Regress report

This is the opposite of a progress report on the human condition, in other words it’s a regress report. Which fits in quite nicely with the overall zeitgeist of many of my other blogposts. I was originally going to call this particular posting, “Billions of big babies”, the same title that I used for the last book that I published back in 2006. Because a large part of the cause for regression nowadays comes from the extreme childishness of a great deal of recent human behaviour. But that title can be misleading, since it seems to imply that most of the overall population has an equal share in the genesis of the current disastrous situation, which is not true at all. The richest and the most powerful people among us are certainly much more responsible than are most of those at the bottom of the pecking order. Their capacity to do harm to others is much greater than most people’s capacity, in the same way that richer and more powerful countries also have much more capacity to do harm than do other countries. Unfortunately, the capacity to do harm generally results in real harm being done every time, since few people seem to be capable of resisting their aggressive urges.

If we look at all the different ways by which human society has been evolving backwards (devolving) since the 1970s, neoliberalism is still the number one cause. Which can be summed up as the tendency among dominant people, no matter what their official ideology or religion, to work together (in spite of everything that divides them), in order to ensure that the enormous gap between the social classes keeps on getting bigger and bigger all over the world. Not only so far as income is concerned but also vis-à-vis all the different ways of accessing knowledge and basic intelligence. With the result that even basic IQs, in the countries that measure such things, seem to be going down these days for hundreds of millions of abandoned “ordinary people”, the austerity process of the past several decades having considerably downgraded basic education. A process that is constantly being reinforced by the increased (often socially malignant) intelligence of the tiny elite from big business and big government that controls all the world’s big data.

The anti-humanist attitude of the ultra elitists in every country also lies behind the current, neofascist reaction to neoliberal austerity. It turns out that the ultra-right-wing populist movement began gathering steam right alongside the earliest forms of neoliberalism, when the “Chicago boys” first established their symbiotic relationship with the Pinochet military dictatorship in Chile (back in 1973), and has never stopped gathering momentum. This world-wide revival of ultra-conservatism is directly related to the equally symbiotic revival of dozens of different varieties of old-time, fundamentalist religion, in every one of the world’s most important cultural centres. Atavistic religion having become a potent and necessary component of each neofascist movement currently dominating large parts of today’s world.

Although extremist tendencies are common to all the world’s established religions these days, it is still important to emphasize the particularly virulent, salafist trend that exists within the Islamic community. All over the Muslim world, radical islam has become a genuine scourge, increasingly replacing the prior cohabitation between moderate islam and modernism with simple, literal, fundamentalist (but fake) answers to everything. As such, it is another excellent example of childish regression, covering every kind of reactionary behaviour, including terrorist aggression against rival ideologies, most of their victims being only “moderate” Muslim believers. Salafist women are also playing an important propaganda role, among other things by showing off their hijab, and other more extreme varieties of cover-up clothing, as if they were wearing signs around their necks proclaiming their sincere belief in male domination of women.

The deliberate dumbing-down of the political discourse of the true-believer, brought on by the ostensible (fake) refusal of elitism, only succeeds in even more fully reinforcing that same elitism. As several ultra-conservative observers have pointed out, most denunciations of ultra-right-wing populism are probably not that dangerous, at least from their point of view, since most adversaries of those movements use a lot of big words, and unpopular concepts, in their writings. Which means that any criticism of their message is probably lost on the most important audiences targeted by neofascist organizers. Dumbing down also includes another recent decline in the already abysmal intellectual levels of popular television programs (“Say yes to the dress”), the pre-programmed hype of social media, the political manipulation of whole countries through controlled algorithms, and an ever-increasing dependence on pets, and inanimate objects (hoarding), as a substitute for human contact.

Not to forget the very important observation according to which all news are fake news, since all facts are necessarily social (ideological) constructions. The human brain is quite simply incapable of describing things the way that they really are, although modern science, with its primary emphasis on verification of each contributing observation and experiment, comes the closest. Every time someone thinks about some phenomenon globally, the brain is constantly “filling in the blanks” in our inevitably limited knowledge of the world, based on some particular interpretation imposed on reality. So even though constant fact-checking has become increasingly necessary in today’s world, no one can really pretend to have established any specific fact whatsoever, once and for all. This is, however, in no way an excuse for particularly reactionary people to make up deliberately stupid stories about everything, based on no real information at all, as they are always doing nowadays. Thereby giving such intense delight to the infantile-regressive people in the ultraconservative movements, who always prefer “spiritual excitation” to any of the more rational ways of thinking.

One of the more interesting observations that I read about recently was the ongoing convergence that some thinkers have postulated between the current tendency among many scientists to acknowledge that many different species of animals are a lot smarter than was previously believed, and the current tendency among many groups of people to follow the existing trend toward reduced human intelligence! Recent human regression seems to have gotten to the point that it has encouraged those same observers to believe that something akin to blind instinct among human beings (“thinking animals”) is almost as potent a force as the ordinary instinct that is still considered by most scientists to be a major influence on the behaviour of what used to be called “dumb animals”.

The worship of extreme narcissism, fulfilling the hippy agenda of the 1960s and the 1970s, certainly seems to be the main underlying cause of recent human regression, since it is by far the most common behavioural tendency favoured by both of the world’s leading ideologies (neoliberalism and neofascism). Hundreds of millions of people wallow around nowadays in more or less extreme personal indulgence, combining such devastating diseases as the various different kinds of drug addiction (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, cocaine, opioids, etc.), taken separately or all together. That are often also combined with addiction to pornography (heterosexual and homosexual) and to unprotected sexual activity. Not to mention increasingly popular forms of legal and illegal gambling, including government-sponsored lotteries and sports-related wagers. “Must have fun” (anything goes) is all the rage these days.

Even the widespread opposition to toxic masculinity, such as in the “me-too” movement, does not seem to have brought about any kind of decline in alpha male aggression toward women, which still seems to be predicated on doing as much harm as possible to anyone perceived to be physically weaker than oneself. Just for the sheer pleasure of acting badly, particularly but by no means exclusively among men in high places. Curiously, millions of women also participate in this same syndrome, usually through atavistic identification with the aggressors (“stand by your man”). To which can also be added millions of victims of professional sport (the concussion epidemic) and various other kinds of disguised suicide, the most important of which seems to be “workaholism”, among those hundreds of millions of people who are constantly refusing to take vacations (“voluntarily” or not so voluntarily after all).

At the same time, hundreds of millions of other people also continue to indulge, apparently more than ever before, in the kind of barbarian cultural practices that were at one time supposed to have been declining all over the place. The incredibly long list of those kinds of practices includes such thoroughly disgusting abominations as honour killings, female excision, forced marriages (especially targeting underage girls), the death penalty for apostasy, religious terrorism and so on and so forth. Practices that not only affect the original host populations in various different parts of the “third world” (Asia, Africa and Latin America), but also minority immigrant populations in Europe and North America. Slavery is yet another cultural tradition from the past that is also being revived all over the world, particularly but by no means exclusively, for sexual reasons.

The former third world is also much more poverty-stricken in reality than it is officially considered to be by United Nations bureaucrats. For them, only about a billion people, less than 15% of the world population, are still living in extreme poverty, defined as an income of less than two dollars a day per person. By Western middle-class standards (which are constantly attracting millions of actual and potential migrants), it would be more accurate to say that 90% of the world’s people are poor, with about 75% living in extreme poverty. In dozens of countries, of which India is one of the worst examples, 97% of the total population is living outside what is called “the formal economy”. Living and working conditions in all those places are so abysmally bad that it seems difficult to know where to start in order to describe them properly. This truly horrible, world-wide income distribution being caused by the combination of neocolonial foreign investment (from several Eastern as well as from most Western countries), with ultra-egotistical attitudes toward their poorer compatriots on the part of most of the local elites.

For their part, the countries hosting most of the Western world’s “Caucasian” populations are still actively indulging in their own barbarian cultural practices, notably through military repression (aerial bombardment) of dissent in the third world and mistreatment of immigrants coming from those same dissenting countries. Not that any of the “Eastern” governments and peoples treat ethnic and religious minorities any better than do the Western ones, whether they are classed as “traditional” minorities, or as more recent arrivals. Every country in the world has also fallen victim to an unprecedented increase in every possible kind of corruption, as well as a major increase in the power, including the military power, of organized crime. Not to mention increasingly violent, religiously inspired, attacks on such nonconformist social practices as abortion, female adultery and homosexuality.

At the same time, the traditional, extractive industries (fuels, metals and other raw materials) continue to be as popular now as they ever were among leading investors, which contributes enormously to ever higher levels of industrial pollution in general, and induced climate change (the Anthropocene hypothesis). Apparently, even the 1987 Montreal Protocol on eliminating the CFCs causing the massive hole in the ozone layer, once touted as the one truly successful, international treaty on the environment, has been thoroughly undermined by illegal production of the offending chemicals, notably in China. The lip-service being given all over the world to doing something about the environmental crisis just makes everything worse by providing people with false hope. The influence of uncontrolled, harmful chemicals on the environment has also apparently had a disastrous effect on levels of human intelligence, not to mention having greatly contributed to a debilitating decline in male fertility. Fake, neofascist solutions to neoliberalism in every part of the world, such as that being provided by the Trump regime in the USA, also contribute massively to regression, considerably amplifying the false-hope syndrome.

Neoliberal counter-attacks on neofascism, such as that provided by leaders like Emmanuel Macron (France) and Justin Trudeau (Canada), are just as counter-productive. Just because theoretically progressive, collectivist solutions to neoliberalism (and neofascism), such as totalitarian communism and democratic socialism, failed to give results several decades ago is no reason to conclude that either neoliberalism, or neofascism, is somehow a good system by comparison. Those ideologically progressive, collectivist solutions failed not only because of their own internal demons (either extreme conformism or extreme opportunism), but also because of the massive opposition organized against them by the combined forces of private (neoliberal) and state (neofascist) capitalism. Exceptions to the rule, that is state capitalist countries that also practice genuine political democracy, social democracy and successful absorption of immigrant populations, are almost non-existent.

Instead, neoliberalism has exhibited a distinct tendency to encourage the rise of neofascism, rather than to discourage it for real. Another recent example was provided in some of the poorer districts of Montreal recently, when primary school teachers noticed that they were receiving more and more recent immigrants every year, from some of the world’s most devastated countries, such as Syria. Apparently, new pupils in those districts, with no appropriate language skills at all (some of them never having held a pencil in their lives), just show up on any particular morning, with no advance notice being given to the teachers. Who are then expected to integrate those children into their regular classes, with no additional training or resources (professional help), no planning, no preparation, no coordination between the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government, not to mention with the independent school-board level of bureaucracy. Which would seem to be the best possible way to foster negative attitudes toward officially illegal immigrants. The insanely arrogant people at the top do not seem to give a damn about any of this, they just make decisions for legal or electoral reasons, and expect all the people below them to do whatever is being demanded of them, regardless of the situation in which they find themselves. “Doing more for less”, over and over again, in the usual laissez-faire fashion.

If we put all those negative situations together as part of a coherent analysis, this means that humanity is collectively going downhill at an increasingly rapid rate, and there does not seem to be any limit as to how incredibly monstrous some people can become. Every kind of leadership in society is pointing in the same downward direction, daring everyone to go even farther than they have ever gone before. It is a race to the bottom of the ocean, even if everyone knows that the bottom is a very long way down indeed. Things are bad enough right now, but they seem to be constantly getting worse, at a pace that could easily speed up quite rapidly. Particularly in the wake of the next worldwide financial crisis, which promises to be a lot more devastating than the one that took place back in 2008. Add on a major geopolitical crisis, in a world chock full of nuclear weapons, and we could end up accelerating already dangerous climate change in a truly major way. Given the kind of people who are running the world nowadays, who is ready to bet that no one will ever be stupid enough to go too far? Or have we already gone too far for anyone to realistically expect us to be able to adopt a more sustainable human condition?

All of which seems to be nothing more than an ordinary consequence of all of us just turning out to be insufficiently evolved animals, sinking into an enormous quagmire of our own fabrication. So, make humanity great again? Good luck with that. Unfortunately, there do not seem to be any genuinely hopeful signs around anywhere.