As a preamble of sorts, I am back.
At the very least, I hope to be more active both here and on my YouTube channel in the future. My wife and I have found our new home for the time being, and my work situation has stabilized: praise God for that. As a matter of fact, that makes a perfect segue into the topic of this article: social paralysis.
There is a class of people in the United States that seem to hold up the weight of the whole crumbling edifice, and I have somehow found my way into it, as if by accident. After finishing my degree in the summer, I took a job at a large logistics company as a delivery driver. It’s not glamorous, it’s not what my education was “designed for,” but it pays the bills. Much of the time I have been away from writing has been due to me adjusting to the work schedule. For someone who is used to being a full-time student and holding a part-time job on the side, 50-60 hour weeks are rather punishing at first. I still feel like all I do is work, but I’ve learned that for the this class of people I am describing, this is normal.
So-called “essential workers” essentially exist in two camps. On the one hand there are those minor cogs that are cycled in and out of large corporate apparatuses being worked, having to take the time out of their day to be at work and put aside other responsibilities, but in the end are not offered enough hours to compensate their effort (and certainly not enough to qualify for most benefit programs). Then there are those with the broader proverbial shoulders who are asked to indefinitely bear 7-day, 60+ hour workweeks to keep the whole thing grinding along. Oftentimes these two parties work side by side, complimentary to one another, or perhaps it is more accurate to say parasitic. It is a kind of symbiosis that leaves both parties weaker and embittered.
As the (I hesitate to call it) pandemic has continued its slow and monotonous crawl across the social landscape, deeper and deeper despair has set in among the populace. Resentment is everywhere, especially around the topic of work. Some, especially older people, decry the state of a country where tens of millions willfully refuse to be employed. Employees who cannot afford to lose their jobs or are too proud or honest to commit unemployment fraud carry on with the understanding that more and more responsibility will fall to them for less pay. Many unemployed people see the overbearing and tyrannical attitude of Capital in this Brave New World of public-private biomedical totalitarianism and are less-than-enthusiastic to shove themselves back into the meat-grinder.
But the despair goes deeper than the workplace. The populace knows it is being lied to by just about every person whose name appears next to alphabet letters, whether that be the CDC, FBI, CBS, or CNN. They stare blankly at transparent propaganda and know it to be false, and yet shouting about it will do nothing. Stating the obvious, that the emperor is wearing no clothes, doesn’t bring about clarity and a return to truth. It brings about gaslighting. You are stark raving mad to believe that the emperor is running about in the buff, and if you seem to think so that is your lying eyes.
At the root of all of this, fundamentally, is the breakdown of meaning. It is a thread that unites both the forces of Capital and the biomedical security state. Both systems can be objectively, transparently awful and counter to human flourishing and they will continue. Why? Because even though we know, intuitively, preternaturally, that these things are wrong and go against our very being, we have been disarmed and defanged by postmodernity. To say a system is wrong is to imply that there exists such a thing as a right system, but a rejection of all social patterns mankind has heretofore employed has assured that a thought like that can’t be entertained. At one point, people might have thought that an upending of all order and hierarchy, a breakdown of arbitrary power relationships like “patriarchy” would liberate us from oppression. The modern age disabuses us of this naive hope. On the contrary, those who would oppress us can use these circumstances as grounds for new and strange tyrannies, because in taking from us any sense of telos, social or otherwise, they have robbed us of the ability to say that what they do is wrong. In the cold and pitiless world of absolute meaninglessness, there is no grounds by which the weak should ask or receive mercy of the strong.
All this brings about the kind of paralysis we have seen; the world seems pregnant with new forms, new politics, new religious movements, new patterns, but every time they are aborted. Nowhere is this scheme more apparent than in the meme of “the happening.” For more than a generation, conservatives of various stripes have seen the writing on the wall and wondered when a fundamental break would occur, when the world would reorganize itself along the lines of the meaning structures that had been abandoned. Every time, nothing occurred. Not even a global pandemic, as meme-tier as it might be, could shake the grip of neoliberalism in its neverending quest to do nothing.
And we cannot escape the loop of nothing, I wager, except through a break, a break that would require someone to say: this is wrong, and stand on firm metaphysical footing. So long as the masses wander blindly in the postmodern haze, I do not see how such a revolution is possible, and so we wait for this almost messianic figure.
At least, that is the high and lofty way of putting it. To be more blunt, we will never reverse our inexorable course until someone, somewhere speaks actual truth to actual power. That may be a long time coming indeed.