The Ultimate Postmodern Joke has Finally Been Realized (Now We Can Move On), by M. J. Emminger

The Western world has for a century been lured down a path of perversion, regression, and decay by a handful of utopian idealists and the abundance of political leadership unscrupulous enough to bite their bait. Philosopher Leo Strauss sees his thinking deeply ingrained in the culture of the US federal government, and to the world's misfortune. Randian political philosophers like him are poised to infect political leadership with concepts of the "obligation" or "sacred duty" of power, but without the faintest grasp on conscience, moral obligation, or for that matter, reality. Alan Greenspan is the old classic—the capitalist economist on-duty, banality defined, his head filled as filled with delusions as it is with greed. Largely responsible for the structuring of major American financial institutions as they are today, "the Undertaker" (Greenspan) has his name inscribed in every Wall Street casino that bets in blood. The punchline to this cultural hijacking is the repugnant venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary, who, after years as a host on the television show Shark Tank, is trying his involvement in politics as a member of Canada's Conservative Party (in which polls show him exceptionally favorable among nine- to eighteen-year-olds—I wonder why?)

Utopian ideology is at the heart of the slow-motion coup d'état which has, in political theorist Sheldon Wolin's eyes, been a constant expansion of America's "power imaginaries", by which the use of limitless monetization and unbound capitalist ideology has expanded the definition of power itself and the forms in which it can exert itself.¹ In such, it has rendered the concept of constitutional power meaningless. But more than that, it has rendered the concept of reality meaningless, inasmuch as reality is an integrating consensus of the mechanics—and limits—of the world. The "neo" political ideologies, neoliberalism and neoconservatism, are but mutations of the classical political oppositions, both infected by the same terminal illness of a utopian capitalism which simply ignores all consideration for the limits of a coherent economic model and ecosustainability—a coherent reality—altogether. Mass propaganda advertises these mutants as the arena of the political dialectic when they are really nothing but perfect accomplices in the suicidal ruse of hypercommodification. Information technology and telecommunications incidentally exacerbate the "reality-pulverization" effect by opening up a world of new ways to exploit general populations while also creating a state of social affairs best called "information vertigo"—i.e. the coexisting states of total information transparency and the weaponized proliferation of disinformation.

Beyond even Wolin's formulation in Democracy, Inc., social control in the United States has taken the form of controlled social atomization via information vertigo and, I would argue, reality demolition. This disintegrated state of society was anticipated by French sociologists of the late twentieth century known as the postmodernists—a strain of thinkers known for criticizing modern utopianist thought in a way that essentially rejected ideology outright. Postmodern theory was meant as a social critique (if a somewhat self-skeptical, even nihilistic, one). Ironically, both its formulations and its self-skepticism have proven more foresightful than anticipated. Instead of being the counter-weight to social decline that was the classical role of philosophy, it was more or less appropriated—simulated—into self-fulfilling prophecy by a college-educated class which found themselves seduced by it. A faux-intellectual class partook in postmodern theory as philosophy (which it was never meant to be)—and thus was born, for instance, the ridiculous New York contemporary art scene—a ruse by investors who introduced an absurd value metrics into the commercial art world while liquidating it of artistic substance.² This hypercommodified culture then came under the cool criticism of the same theorist whose ideas had been appropriated by it, Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard even had a stint with the New York contemporary art scene, where he was given an exhibition of his photographs (which are anything but remarkable—the only significance of the exhibition was the name attached to it). Accross the board, this hip intelligentsia would find the thinking of Baudrillard seductive (seduction is a topic he often wrote about, particularly in Fatal Strategies, and a social critique loses its efficacy when it becomes seductive.) And as it is always the tendency for intellectual brilliance to become adulterated and seep into popular culture as such, postmodernity eventually became used—simulated—to the advantage of the power elites, notably in the form of the virtual manipulation of money and debt into insidious tools for fraud by big financial institutions. (This isn't to say any Wall Street investor knows anything about postmodernism or has ever picked up a book by Baudrillard—the thought of a moral-less coked-up monkey trying to read Baudrillard is priceless.) Everything has become acceptable, nothing is off-limits; the barrier between the real and the imaginary has been torn down and the ideological majority in power have been liberated from any obligation to answer to reality.

Whether to the advantage of humans or not, reality always asserts itself. Our arrogance, first in allowing ourselves to believe in ideologies which place humans first, then in disposing of any sense of reality in our quest for gratification, will spell our collective suicide if we do not radically re-orient our society, and soon. The test of climate disaster will be a test of whether humanity can return to sobriety and a sense of humility before the natural world, and it will be our ultimate test.

There are some bright people in the world who nonetheless lack an imagination. Particularly, those who dismiss postmodern theory as a charade, a pointless mental exercise. utter nonsense, etc. Most egregiously I point to the infamous Alan Sokal and, in agreement, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins played a vital role in shaping my worldview in early adulthood, but alas, rationalists like he and Sokal are too commonly plagued by a lack of imagination. So it was with their decisive repudiation of postmodern theory as obscurantism.³⁴ (While I can understand a scientist's disdain for the use of scientific terminology in fields of study outside of its scope, there was a message in the writings of Jean Baudrillard, and it's a mere fact that the likes of Sokal and Dawkins are either unwilling to interpret it or just incapable.) Noam Chomsky at least has the self-confidence to admit that he doesn't understand much of postmodern theory.⁵ University culture on the other hand generally shares the sentiment of the high-profile rationalists, wherein philosophy professors of similar nay-sayer status regurgitate the academic consensus that postmodernism is of no value to human discourse. But humor me if you will. Recall the state of the world a decade ago—the social and political environment—and then consider how it has changed in that decade. Quite profoundly, few would disagree. Mike Judge, who a decade ago produced the film Idiocracy, is astonished to find that his film has become a reality only ten years later in the form of the Donald Trump phenomenon.⁶ Judge certainly had an imagination, but perhaps willfully rejected the potential, severity, or imminence of his own prognosis. Some fans of the film, including myself, were less surprised.

It's not uncommon today to hear someone say that a decade ago they could never have imagined that the world would change in the dramatic ways it has. Western society has become radically atomized, less able to comprehend, more perverse, and there is a general sense of disbelief, a derealization en masse. It's no longer controversial to perceive society as one in which each person lives in his or her own reality perhaps vastly different from the reality of the next, indeed with a significant demographic having lost all sense of reality whatsoever. The super-rich class are aliens to us. From their luxury highrise apartments in New York and Chicago, they control government policy and the world economy with the levers of their simplistic selfishness and greed. They never have a moment of contact with reality. They've no understanding of the plight of the average person, what it is to be inconvenienced or discontent for even a moment, and they fear what they do not understand. In sheer fear they further and further distance themselves from the world by using their money as tools to make us divide and destroy each other while they suck as much power and as many resources from us as they can to hoard for their own. From this we get the perversity of endless war, now nothing more than a systematic process of generating profit by the bomb dropped, the violence escalated, the regime overthrown. Wall Street investors literally gamble with blood. This global paroxysm is the realization of Baudrillard's "ecstasies" as described in Fatal Strategies, of discredited Western ideologies not dying natural deaths, but tenaciously "anticipating" their own deaths, reasserting themselves as obscenities having been liquidated of meaning, exacerbated by anger in response to existential crisis—endless, ecstatic, fatal forms.⁷ Agonized by their liquidation, unwilling to accept death, for as surely is a flawed ideology unwilling to die as the kind of bacterial scum exemplified by Dick Cheney, Rudi Guliani, and Tony Blair, who continue to peddle their fantastic worldviews in the wake of the destruction of Iraq while the inability to accept facts renders them sociopathic parasites of the lowest order. No more actualized can these "fatal strategies" be than in the obscene neoconservative (and now neoliberal, for there is no distinction in their foreign policies) foreign policies of America which are nothing but an ecstatic stream of irrational reactions with no goal whatsoever—strategies that the pure object of war uses against us.

Sheldon Wolin understood the postmodern condition of society, postulating today's social order as having taken on a postmodern form of totalitarianism, which he calls "inverted totalitarianism"—a totalitarianism based on myth, perversion of the legitimate ideas of liberty and democracy, the unrestraint (liberation) of definitions and uses of power, the free interpretation of law, and the rendering of the populace apathetic, indifferent to politics and under the illusion that their freedom is being protected by endless war abroad.¹ It is the fatal strategy against human civilization of the vicissitudes of stock market charts, instability, violence, and war being directed and exacerbated by the turbulence of bull and bear markets, the red and green bars being the only reality known to the Wall Street gamblers whose psychoses systematize the bloodshed. This while we march headlong into collective suicide via climate disaster in the name of none other than profit—for whom? It is not humans that profit from the corporate machine; one wonders if in the case that humans are extinguished, this machine will continue to operate seamlessly, generating optimal profits for exactly no one. Thus the pure object of balance sheet logic seduces, sucks in and swallows its subject, humans who in their reckless arrogance were clandestine to subject it to their will. Object and subject: imminently reversible roles⁷—this rule has no concern for humans, no special exemption for them. Baudrillard on third order simulacra: "It no longer needs to be rational, because it no longer measures itself against either an ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational."⁸

Our nihilistic system of world order challenges the very notion of reason, at least in the extent that it has any emancipatory value to humans. And as the new atheist fundamentalists, the Dawkinses and Sam Harrises, continue to wage war in the name of the doctrine of reason as the truth and the light and the way, one consideration that skips their imaginations is one possible deduction from Dawkins' bestselling book: that perhaps the inability of reason to prove the ultimate benefactor to humans is prefaced by the hypothesis that there is no real reason for human existence. To attempt to find a human recourse then which is both founded primarily on reason and largely to the advantage of humans would likely prove fruitless. Too often suggestions of the sort are charged with being nihilistic, or philosophical dead-ends, but they needn't be. Whoever claimed that the primary basis of altruism was reason? Rather, one might place altruism on the same order as art, which, Chris Hedges explains, is a non-rational—but not irrational—force; a transcendant capacity,⁹ one that may be best never fully understood. And certainly one that needn't be rationalized.

The Trump phenomenon is but the shameless and too-real-to-believe product of a society which has descended down a path of total self-mockery, substitution of reality with parody, moral vertigo and disbelief. It is the ultimate postmodern joke realized, and the vindication of such prophetic thinkers as Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio. As the corporate machine of our making has seduced us into arguably securing our own doomed fate, we have allowed ourselves to pervert human society wholesale, to turn the human narrative into a self-parody in shameless service to our egos. On the forefront of the rapacious simulacrum which brainwashes an uneducated white population into thinking that life is nothing but a game of egos, "me-first", and exploitation, Fox News administers to its audience the kind of fact-ridiculing psychosis that eventually creates catastrophic accidents like Trump. Life is a game to Trump, and a presidential run no more serious than his role in The Apprentice—as long as he doesn't actually become the nominee. As Michael Moore's research indicates, it is all but apparent that Trump is trying to self-sabotage his campaign—whatever it takes to give him an excuse to drop out of the race before the general election.¹⁰ Finding it virtually impossible to make a statement too offensive for the uneducated Republican majority (not to mention the even more dangerous mob of sociopathic Alex Jones fans), he's now resorted to twice reiterating the most insane view on nuclear weapons conceivable: "If we have them, why don't we use them?"¹¹ Having run, Moore claims, for no other reason than publicity, it would appear that the success of Trump's campaign is as much an absurd punchline to him as it is to anyone. It's a development that confronts us with the dreaded question, "Is American culture actually as warped as it is in theory?"

It was while looking at images of a Trump rally during the primaries that the prophetic power of Jean Baudrillard became almost too brazen for me to believe. More than three decades ago in 1982, just after the publication of his acclaimed Simulacra & Simulation, came the publication of Baudrillard's In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. It was a new formulation of the social mechanics of the masses, premised on the inadequacy of the popular idea that a mass (of people) is a predictably responsive entity, one to be manipulated to the will of either exploitive powers or, for the inverse purpose, revolutionaries and radicals. Classically, this may have been the case. But has modernity fundamentally altered the dynamics of a mass? Baudrillard posited this: a popular mass more likely behaves as a mass ("la masse") in the physical, electromagnetic sense. A mass of high inertia and low conductivity, it is a poor conductor of the political, of the social, of meaning in general. Energies flow through it, political and social energies conspiring to assimilate it, to give it a charge in accordance to their will—but in reality it reacts not as so desired. The inverse happens: a mass assimilates all energies it encounters, absorbs them and neutralizes them, providing no response. It flows indifferently with the currents of all encountered energies, here and there moulding itself to the image of whatever assails it, but it does not, as both the political elite and the intellectual class would have hoped, amplify or try to transfer that energy. It simply absorbs it.¹² A postmodern joke by definition: the joke is on the elites and the intellectuals who have sought to subject the silent majorities to their will. A silent majority, it would appear, is just that: silent. I scrolled through the images of the Trump rally and one caught my eye. Supporters were holding placards that bore a new campaign slogan: "The silent majority stands with Trump". Indeed.

No more vindication of Baudrillard's clairvoyance is necessary. The silent majority has proven to act exactly as he theorized: an unresponsive mass lurking in the shadows of politics and the social, an invisible entity. As the neoconservative elites, the Tea Party and their messengers Fox News, endeavored to capture the votes of what they thought would be their useful idiots, an uneducated white working class—drilling them with ideas of xenophobia, hate, egoism, and a war on political correctness—they accidentally created a monster, and that monster slipped out of their grasp. Their ambition, to tame and seize control of this demographic to serve their political interest, didn't translate at all according to plan; and thus the silent majority has latched onto and absorbed this embarassment, this flagrant and plain-spoken epitome of the hateful rhetoric the neocons meant to employ as a manipulative tool. And they have swept up this rhetoric as a mass, offering nothing to the will of the GOP in response. None of the sixteen establishment Republican candidates stood a chance against Trump. The Koch Brothers are fiery with frustration over the Trump phenomenon, a symbol of their utter failure to influence the election with their $889 million investment.¹³ By trying to subject its base, the Republican establishment finds that its base, the objective mass, has subjected it instead. And is the Republican Party not now the sad subject of its base? Reluctantly they fall in line behind Trump. They dance to the will of the silent majority. We see too that the objective "strategy" of the silent majority has sealed the fate of the party.

Such climactic paroxysms of postmodern social mechanics have an advantageous side. Trump is among many occurences of the past few years that has torn down walls to impose a definitive transparency upon society at large—in Trump's case, as an effective reality litmus test. One need only refer to a list of Trump supporters for a manifesto of people whose absence from reality is among the greatest impediments to systemic change. We see the delusional underpinnings of American imperialism and "free market" ideology finally being stripped of their veils and their embarassing bodies being publicly exposed. The pure object of power struggle—the "survival of the fittest" which imposes itself on a largely un-self-aware animal kingdom—has its revenge for subjectification by humiliating the Randian idealists who attempt to simulate it. Thus the financial elites, their game now known to everyone, feel a very real sense of powerlessness. Capitalism was never a scheme by a "responsible" upper class to facilitate human progress. The powerful never had any merit, any special knowledge of the world or sacred duty. The illusion of a meritocracy depended on the confidentiality of the fact that they are simply selfish people. This fact is now transparent; and money cannot buy someone the out of the humiliation of being known by mainstream society as a selfish person. But while transparency as such can yield a sense of justice, it is never revolutionary. Altogether, information only serves to further atomize society as one warped sense of reality necessarily morphs into one even more denialistic, confused, and exacerbated. If transparency is to have any value—i.e. if we are to fend off the common gut reaction of nihilism to the disrobing of the perversities of the social order—it is demanded that we supplant a negative with a positive.

How do we do this? If we continue to allow the wholesale self-parody of reality to be the only game in town, we have without a doubt signed off on collective suicide. All those of good will know that terminal climate disaster is no acceptable final chapter to the human story. But this puts a monumental task in our hands: we must subvert the culture of glib reality-denial and self-mockery; we must be radical alterities. A new and ambitious method of civil activism needs to be conceived. May I suggest this: if we are to deny the future such grave predicaments as this election (which has also, mind you, been a ruse to oligarchically anoint Hillary Clinton to the presidential throne, our predicament not least grave because of this disastrous likelihood), we should look beyond the dogmatic investment in reason and grant ourselves the right to our imaginations. Let us boldly explore the limits of our imaginations, without fear of their yet undiscovered territories and under no illusion that anything is impossible. Let us let altruism thrive among us without need for a rational basis. Let us allow artistic value and the products of fearless imagination to replace use value and the products of the market. Perhaps we can weaken the financial elites by harnessing a power much greater than what they have: the power of awe and earthshattering beauty, the power implicit in proving to the world that thousands can come together and cooperate to achieve something assumed impossible. Let us engage in acts of civil demonstration of staggering poignancy and precise coordination, capturing the attention of local and alternative media; and let them not be merely critiques of the already obvious, but celebrations of the fresh and imaginative, the wholly unobvious. If we can not only manage to expose to ordinary people what an embarassment our socioeconomic order is, but convince them of what a real humanity is capable of, our victory is certain.

Citations:

1. Wolin, Sheldon S. Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

2. Baudrillard, Jean, and Sylvère Lotringer. The Conspiracy of Art. New York: Semiotext(e), 2005.

3. Sokal, Alan D., and J. Bricmont. Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science. London: Profile Books, 1998.

4. Dawkins, Richard. "Postmodernism Disrobed." Dawkins Review of Intellectual Impostures. July 9, 1998. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/dawkins.html.

5. "Science, Religion & Human Nature." Interview by Noam Chomsky. Z Video Productions. February 2010. https://zcomm.org/z-video-productions/.

6. Stanley, Tim. "Donald Trump for President: Is Idiocracy Coming True?" The Telegraph. January 28, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/idiocracy/donald-trump-president-predictions/.

7. Baudrillard, Jean. Fatal Strategies. Brooklyn, NY: Semiotext(e), 1990.

8. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra & Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

9. Hedges, Chris. "The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies." Speech, Santa Monica, CA, October 13, 2013.

10. Guerrasio, Jason. "Michael Moore Says Donald Trump 'never Actually Wanted to Be President'" Business Insider. August 16, 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-moore-says-donald-trump-never-actually-wanted-to-be-president-2016-8.

11. Krueger, Katherine. "Joe Scarborough Claims Trump Asked Advisor Why US Can't Use Nukes." Talking Points Memo. 2016. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/joe-scarborough-trump-briefing-nuclear-weapons.

12. Baudrillard, Jean. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Or, the End of the Social. New York, NY: Semiotext(e), 1983.

13. Kirby, Jen. "Billionaire Koch Brothers Will Probably Sit This GOP Convention Out." Daily Intelligencer. April 25, 2016. http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/04/koch-brothers-will-skip-2016-gop-convention.html#.