Late morning mullings

Some thoughts

“The world will end…the mechanical will have Americanized us to such a degree, progress will have atrophied the entire spiritual part within us, [that we will] die by that we had thought we could live by. [We will be destroyed]… by the abasement of the heart.” – Charles Baudelaire. April 9, 1821 – August 31, 1867. From Seeing Double: Baudelaire’s Modernity by Francoise Meltzer

https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/marxism-died-in-the-east-because-it-realized-itself-in-the-west/

Marxism has been the culture of the transition from the Christian-bourgeois society—of which we find the insuperable example in the work of Benedetto Croce—to the bourgeois society in its pure state. We could even say that Marxism represented the “transition to the worst” in the sense that, through Marxism, bourgeois society has shed every residual moral and religious sense, unburdening itself of all “impurities” that still tied it to traditional society, thus presenting itself as full materialism and full secularism. The West has realized everything of Marxism, except its messianic hope. “Socialism” Veneziani writes “has not inherited capitalist society, but has become included, entangled in capitalism itself; in many respects, it has been the intermediate stop on the journey from capitalism to neo-capitalism.” Veneziani notices that Western society realizes the essence of Marxism: “radical atheism and materialism, internationalism and universal non-belonging, the primacy of praxis and the death of philosophy, the domination of production and the universal manipulation of nature, technological Faustianism and equality that realizes itself as homogenization.” The new globalist liberalism, Veneziani observes, absorbs the lesson of Marxism, purifying it of all prophetic, gnostic and anti-modern slag, and of solidaristic suggestions.

Therefore we can say that the West is Marxism’s full secularization, as well as its perfect realization. It is Capitalism that absorbs Communism, using it to erase religious sacredness and national sacredness, a goal it could not have reached in any other way.

The element of Marxism, and of Socialism in general, that remains unexpressed, unrealized and betrayed in the neo-bourgeois and Occidentalist society is precisely what was “great” in Socialism: the denunciation of alienation and the hope, which was “religious” in its own way, to overcome it. This is what Veneziani emphasizes in his final pages, observing how alienation has established itself and is expanding in Western society. In fact—and allow me to recall an idea that I already presented in 1963—Western irreligion has pushed the process of alienation to its extreme consequences. The disappearance of religion has coincided with the reification of man. Thus, the exact opposite of what materialist thought had envisioned has taken place: the eclipse of religion has not brought about the end of alienation, but rather its expansion.

The affluent society, as Galbraith called it, has succeeded in eliminating the dialectic tension of the revolution while succeeding in pushing alienation to the highest degree. Alienation coincides with de-humanization and, at the same time, with the loss of every common (and not just religious) framework of values; and these two processes, which are tightly intertwined, effect the reduction of the person to a thing that Veneziani describes in his book. Thus is born the gigantic process of alienation that Veneziani sketches effectively: “alienation as loss of one’s identity, alienation as estrangement from the environment in which one lives, alienation as communal dis-integration and bewilderment in Heidegger’s sense of the word, alienation as exploitation and thus expropriation of one’s work, alienation as commodification of man.” Therefore, Western society seems not just to elude Marx’s denunciation of alienation, but to disregard it altogether, to the point that alienation realizes itself most powerfully.

https://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html

From Deluze: Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ("you are no longer in your family"); then the barracks ("you are no longer at school"); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, "I thought I was seeing convicts."

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

https://cassiopaea.org/cass/timeline.htm. Agents of the world's elite have been long engaged in a war on the populace of Earth. Greed is the motivation for this war, a greed so pervasive that it encompasses the planet and all of the beings on it, but in recent times a philosophy has been used to justify that greed. It is the philosophy of mass control, that ultimately aims at dictating every aspect of human life - even remolding man's perception of reality and himself. [Jim Keith, Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness]

There is a little known fact about hypnosis that is illustrated by the following story:

A subject was told under hypnosis that when he was awakened he would be unable to see a third man in the room who, it was suggested to him, would have become invisible. All the "proper" suggestions to make this "true" were given, such as "you will NOT see so- and-so" etc... When the subject was awakened, lo and behold! the suggestions did NOT work.

Why? Because they went against his belief system. He did NOT believe that a person could become invisible.

So, another trial was made. The subject was hypnotized again and was told that the third man was leaving the room... that he had been called away on urgent business, and the scene of him getting on his coat and hat was described... the door was opened and shut to provide "sound effects," and then the subject was brought out of the trance.

Guess what happened?

He was UNABLE TO SEE the Third Man.

Why? Because his perceptions were modified according to his beliefs. Certain "censors" in his brain were activated in a manner that was acceptable to his ego survival instincts.

The ways and means that we ensure survival of the ego are established pretty early in life by our parental and societal programming. This conditioning determines what IS or is NOT possible; what we are "allowed" to believe in order to be accepted. We learn this first by learning what pleases our parents and then later we modify our belief based on what pleases our society - our peers - to believe.

Anyway, to return to our story, the Third Man went about the room picking things up and setting them down and doing all sorts of things to test the subject's awareness of his presence, and the subject became utterly hysterical at this "anomalous" activity! He could see objects moving through the air, doors opening and closing, but he could NOT see the SOURCE because he did not believe that there was another man in the room.

So, what are the implications of this factor of human consciousness? (By the way, this is also the reason why most therapy to stop bad habits does not work - they attempt to operate against a "belief system" that is imprinted in the subconscious that this or that habit is essential to survival.)

One of the first things we might observe is that everyone has a different set of beliefs based upon their social and familial conditioning, and that these beliefs determine how much of the OBJECTIVE reality anyone is able to access.

In the above story, the objective reality IS WHAT IT IS, whether it is truly objective, or only a consensus reality. In this story, there is clearly a big part of that reality that is inaccessable to the subject due to a perception censor which was activated by the suggestions of the hypnotist. That is to say, the subject has a strong belief, based upon his CHOICE as to who or what to believe - the hypnotist or his own, unfettered observations of reality. In this case, he has chosen to believe the hypnotist and not what he might be able to observe if he dispensed with the perception censor put in place by the hypnotist who activated his "belief center" - even if that activation was fraudulent.

And so it is with nearly all human beings: we believe the hypnotist - the "official culture" - and we are able, with preternatural cunning, to deny what is often right in front of our faces. And in the case of the hypnosis subject, he is entirely at the mercy of the "Invisible Man" because he chooses not to see him.

Let's face it: we are all taught to avoid uncomfortable realities. Human beings - faced with unpleasant truths about themselves or their reality - react like alcoholics who refuse to admit their condition, or the cuckolded husband who is the "last to know," or the wife who does not notice that her husband is abusing her daughter.