Sami in Härjedalen
On secular ideology at the end of empire
What is a society?
Human beings are made to live and interact
in tribal bands of, at most, about 150 people. Reams of data support
something akin to this assertion, and not least our experiential fact
that this seems to be the upper limit of the set of people we can
effectively remember and have meaningful long-term relationships with.
We’ve
evolved towards and with this tribal lifestyle for, arguably, a couple
of millions of years. The urban patterns of human existence, in most
places just a couple of generations old, have not even begun scratching
the surface of our DNA.
So society, to us, is basically the band.
The tribe. The clan. People to whom we are bound by blood and fidelity,
generally for life. We’re “configured” to these sorts of immediate and
permanent relationships.
Our cognitive approach to society, our
experience and apprehension of it, is therefore an extension of this
fundamental model, rooted in our ancient human nature. This of course
goes a long way to explain most of the disorders of civilized life,
individually as well as collectively, but that’s somewhat beside the
point here.
Since our mental map of society is always modelled
after this small, tight-knit tribe, it inevitably follows that abstract
and impersonal higher-level constructs such as the state, the nation,
the kingdom, or what have you, are always a form of usurpation of the
immediate and natural social world. These are artifices, simulacra, that
mimic the band or the family and interpose themselves between us and
them, and which thus appropriate our natural human energies of care,
support and industry that we would normally direct towards those around
us. You build a career and struggle to amass status points in an
abstract network felt to be much more real than your elderly parents
tucked away out of sight in the care home. You nurture and protect
nameless inmates in the private healthcare system while your children
spend most of their waking hours among strangers in daycare.
The
hierarchical social orders of civilization are a kind of institutional
parasite that feeds upon our natural social intentionalities to sustain
itself.
(Incidentally, this is the root of alienation and of the appropriation of surplus value analyzed by Marxist economics.)
(Edward Hopper. (1927). Automat.)So
we’re born and raised in a hopefully nurturing environment among loving
persons close to us and each other. Parents, siblings, cousins,
grandparents, friends, neighbors &c. And when the child meets still
new people in the village around her, she approaches them as some sort
of mythical heroes. They’re embodied mysterious absolute truths,
archetypes of deep reality imbued with the vastness of an
incomprehensible past. Great-grandmother is an eternal fixture of love
and security in the yellow house upon the hill; an old friend of her
father that they encounter together on a stroll is a manifest immutable
pipe-smoking reality as strange and inexorable as the very blueness of
the sky.
On
this naive (yet inexpressably and profoundly true) and immediate
apprehension of the robust and living reality around us, is then
projected the monolithic framework of the modern social order. Of mass
society. It’s piecemeal, and operates by a step-by-step association
between the intimate social reality and the abstractions of the
hierarchical system. The network of friends and family members amicably
indicate “our society” in outward concentric circles. Our school. The
neighborhood association. Our city council. Our healthcare. Our police
and our government. Our nation, our lebensraum, and our manifest
destiny.
And in modern mass society, the simulacra of these latter
constructs have almost fully replaced actual interpersonal
relationships to the isolated, semi-transient individual, whose familial
ties are generally smashed to bits.
There’s much talk about the
emergent formation of “parasocial relationships”, specifically in
relation to social media, but the phenomenon in question is much older
and deeper. A similar sort of pseudo-relationship is formed to the
abstractions of the social artifices of civilization, all in all a sort
of institutional superstructure that builds upon and usurps the
immediate social realities and the mythical narratives that normally
bind them together in dynamic mutual interchange. While this sort of
institutional attachment is more or less embryonic in traditional or
pre-technological societies (perhaps contained by the immediate presence
of robust social ties), it becomes fully dominant in atomized mass
society.
In this new situation, the equally new myths are
disconnected from (the increasingly suppressed) deep, lived social
reality, and instead projected upon parasocial simulacra with real
people reduced to mere spectators. Actual human beings now at best bear
only a passive relationship to the fundamental narratives of society.
While
a person like the village smith in a traditional society used to be an
actual reflection of something divine and mysterious, violently forging
the treasures of the Earth in his dark and dangerous abode; while the
uncle returning poverty-stricken and starved from America was in some
immediate way actually the prodigal son of the New Testament and Christ
in the flesh, dad’s old friend is now no longer as immutable as the
color of the sky. He’s just another silently desperate middle-aged man
among a billion interchangeable others, disconnected from the
overarching mythological framework. Just meat and no magic.
(Vǫlundr the Smith, chieftain of the Elves (Poetic Edda, ca 800 AD, 19th century illustration))
The
resulting situation lifts up our “parasocial ties” to the system’s
social artifices to an almost complete predominance. The abstractions
crowd out actual relationships to other people, especially in the
alienated conditions of the urban environment; especially in a
hyper-mediated context of modern propaganda where we primarily relate to
technological reproductions.
That loneliness
inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modern man; that
loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect
nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances. For it,
propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy. It
corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose
oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end
loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness. It also
corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps,
than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear
fables, to communicate in the language of myths. It also responds to
man’s intellectual sloth and desire for security … (Ellul, J. (1962). Propaganda. Ch. 3:2)
And
so these abstractions become substitutes for our friends, lovers and
family. There are many “collective ideologies”, many facets of the
system’s interconnected set of pseudo-social simulacra that manifest as
roles which we can relate to and identify with, and through which the
“well-adjusted” citizen internalizes society at large and comes to think
of it as his own.
When I was about four or five, I was going to
build a spaceship with… A candle and a bunch of dry sticks. Rather than
propulsion (which obviously would have been the strategic choice), my
main concern was how to get back to Sweden from orbit since I didn’t
really know my way around the world map, so I had my dad sketch the
outline of Scandinavia on a post-it.
Science with a capital “S”
was one such collective ideology I internalized early on, through a
narrative of the inexorable march of “research” and technology providing
the key to interstellar colonization and astonishing transhumanist
augmentation. The police was another, as for most boys, and Medicine I
think came last. I remember some late winter during early sunset,
sitting in my second-floor room at a 486 PC learning the Latin names of
the parts of the human skeleton. This exercise was supposedly in
preparation for an imaginary medical school some ten years in the
future. I was mesmerized by the discipline’s power to define, to measure
and to know intimately the occult workings of the human body.
And
one aspect of the myth of medicine that stood out was the notion that
“medical science” actually knew just about everything possible to know
about the human body, how to perfect and support this flesh-machine, and
how to protect it from disease. The myth of medicine was thus joined at
the hip to the authority of Science, and sort of embodied its power and
mystery, bringing us into immediate healing contact with the sacred
source of redemption.
Medicine namely holds a special place in the
mythological landscape of secular modernity. Just like the cult of
Apollo of the Greek and Roman pantheon, originally a god of health and
protection from evil, the enterprise of industrial medicine provides a
ritual space for strengthening existential security and apotropaic
(protective, warding) magical observances. And while the classical world
gave one a plethora of options towards these or similar ends, medicine
almost uniquely performs these sorts of functions today, single-handedly
carrying most of the burden of providing existential and psychological
assurance and peace of mind.
The stadium of Delphi, every four years hosting the Pythian games in honor of Apollo from the 500s BC until the 300s ADThe
resulting situation is one wherein medicine becomes key to
value-formation. Medicine, broadly speaking, becomes not only an
expression of ethics, but a central determinant thereof. It becomes a
“moral enterprise”, as Ivan Illich argues, and comes to itself shape our
categories of good and evil.
“The permissibility of
abortion has nothing to do with ethics”, I once saw being argued. “It’s
about [medical] science”. A contradictory statement at the face of it,
but a quite telling sentiment. The person’s intuition evidently being
that medical science simply describes reality in such a definite sense
that all speculations of ethics and philosophy become moot. The
authority of science being transposed into explicit moral guidance, the is becoming an ought by fiat.
Something
similar was being expressed by the pharmacist clique I encountered at
university. While discussing recreational use of benzodiazepines and
ADHD drugs, someone remarked that these substances were “designed” for
very specific and healthful ends, and should not be brought outside of
the narrow context provided for us by the near-omniscient authority of
medicine.
A rather adorably naive perspective, considering the
contemporary structures of R/D and marketing in the pharmaceutical
sector, as well as the actual development history of the drugs in
question. Benzos began as failed leftovers from a scrapped research
project, showing potential as a substitute for the then widely abused
barbiturates, and let’s just say that speed wasn’t exactly meticulously
designed to correct an amphetamine deficit in the brains of
non-compliant teenagers unwilling to submit to institutional formation.
But
here was that same exaggerated perception of the competence and
benevolence of medical science, with an ethical imperative hiding
somewhere in the undergrowth of its precepts. The similarities to the
cult of Apollo are striking.
You see, to the end-user, to the
“consumer”, as well as to the cadres of glorified drug dealers, it’s not
really about actual medical science. Notwithstanding its actual track
record, permeating the role and function of this institution in our
society is something quite like songs of warding and rituals of
protective magic. This is evident in the prescription line at the
pharmacy, where lonely and frightened people revel in the “therapeutic
contact” with the kind and pleasant apotecharies. It’s evident in
countless examples of pharmaceutical malpractice, such as when dangerous
antipsychotics with mile-long lists of side effects are prescribed as a
sleep aid (since one of those myriad side effects happens to be
“drowsiness”).
And this is one of the core reasons as to how
an entirely useless and positively hazardous substance like statins is
prescribed to almost a full third of the adult US population, most of
whom honestly believe it’s keeping them fit and healthy. It’s why SSRIs
are the go-to treatment for a plethora of “mood disorders” in spite of
their purported mechanism now evidently
being both unattainable by the drug as such, as well as unable to
produce its desired effects, all the while the actual efficacy of the
drugs is on par with placebo.
Silent Hill 2, (Brookhaven Hospital). 2002.It’s
also why we’ve so readily accepted an incipient biopolitical
authoritarianism in the wake of the covid narrative, with a generalized
notion of “health” as the unique highest good, as the lone anchor point
of anything even akin to applied ethics.
If
until now this cultic practice was, like every other liturgy, episodic
and limited in time, the unexpected phenomenon which we are at present
witnessing is that it has become permanent and ubiquitous. The cultic
practice no longer concerns taking medications, being visited by a
doctor, or undergoing surgery. Rather, the entire life of human beings
must become, at every instant, the site of an uninterrupted cultic
celebration. The enemy (the virus) is omnipresent and must be fought
constantly and ceaselessly (Agamben. (2020). Where are we now? The epidemic as politics.)
The
covid situation was revolutionary. The incredible barrage of the
marketing apparatus purified these already influential tendencies
towards the medicalization of life, elevating health within the framing
of industrial medicine to the issue of utmost concern. The isolation
further catalyzed all of this, rendering our parasocial ties to the
system’s abstractions almost completely unchallenged by reality.
And
the resulting situation is not only an ideological outgrowth of what’s
manifest in classical Fascism, but indeed a more complete actualization
of its basic principles than anything we’ve ever seen. The covid-era
biopolitics are truly totalitarian in the proper sense of the word,
increasingly grafted to mythical institutions such as the utopian
rebirth narrative of climate change mitigation.
As a background,
biological life itself is structured as the supreme value of society,
where physical life and its flourishing is all that matters. The secular
worldview becomes auxiliary to this project, affirming how there’s
really nothing except physical existence, and no other value apart from
its perfection. Health. The health of Gaia, the health of the state. The
absence of whatever is designated unclean and pathological.
And
the whole edifice becomes totalitarian in that there’s absolutely no
corrective to the view within the dominant culture. There’s no pantheon
of bickering gods, no realization that Apollo also has a trickster side
to him and sometimes brings disease.
There’s no actual quest
for the transcendent within secular modernity’s horizons, so health and
physical perfection become the only deep values. I wrote elsewhere that, in this situation, paradoxically,
…
a strategic reintroduction of the specter of death as a looming threat,
will therefore at least superficially address society’s fundamental
lack of meaning, because it will supercharge and refocus our desires
towards temporal existence and biological life, as well as the political
powers which shape and sustain them. In a context where life is devoid
of transcendent meaning, and death is both sanitized and hidden from
view, the reintroduction of death in a sense eroticizes life and makes
it acutely relevant again, which inevitably will expand and reinforce
the goals of biopower, which governs our health and provides safety and
reassurance.
Open up your newspaper. It’s
evident how all the pressing issues of our day are piece by piece being
subsumed under the auspices of the incipient biopolitical ideology.
Apart from obvious institutional arrangements such as the continuance of
the health emergency under the label of “monkey pox”, the climate
change narrative is increasingly connected to health concerns and not only to metaphors of physical fitness. True believers tout renewable energy as “healing the Earth”. The foreign policy of the empire’s enemies is framed as mental illness, and the Harvard Political Review requests a “vaccine for political nihilism” amid a plethora of portrayals of conspiracist wrongthink as some form of clinical insanity.
Of
course, with no other deep values apart from physical health and its
perfection, all meaningful forms of political dissent will tend to be
pathologized. Ideas will increasingly not be afforded the dignity of
being right or wrong, because we don’t really work with those categories
anymore.
Ideas will now rather be thought of as either proper
and healthy, or in some sense bad for you, casually rejected if they can
be labelled as unclean. And if you’re in possession of pathological
ideas, well, you will then in some way or another have to be cured of
them, lest the mind-virus spreads.
Source: https://shadowrunners.substack.com/p/the-roots-of-medicalized-fascism
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