Hello friends, in this post I would like to share some thoughts about the nature of the society we find ourselves in, including some of the invisible or ill-understood mechanisms by which capitalist hegemony is maintained on the planet.
Over the years I have collected various articles I've found in my pursuit of truth that have always really resonated with me. One is called “We are all very anxious: Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It”. The whole article is well worth a read, but I want to share a few passages from it and then add my thoughts.
Each phase of capitalism has a particular affect which holds it together. This is not a static situation. The prevalence of a particular dominant affect [3] is sustainable only until strategies of resistance able to break down this particular affect and /or its social sources are formulated. Hence, capitalism constantly comes into crisis and recomposes around newly dominant affects.
To me, this relates to the fact that because capitalism and its attendant features and ways of living are so antithetical to the natural way of living on this planet (blissfully, in abundance and in communion with the natural world), those that have created the system for personal gain must be constantly working to be a 'step ahead' of any potential movements which would seek to overthrow capitalism to establish a more humane society.
Today’s public secret is that everyone is anxious. Anxiety has spread from its previous localised locations (such as sexuality) to the whole of the social field. All forms of intensity, self-expression, emotional connection, immediacy, and enjoyment are now laced with anxiety. It has become the linchpin of subordination. … The present dominant affect of anxiety is also known as precarity. Precarity is a type of insecurity which treats people as disposable so as to impose control. Precarity differs from misery in that the necessities of life are not simply absent. They are available, but withheld conditionally. Precarity leads to generalised hopelessness; a constant bodily excitation without release.”
I resonated with this so much when I first read it, because it nails a major mechanism upon which this modern totalitarian beast is maintained. I think many people that would otherwise be more active in terms of protesting, organizing etc don't because they're living paycheck to paycheck and thus are concerned about losing their income, or else are too busy and stressed to think about anything other than day to day survival. This last part is described as the 'eternal present' in 1984 – people don't have time or energy to remember history or plan for the future, it's just about getting through the day and then numbing out with different kinds of soma. This is the kind of condition those that have created this system want to keep the population in – 'sober' enough to labor for 30-50 years, but never quite content or free enough that they could actually start to think about and better understand modern society*.
Excessive anxiety and stress are a public secret. When discussed at all, they are understood as individual psychological problems, often blamed on faulty thought patterns or poor adaptation.
This is a constant in modern society, and is a close sibling of gaslighting. The idea that people are unhappy because they're living in a miserable, antihuman system isn't to be entertained in the therapist's office or in most other places; instead, from the earliest age, people are continuously gaslit into believing that they're crazy for wanting to actually live a free human life. The dictatorship of the parent (parents these days think it is okay for them to wholesale impose their will on youth for 18 years), combined with the tens of thousands of hours most spend being indoctrinated into the robotic labor routine, serve as the key mechanisms to take a loving, caring, spontaneous free spirit and turn them into a mindless drone for capitalism.
Earlier we argued that people have to be socially isolated in order for a public secret to work. This is true of the current situation, in which authentic communication is increasingly rare. Communication is more pervasive than ever, but increasingly, communication happens only through paths mediated by the system. Hence, in many ways, people are prevented from actually communicating, even while the system demands that everyone be connected and communicable.
Any totalitarian system needs to keep people separated, and unwilling or unable to communicate with one another about the suffering they are experiencing as a result of the system. I'm sure the myriad ways that has been advanced will be readily apparent to the reader…the past two years alone have wrecked devastation on the already fragile social fabric of society (plus driven communication ever further onto platforms controlled by mammoth corporations), and it seems that people are increasingly losing the language to even be able to communicate with each other, particularly the younger generations, who have been raised essentially in a digital world of memes and five second videos. Social media has also affected society in a profoundly negative way since its inception, and there is a lot of evidence that these companies have been specifically deploying strategies to further divide and polarize the population, such as using algorithms to display posts in feeds in a way that will maximize the emotional reaction of the viewer.
The article has some suggested solutions at the end, most of which revolve around creating spaces where people can feel safe to connect about their common pain and frustration.
The goal is to produce the click — the moment at which the structural source of problems suddenly makes sense in relation to experiences. This click is which focuses and transforms anger. Greater understanding may in turn relieve psychological pressures, and make it easier to respond with anger instead of depression or anxiety. It might even be possible to encourage people into such groups by promoting them as a form of self-help — even though they reject the adjustment orientation of therapeutic and self-esteem building processes.
This happened for me personally. I have always recognized on some level that things are massively wrong on the planet right now, but when I was able to have that 'click'** and realize, 'ohhh, the reason I've been so miserable all this time is because I'm living in a deeply totalitarian society!', it really did provide a psychological release for me.
I will leave it there for now, sending blessings to all.
*I wanted to share a good quote that relates to this from Orwell:
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
In any sane society, the basic necessities of life would not be behind a paywall.
**One of the key materials that helped me to have this experience was 'Caliban and the Witch' by Sylvia Federici. In the book, Federici smashes the notion proposed my modern mainstream economists, and even the likes of Marx, that capitalism 'arose naturally' from feudalism; rather, with exhaustive sourcing, she demonstrates that in fact capitalism was implemented in medieval Europe only through absolutely brutal campaigns of state-sponsored terror against the medieval population, including the burning at the stake of not only witches, but dissenters of all kinds to the new order that was being imposed. Reading that book was for me like getting a profound glimpse at some of the true histories of the world that have led us to where we are now, because once the architects of capitalism were able to firmly establish it in Europe, they set about spreading it to the whole world and destroying any culture that would not submit to the capitalist order…hence present-day global society.