The best dystopia is a dystopia where people sort-of-understand their dystopian fate. People in the optimal dystopia often joke about living in a dystopia. They talk about the concept of a “darkest timeline” and speculate that they may, in fact, be living in it, but then laugh away the idea and return to their entertainment. There is a lot of entertainment in the optimal dystopia.
In this world they like to be entertained by movies and television shows about dystopias. The residents of this world like to watch stories about apocalyptic natural disasters. They like gods in capes fighting monsters and each other to save earth, or something else that seems important by the end of act 2.
What stops them from really grasping their situation? How could these people live in a world where their brothers and sisters live in tents filled with shit, a world of ritualized mass shootings of children and enormous factories dedicated to the industrial murder of animals, a world burning itself alive: how could they keep living in this world and not see it for the dystopia it was?
Try it yourself, try to go around and see the world as a dystopia. Quite likely, you already do. Try again. See, again everything mentioned above. See the domination and the stupidity. Don’t look away. See who is in charge and how they got there. After less than 5 minutes, you will understand why we do not continually see our world as a dystopia. It hurts too much.
Instead this world shows itself as steady stream of uplifting and tragic allegories: the uplifting election of a figure allegorizing all oppressed people as our leader, the tragic slaughter of human beings by an allegory of racism, the uplifting sight of idealistic children in the street waving slogans written by oil companies to avoid expropriation, the tragic sight of another war produced by another evil dictator. Even our fictional dystopias don’t seem so bad. But you’ve heard all this before. This, and everything else is on repeat. Repeat repeat repeat repeat.
What is this wintery landscape? Where are we? We’ll call it managerworld around here. Everyone has a manager and every manager has a manager. Somewhere at the top there’s rumored to be billionaires, but not everyone believes that they exist. Mostly its managers.
The managers rule through invisibility. What is visible are the differences between business and state, between nation and nation, global north and global south. But everywhere: in commerce and in politics, in Ukraine and in Russia, in the first, second and third world: the manager manages.
The managers rule through inevitability. There doesn’t seem to be any other way to order a complex society than without management. The very requirements of technology, of work processes, of reality itself seem to cry out to be MANAGED. How else do you expect such a complex world to run? How else do we stay competitive?
Nobody has an answer. Not anymore. Once there were answers. At least two different kinds of answers. One answer went to the right and one went to the left. The answer that went to the right went like this: managerland kills the lifespirit; let us reclaim our own life and strength; let those who can rule, rule, and those who serve, serve. The answer that went to the left went like this: let us finish the revolution, let us liberate ourselves from the metanarratives, let us awaken into our particularities.
Managerland was listening. Managerland heard your complaints. Now there are extreme sports and legalized DMT to bring back virtu. Now there are interest groups for all particularities and the legislation of mandatory acceptance.
Both paths lead back to managerland. But why is it so cold in here? Why can’t we see so far into the distance? The field of vision in this winter is shallow. Outside we see snow and the looming shapes of apocalypse. Will the latest designated villain in the metasystem actually do the evil act we have been dreaming of the whole time? Or will monkeypox fuse with COVID and genital warts, creating a respiratory virus that causes its victims faces and genitalia to blossom into wartscapes. Who knows!
Only one thing is certain: whatever happens, whatever is going on: processes, scenes, wonders, signs, miracles, or strategies, all that is, in all the possible “fields of sense,” none of it will be seen from the shallows. Take the democratic socialist shallows. Here is a real life passage from a famous word deli of democratic socialism:
His understanding of this common ground or social system is decidedly vague; so too is his conception of an elite. The latter he defines as a small group of people who have power over a larger group. Crucial to this definition is that the concept of an elite is nonessentialist: there is nothing about a specific racial or ethnic group that classifies it as an elite. This is a good corrective to the excesses of identity politics, which encourage an obsession with combating the dangers of “whiteness” and men, heterosexual or otherwise. It is, nevertheless, hard to avoid asking the question: Where does this broad notion of an elite leave the Marxist definition of capitalists, defined by control over the means of production?
Does this author consider the intricate differentiation performed by James Burnham, in the Managerial Revolution, made of the “control over the means of production” - which turns out not to be a singular entity, controlled by a capitalist class, but a sphere of contestation, wherein a rising managerial class has seized control and instituted a new, vastly more efficient system of social administration?
No, the author does not, because this pattern, this perspective: this does not fit into the social democratic cognitive toolbox. To call this a “toolbox” is excess praise. Jacobinsprache, like all shallowsprache, doesn’t have tools, but rudimentary shovels capable of digging up sufficient dirt to last for precisely one media cycle and leave absolutely no trace on the mind: this is the point of shallow politics.
People who talk in order to talk so that their way of talking may continue to be talked: the shallow left, right, and center. The words and concepts all use are absolutely empty and dead. The left’s “marxism” has sublimed into a jewelry to designate cultural status within the nightmarish exurbs of the professional managerial classes, the center relies on a childishly shallow conception of “liberalism” that cannot grasp that a genocide performed against Bengalis is the same as a genocide performed against Roma, against Kulaks: this is to say that Winston Churchill, the Japanese Royal Family, Thomas Jefferson, Stalin, and Hitler all share something terrible. And the shallow right? Captured by a hateful satanic Calvinism which hates the flesh, the world, and worships malicious tyranny. Such demented fanaticism has primed the shallow right for total capture by the basest demagoguery.
Social workers pretending to be revolutionaries, genocides pretending to be heroes, Mammon worshipers pretending to be traditionalist: the creatures of the shallows. Why can’t they go out past the buoys and swim in the depths? Obviously because they don’t know how to swim. They have become accustomed to the comfort of the shallows. It is easier to sleep on land. Everything seems so real when you talk the same inanities as everyone else.
Once in a while a creature leaves the shallows and goes deep. Sometimes their corpse washes back up in the shallows and serves as a lesson: THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GO DEEP.
There is life in the deep. Everyone here knows that. We see a great creature leap up at night, catch the light of the moon, and smash down back into the green dark water. this is the great whale named DEEP CENTER, and next to it swims a bearded dolphin named CHRISTIAN VITALISM and all around them swarm the mobile coral reef called FRACTAL COMMUNISM.
Water coordinates with the psychological function of feeling. To say there is no water in shallow winter is to say that the contemporary scene affords no feeling. The apparent emotion - grief at shootings, rage at tyrants, punches at awards shows - are visibly robotic. Some terrible dry and cold force works its way on the surface world.
We will stay and study.
This is an extremely well worded, intelligent look at our world & delves into how our “theories” of that world affect our perception. Once you can step past your fear of the unknown, this book will open your eyes to the ways society deceives & subverts our view of the world we live in.