time.  

To propose that an irrational people created this God would be to assume that oneself is thus objectifiably rational and coincidentally, just like the terrific old testament thunder God, judging vast swathes of humankind through all of history as being utterly wrong for worshipping a false idol.   

Atheists and their forerunners, the Deists, far from freeing anyone from idolatry, really believe they themselves embody God, and that there can be no other God possible but themselves.

From time to time we have also seen such demagogues rise and fall, leading people astray into irresponsibility they feel no subsequent accountability for.

Colonial, through and through, but to colonise new parts of one's own brain, rather than
finite projections of the subjective business of cartography and the attendant lugubrious
and sensual conquest of physical space.   Pleasures built on the pain of striving -
To navigate new deltas or rivulets of neural bypass, to light up new networks is the
true enlightenment sought by men through the ages.  Paradoxically this could be the age of yin, of inward turning, as opposed to the choice between extrovert self-obliteration, or
raving decadence evidenced in sharp declines in comportment, etiquette, modulation,
composure, or self restraint in favour of a faux primitive, nouveau-pagan narcissism.

Of the unified personality in the soul of the world is the confluence of running
to the frontier and therewith, the awareness found at the polar edge of total physical
liberation in rebellion against the limits of Confucian mastery.