Useful Idiot Ideologues are Dealing with Reality much like Some did Hundreds of Years Ago
"Humankind cannot bear very much reality." - T.S. Eliot: "Burnt Norton" (1935)
by James Albert Barr
Relatively recently, I correlated a couple of very fascinating, if unsettling, and spot-on passages from two books from two very different eras that both appear to describe and/or mirror the deluded mind-set of present-day far-left ideologues, but can also describe any extreme political sect, from the left or right: one from the early 20th century, discussing the harsh living conditions during 14th/15th century Europe, and the other from the turn of the millennium speculating on postmodern philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard's 1988 book, "The Inhuman", and what effects Artificial Intelligence could have on the world, and on humanity, particularly, like the notion of "difference" being phased-out, resulting in rendering human behaviour as "inhuman", losing its soul, its individuality, its personality. Or as Vernor Vinge put it in 1993, talking about the possible, if not probable, advent of the Singularity appearing in 30 years time; that is, by, yup, 2023! Of course, that hasn't quite happened yet, despite Vinge's prediction, but it has gained considerable momentum over the last few years, and evidently making continual leaps and bounds with evermore troubling speed and impatience.
The first passage comes from the 2001 Postmodern Encounters series booklet, "Lyotard and the Inhuman", by Stuart Sim. In this passage, Sim presents Jean-Francois Lyotard's description of a kind of "rationality" emanating from the inhuman character of the machine/A.I. and capitalism, which I verily think accurately describes as well, the hive-mind/"We're on the right side of history!" mentality of far-left activists-cum-useful idiots for accelerationist capital and technocratic agendas:
"The philospher Theodor Adorno, an important influence on the post-Structuralist and postmodernist movements, is famed for his remark that 'to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric' - the point being that we could only be appalled at where the exercise of reason had led us in this instance.
Post-humanism takes its lead from sentiments like this. Lyotard regards such 'rationality' as endemic to capitalism, which he conceives as a 'monad' - meaning it is a self-contained entity oblivious to everything except its own interests. 'When the point is to extend the capacities of the monad', he claims, 'it seems reasonable to abandon, or even actively to destroy, those parts of the human race which appear superfluous, useless for that goal. For example, the populations of the Third World."
The "Third World", huh? It seems abundantly clear that even the First Worlds, and their traditional "ways of life", are now deemed "superfluous and useless", that is, in their terminology, "legacy systems", to the monad's, that is, technocracy's/A.I.'s, ultimate goal and seemingly non-negotiable purpose! Indeed, it's simply incredible to me that the far-left millennials in particular, but as well as narcissistic, self-righteous axe-grinding hold-overs from Gen-X and the Baby Boomers too, are collectively oblivious of the tenable evidence that they are in fact manipulated cogs in service of, and to, the late capitalist machine itself (so effectively and crucially described by the now sadly late Mark Fisher in his 2009 "Capitalist Realism" book, and his many engaging and passionate public lectures before his tragic suicide in 2017). Though so many of them claim to be proponents of communism and socialism.
My, how the, now ubiquitous, propagandist strategy has duped them all! Most, I'm sure, are wholly unaware of their "presidential hero", Obama, signing the Smith-Mundt Modernisation Act of 2012, that went into effect during the summer of 2013, making it perfectly legal once again to disseminate propaganda unto the domestic population in the U.S.. Just look at what has happened to mainstream news outlets over the last decade, how egregiously partisan and politically biased, and therefore harshly judgemental towards "the other side", they have become!
And despite their so-called allegiance to "social justice", SJWs appear more and more to be actual "inhumans", or post-humans, certainly irreparably damaged ones, who will ultimately help facilitate the apparent coming Singularity, or Great Reset, so celebrated by the growing transhumanist movement, cyberpunk aficianados and, of course, the likes of Ray Kuzweil, Bill Gates, Yuval Noah Harari (who literally wants to digitally "hack your brain", claiming that "the era of free-will is over"!), Klaus Schwab, and the corporate/technocratic contingent in general.
The second passage I will cite here is from Johan Huizinga's 1919 history book, "The Waning of the Middle Ages", in which he describes the collective necessity of the advent of "chivalry", as an effective palliative for the brutal, harsh reality of life in 14th/15th century Europe, particularly Burgundy, an historical territory, former administrative region and province of east-central France:
"The conception of chivalry constituted for these authors (Froissant, Monstrelet, d'Escouchy, Chastellain, La Marche, Molinet) a sort of magic key, by the aid of which they explained to themselves the motives of politics and of history. The confused image of contemporaneous history being much too complicated for their comprehension, they simplified it, as it were, by the fiction of chivalry as a moving force (not consciously, of course). A very fantastic and rather shallow point of view, no doubt. How much vaster is ours, embracing all sorts of economic and social forces and causes. Still, this vision of a world ruled by chivalry, however superficial and mistaken it might be, was the best they had in the matter of general political ideas. It served them as a formula to understand, in their poor way, the appalling complexity of the world's way. What they saw about them looked primarily as mere violence and confusion. War in the 15th century tended to be a chronic process of isolated raids and incursions; diplomacy was mostly a very seldom and very verbose procedure, in which a multitude of questions about juridical details clashed with some very general traditions and some points of honour. All notions which might have enabled them to discern in history a social development were lacking to them. Yet they required a form for their political conceptions, and here the idea of chivalry came in. By this traditional fiction they succeeded in explaining to themselves, as well as they could, the motives and the course of history, which thus was reduced to a spectacle of the honour of princes and the virtue of knights, to a noble game with edifying and heroic rules."
Now, simply substitute "social justice" for "chivalry", and 21st century for the 15th century, and you essentially have a near-perfect encapsulation of the present day's psychologically necessary conditions for dealing/coping with reality for a certain politically-driven, but apparently mentally-ill, demographic. The crucial difference being that today's collection of hapless SJW/far-left ideologues, Woke Hollywood and Disney, and gender dysphoric, spiteful mutants are mere, oblivious puppets being insidiously, however cunningly, manipulated by oligarchical technocrats and their managerial engineers.
To a considerable extent, times never seem to change, really; only the signifiers (we are, after all, hopelessly mired in a state of "semiotic chaos", deliberately or not - I wager it's the former), technologies and fashions (which is also in a tail-spin of retro/futurist-absurdity) do, evidently. The abject confusion and hostility has certainly run rampant over the past several years, what with all the so-called cis-gender discrimation and unbridled hate, shame-baiting nonsense and trans-pronoun lunacy, I guess it's only a matter of time until real violence breaks out, exponentially, among the unwitting populations, in a more direct and consistent fashion, sadly.
