Disaster Revolution
there is a balm here in Gilead for the moebius irritant
⬆︎⬆︎ This essay was originally recorded LIVE on the This Is Hell! radio show/podcast. Visit the website for long form interviews, Rotten History, hangover cures, and more.
It’s only a matter of time before a solar mass ejection or some other natural disaster knocks out the grid. That will be a glorious and terrible day.
Without transitioning to what might seem to be a new topic, if I may, one of today’s major social quagmires is debt. It might be the most egregious societal inhibition of our time. Debt having been tangled into Gordian confusion by the “cloud capitalism” of the finance industry is crushing the economy and the people in it.
It’s odd because debt is almost entirely imaginary, and yet the part of the economy that it’s crushing with its burdensome heaviness is the real part. The only real part, really: the part of the economy that grows and picks and processes and transports the food; the part of the economy that travels great distances to reach where it can exchange labor for money; the part of the economy that teaches and learns, the part that sets broken bones and medicates to clear up infections; the part that comes to the rescue when disaster strikes; the part that fastens materials together to make plumbing and houses, and vehicles that bring distant people to each other and necessities to those who need them.
Debt, and the rent and fees it often wears in disguise, demands that people do all these things while it throws up obstacles to accomplishing them in order to extort more debt. Debt is both the impetus and the obstacle to alleviating itself. It mimics the Buddhist idea of existence as suffering. It is the moebius irritant.
We’re currently at the culmination of the Tech Bro Coup, the fake genius takeover. Socrates had a similar prima facie dumb idea that philosophers would rule the republic because of their wisdom and knowledge of the good and their moderation in all things. There would be censorship and enforcement of a Noble Lie to filter all wrong ideas out of the subservient classes. There would be an ignorantly loyal warrior class. A mangled construction of all the worst parts of Socrates’s good city is the oligarchy we suffer within today. This is what we have at long last. Socrates’s student, Plato, wrote it down, most likely with what he assumed were helpful editorial changes, and that’s what today’s tech chuds misunderstand as Plato’s stupid republic.
Ridiculous imposter philosopher kings – because there is no other type of philosopher king –have ridden into power on the back of a worthless cartoon Arturo Ui oaf. Only Plato himself, moronically self-important, although materially egalitarian, fascist that nevertheless he was, could have chosen such a perversely perfect and perfidious instrument for destroying his designed government in the process of its installation. It took a think tank of narrowminded bigots to write up the step-by-step recipe, and here we are, here is the expected maggot-riven loaf fresh out of the oven.
This is it. This is what we get. A world of lies because truth was never the goal. The goal was what one Greek blabbermouth dumbass decided was the moral good. If any book should be burned, or at least censored for the good of the populace and those arrogating to rule them, it should be Plato’s Republic. But what advantage would we gain? The way to good ideas is not by burning bad books. The way to good ideas is by freely choosing them over those ideas that have proven bad. But we just aren’t the beings to do that. We know after millennia of experimentation which ideas are good and which are bad, and yet we are operating collectively on a massive scale according to only the bad ones.
Even Socrates stipulates that both excessive wealth and excessive poverty cannot lead to anything but a miserable condition. And yet excessive wealth for a few and poverty and exploited labor for the many are the only two obvious achieved goals of global neoliberal capitalist rule.
The buggering-up of the economy with debt and its demands has created popular unrest and defiance that will lead to debt strikes, triggering reprisals from the elites’ police forces, which will in turn provoke larger rebellions, the cycle repeating and spiraling in intensity until all that class conflict crescendos in the forgiveness of debt, the wiping clean of all slates. That, or global destruction by the sore losers with all the bombs.
The collapse of the grid will usher it in. Those who would impose debt will finally be forced to admit it’s impossible to figure out who owes what to whom, and that the game of accumulating wealth has never been a fair contest in any case. That the very idea of life and the pursuit of material resources as a contest has revealed itself to be a cruel absurdity.
Electronic wealth assignment having been erased, the task to get material wealth redistributed reasonably fairly can commence. The aggrieved unpaid private armies that had policed the people will join us in turning arms on our erstwhile wage-thieving employers. We’ll swarm estates, private islands, over borders, into the hearts of nations’ capitals themselves. Even after many millions have been mowed down by the last of the loyal private paramilitaries, there will be too many demanding people for massacres to make even a remotely inconvenient dent in the revolt. The majority empowered as revolutionary soldiers will fight on and on. The toll will be grisly, although some will later say the atrocities had been exaggerated.
At last, the least violent form of law anyone can enforce, when the smoke clears, will be The Fairness Doctrine. In order to keep their heads and at least a portion of their belongings, the once-stratospherically rich will be publicly generous, enough so the thing, that “word-of-mouth” thing, can placate the rest of us. The former rulers’ acquiescence to reality must register, in public, to convince the people to spare their former masters the loss of all they possess.
Once the Overweeners, the overlords of profit, have been toppled, the true needs of land and people can be responded to.
There will be no choice remaining but to cooperate. Kindness, neighborliness, and one’s honor will be the only currencies left. Those who can’t muster the daily evincing of those virtues will be cared for by their communities as wards of the more able members of society.
It won’t be a great time to be alive. But the lifting of the yoke of strata upon strata of unproductive ownership – Overweeners, Rentlords, and Shareholders – and the silencing of their demands for percentages, will renew us. Debt relief and rent relief will unleash the potential of rank-and-file motivation. The elite leeching class will be undone by their inability to maintain the electronic calculating technology keeping tabs on their claims to hoarded wealth and property. As a result, they’ll be shaken off like the expired fleas they are. So it shall be told to descending generations in our posterity.
I hear a warning to make it clear that, no, I’m not a communist. Except in the sense that we all are now, kind of.
