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Freedom and Government

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Reagan and other early neoliberals wanted people to free themselves from the government. The message landed well because the evidence of the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century was right there for everyone to see. Going in the opposite direction from the complete governmental control of those regimes seemed like a decidedly excellent idea.

Neoliberalism, though, is as changeable as it wants us to be. Since Reagan’s time, it evolved from freeing the people from the government to freeing the government from the people. The government doesn’t give a flying hoot about what the people want anymore. Whatever Walmart or Pfizer want, they’ll get, and people can stuff it.

To distract us from how completely unnecessary we are to the post-national political process, we get soap opera plots involving politicians. They do no politics (in the sense of actions that impact the life of the polis) but they perform entertaining antics.

This was different only a few years ago but things evolve fast. From seeking to be legitimized by the consent of the voters, the actor-politicians moved to pretending to seek legitimation, and now finally to not even bothering to pretend.

12 responses to “Freedom and Government”

  1. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    OT: Prigozhin’s plane shot down by russian air defense(!) near Tver….. (unconfirmed reports he and Utkin were both on board)

    https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1694391130735952081

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    \ the actor-politicians moved to pretending to seek legitimation, and now finally to not even bothering to pretend.

    Now a serious question, if things continue going in the same direction, how is it different from Putin?

    Btw, I don’t see it in Israel, though we do have probably even bigger problems, just different ones.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Putin is the next stage of what we are experiencing. He’s Justin Trudeau 2.0. So yeah. Not very different.

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  3. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    “Whatever Walmart or Pfizer want, they’ll get, and people can stuff it.”

    What’s the end goal though? Sometimes I feel this materialist analysis has become outdated. If the profit motive was the driving force behind the state of affairs, why do corporations have gargantuan DEI departments filled up with absolute deadweights? Why do corporations deliberately antagonize their customer base (see budweiser for a recent example of this) at the expense of their profits? Why does the capitalist class actively support (using politicians/DAs as a proxy) criminals looting department stores, rampant drug use in public places, and so on? I think there’s something more nefarious at play.

    What do you think?

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    1. Stringer Bell Avatar
      Stringer Bell

      Like, when you hear about a two year old child killed in gun violence in the south side of Chicago, and some idiot lefty tells you this is a direct consequence of redlining in the 60s, that’s how hollow this explanation feels. I feel we’re far beyond the materialist realm of profit and loss. This seems more like a spiritual war. This desire to tear down every semblance of all that is good, wholesome, joyful, meaningful. It’s not just about money. I’m really at a loss to explain it, sorry.

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    2. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “What’s the end goal though?”

      My take (based on sth Clarissa wrote some time ago and my own observations…)

      There is no end goal… it’s all too nihilistic for that and it will change anyway.

      The more immediate goal is to cement into place a rigid class system (to protect those at the top from their many, many failures).

      The system might look a little like:

      Shining elites (tiny, tiny group of ridiculously powerful mediocrities)

      High end work horses (bigger group with a touch of meritocracy so they can mitigate the worst effects of shining elite rule kept working by the promise of promotion to shining elite status…. which never happens)

      Infrastructure grunts (keep the system going at lower levels, one goal is to reduce the numbers to the barest minum possible).

      Indentured Consuelas (personal servants with no rights)

      Swamp people (underclass… already seen staggering around on streets in major cities drugged up to the gills).

      A lot of the surface details are different, but I highly recommend the sci fi novel He, She and It (I read the British edition retitled Body of Glass)

      I remember reading it in 1992 and not understanding a lot of it only to see big parts of it start to come true in real time….

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He,_She_and_It

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    3. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      There are people who think they are next-level humans. Or not even entirely human because they progressed beyond humanity. They do biohacking, they get in touch with the spirit world. They really think they are on a different level, beyond good and evil because they now define good and evil themselves. Some of them believe they are so advanced that they should never die. Money is definitely not the end-goal for them. It’s a necessary instrument but the goal is to achieve and sustain this transcendent state.

      The legend about the rich and the powerful drinking adrenochrome rose because these people do, indeed, have a source of adrenaline like no other. They don’t drink any literal blood of children (although, metaphorically, you can say they do something close). But their transcendent experience is, indeed, deeply enjoyable. They are chasing this high of godliness, and to us the manifestations of this process often look insane. But there’s a logic in them that our next-level humans see and exploit.

      Obviously, they aren’t really next-level. These are shallow, vain, stupid people. The whole capacity to see themselves as next-level betrays the shallowness and the stupidity at their core.

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        See: Michael Pollan: How to Change Your Mind.

        He’s a total fanboy of all that. I’d slap him if I met him.

        I find the whole thing totally creepy and… infuriating is the wrong word. I don’t know how to say it.

        I was born with a neurological oddity. From outside, it doesn’t interfere much with my day-to-day life, but it does impose some pretty profound limitations, and affects how I see/experience the world. It amounts to immature brain wiring– everything’s overconnected. I see sounds. I can’t filter out background noise. I can’t zero in on the “important” things and edit out everything else– I have to take it all in, and then find the important stuff, and that takes longer, so I take too long to respond in conversations, it comes off as weird, and most normal people won’t talk to me more than once (text-based internet communication is a godsend. I’ll be sad when it’s gone). Because it’s always too much information coming in, I can only really operate on one channel at a time– I can look at you, OR I can listen to you, but I can’t do both at once. My visual “refresh rate” is abnormal. LED lights that nobody else seems to mind are exhausting disco strobes to me. Unlike incandescents and fluorescents (which do flicker, but not as bad), LEDs go all the way on, and all the way off, with the frequency of the alternating electrical current, and I can see that. If I wave my hand under such a light, I don’t see a hand waving, I see ten separate hands frozen in the air (in non LED light, it leaves a smooth trail). I see geometric patterns in things. Nothing ever really holds still– everything’s got a bit of restless motion to it, even floors and furniture. Most things shimmer. Especially text. I’m extremely prone to hypnagogia, and sometimes get them when awake, but just in a relaxed or meditative state. There’s this funny thing that happens when I turn on the light each morning– just for a sec, beautiful complex glowing patterns hang in the air. Scales, interlocking circles, radials, meshed spirals, fractal things…

        So whatever. That’s normal. It’s always been that way, and it took me a long time to figure out that everybody doesn’t perceive things that way, and that people take drugs deliberately to experience it.

        I’m baffled by why anybody would want to. I’ve done a lot of reading to try and understand it, and concluded that the difference between the born-that-way experience and the drug experience is: euphoria. I don’t do euphoria. But people who take the drugs have the sensory experience + euphoria. That’s it. That’s the difference. The euphoria tricks you into thinking it’s all GREAT and MEANINGFUL and IMPORTANT (and by extension YOU are important and isn’t that great…). It’s really not. It’s just there. It’s just like people taking other drugs, like THC, to get high– except the THC is just the euphoria without the sensory effects (mostly), everybody’s familiar with the quality of insight people come up with when they’re baked, and rightly laughs it off. When you get that same feeling deep-sea diving, nobody thinks it’s a good thing. That’s when you take off your breathing tube and try to share it with fish, or lose track of which way is up. Then you die. No earth-shattering revelations there.

        But get into LSD, mescaline, toad-licking, psilocybin, stuff that artificially overconnects your brain (so you can be like me for a day!), but also gooses it with euphoria so that you think it all MEANS something and now you’re a vessel receiving the secrets of the effing universe…

        Sigh.

        I mean, I’ve occasionally heard voices (see hypnagogia above), had some interesting visions, and briefly talked to at least one shiny many-concentric-lines entity. But no euphoria, you know? That completely changes the experience. I don’t just wide-eyed innocently accept those things as real, meaningful, or good. I question them with a huge amount of skepticism. There’s no reason those can’t be internal delusion, and I belong to a religion that says there’s plenty of things “out there” that are willing to stop by for a chat when you’re receptive: and a lot of them are happy to play pretty and tell you lies. That framework seems useful, and I try to stick with a monastic skepticism about anything that seems chatty. No great revelations. But I can see where a little jolt of chemical euphoria and a dash of narcissism could easily turn some of those things into one of those OMG. Secrets. Of. The. Universe. type stories.

        (Feel free to write me off as a loony at this point, I know how that sounds and I won’t be offended)

        Orthodoxy gives us a roadmap for this. Templates for questioning spirits. Guidelines for judging otherworldly experiences. Best practices for dealing with the supernatural. It’s real, but the prevailing rules are: caution and humility.

        Just about any religion with a tradition of shamanism or fasting/meditation disciplines (such as Buddhism) has its own guidelines and guardrails for this sort of thing, as well.

        The class of well-off people like Pollan, like Silicon Valley-ites and our would-be Brahmin class… they’re trying to hack their way in through the back door and go exploring with no maps and no guardrails. Screw all that, we’re better than thousands of years of religious tradition because we’re the Smart People and we make our own rules. Who needs rules anyway? And then they think they’ve reached enlightenment and deserve to advise and administer the rest of the world.

        We have a clear guideline for this: “By their fruits you shall know them.”

        They talk a big talk, but the fruits are nasty. I think that says a lot about who they’ve been talking to on the other side.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          I’m a neurological oddity, too, and it’s fascinating to me to find out about other people’s neurological setups. Thank you so much for sharing! I have had some of the same experiences as you, and for me to say you are nuts, I’ll have to accept that I’m nuts, too. 🙂

          I’m in many ways the total opposite of you. For instance, I have to operate on two channels simultaneously or I begin to malfunction. But I have hypnagogia, too, and it’s part of why I have these extreme sleep issues my whole life. I get stuck in the hypnagogic state and don’t move in to real sleep. It can go on for hours. It’s a whole world in there, and I like it, so I keep myself there purposefully. I never thought about it as something that people try to generate artificially because it makes them feel special but what you say makes a lot of sense. You and I, as people who were born that way, know that, as everything in life, our way of being has benefits and drawbacks. You pay for everything. Nothing is 100% rewarding. I can go into states of extreme focus for hours on end, shutting out everything in a way most people can’t experience without drugs. But I pay for it by having to spend hours a day alone in a darkened room. Hypnagogia is my soothing mechanism and it’s great but I have really bad sleep issues my whole life because of it.

          People want the “special” parts without the tradeoffs. That doesn’t exist but they trick themselves into believing it does. The people who are into this biohacking and “next-stage humans” are usually people who are actually “previous-stage humans” because they completely lack in insight or any philosophical grounding. They are like kids who had candy, liked it, and now want to keep eating tons of it because it’s so good! Immature idiots is what they are.

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          1. methylethyl Avatar
            methylethyl

            “They are like kids who had candy, liked it, and now want to keep eating tons of it because it’s so good! Immature idiots is what they are.”

            Yes, this.

            And yeah, I’m also really good at the one-track focus thing. When I was in the workforce, I was the best (that’s not a brag, it’s the truth) at stuff that the nice sociable office people didn’t want to touch– clearing up tedious data-entry backlogs, and other things too boring for normies to contemplate. I could process more rebates in an hour than anybody else at my company. My supervisor would say: “Oh, give that project to Ethyl, she’s a MACHINE.” i.e. I didn’t have to take breaks, talk to other humans, or get distracted, I could just start the job, be accurate, work till it was done, and go home. I could also spot patterns– with rebates it meant I could see when something weird was going on, patterns of addresses, duplicates, surnames… I couldn’t tell what it meant, but when I pointed it out to my boss, it saved the company thousands of dollars because it was fraud.

            So yay, I have skillz. They’re just not people skills.

            But yes there are costs. I can’t have a regular social life. I can’t enjoy video content (TV, movies, etc.), amusement parks, or concerts. I can’t follow a conversation in a noisy environment. Huge swathes of music are off-limits because there are narrow frequency bands that are painful… and they include anything in that high, hissing range of cymbals, snare drums, tambourines, sleigh bells, radio static… Lots of commercial lighting is oppressive (Hobby Lobby is one of the worst offenders– I will never go there again if I can help it), and now that incandescent bulbs are nearly impossible to get– home lighting is getting that way too. More and more I try to orient around daylight hours so I don’t have to rely on electric lights. I miss out on a lot. There’s much that’s great in life, but… it is difficult to find superficial common ground with other people. Americans rely hugely on pop media culture as a frame of reference and for casual conversation topics… and that’s not a loop I’m in on.

            I try to view it philosophically. There is a certain monastic flavor to my home life– avoiding overstimulation is the ruling principle. I hope it’s good for my soul, rather than just stifling to my family.

            The hypnagogia… are brief, usually. Any that last a while are haggings/sleep paralysis and extremely unpleasant– but I’ve learned how to dispatch those and now they don’t happen. I think the monsters gave up. The other kinds– they’re just little snippets. Vivid but random. I have grapheme synesthesia (fairly common) where letters and numbers have… colors, personalities, and other less quantifiable attributes. I once had an immersive vision of the number 4. It was like a religious experience– the most intense of my life. I won’t bore you with details 😉 It has had two lasting effects: 1) The number 4 and I are pals. It’s the nicest number. 2) It hugely reinforced my natural caution about religious experiences.

            Yes, of course there are legit religious experiences– angels, saints, the works. But there are also experiences, that have a lot of weight and significance and even joy embedded in them… that aren’t Great Truths that need to be urgently shared with the whole world, and relevant to the salvation of your soul and the good of humanity, that make you a special messenger to the proles, etc. and I’m extremely relieved to belong to a religious tradition that has clear procedures in place for discernment, where those things are concerned. I can easily see where, without those boundaries, things could go off the rails very very fast.

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    4. PaulS Avatar
      PaulS

      Corporates do value profits, but they value their brands even more because you can’t make profits if nobody wants to buy your product because your brand is unfashionable. This is the main reason for the DEI departments. Corporate types generally aren’t that good at keeping up with the fashions, hence fiascos like Budweiser.

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  4. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    It’s grim, but it makes sense. Thanks.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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