Horror or Snark? The Millennial’s Dilemma

Millennials, the young adults born in a developed country between the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, are frequently scolded for acting like perpetual adolescents, for failing to face up to their adult responsibilities, for being overprotected by their parents who themselves—like everyone else—understand less and less how to prosper in the postindustrial world. There are various factors that could account for that generation’s failure. The high-speed internet and the ubiquity of smart phones, along with the loss of manufacturing jobs in developed countries after globalization have created so-called gig economies. The increasing reliance on industrial automation and the collapse of the American liberal class (as explained well by Chris Hedges and Thomas Frank) have disenfranchised most Americans, as the majority of the economic gains since the 1980s has gone to the richest one percent. The children of the internet age have thus been left to hustle for diminished economic opportunities: their jobs are often in the service sector, they’re typically short-term or unsteady and they don’t pay the bills, and so Millennials are often still financially dependent on their parents.

Moreover, as the art of selling products has become nearly a science for large corporations, allenthusiastic consumers have been infantilized to some extent, including Millennials. We watch television or play on our smart phones more than we read books and so our attention span has shortened, and instead of instilling in its younger users a universal perspective so that they think of themselves as part of a global collective, the internet has created echo chambers that foster self-absorption. Finally, dating apps and other dehumanizing areas of online culture have arguably made Millennials antisocial in that these young adults prefer to communicate on chat forums or on Facebook and Twitter or with emojis rather than to converse in person. To take an extreme example, Japan’s Millennials are often wholly uninterested in sex or dating, a problem known as “celibacy syndrome.”

Suppose there are these structural reasons why those who are currently in their twenties or thirties have gotten stuck in an adolescent phase of emotional and cognitive development. Suppose that technologies and economic forces have created a social environment that prevents the younger generation—one that’s still mentally flexible—from settling into a stable work or family life, into a routine that promotes virtues traditionally associated with mature adulthood. Are Millennials condemned, then, to be a deadweight generation, an albatross around the neck of humanity?

Consider that if Millennials are locked into an adolescent mentality, they’ll stand apart from society. They’ll be outsiders or even outcasts, just as modern teens have usually occupied a twilight period between childhood and mature adulthood, between phases driven mostly by play and work, respectively. Teens are no longer the center of attention as they were when they were adorable babies, but they lack the authority and responsibility of adults. Yet teens have the intellectual capacity to understand their forlornness, which makes them infamous for their angst. Teens often lash out in frustration or from boredom, revolting against the world that doesn’t live up to their ideals. They can afford to do this because they’re not yet part of the wider world: they’re social outsiders who are compelled to look at society objectively, albeit often with a lack of sufficient information, because they’re not yet committed to a daily grind outside the ivory tower. Teens have the spare time to philosophize, but are typically unable to apply their insights because they’re powerless and so they stage futile, mini rebellions. 

Perhaps Millennials are like teens in those respects—except that Millennials are better informed, so they should be able to comprehend the horrors of natural reality, that there is no god or immortal spirit or perfect justice or freedom or objective purpose of human life. In theory, young adults now are poised to be a generation of prophets. Their protracted immaturity should have the silver lining of alienating them from the diversions of traditional adulthood, and so their paradoxical adolescence could signify the dawn of Homo deorsum fluens, which is to say a species that’s self-conscious about being outcasts in nature. This would be a period in which our systems and technologies come almost to run themselves, leaving people in the lurch, with nothing to do but to contemplate the embarrassment of their overactive brains.

But owing to the appeal of certain defense mechanisms, Millennials are no prophets. These young adults are coddled by their overprotective parents and they often indulge in reactions of snarky detachment. Instead of confronting existential absurdity, which has historically been the lot of outsiders such as shamans and prophets, and instead of facing the horrific implications of modern science for the presumption that we’re an exceptional species, Millennials use juvenile humour to try to distance themselves from the real world. This cry for cynical and complacent comedy was met in the ‘90s by the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Louis CK, and Jon Stewart, when most Millennials were teenagers, and it’s indulged currently by that trio’s professional descendants, such as Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, and Anthony Jeselnik. This postmodern comedic stance allows the disenchanted audience to feel superior to the world’s inhumanity even as the comedy undercuts the basis for any such privileged position. Thus, the mockery of President Trump is endless and perfectly deserved, but there hasn’t yet been much reckoning with what the preposterousness of Trump’s reign means for liberalism, democracy, and the American Dream.

In addition to parental coddling and ironic emotional detachment, Millennials are caught up in the distractions of geek culture such as the explosion of superhero movies and computer games, which provides the audience a cathartic experience of feeling heroic, while typically reinforcing the conventions of the neoliberal establishment. Grappling with nature’s impersonality requires a radical shift in perspective, a subversive level of objectivity that threatens to deprive the radical of the chance of being happy. The parents of Millennials aren’t the only ones who would want to protect their children from that fate; big businesses, too, would prefer to retain young people as lifelong consumers, instead of potentially losing them to a revolution of spiritual discovery—as nearly occurred in the US in the 1960s. Indeed, this is the same reason for the long-lasting opposition to marijuana’s legalization: unlike alcohol, this recreational drug is bad for business, because it invites the user to question everything, to think creatively, and to adopt a universal spiritual outlook that’s antithetical to the major religions (including the civic religion of neoliberalism), which are compromised by business or political concerns.  

Millennials, though, are at the forefront of this collective retreat from horrific reality, whereas they’re uniquely well-positioned to address it. They have little left to lose, aside from their cushy dependent lifestyle. If the now-nostalgic respect for being bread-winners and family men and women is lost to them, and they’re condemned to languish in a prolonged limbo even while they have the world’s collective knowledge at their fingertips, Millennials could yet save everyone from nihilism by inventing a spiritual outlook befitting the late modern zeitgeist. Millennials could start a new religion, one that isn’t obsolete and that inspires us to acts of tragic heroism. But this is evidently no easy task. Retreating to idle detachment, to ironic remarks and to a false sense of superiority and entitlement that are fueled by postindustrial consumer culture appears to be how Millennials are instead dealing with their outsider status.

Still, instead of mocking or chastising young adults for failing to grow up, we might reflect on what their failure means for our collective near future. Instead of pretending that they know better, older adults should realize that the hyper advancement of technology makes comparative children of us all, that the posthumans heralded by techno gurus might mentally resemble not gods so much as protohumans, which is to say children. Of course, every historical age has had its challenges and previous ones were sometimes heroically overcome. The young generation may or may not now have the courage and the creativity to envision an authentic late modern form of maturity, a realistic but honourable kind of adulthood. Regardless, the rest of us might be wise to appreciate the stakes and to help Millennials along.

Selengkapnya →

Clash of Worldviews: The Paradox of Late Modern Conservatism

MODERATOR: Welcome to another episode of Clash of Worldviews. Tonight we’re fortunate to have with us in the studio Fred Gulpa, self-described alt right transhumanist; Rich Goldfarb, a fiery young Jewish conservative debater; Adam Garnett, noted liberal secular humanist; and Heather Fogarty, hypermodern skeptic and gadfly. Welcome to all of you and to our viewers joining us from around the world. Tonight the topic is postmodern conservatism. What does it mean to be a conservative in the twenty-first century, under advanced technoscientific, postindustrial conditions? Who would like to start us off?

RICH: That’s a preposterous question and you’re an imbecile for asking it. Your hair is all messed up and I’m appalled by your cheap aftershave, which I’m aghast to say I can smell all the way from over here. So you must be a closet liberal, which is unfortunate because all liberals are evil.

MODERATOR: Uh, oh…kay? That wasn’t quite the response I was looking for. I understood that you’re a professional debater, Rich. Have you learned about ad hominem attacks?—not to mention red herrings, since I’m just the moderator here.

RICH: You see that’s just like a liberal. Run from your liberalism all you like, but it’s a disgrace.

You want to know what conservatism means today. I’ll tell you: it means standing up for divine or natural rights against tyrannies like the liberal state that holds a gun to your head to push corrupt liberal values down your throat and to collect ill-gotten taxes to grow its Mafioso hold over the population. The liberal government is an incompetent bureaucracy that can’t do anything right except shake down its citizens, disrupt the free flow of market competition, and expand the cushy public sector for the pack of liberal cronies. Conservatism means respecting the traditions that connect us with what’s right in the world so that we can oppose what’s evil. And liberalism is evil. Liberalism boils down to kleptocratic communism: the liberal state wants to redistribute money that was earned in market transactions, which means the government steals from the rich to give to the poor—like Robin Hood, except that instead of a hero, the government is evil. Stealing is wrong. And like cancer, the liberal state needs runaway growth in its tyrannical powers to protect unnatural liberal morality, including silly rights for women’s equality with men, for the killing of babies, for politically-correct recognition of absurdities such as the wholesomeness of homosexuality, and for government boondoggles like its nonsolutions to the overhyped problem of global warming.

ADAM: I mean: wow. Just, wow. It’s safe to say there must have been a hundred strawmen in that screed.

RICH: Everything I just said is obviously correct. You’re an execrable monster and a charlatan and a demonic insect for suggesting otherwise.

HEATHER: Uh, Rich, I think someone neglected to inform you that Clash of Worldviews isn’t like the infotainment newshour shows or campus debates you’re used to having, in which the goal is to pwn your opponent with vile hate speech and cheap zingers. We’ll actually expect some arguments here and won’t be impressed by schoolyard tactics.

RICH: Thanks for the tip. But everything I said is still obviously correct. There is no counterargument for liberals, since all liberals ever do is call conservatives bad names. Liberals are the ones with no arguments, and that’s because liberals are—

ADAM: —evil. That’s what you were going to say, right? Yeah, that shtick’s going to get old real fast. You’re starting to sound like Ben Shapiro.

RICH: I’m waiting for the rebuttal.

Theocracy, Natural Rights, and the Tyranny of Liberalism

ADAM: Alright. First of all, you said a lot more about liberalism than about conservatism, even though liberalism isn’t our topic. But fine, maybe we can arrive at the nature of conservatism indirectly, by focusing for a while on its opposite.

So just for starters, your slide from social democracy, or the so-called liberal establishment, to communism or tyranny is a grotesque oversimplification. In a democratic country with a capitalistic economy like the United States, the government needs certain powers to protect the social fabric and thus to prevent an outbreak of chaos, as in what’s called a failed state. The selfish impulses that capitalism nurtures are utterly amoral. For example, enterprising businessmen in early American history had no compunction against selling slaves; likewise, even today there’s a thriving business of human trafficking of sex slaves. Responsible governments collect taxes not just to protect private property or to defend against foreign enemies, but to preserve the public welfare, which means upholding its culture’s ideals. Slavery is against both Christian and Enlightenment values, but as long as there’s a supply of and demand for slaves, capitalism itself isn’t going to end slavery. Thus, the government needs to step in as a bulwark against capitalistic greed.

I mean, there are a hundred other grotesqueries in your rant, but let’s leave it there for a minute. Tell us, then, how are all liberal governments communistic or tyrannical? 

RICH: A social democracy is communistic and tyrannical because it’s the same principles that are being violated, regardless of the differences in the degree of evil. Stalin killed millions of his citizens and Obama didn’t lower himself to quite that level, but both idolized the state and prized the bureaucracy over the welfare of the majority. Obama didn’t care about the average citizen when he bailed out the big banks or when he subsidized irrelevant green energy companies. He cared only about his donors and his elitist comrades. Instead of letting all Americans face up to their responsibilities as free individuals and trusting in their ingenuity and entrepreneurialism, Obama propped up failing institutions, offsetting the costs onto consumers in the form of higher taxes or inflation. Obama weakened the economy by rewarding risky lenders, borrowers, and investors, setting us up for the next bust in the economic cycle.

HEATHER: No, Obama tried (and failed) to de-rig the economy which nature had rigged under Clinton’s and Bush’s years of deregulation. Obama protected the majority from a second Great Depression that could have occurred, had the big banks been allowed to see their greed through to the bitter end. It was nature in the form of the selfishness and short-sightedness of the home-buyers and bankers—which are essential to unregulated capitalism—that left Obama with the remnants of that ticking time bomb of an economy. And why is nature so volatile and indifferent to the majority’s welfare? Why in the wild do predators prey on the herd? Because there are no rights in nature, nor is there any god in control.

How ironic for you to demonize neoliberal politicians like Obama, who didn’t take even a rhetorical stand for a public option in the healthcare debate and who thus never represented progressives, when the real villains in the economy are obviously your plutocratic heroes who don’t deserve their wealth because they perpetrate frauds like the housing market, corrupting or circumventing regulators and market analysts like those at Moody’s and putting the whole country at risk. If anything, redistributing much of their ill-gotten gains does the plutocrats a favour, by lessening the temptations which tend to turn the wealthy into rampaging psychopaths with god complexes.

You say regulators cheat the economy by picking winners and losers and preventing entrepreneurs from saving the day, as would allegedly happen in the more natural or godly course of events in which market competition is allowed to unfold. But the same counterfactual point can be turned against you. Plutocrats like the Koch brothers and the Wall Street bankers and the big donors to political campaigns and the rest of the top one percent of the American population that has such a disproportionate influence over politicians who write the tax code and the loopholes in the banking laws—those titans of industry and of financial fraud likewise prevent the little guys from getting ahead, by being instrumental in the decline of American unions, for example.

So your economic picture is warped. You depict a meritocratic market being tampered with by arrogant government officials, but that description is incomplete, at best. There’s an additional source of manipulation in the economy, namely the machination of the richest one percent. Indeed, the government’s interventions are needed to counter those of the lords of the private sector. It’s not as if the economic playing field would be leveled in a perfectly deregulated marketplace, were the government almost nowhere to be found. On the contrary, monopolies and oligopolies would form, wages would be lowered as unions are crushed, demagogues would bamboozle the consumers, and prices would reflect perceptions that have been distorted by masterful market manipulations that ignore the long-term costs of that rapacity, to the world’s detriment.

ADAM: I’d add that there is, of course, an enormous difference between communism or tyranny and social democracy: the latter is more self-governing than the former. In a democracy like the United States, the majority have a say over the identity of their political representatives. Granted, in practice there are numerous flaws, including gerrymandering, the Electoral College and so on, but in a dictatorship there isn’t even a theoretical possibility of removing the tyrant until he dies from his debaucheries. So it’s merely a bizarre rhetorical trick to call a liberal state tyrannical.

FRED: I’d like to weigh in on the merits of democracy. The United States is indeed democratic and that’s why it’s doomed. Capitalism and personal freedom flourish in places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai, and those populations don’t have to worry about their country being looted by elected politicians and bureaucrats who aren’t invested in the people’s welfare, because they’re hired guns at war with opposing parties and so they’re inclined to salt the earth after their transient time in office, to sabotage their opponent’s administration. The attention span of elected authorities is narrow and so democracies are inefficient at addressing long-term issues; the infrastructure therefore tends to decline, for example. Moreover, democracies are prone to being attacked by demagogues who exploit the free-flow of information in the media, filling the culture with disinformation, which burdens the public with a blinkered view of reality, causing it to elect politicians who are, at best, only superficially suitable for high office. What keeps the overall standard of living from declining, at least in parts of a liberal democracy, is the competition for profit in the market, which leads to innovation and to a decrease in the price of goods over time.

ADAM: Some of those criticisms apply much more to so-called conservative politicians than to liberal ones. Democrats believe in good government, so to protect their brand, as it were, their incentive is to project at least the appearance that a democratic government can work, whereas Republicans trust more in the market and so they have reason to enlist foxes to guard the hen house and to act like a wrecking crew while in office, as Thomas Frank pointed out in his book by that name.

But let’s not get bogged down in an amateurish either-or debate. No one except for Captain Overstatement here is saying that one side is purely evil and the other purely good. Democracy has its problems and so does capitalism. We’re not here to debate their comparative merits so much as to explore what it means to be a late modern conservative. Isn’t that oxymoronic, to live in a new world but to hold on to an old one? How is conservatism even possible now? Aren’t today’s so-called conservatives nothing of the kind? I mean, what are they conserving when they say a postindustrial marketplace should be allowed to operate without governmental intervention?

MODERATOR: It’s a fair question. Rich, do you want to address that? What makes you a conservative?

RICH:…

HEATHER: I think he’s sulking.

RICH: No, I’m just disgusted that I have to sit near useful idiots who make excuses for the evil government’s theft of private property and for its bullying of hard-working wealthy Americans.

HEATHER: Yeah, the top one percent of power elites who’ve gotten all the increase in American income growth over the last several decades sure do need a tax break. Watch me shed a tear for the billionaires.

Wait a minute. I think I see the key to all this: it’s Judaism. Rich’s zealotry must stem from his Jewish upbringing. He already said conservatives defend the only source of rightness in the world, which is God’s Word or natural normality. So God commanded that we not steal or be jealous of others’ private property. Therefore, a tax-and-spend liberal government that coddles a lazy underclass is sinful. Is that about right, Rich?

RICH: Of course liberalism is sinful and not just wrong on the economic technicalities.

HEATHER: Well, that’s because nothing is really right or wrong on those technicalities. Economics is a pseudoscience and economists use fancy math like squid ink, to hide the counterfactuality of their models. 

RICH: Whatever! The government has no right to steal money from the rich and to give it to the poor.

ADAM: No right, because God said so?

RICH: That’s what I believe as an Orthodox Jew.

ADAM: Ah, but that’s an embarrassment, isn’t it? It’s one thing to speak with an aggressive, commanding tone, talking a mile a minute and piling up the personal attacks as though your opponent didn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s another to admit that something as quaint and silly as theism is at the bottom of all your politics. You have the nerve to speak of liberal bureaucrats as acting like mafia bosses, but there’s a reason they call Vito Corleone the godfather. Indeed, has there been a more tribal, tyrannical, Trump-like man-baby of a god than Yahweh as portrayed in the Jewish scriptures? Arguably not.

RICH: That blasphemous remark is an abominable hate crime against my religious identity, and my lawyers will be in touch. In any case, I don’t appeal to Judaism to publicly support my social philosophy.

HEATHER: Well, what then do you conserve as a conservative, if not for God’s Word? It must be natural law. Is stealing supposed to be unnatural? What a joke that would be. Have you ever seen a mouse sneak into a kitchen and eat food from the cupboards? Or how about the cuckoo bird that lays its eggs in other birds’ nests to avoid having to feed its oversized babies? How about a beta wolf that mates with the alpha’s squeeze on the sly?

RICH: Obviously animals don’t have freedom or private property, so they can’t be guilty of crimes like murder or theft. 

HEATHER: That’s right. And so humans are rational persons who set up unnatural societies befitting our anomalous skillsets. Do you see where that takes you? It means that as far as we can manage, humans aren’t beholden to so-called natural laws. Our rights flow from the artificial laws we conceive of, not from instincts produced by natural selection. So why should any human society appeal to natural rights when those are suitable, at best, only for animals?

If we work hard and earn a pile of money, you say we have a natural right not to have that property be stolen by anyone, including the government. In so far as that right is merely natural and not justified by anything like a political constitution or philosophical declaration of rights, the right to private property rests purely on power. Might makes right, money equals power, so the right to keep your earnings amounts to the warning that thieves had better watch out, because the aggrieved party may still have power enough to take vengeance. Or else the power itself will corrupt, and so the thief should think twice before trying to acquire power in such an underhanded way.

But if that’s the primitive basis of conservative social policy, it can easily be parodied with the sort of Just So stories you find in evolutionary biology. Maybe men are stronger than women, so men have a natural right to rape them. Maybe some nations are stronger than others and so the weak should serve the strong as slaves. Where does that anti-progress end? Why not just annihilate human civilization with nuclear bomb blasts and get it over with? Why did our primordial, protohuman forebears struggle to achieve self-awareness in the first place if their “conservative” descendants were just going to spit on those miraculous acts of transcendence and whine that we should stop acting like civilized persons and be more primitive? What a joke!

Technolibertarianism and the Instrument of Unchained Capitalism

FRED: All this talk of miracles and transcendence coming from an atheist? That’s the joke that amuses me. You’re getting hung up on Rich’s brand of adolescent self-righteousness, but you’re missing where the action is in conservative circles these days.

It’s a question of means and ends. The viable conservative’s ultimate goal is the transhumanist one of becoming godlike due to a superabundance of technoscientific power. A crucial instrument for achieving that goal is capitalistic competition, which drives businesses to employ the top researchers and engineers, thus incentivizing the innovative production of sellable goods. Many of the products need to satisfy our chief demand, which is to become godlike—now that the fictional deities are known to be dead, as culture critics from Nietzsche to Yuval Harari have recognized. Unchained capitalism that proceeds at a breakneck pace towards achieving that ultimate end entails social hierarchy. In that analogy, liberal qualms are the chains or the brakes that only delay our destiny as a species, and the result of liberal sentimentality is the imposition of artificial social equalities which hinder the great work of capitalism.

That, then, is the crux of the matter for late modern conservatives. It’s not about defending ancient moral codes as being good in themselves, because some god allegedly commanded that women should submit to men or that homosexuals should be stoned or that humans ought to have dominion over the sea and the earth. That’s paleoconservatism, and it’s an embarrassment that has no chance of withstanding science-centered skepticism. What we need is neoconservatism that makes peace with the strongest elements of modernity, such as technoscience and capitalism, while abandoning the weaker ones such as democracy, rationalism, and maudlin liberal morality.

Neoconservativism began in the US in the 1960s, as a backlash against the pacifist opposition to the Vietnam War. Rather than being theocrats, those neoconservatives were the often Jewish and therefore comparatively atheistic cold warriors who advocated a hawkish foreign policy in the name of spreading democracy in the furtherance of capitalist interests. Most of which was thoroughly wrongheaded. Those neoconservatives seem to have gotten caught up in Leo Strauss’s double game; they bought into their noble lies that were meant only for the unphilosophical masses. What are now called the neoreactionary conservatives—including Steve Bannon, who’s the resident philosopher king of the White House—reject democracy precisely because it doesn’t sit well with capitalism. Democracy works only when the masses who indirectly rule are equally in possession of the traits that would make them worthy to look after their national affairs. But the brutal truth of capitalism is that it creates a hundred losers for every winner, and the losers naturally stagnate, making them unworthy of a vote.

Capitalism, though, is the greatest force for good on Earth, because it’s the fuel for technoscientific progress, which is our only hope of salvation. Read your Moldbug and your Nick Land: capitalism is the answer not just in economics but in politics. Instead of stealth oligarchy, such as we have now in the US, we should be open about the greater efficiencies made possible by living under the promise of profit and the threat of literal bankruptcy in all walks of life. Instead of a nation we need corporations; instead of a government we need a board of directors and corporate officers such as CEOs. Power relations should be formalized and made transparent so that politics can be run efficiently as a business. And again, what makes this conservative is that we should embrace the resulting inequalities and hierarchies as steps we need to take on our way to the posthuman future.

ADAM: Again, wow. What an odious worldview you have there. No wonder your fellow deplorables hide under a rock in their mommy’s basement, playing video games, trolling chat forums, and emerging only at night to offend women in clubs with their “game.”

FRED: And I thought Clash of Worldviews was about arguments, not personal attacks. You see, this is the liberal’s sentimentality I was talking about. It’s like the feminist’s double standard: she wants equality but she also wants to be treated like a lady. She can’t have both, but she expects men to look the other way and to play along, because it’s supposed to be rude to shatter the illusions of the weak-willed folk who need them. So instead of rubbing the feminist’s nose in the ugly truth, that she’s been duped by the liberal culture, we neoreactionaries run our game on these women, and with every sexual conquest we prove that the value of social equality is based on a lie.

Likewise, Adam thinks he can stand on the mere offensiveness of the harsh truths I’ve just told. He thinks he can fall back on his effeminate protests against a manly worldview that could be responsible for “offending” women in night clubs. Horror of horrors! Meanwhile, his liberal rationalism is a form of worshipping human nature, which causes him to hide from the holocaust we members of developed countries are perpetrating on most other animal species. Is he man enough to hunt for his meat? No, that’s now a conservative’s pastime. So he’s either a hypocrite or a vegetarian, but if he’s the latter, he must be a radical rather than a secular humanist, since the humanist always puts human pleasure first. Either way, he’s a hypocrite.

ADAM: Just because I’m offended by your bestial notions doesn’t make me less of a man than you.

FRED: Then why not try specifying what’s wrong with neoreactionary conservatism?

ADAM: Again, where to start! I agree that capitalism by itself generates and preserves social inequalities. So who is supposed to be cheering for this posthuman end point, the wealthy who will likely be the only ones to reap the benefits or the masses who will be thereby enslaved? The whole thing is incoherent.

FRED: Is it? Most people only want to worship a god, while some want to be gods. The former are consumers who should be duped by capitalists for the greater good, instead of by liberals for the democratic state which retards progress. Those who want to be gods are the psychopaths who tend to elevate themselves to high positions in their dominance hierarchies. So there’s no such incoherence, and once again we’re left with the worries of a feminized beta male.

HEATHER: Ugh! Enough with the penis-measuring contest. I’m not interested in that macho nonsense. Let’s get down to philosophical business here and discover where the truth lies.

I thank Fred for his presentation of what indeed looks like a late modern form of conservatism, one that marries Silicon Valley technolibertarianism with a Nietzschean or Lovecraftian reaction against the Enlightenment. We’re meant to embrace the empirical knowledge and technology that have made possible modern economic growth, while spitting on democracy and the liberal ethos that have provided for the civic religion that’s placated the masses who might otherwise have been disgusted with that growth. As you suggested, Fred, we’ve been swimming in noble lies about reason, freedom, and the American Way. The Enlightenment was itself a reaction against the Christian theocrats’ dogmas, which held back scientific progress. And now the neoreactionaries want that progress without the noble lies. That strikes me as a dangerous game to play.

FRED: Are you saying you’re a friend of the noble lie? I thought you were a cynic and a skeptic, eternally vigilant against any sign of self-deceit. Surely you haven’t fallen for the liberal’s work of megafiction. And if you say you and some minority are enlightened while the masses should be left in ignorance, there you have the makings of an inequality and a social hierarchy.

HEATHER: Not exactly, since for me the truly enlightened individuals should be mere gadflies, not godlike psychopathic dominators.

FRED: Fine, but that still means you’re not exactly a liberal; you’re not an egalitarian warrior for social justice, sworn to rectify every offense taken by a spoiled millennial.

HEATHER: If you’re asking whether social equality is my highest value, I’d say no it’s not. But that doesn’t mean I’d rejoice at the prospect of any old hierarchy, such as the sort that’s left in the wake of heartless capitalism. You say economic inequality is a necessary evil of the unregulated, selfish hunt of profit, since while that kind of capitalism devolves into a free-for-all for sociopaths and their cronies who naturally double-cross the know-nothing consumers, greed and cruel struggles for profit are instrumental to some transhuman future. The liberal imposition of social equality, then, is supposed to be an act of feminine cowardice, an intrusive restraint on progress. 

But is transhumanism meant to be just a substitute myth to replace faith in a pre-existing deity? Or are we supposed to take that extreme merger with technology seriously as a physical probability?

FRED: It’s both. Transhumanism serves as a religion that isn’t wildly irresponsible in light of our current state of knowledge and power. Yes, it’s speculative to think we’ll decode the brain and be able to recreate consciousness in a computer. Yes, it’s speculative to think nanoengineering and cloning and all the rest will solve all our problems. But unlike the premodern religions, these science fictional scenarios aren’t mere escapist fantasies.

Moreover, even should transhumanism turn out to be a crock and we’ll never be more godlike than we are now, running with capitalism and disposing of milquetoast liberalism would still be the noble course. We have a chance to serve in a grand enterprise that may succeed or fail, or else to languish in the limbo foisted by neoliberal centrism. Neoliberal triangulation only balances the left and the right so that the country goes nowhere: you enable capitalism and the welfare state, but only so far so that either side ends up holding the other back. As Adam Curtis explains in his documentaries, the public loses faith in politicians because it looks like they’re technocratic system managers, cloaking their nihilism in serious-sounding pragmatic rhetoric.

HEATHER: Well, I agree with some of that, but I couldn’t sign on to a transhumanist religion.

FRED: Why? Because you only want to criticize but never to join a movement, because you want to look at everything from above, with ironic detachment, so you never have to risk feeling disappointed if the plan doesn’t work out? You don’t want to give yourself to anything greater than yourself, because deep down you’re an individualist and a narcissist to boot.

HEATHER: I am an individualist. As I said, the evolution of self-awareness, language and reason which make our autonomy possible are virtual miracles in the universe, meaning that they’re intriguing anomalies. So any mass movement which denigrates our potential to enlighten ourselves and to seek honour in a flawed world is an unsavoury con, in my judgment.

FRED: But transhumanism celebrates personal liberty! The goal is to use technoscience to deify us so we can do whatever we want.

HEATHER: Unfortunately, that myth is hampered by its literary debt to ancient theism. Gods go crazy because they become corrupted by their power and isolation. That’s the history of monotheism and of the popes and caliphs and kings who ruled in their god’s name. Human gods would be just as disastrous as the model gods they worshipped. And anyway, most people wouldn’t enjoy the technologies in question, since the tools and enhancements would be hoarded by the power elites who are the least in favour of competition, by the way, since they seek to establish monopolies or oligopolies at every opportunity.

ADAM: I’d like to step in here and remind everyone that liberalism is the progressive force, not conservatism. Equal rights for minorities are signs of progress, whereas racism and misogyny, slavery and patriarchy have always prevented the freedom of thought which is the cornerstone of scientific and technological development.

FRED: In previous empires, perhaps such traditions did blind the masses to the benefits of secularism, but that’s only because they were upheld by theistic fairy tales. The point of neoreactionary conservatism is that we can have the inequalities without the dubious myths. Instead, we have natural relations between means and end. Sacrifice in the capitalistic struggle for selfish advantage so that the techno gods might be born!

ADAM: But which inequalities would you excuse? Are you saying whites should rule over blacks, men should dominate women, and heterosexuals should persecute homosexuals?

FRED: Any hierarchy which is a byproduct of unvarnished capitalism is worth it if that social order improves the chance of our realizing the next stage of our evolution—because human nature as it is now won’t cut it.

ADAM: But let’s just take one of these vaunted inequalities as an example. You say egalitarianism has held back progress towards realizing the transhumanist dream. For centuries, patriarchy kept women out of the marketplace, but after the rise of Western women in the last century, productivity increased tremendously because women could finally educate themselves and apply their professional talents in competition with men. So that’s a case of social equality benefitting capitalism, contrary to what a neoreactionary would have predicted.

FRED: Again, only those equalities that are grossly artificial, which have to be sustained by enormous governmental effort and which impede the cutthroat competition in the marketplace that spurs growth should be eliminated. As for working women, much of their equality with men is illusory. Many have lower incomes than men in the same line of work, because women need to take off more time to raise their children. In any case, as long as women are competing with men with no unfair advantage from government aid, the market will sort us all into a dominance hierarchy. Only when such a hierarchy arises do you know you have a working capitalist economy, rather than a stale socialist one with centralized power in the hands of know-it-all bureaucrats. A conservative prizes the inequality as a sign that great struggles for power are taking place, with the byproducts of winners and losers. And we should hope that the end of that struggle is a glorious, posthuman form of life.

HEATHER: The vast economic inequality in the US, between the richest one percent and everyone else isn’t the result of any such noble struggle. The postindustrial economy is based on financialization, which is the rise of a class of con artists, bearing pseudoscientific economic models, who don’t make anything but just prey on host countries with massive frauds. So no, I’m afraid not all social inequalities are signs of hard work or progress. Some competitions are rigged to go nowhere or even to self-destruct. Like Rich, the Fox News memes of the culture war have blinded you to the fact that power can be concentrated not just by a government but by a cadre of plutocrats.

RICH: Well, I’m intrigued by Fred’s new form of conservatism. Where it errs, in my view, is its discounting of the benefits of a modest welfare state. So-called unregulated or unvarnished conservatism would descend into anarchy and would indeed self-destruct. Some taxed protections of the losers in the marketplace are needed to maintain public confidence that their country isn’t a cesspool that deserves to be reduced to ashes by an almighty God.

FRED: Alas, there’s no such God, but a religion inspired by science fiction can provide new justifications for a doubling down on capitalism, as I’ve explained.

RICH: The American Founders embraced Judeo-Christian morality as the basis of their Declaration of Independence. Some form of welfare state is needed to protect our God-given or natural rights, and taxes are needed to preserve the infrastructure that enforces those protections. By contrast, purely private interests would dictate that the losers deserve their failure and should be left to rot. No one should want to be part of such an amoral, heartless wasteland as the one you envision.

FRED: There are no such inherent rights because there’s no such Creator. We have to work hard to create the divine, posthuman beings that would manifestly have the absolute right to rule. And I hate to burst your bubble, but postindustrial behaviours, as opposed to the noble lies we tell ourselves, are already amoral and heartless. Again, we’re devastating the ecosystem and we support dictators or otherwise illiberal governments abroad to protect the young wage slaves who mass-produce the junk we so greedily consume. Yet we don’t hesitate to identify with America, with the land of the free and the home of the brave, because we buy into the myths. All I’m saying is we could use new myths, ones that wouldn’t bolster such shocking self-deception.

MODERATOR: I’m afraid we’re out of time, guests. Perhaps the upshot is that conservatism under postindustrial conditions will have to look very different from its traditional, theocratic form if it’s to avoid being largely ridiculous. At any rate, I’d like to thank you all for this stimulating exchange of ideas. Stay tuned for mind-numbing platitudes and distractions meant to keep you in the dark until you’re dead and buried. 

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Life as a Dream: The Secular Myth of Objective Truth

Art by Erik Johansson

Is life is but a dream, as the nineteenth century nursery rhyme assures us? Liberals, humanists, and naturalists insist that now more than ever, with the rise of fascism in Europe, Russia, and America; with the strange convergence of alt-right grievances with postmodern cynicism; and while demagogues, charlatans, and agnotologists in politics, advertising, and the corporate media are spreading doubt, spin, and propaganda, we should stand up for truth. However, this conflict between so-called rationalists or critical thinkers, on the one hand, and hillbillies and con artists, on the other, is a tempest in a teapot. Those who take the long view are invited to understand how truth died with God shortly after the Scientific Revolution, several centuries ago.

The concept of truth had already been suspect for millennia, when divine reality was thought to transcend human comprehension. What we took to be mundane, worldly truths, such as that the desert is hot during the day or that a normal human face has two eyes, a nose and a mouth, were mere illusions compared to mystical “truth,” the latter being ineffable and at best experienced as awe in moments of heightened awareness. Gods were only posited by our imagination, based on a lack of data (and on a noble lie developed by psychopathic power elites for the sake of pacifying the human herd of betas). Scientists collected the data, thanks to advances in technology, mathematics, and epistemology, and the gods were accordingly replaced with atoms and physical forces. Natural reality is measurable whereas the gods weren’t, but atoms and forces are likewise beyond our understanding in that they’re wildly counterintuitive.

The only thing we can fully understand is ourselves. Everything else must be simplified in the telling of them with concepts and models which idealize and which rest on falsifying metaphors that would humanize the inhuman. The proper subjects of knowledge are us and our societies; reason evolved to enable us to understand only minds and cultures with which we’re intimately familiar since we identify with them. The stories we tell about ourselves aren’t simplifications, since we’re identical with the subjects of those narratives, not with our brains as such. When we seek to understand the wider world, however, we either project human categories onto nature, as occurs in theistic religions and in folk conceptions, or else we effectively exchange the pursuit of truth with that of power.

In the epistemic context, anthropomorphism is philosophically unforgivable, however socially useful might be the gratuitous shrinking of outer reality so that it seems to fit within the human scale. Socrates sacrificed his life for the principle that truth matters more than our comfort. Instead of flattering ourselves with delusions that hold society together at the cost of confining us to an animal mode of life, we should search for a higher calling according to our position in the ultimate, metaphysical scheme. Unfortunately, Plato’s teleological picture of nature is a rehashing of the folk prejudices, losing the human interest of the transparent personifications in popular religion, in exchange for pseudoscientific respectability afforded by the philosophical discourse. Instead of angelic or monstrous spirits flitting about and deciding how events unfold, there are supposedly levels of being, including Forms and their material copies. In any case, scientific naturalism renders such interim philosophical tales obsolete. What isn’t well-appreciated, though, is that the very notion of truth is also outdated. 

Power and Truth, Measurement and Agreement

On the contrary, says the scientific realist as opposed to the pragmatist, science has proved a million truths, as can be seen from the power of the myriad applications of scientific theories. Functioning and indeed astonishing technologies stand all around us and that success would be impossible were there no systematic difference between scientific models and religious dogmas, for example. Indeed, there must be some such difference, but a scientific vindication of the commonsense concept of truth isn’t it.  

To be sure, we can try to make sense of the success of technoscience by positing happy semantic relations between natural facts and the symbols that scientists use to explain them. But that old-fashioned way of understanding where we are is awkward in light of the content of the scientific picture. Science shows us events occurring within or because of alien dimensions that we can measure and predict despite the stubborn fact that no one in the least understands those events. We can detect changes in the subatomic world, for example, and can take advantage of those forewarnings by devising models that work, in that their parts correlate with the facts, within the parameters that interest us. We can then exploit those correlations with machines that apply the lessons that are implicit in the models. But a scientific statement can be useful without being true. More precisely, the statement’s utility can be as mysterious as the inhuman reality of nature that scientists discovered to the detriment of all exoteric dogmas. We can say the theory is useful because it’s true, whereas a religious myth is false, but in light of the anti-human content of that very naturalistic theory, calling the theory merely true is itself dogmatic. Talk of truth now, after science has shown us the monstrous scale of the universe and the inhuman logic of quantum reality, is akin to chanting a mantra to ward off some fear.

But haven’t I just presupposed a truth, namely that the universe is very large rather than small? No, because the intuitive concept of size is meaningless for astronomical purposes. What does it mean to say that our universe is enormous if the whole of it may fit into what would seem to outsiders like a miniscule seed or near-singularity subsisting within a black hole embedded in a parent universe, as the physicists John Wheeler, Lee Smolin, and Nikodem Poplawski have theorized? Again, the concept of physical size makes sense in the context of measuring things that pop up in the field of ordinary human interaction. Thus, thousands of years ago, hunters would have called a bear large rather than small, to signal the urgency of the threat, and a baby is called small rather than large, in which case "large" connotes danger and “small” connotes helplessness and preciousness. Statements that employed such concepts were never merely true or false. Instead, the concepts comprise the mental HUD (heads up display) we developed (during what Yuval Harari calls the cognitive revolution, about 70,000 years ago) to interface with the environment after the perception of the latter has already been put together and pre-interpreted by the brain. And that evolutionary, biological story of how experience arises shouldn’t be thought of as true. Instead, that story is powerful, meaning that it achieves certain purposes. Likewise, religious narratives achieved alternative purposes. It’s just that we Western Faustians, as Oswald Spengler called us, care more about individual power than social harmony.

Take another example of scientific “truth”: global warming. Scientists agree that our planet is warming as a matter of fact, due largely to relatively recent human activities. We can model the mechanisms involved and can use the models to predict what will happen next if we respond this way or that to the threat. But is it truethat the earth is warming? To say that this is true is to say that our concepts are adequate to the facts such that there’s a correspondence or agreement between the former and the latter. And that is a hangover piece of anthropocentrism. Far from there being an agreement between the neuronal firings in our head or a sequence of linguistic symbols, on the one hand, and the facts we’re supposed to be speaking about, on the other, our attempts to understand reality are laughably outmatched by nature’s alienness.

Again, what does it mean to say that the earth is warming, when the interval that interests us is trivial compared to the sun’s lifespan? Yes, the planet’s climate has changed from year to year over the last several decades (mere decades!), and the trend is toward greater warmth, but talking about warmth in relation to the sun is as absurd as saying that it would be a little chilly on Pluto. The concept of warmth is suited to the mundane discourse in which we compare fractional differences in comfort depending on whether we’re wearing a jacket made of polyester or one of leather. Talk of global warming isn’t adequate to the task, as is suggested by the film Sunshine, which depicts the sun as a majestic god that enraptures an unlucky astronaut before roasting his every atom. No, what we would need is a concept that grasps at an intuitive level the unimaginable timespans and temperature fluctuations involved in the sun’s relation to this planet. In the distant past, the Earth was much hotter, which allowed animals to grow to monstrous size. (And that evolutionary statement about the dinosaurs is also a gross simplification and thus isn’t well thought of as merely true, because our concept of life is laughably inadequate due to our ignorance of life’s relation to the universe as a whole.) Likewise, one day in the distant future the sun will engulf our planet in flames. But there’s no word that encompasses the wild variations in the sun’s overall relationship to Earth. So our focus on the years that concern us is as arbitrary as a mayfly’s noticing just the changes in its puny environment that affect its 24-hour life cycle.

It bears repeating that measuring isn’t the same as understanding. A measurement can be more or less accurate, but accuracylikewise isn’t the same as truth. If you’re aiming for the middle of a dart board and you hit that target, your throw measures up to the standard and achieves your goal, but that doesn’t mean the throw agrees with the middle of the board. The numerical values on a thermometer are as anthropocentric as the linear divisions on a dart board. The decimal system suits us because we have ten fingers and toes and we attribute superstitious importance to ten as a complete figure; for the same reason, we mourn a baby’s loss if it’s born with only nine digits. Moreover, arithmetic presupposes that members of a type are interchangeable or that the differences between them are negligible—which they may be, for our purposes. When the Nazis assigned numbers to Jewish prisoners in their concentration camps, Allied soldiers were horrified by the inhumanity, but when we hold out a thermometer to measure the temperature and the reading says 30 degrees Celsius for the second day in a row, no one’s offended by this neglect of the untold variations in the factors that determine those temperatures. If you pick three apples from a tree, and then three more from another tree, you ignore the differences between the trees, the apples, and the other parts of the orchard, because your concept apple already simplifies so that many different things can count as the same for your purposes, and all that matters at the moment is that you have two groups of three things. The groups are reduced to being the same in that abstract respect. But that abstraction isn’t natural, just as there’s no such thing as a perfectly round circle or straight line in nature. No two apples are exactly alike and no two environments or temporal slices of an environment are remotely the same despite their having the same temperature according to a device we set up out of self-interest.

If a mayfly could judge its environment, assigning categories and drawing distinctions, and its judgments enhanced its fitness or achieved its mayfly goals, we would say that its judgments are, at best, true for the mayfly. The mayfly’s model of the facts would be so primitive and shockingly ignorant, from our comparatively godlike perspective, that we could only condescend to that aquatic insect and regard its worldview as having mere subjective truth. But ideal subjectivity isn’t the same as semantic, objective truth. The latter kind of truth is the agreement between a set of symbols and a real state of affairs. For Kierkegaard, subjective truth is inner authenticity, meaning the choice of how to live that remains “true” to your inner being. This integrity or faithfulness to your private thoughts and feelings is obviously not the same as the relation of semantic correspondence. You can express your authentic self even in a hostile or indifferent world, in which case the feeling that some statement is true for you, in that it coheres with your inner identity, needn’t agree with anything outside yourself. On the contrary, subjective truth can be tragic in that there may be a palpable disharmony between the self and the facts, as the real world extinguishes the self and consigns it to oblivion.  

Natural and Artificial Languages: Tools for Different Purposes

You might be thinking that even if ordinary concepts from natural language don’t agree with reality, since they’re too self-serving, scientists use more precise, artificial languages, including arcane mathematical concepts that may indeed encompass nature’s strangeness. But an artificial language like physics or chemistry has as little to do with a natural one like English or Cantonese, as subjective truth has to do with the objective kind, with the alleged agreement between certain statements and facts. Natural language is a tool for facilitating social relationships and thus its concepts ooze with anthropocentric metaphors and projections. The point is to enable us to read each other’s minds or to manipulate each other so we might dominate a social hierarchy. By contrast, artificial language is a device for providing us with power over nature.

When we speak of size or of warmth, we’re expressing ourselves so that the standard ought to be Kierkegaard’s ideal of subjective authenticity. Instead, most of us are self-deluded and so we concoct various mesmerizing fictions, including Plato’s tale of universal teleology or the semantic conceit of truth as agreement between us and the world. We take the expression of our comfort, when we say we feel warm in this jacket, for a statement that has as its objective meaning that it somehow latches onto reality, that it captures or mirrors a fact. This notion of semantic truth made sense in our ancient animistic period when we personified the whole world, believing that living spirits were at the root of everything so that we could imagine our self-expressions did indeed reflect wider reality. But after science revealed nature’s monstrous complexity and its strange lifelessness, or its undeadness, our self-expressions are merely grotesque if we presuppose that they satisfy anything outside themselves, that at their best our statements harmonize with anything in nature we didn’t create.    

An artificial language, such as the math used in a physicist’s equations is a set of tools for measuring and predicting, not for understanding. There is no hope a person will understand anything in nature unless she becomes as alienated from all she holds dear as is the universe alien to her intuitions. To understand something is to grasp its meaning. Nature has no meaning. Meaning is a product typically of human foolishness, so we understand only ourselves and our cultures. The rest is fit only for power differentials and for edifying existential reactions such as angst, horror, and awe. A scientist’s technical, abstract concepts, then, are at best only foreshadows of the machines that will harness the part of natural reality which informed the scientist’s model. The technical concepts are part of the blueprint for the technology with which we try to gain a foothold in the inhuman outer world. We have indeed overpowered much of our planet, at least when our Faustian efforts are compared to those of other species, most of which we’ve decimated or enslaved. But the conceptual instruments we use to develop the weapons in our struggle against natural processes don’t agree with anything. Instead, these concepts are techniques for preparing for our conquest of the modeled part of nature. The equations and definitions and laws divide and conquer their subject matter, just as a scientist will lay an animal on the dissection table and measure its innards to perfect the model of that species. That model doesn’t allow us to understand the creatures we torture, enslave, or consume; the point instead is for us to dominate them as though we were gods. A diagram of the layout of an animal’s internal organs doesn’t agree with the biological reality. On the contrary, the diagram is convenient because it inevitably simplifies, leaving out details that don’t interest us. The diagram is suitable only for certain purposes and those purposes usually presuppose the ideal of human dominance of the planet.

Like an accurate measurement, a natural law will correlate with the facts, but correlations are cheap and they don’t add up to truth. A thermometer is a device that registers changes in the environment and displays them in a useful fashion. Instead of meaningful agreement, there's causality, a mechanism connecting the tool to some natural process. Likewise, Newton’s law that force equals mass times acceleration is an arrangement of technical concepts that puts us in contact with a certain natural order. If there’s a semantic relation involved, it’s adequate only for our parochial purpose of dominating natural territory like crazed apes running amok, wearing lab coats. We will likely all be dominated by nature in the end, when our species is extinguished and all traces of our accomplishments will be undone as the galaxy evolves as a whole. Thus, to speak of the truth even of a natural law is unbecoming. The law enables us to measure the course of stars and planets, and to reach the moon by spaceship, but we don’t thereby understand anything, nor is our attempt to overpower nature wise.

Our best statements aren’t true in the sense that they agree with what they’re supposed to be about. The statements afford us some ultimately meager power which nevertheless naturally corrupts us, since we’re animals and that vanity may be the mechanism by which the wilderness counts us as being unfit to endure the variations it’s bound to pursue according to its alien agenda, as it were. Our technological success tempts us to overstep the bounds of ethics, to presume we can be realists whose discourse is objectively valid, that science agrees with reality, that there are realities named by our symbols so that we’ve put our finger on the world once and for all, or that we’re progressing towards that end. Again, this is an embarrassing lapse for alleged naturalists and humanists. The problem is that the Scientific Revolution began with the Renaissance during which early modern Europeans became engrossed in their potential for progress. The early humanists were highly optimistic about the powers of reason. But humanism needn’t amount to childlike glee in our secular abilities. Indeed, humanists can be misanthropic:we can be students of human nature, dismissing dogmas which held us down, but lamenting our fate in the existential context. Late modern humanists should know better than to parrot the exoteric dogma of semantic truth or to fall for the myth-laden explanation of technoscience’s great successes. We succeed not because we agree with nature, but because we’re predatory and psychopathic enough to aim to dominate it, but are also hapless and deluded so that instead we'll all be crushed and Mother Nature won't even have broken a sweat.

If Life is a Dream, which makes for the Best Story?

Bury, then, the anthropocentric notion of objective truth, with the theistic fictions. But is there a more fitting way of speaking philosophically about how we best relate to the world, besides the humdrum business of pragmatism? Perhaps our thoughts and utterances aren’t just instruments, but artworks, and perhaps all of nature consists of things created and destroyed, as the field of becoming. This metaphysical picture shouldn’t be thought of as true or false, for the above reasons. Instead, think of it as a poetic bet that honours the power of technoscience while not indulging in any anthropocentric delusion. At a minimum, as Heraclitus said, things in nature come and go. We too came and will go. Things everywhere are created and destroyed. Our technologies are creations of clever mammals created by a planet created by a star created by gravity acting on a nebula that was created by atomic and subatomic shenanigans. This means that aesthetics should take priority over semantics when we evaluate our judgments. Our worldviews are creations made of ideas. They are all therefore fictional, and the fictions can be more or less useful for various purposes, which is where aesthetics meets with pragmatism. But it’s not just our worldviews, our models, theories, philosophies, and myths that are works of art. Our reactions to the world that add up to the themes of our life are also our handiworks. Moreover, our perception of the world is a figment of the brain that interprets the inputs of the five senses. Put all this together and life becomes very like a dream, like a play or set of scenes that seems normal when stitched together but that unfolds strangely when viewed from a critical distance.

As the philosopher Kant pointed out, we think we understand the world because we’re aware only of how the world seems to us as we help to shape it with our basic categories and sensory modes. Other species might bring different mindsets to the task of making sense of a reality that ultimately eludes all our grasps. Our perceptions are collective hallucinations; the transductions may be mechanically guaranteed, but the concepts and logic we use to understand the sights and sounds are evidently detached from reality and tainted by our complaisance. We judge the neo-fascists as dupes and trolls, and we presume we liberals and critical thinkers are superior since our worldview is reality-based while theirs is a set of memes spun by a propaganda machine such as Breitbart or Fox News. This division may work for partisan purposes, but not for philosophical or spiritual ones. Ultimately, we are all dupes and monsters. We are predators that pretend to be passive observers who know what’s happening in the real world. We’re playthings of unfathomable natural powers that squeeze us even when we applaud ourselves for seeming to dominate the wilderness with our toy machines. And the sign that a worldview is reality-based is that it drives the contemplator to awe and to terror, not that it motivates him or her to espouse any sentimental notion such as that we all have equal rights. We’re all perfectly equal only in sharing the fate of being worm food. That fate could inspire us just as easily to attempt to be freeloaders, as to having empathy with others. Considering that life is a joke and our so-called reality is a dream world conjured by the brain and by the egotism and shortsightedness that drive mass culture, we might just as easily decide to outcompete and dominate weaker, more deluded players than to pursue gentler, socialist causes.    

All this would be so were there no aesthetic standards in addition to the delusional ones of morality, mass religion, and partisan games. If life is a dream, the question is which lives provide for the best stories. Which fictions are best as works of art? The problem with Donald Trump, for example, isn’t that he’s a psycho clown. We’re all psycho clowns in having to read the tea leaves supplied by our brain, to make any sense of what turns out to be a wholly alien and monstrous wilderness from which we hide under the circus tents of our self-serving, typically-ludicrous cultures. No, the problem specifically with Trump is aesthetic: his lies are dull, because his vocabulary is literally childish. That’s it. That’s enough reason to dismiss his whole life and his claim on your attention. Trump is boring to connoisseurs with good taste in life-fictions.

You’ll say this can’t be so, since the spectacles of Trump’s power plays are evidently riveting in that they hold much of the world’s attention through the mass media. Trump does hold our attention—like a train wreck. We consume news of the neo-fascists by rubbernecking, as we use these particular clowns as canaries in the coal mine. We search for signs of our civilization’s downfall as we learn that we can be pitiful enough to fall for fascism even after the catastrophic ends of the totalitarian regimes of the last century. We have little historical memory, precisely because social media entrances us with spectacles of the moment. The internet was supposed to bring everyone together in common knowledge; instead, the net ghettoizes us as we settle into our sub-niches. And technoscience should have been powerful enough to inform us of certain elementary facts of our nature and our past, but we’re as easily fooled by demagogues as were the ancients who worshipped their rulers as divine.

The phenomenon of Trumpism is important and it deserves our attention, but Trump himself makes for a dismal story. However greater the stakes were in his life, as he reckoned with billions of dollars whereas most people deal only with thousands, his deeds were unheroic and so as a protagonist he doesn’t attract the well-read viewer’s attention. His life story isn’t a book we should want to read, because we shouldn’t want the catharsis we’d achieve by identifying with Trump as a character. True, Trump became president of the United States, which is ordinarily heroic, but if Trump burns down the government he’s supposed to lead, the way he burned down his companies and conned his previous partners and investors, he’ll have reduced the presidency to his tawdry level and so spoiled the genre of American politics. More precisely, he’ll have given the game away, revealing the conflict between the psychopathy of all American presidents and the equally cold-blooded group-think of the American deep state.

In any case, this is how we should begin to evaluate life. Instead of congratulating some lifestyles for being based on truth and reality, while condemning others as fraudulent, we should be searching for inspiration as artists and as consumers of life-as-quasi-art. Not all social constructions and fictions are equal, just because nature laughs in all their faces. Some tales are original while others are clichéd and hackneyed; some resonate with your emotions and so help you be subjectively true to your inner self, while others seem mean-spirited or otherwise small-minded and function more like traps than like opportunities for mind-expansion or for testing the merits of your thought palaces. Life is but a dream—and we should be thankful that we lack the vantage point for taking in the cosmic whole, that we must content ourselves with fantasies and games to distract us so that we needn’t continually ponder the absurdity of our existential situation. Thank the strange heavens for killing off the gods of our babyish religions and for awakening us to the embarrassment of that secular fairytale of objective truth. 

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