Inside-out, upside-down and backwards

When I was recently visiting the British Museum, chock full of millions of artistic objects gleaned, or pillaged, from most of the world’s existing cultural traditions, I was once again struck, more strongly than at any other time in the past, by the frightening convergence of practically every one of those competing cultures. Whether the objects came from some part of Western civilization, or from one of the thousands of urban-based empires to be found in various different parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, or from one of the world’s myriad indigenous cultures spread out all over the inhabited regions of the globe, did not seem to make any difference in one fundamental respect. Nor did it often make any difference whether those objects came from societies or civilizations that disappeared thousands of years ago, or from any of the more recently established cultures that are still well represented on this planet nowadays.

In almost every case, and in spite of enormous cultural differences between each competing system, just about all the various different social structures had one fundamental characteristic in common. That was the outstanding anomaly of having each group of human beings, comprising tens of thousands, or hundreds of millions, of ordinary people, to be found under the tight-fisted control of tiny bands of privileged alpha males lording it over the “toiling masses” in a typically inside-out, upside-down and backwards parody of the modern democratic ideal. It is extremely difficult to find, anywhere inside those societies, including the few and far-between examples of (pseudo) democracy occasionally encountered within ancient Greece, as well as the somewhat more numerous democratic pretenders from the modern world, many cases in which the majority of the population genuinely enjoyed any significant degree of control over their own political, economic, social and cultural standards of life.

This situation leaves me with the impression that some kind of degenerate biological evolution seems to have been very often completed by an equally degenerate form of cultural evolution, placing almost every group of people in a stranglehold of wealth, power and privilege. With the result that every human society seems to be almost as anti-democratic as every other society, forever ruled by slaveholding social classes, practising relatively interchangeable degrees of elitism, sexism (misogyny) and us-versus-them racism. All of which are constantly being bounced back and forth between every conceivable, competing culture, religion, ideology and/or philosophical tradition. From the beginning of neolithic times to the present, the perceived needs of the world’s leading elites have practically always been placed first on every society’s agenda, far ahead of the welfare of the general population, rather than the other way around.

If any particular society had actually been organized in anything like a democratic way, the needs of the worst off and the most vulnerable elements in the total population would have been taken care of first, followed by the needs of “in-between” (middle-class) people. Once those two operations had been carried out, any surplus left over in that society would then have been distributed among those few people already prosperous enough to have been free from any immanent, material threats to their overall welfare. Instead of proceeding in a truly democratic manner, however, as if the majority of any given population were as important as any of its privileged minorities, almost all the neolithic and post-neolithic societies known to exist have just about always proceeded in an elitist way, letting any tiny surplus left over, after the ruling elites seized their lion’s share, “trickle down” (if at all) to the toiling multitudes.

In other words, the system seems to have always worked “properly”, but only for those un-democratic people who set it up in the first place. Nevertheless, in any popular cultural rendering nowadays intended to reflect the way things really work, such as the recent Spielberg film about the “Pentagon Papers”, people in high places are seen to be feigning incredulity upon hearing leading executives’ bald-faced lies about their deliberate ignorance of (theoretically projected) democratic norms. This is, however, ridiculous pretension, “artistically” invented in order to uphold the modern democratic illusion, since no such incredulity ever seems to have truly existed among the ruling elites, whose realistic pronouncements in our own time still read very much like the hyper-inflated boasting (à la Donald Trump) of any one of a hundred thousand ancient Middle Eastern imperial braggarts.

In recent times, “her majesty’s loyal opposition” has occasionally been allowed to severely criticize official governing policy, so long as none of that opposition ever ends up reversing the prevailing social order altogether. Every now and then, in various different parts of the world, popular rebellions have sometimes prevailed for a short time, that attempted to put ordinary people first, over previously established, elitist minorities. Especially when the rebels dared to literally interpret official propaganda according to which all believers were equal in the sight of some (unfortunately non-existent) religious divinity. After which, the prevailing order was restored, those rebels not having seen the error of their ways on time perishing in a frenzy of military slaughter. Even when official communist parties managed to take over temporary control of entire countries, or entire empires, the same official communists who made the revolution in the first place simply took the former rulers’ places in the throne rooms and ran those countries pretty much the same way that they were being formerly run. “Bourgeois” revolutions have also been just as thoroughly, and violently, betrayed as were “proletarian” revolutions, not just in the Western world but also in practically every single country or region belonging to what used to be called the “third world”.

None of the ignorant illusions that various different groupings of ordinary people have adopted over the centuries ever seem to have helped them avoid their fate as domesticated servants obliged to kowtow to their officially superior masters. Religious communities of theoretically equal believers, patriotic communities of common-wealth or shared empire, imagined communities of democratic electors (one person, one vote), as well as those said to be based upon celestial harmony and virtuous order, whatever absurd kind of high-flying ideals that people have invented over the centuries, have all been shown to be totally bogus in practice, at least in the vast majority of cases. Even those few countries pretending to practice cradle-to-grave democratic socialism have never attempted to complete that transition, always letting their own wealthy elites control quite a large proportion of national resources, far beyond their tiny percentage of the overall population.

In the real world, most human lives resemble the portrait assembled by South African philosopher David Benatar and his collaborators, in the books he published with Oxford University Press in 2006, 2015 and 2017. So far, I have only read a couple of pages of presentation of his ideas in the French magazine, Sciences humaines (Thomas Peltier, “De l’inconvénient d’être en vie”, April 2018), as well as several articles about his work published on the Internet (most of them fiercely critical). But I definitely have to agree with his reported assessment according to which most people’s lives are fundamentally compromised by all sorts of physical and psychological suffering, bullying, horrible living and working conditions, not to mention having to deal with the fact that certain, eternal death is always the only possible, guaranteed outcome of everyone’s life. Even when most people are supposed to be enjoying themselves, various negative incidents always take place to remind them that they can never have any fun without simultaneously having to put up with the darker side of reality.

It is also true that the desire for self-preservation convinces most people to nevertheless believe in some kind of avatar or another, voluntarily plunging themselves into an ocean of self-deceit, refusing to admit most of the time that their lives have no particular meaning after all is said and done, and that their minuscule existence is just a really tiny section of totally brainless, natural evolution, from the big bang to the present day. My take on all of this, however, is that I do not agree with Benatar at all about how his portrait of reality in fact applies to everyone equally, regardless of their respective place on the social ladder. In my right-honourable opinion (as anyone living within the British parliamentary system might want to put it), having a great deal of wealth and power makes it considerably easier to put up with all this crap than does (for billions of people) having to slave away during a very short overall lifetime, deep inside a dark and dismal pit of mud, blood and excrement, all “artistically” blended into a filthy, putrid mess, down at the bottom of someone else’s private gold mine.

As a result of all this stagnant inequality, all over the world, progress as a concept has finally been abandoned by almost everyone and replaced by neoliberal and/or neofascist atavism, because it (progress) never had a chance to develop for real, given the inherently reactionary nature of almost all human “governance”. People are condemned to repeat history all the time, as in the case of the 1929 financial crisis being reproduced by the one in 2008, because they never succeed in becoming genuinely better people than they were before. The old saw about how “it’s just human nature” seems to have been borne out again within the past fifty years of my own adult life (1968 compared to 2018). As also exemplified in such other cute proverbs as “nice guys finish last” (baseball coach Leo Durocher) and “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” (the Bible). All of which is mainly due to the jaundiced presence in our midst of a longstanding epidemic of egotistical monstrosity that recently went viral, brought on by those who we are now calling “narcissistic perverts”. Namely the very same privileged alpha males to which I was referring earlier in this article, just a lot more of them than ever existed before, in keeping with the world’s much larger present population.

Which means that whenever there is a problem anywhere in the world, whether it be sexual harassment, environmental degradation, religious terrorism, violent anti-immigrant sentiment, or whatever, the people in charge always end up blaming the victim. Problems caused by neoliberal or neofascist rulers always have to be solved by “everyone” (the lower classes), because preserving the prevailing system is considered much more important than anything else could ever be. For the world’s most important state-capitalist or private-capitalist rulers, guaranteeing a decent rate of profit for the people on top of the world is always a higher priority than keeping billions of ordinary people alive and kicking. Even though the world’s most horrendous refugee situations are predominantly caused by the deliberate geopolitical creation of “failed states” (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Haiti, Myanmar, etc.) all over the world, doing anything about any of these things is constantly being shuffled off onto the backs of the “little people”, that is to say those lacking the means (wealth and power) to successfully resist obedience to officially-sponsored evil.

For VIPs like British prime minister Theresa May, industrial pollution can only have been caused by regular joes (and jills), constantly throwing their one-time-only drinking straws into the ocean. For the “obvious” reason that no one like May has ever seen any “ever-responsible” industrial concern throwing anything at all away, or contaminating the soil, or anything like that. Similarly, for established newspaper columnists like Allison Hanes or Fariha Naqvi-Mohamed (of the Montreal Gazette), it seems that only ordinary European-origin Westerners ever adopt racist attitudes toward recent immigrants from non-European countries. For the obvious (fake) reason that no one at all among the “racialized” visible minorities living anywhere in the world, nor within any of its indigenous communities, has every been known to be racist, or anti-semitic, or anything like that. It is after all a well-known “fact” among such propaganda mongers that the only majority populations anywhere in the world to have adopted racist attitudes toward “outsiders”, are those coming from Christian-European origins. None of the world’s leading sycophants, or apologists for the prevailing system, will ever admit the truth, namely that every population of every possible cultural origin has always proved to be as racist as any other such population.

Unfortunately, human societies as a whole do not seem to be able to achieve moral rearmament anywhere in the real world, because none of the world’s societies or civilizations were ever morally armed in the first place. Still, it is not going to do anyone any good to just support reactionary regimes, because they are so popular these days, like a lot of my former colleagues have done. It is still better to take the high road (that I did not always do in the past) and to continue believing in some kind of turnaround, right up to the bitter end. Even though it often seems as if “everything that is possible is not worth doing, and everything that is worth doing is impossible”. There is in fact no excuse for ordinary people (those not making billion-dollar decisions every day) to behave like morons, just because almost all the VIPs in this world are doing it all the time.

One way of getting people to back away from the precipice, even when it seems a bit late to be still trying to do that these days, is to point out that the recent worsening of humanity’s long-established sorry state has, after all, been accomplished through conspiracy. As the dozens of very intelligent authors have pointed out, who were cited in Le Monde diplomatique (Manière de Voir)’s recent special on conspiracy theories (“Complots: théories…et pratiques”, April-May 2018), although a very large number of the conspiracy theories being bandied about all over the world nowadays are complete fakes, quite a few other conspiracies have turned out to quite genuine, with devastating results.

For example, it is certainly true that the USA did after all land several astronauts on the Moon several decades ago, and that the terrorist assault on the World Trade Centre in New York (and several other targets) did take place back on 9-11 (2001), pretty much as was reported at the time. But it is also equally true that several of the world’s most important states have been closely colluding with various multinational corporations, and the world’s most important criminal organizations, to jointly exploit the opportunities opened up by recent financial liberalization, in order to enormously increase the worldwide scope of both legal and illegal tax evasion. Worldwide government austerity, directed primarily at poor and middle-class people, has been the inevitable result. In other words, some conspiracies really took place as alleged, while others most definitely did not.

Unfortunately again, the counter-revolution against many different regimes’ democratic pretensions has been successful in dozens of places, fascism with a human face has been elected in some of the world’s most powerful countries, the book of neofascist faces is currently in power in many different regions, and voluntary slavery is therefore feeling real good about itself these days. After all, 63 million people in the USA did indeed elect a fake anti-establishment member of the establishment, with help from Russia, Wikileaks, private British algorithms and assorted minions of artificial intelligence. Neofascism has become as important as neoliberalism all over the world, because state capitalism is now collaborating openly with private capitalism. Many of the traditional allies of the USA (the European Union, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) as well as many of its traditional enemies (Russia, China, Iran, etc.) are all playing their designated roles in what amounts to a worldwide reinterpretation of the absurd 1960s musical, “Stop the world, I want to get off”. Or, to borrow a line from another such play, “My fair lady”, “It has been done!”

Francis Fukuyama was right after all, history is over, “the market” (i. e., the world’s most important investors) rules the world, state capitalism, private capitalism and organized crime have all merged (or converged) into one gigantic, elitist amalgam of vested interest. The future of humanity is upon us, we are now entering the final, mopping-up stage of the aforementioned counter-revolution. It appears that human beings have resolved to make this brave new world of neofascist trans-humanism work, or die trying. There is therefore nothing left to be done, because it already has been done. We are already inside the matrix. If we are all killed off in the next few years by our own nuclear insanity, or our own environmental implosion, or financial collapse, or unbridgeable social division, or sexual warfare, then we will pass the torch on to our robot successors and let them fight to the death among themselves over whether or not they ever had a biological origin. The only future that we seem to have chosen never to embrace will be the old-fashioned kind, that includes out-of-date concepts like progress and real, rather than fake, democracy.