https://john-steppling.com/2021/11/the-happiest-place-on-earth/
Throughout the pandemic and certainly forefronted in the propaganda of the ‘Great Reset’, is the idea of saving — rescuing or protecting. Save the planet, save your grandmother, save the future. Protect the planet, protect nature, protect grandma. There is a quality of messianism running through the marketing, and I sometimes wonder if its even intentional. For the climate marketing, it’s clear they have pushed something akin to an evangelical tone, in a mash up with New Age bromides and cliches. But even the pandemic has taken on a tone I last heard on charismatic christian preachers.
Now, I was struck how often when you read descriptions of the Nazis you hear the word technician. The emphasis is always on precision and a near Euclidean code of duty. Agamben’s observation that the pandemic is now a religion certainly seems correct. And the authoritarian subjects of the affluent white bourgeoisie, those of the new OCPD variant of anal-sadism, are eager to join in this new crusade, a planetary exercise in white saviourism. And yet, millions of people around the world are protesting. My sense is these are mostly working class people, those hit hardest by this new religion. I think they fear for their children (shit, I fear for my children). And then Africa, a continent barley vaccinated at all, whose population has near unanimously rejected the entire narrative.
So the question is really in what way the engagement with screens, with social media, and with electronic media has contributed to the weakening of an already weak ego, a ‘small ego’, and in turn this weak ego has intensified this divorce from our bodies, and a reliance on an ever stricter super-ego. Or, perhaps more, that this screen habituation has reinforced a societal encouragement to think instrumentally, to mimic those symptoms found in OCDP, and perhaps that mimic of symptom becomes actual symptom. For what is illness, exactly, in a society so aggressively irrational and manipulative. What one has seen over twenty years is the the manufacturing of the anal character, and the simultaneous evisceration of any counter culture.