The Conquest Of Real - Degenerate Philosophies of the Book
Politics / Religion Jul 21, 2014 - 03:29 PM GMTBy: Andrew_McKillop
A Dangerous Time
Try to find a common theme, apart from the probable or possible role of the US CIA and other secret services in Al Qaida and ISIS, the Ukraine civil war, Boko Haram or even the rigging of gold, oil and other financial markets. Or the increasingly global Flash Mob uprisings, disappearing or destroyed Malaysian airliners, Russia's ***** Riot, and a bearded lady-transvestite winning the Eurovision song contest of 2014.
The common link is the retreat from real – the real world, real things, reality. Fantasy is the default, usually with a morbid, violent or bizarre handle.
The age-old roles of death and fear of death are used to better unseat and supplant reality, and anchor new and enticing but short-lived, always-disposable fantasies in the confused thought matrix of “the mass”, firstly in western society but now almost worldwide. The image is that of society fumbling down a rocky lane on a dark and foggy night, instead of traveling an open highway in daytime. To be sure this is dangerous, but for bystanders and voyeurs this is one of the quick-cheap thrills we get from destroying meaning and avoiding the real.
Of course this is the privileged domain of conspiracy theorists, but few of them state what is really happening. The Conquest of Real is not just the denial or postponement of the real, but destroying it with a newfound inability to know. Put another way “What you cant know does not exist”. For conspiracy theorists the main interest is to find out who wants to make us unable to know?.
Remember the Y2K hysteria in 2000? Or the Maya 13th Baktun of December 2012 after which the world would surely end? They threatened “potted disaster” but the political handle was hard to spot, even by seasoned conspiracy theorists. Neither of these instant apocalypses generated any commercial spinoff – for example plastic replica silex knives of the type used by Mayan priests.
Unstrange Fascination with Death
Of course Mayans seemed strangely fascinating. They were unbeatable for running mass executions. Their priests used silex knives to slice open the rib cages of hundreds of victims a day, to rip out their still-beating hearts and place them high up the Mayan Pyramids. The gods invented by the priesthood elite were numbered in dozens, and were mostly evil so these gods could only approve of mass slaughter - and also Save the World!
In any millenarian cult, the defeat of logic is paramount.
How would mass slaughter save the world? How does “quantitative easing” or the massive and constant printing of chaff money by the central banks Save the Money? It doesn't and it can't, but that is logical so it is haram, as in Boko Haram. Reality and truth are dangerous, unclean or at very least must be disactivated and shunned whenever possible.
As we know, the Mayans died out and the world didn't end in Y2K or 2012. Much more important is why it all seemed – and seems - so fascinating. Why do we need Al Qaida and Men in Black terrorizing people in Iraq or eastern Ukraine, or a bearded shemale Eurovision song contest winner?
This is where the conspiracy theorists can start posing themselves questions. In the former police states of the Evil Empire, as “Ronnie” Reagan called it, the propaganda apparatus did not simply hand out ever more generous dollops of unreality. Of fantasy, often macabre or deathly, or both. Police state propaganda was organized and structured, and had a defined goal of brainwashing “the mass”.
What we have in our (over)mature democracies, or former democracies is what we can call self-amplifying and runway feedback in a process that lunges further and faster into the unreal. This is like the multiplying buckets of the Sorceror's Apprentice – now sometimes filled with blood.
The Y2K hysteria can be called a millenial cult for the millenium, but it was only short-lived. There were no “sacrificial victims”. Shortly after, in September 2001, a much more powerful new social, cultural and ideological fantasy was created, with about 3000 sacrificial human victims, mostly in New York. Within weeks if not days, the “9/11 Mystery” had been concocted and to this day has its web of plots, intrigue, half-truths and lies swirling like fog on a dark and rocky path, blotting out any definitive knowledge of what really happened.
The Conquest of Real
What is real and what is illusion? Putting it simply, reality is hard-edged and like the Truth has only one version on offer. Fleeing from that to mass fantasy products fabricated by the imagination starts by denying or at least diluting the real, before completely supplanting it. Goethe, who invented the fable of the Sorceror's Apprentice worked this theme a long time ago.
The iconic symbol of new non-reality, of new and evanescent fuzzy-edged meaning which literally waxes and wanes, is The Moon. It indicated to sages over long ages and in varied societies and cultures that a scarcely sublimated need or desire for security is present. This overrides all need to find true meaning. Collectively, society stumbles along a path sewn with mantraps and surprises, mostly bad. Each revelation is only fleeting, and the process snowballs by demanding ever more effort to build and maintain the always-growing web of fleeting images, which supercede and replace the real world.
In the past, this process or system was the time-hallowed trigger for Witch Hunts - literally barking at the Moon. In the future USA and in England for about 200 years from the 16th to 18th centuries, and in Germany where witch hunts where contemporaneous with and linked to the much wider and massive Schwarmerei peasant revolts, historians estimate that probably 50 000 or more persons died. These were mostly innocent victims of society's psychotic angst, wrongly accused of evil, and drowned or burnt at the stake, starved to death, or killed by any weapon to hand.
Our present loss of meaning trades false security for truth, illusion for knowledge. The process is uber- dangerous but in our 21st century western societies the tipping point happened years ago, probably 20 years before the turn of the century, so the process is “mature”. Like a nova or supernova star explosion or the sunspots of our Sun, there are periodic epic outburst phases such as the moment of Y2K hysteria, the start of 9/11 madness, the global warming panic, peak oil fear or the Big Bang of the disembodied and delinquant financial “industry”, which since 2008 is in permanent and probably terminal crisis.
The hysteria phases can be transient, but their role is to accelerate the destruction of reality and the web of meaning in society, to subvert the truth by supplanting it. This is the essential and basic goal of easily identifiable “manufactured outbreaks”. Y2K hysteria soon waned and was forgotten, but it was replaced by the longer-running, more gory and very dangerous 9/11 Terror theater of the absurd.
Overall, the “founding hysteria” is not really important. They are the launch pad for mass fantasy and illusion, they have made their mark proving that society was primed, ready, anxious and willing to stumble into what I call The Great Unknowing.
From Extra-rational to Post-rational Belief
The seeds were sown. They drew on a rich subsoil, the Twin Track template of constantly mixing and mingling fantasy and truth, a template dating far back into the past. We could surmise that in our 21st century western society case this especially dates to the 1970s or the beginning of the 1980s.
What happens is that extra-rational or post-rational belief swamps opposing knowledge-based belief, which is feared and then disowned, derided and forgotten. The 9/11 event, as we know, made it easy for the former "Western democracies" to run a war-crazed rampage, firstly in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. The fantasy component was high or very high, from the start. In the particularly dirty Iraq war this killed at least 100 000 Iraqi civilians and showcased Depleted Uranium weapons leaving cancer-causing radwastes behind for decades. As a “peace dividend” huge quantities of Light Sweet Crude were announced as available almost for the asking beneath every single palace of Saddam Hussein.
This could only be true! In large part due to the permanent wraps of disinformation, fantasy and illusion, pursuing the higher goal of replacing truth and reality with “fuzzy edged meaning”, no shame was ever expressed by the leaderships responsible for these war crimes. The events were memory dumped and erased from the hard disc of western society in a process where they firstly became “controversial”, and then became unknown.
Soon they can be denied as ever having happened, by the willfully self-deluded, in the same way that victims of the long series of Witch Hunts were soon forgotten – along with the hunts themselves.
Unknowingness glides forward like a thickening fog. The process is self-feeding – like the always growing numbers of buckets that the Sorceror's Apprentice magics into being. Society's path darkens further, always more somber, obscured by the banks of fog welling up on a dark and rocky lane to nowhere – or to the abyss – but that is the “macabre charm” of this degenerative process!
Degenerate Philosophies
Certainly the three so-called Religions of the Book can be called “degenerate philosophies” and some philosophers of religion do not use inverted commas to say so. Their explanation for why they use this supposedly emotive term is that, for example, there is clear evidence in the three so-called Abrahamic Religions that they exploit what is called platonism and neo-platonism, named for Socrates and Plato, but deform it either accidentally or purposefully.
One factor is their denial of rational logic – for example the cult and role of miracles, but many other non-rational components of religious belief are also clear. One of these, in all the major religions, is the quest to achieve a state of unknowing or the erasure of all former and previous knowledge, either implied or formally defined as “unclean”. Other manipulation and deformation by the Abrahamic religions of well-known logical systems, notably of syllogistic reasoning, is easily identified.
Our 21st century cult of unknowing pursues the goal of creating degenerate and false innocence. Comparing this to the similarly false logic used by the three Religions of the Book, we could say that a typical false syllogism used in western society today is as follows:
Major premise: Ignorance is innocence.
Minor premise: Innocence is beautiful.
Conclusion: Therefore we are beautiful.
In some specific domains, such as the music business, films and fine art the “emancipation from conventional morality”, and reality, can be called decadent by some but creative and stimulating by others – heavily underlining the role of ambiguity in society and the communication of ambiguity. In these cases, the ambiguity is desired, and even has a price tag or economic value.
But deconstructing conventional morality, in the philosophical domain, followed by ideological and then political reconstruction, incumbent elites can be protected but the process easily leads to unintended results. Decadence becomes more than exciting and intellectually challenging and becomes intrinsic or “hard-wired”, always operating on fuzzy-edged borders and shifting frontiers.
Decadence is a major unintended goal of the unknowing process, insofar as the process is consciously designed or willed.
As a key example, the outrage of war-and-gore can be reprogrammed as consumer sport and decadent distraction. In the same way as Germany beat Brazil in the 2014 World Cup football contest 7 – 1, the first days of the Israeli invasion of Gaza in July produced a 200 – 1 victory for Israel measured by body count. The mainstream media, today, is stuffed with images of body parts falling to ground from flight MH17 over a region of about 30 square kilometres in eastern Ukraine. We are shown stray dogs eating the putrefying body parts under a hot Sun.
Reporting of these events – football and war – is “dangerously similar”. More outrages can follow whenever they are needed, and that is now increasingly often.
We can easily compare this festival of gore with the rising numbers of Roman gladiatorial open-air death fests in the last decades before Rome was sacked and burnt, about 440 AD. Blood and circuses had fully replaced bread and circuses but in no way prevented Rome's fall. Paying an ever-rising tribute to the Conquest of Real and the destruction of meaning in society, we cannot be surprised that this is also the path to war.
By Andrew McKillop
Contact: xtran9@gmail.com
Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights
Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012
Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.
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