In this post I go on about how personality, identity and feelings are related to the political power of the liberal democratic model.
What I am trying to explain are the complex social processes which partner with a hundred year old political system.
The power of this system is secured by the manufacture and manipulation of the feelings, dreams and opinions of its public.
This is an alternative look at liberal democracy.
Strap in.
Introduction -The Liberal Century
Part one - The Freedom to Consent - The Making of Belief
Part two - The Personal as Product - Women and Men as Consumer Product
That is enough for one day, so the next instalment will cover:
Part three - Why Things Are Like This (and not themselves)
Part four - The Production of Personality
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SERVITUDE
Liberal democracy is a hundred years old. When I talk about the “liberal” system, I do so in two ways.
The system of the management of public opinion designed in the 1920s
The refinement of this system from the fall of the Soviet Union
I am talking about the first instance here.
PART ONE: THE FREEDOM TO CONSENT
In which I explain the model of liberal democracy as a system of government by propaganda.
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PUBLIC OPINION
The methods of liberal democratic management arose from the attempts by the US government to engage its population in the European War. Its name changed to World War One, as one result of a successful campaign to mould public opinion.
There is more to this method than mere propaganda, whose centrality to the function of “liberal democracy” is of course obvious.
Propaganda is used because “the public” cannot be trusted to decide for themselves.
It is the role of the elites to determine what is, and what is not to be decided.
Liberal democracy is the system of government for the people, directed by expert elites.
It is based on the belief that the public require not rules, but the idea of them, their content being irrelevant.
All that matters is that there are rules, and norms, and it is up to the elites to decide what they are, too.
Our political ideology is refined in this way. Consider the ones which are prohibited.
The liberal ideology reserves to its elites the privilege of spectacular and almost unlimited violence, and currently defines the value of human life according to financial cost or personal advantage from the point of view of the public.
The architects of the liberal democratic model, which is present in every subject nation of the US empire, were also interested in moulding a common belief - to replace orthodox faith with a sort of secular religion.
PROCESSED WORSHIP
This idea did not originate with John Dewey, whose essays on this subject are collected in a 1934 volume called A Common Faith. It was present in Auguste Comte, in the French Revolution’s “Cult of Reason”, and returned in Matthew Arnold’s “Culture and Anarchy”.
There are in fact secular religions which were not so much created but encouraged by the liberal state.
For the plebs, it is sport. For the smug, it is art. Some worship credentials.
All are really about money, which furnishes a compelling spectacle through these exorbitant totems.
The late stages of Liberal democracy have produced, along with its techniques and those of mass society generally, a moral inversion.
This has also led to “social justice” being infused with intense moral fervour. The rights agenda is an example of this. So is the idea of “climate justice”.
PART TWO: THE PERSONAL AS PRODUCT
In this part I go on about women, and then about men. Both are products of a pharmaceutical-consumer phantasmagoria, when seen from the ideal point of conformity to the liberal-neoliberal system.
WOMAN AS CONSUMER
Women are the most enthusiastic consumers on the planet, estimated in 2020 to control 20 trillion dollars worldwide in consumer spending. This “growth market…more than twice as big as the economies of India and China combined”, led to the Harvard Business Review’s 2020 claim that
“Women now drive the world economy.”
Women also drive the political economy - the currency of policy decisions. Black men in the USA are said to have feared the censure of black women for voting for Trump, being twice as likely to vote for him.
Tommy Sotomayor (he is the black one) says this at around 2:00
“The fear in the black community is that black men don’t want to upset black women.”
Is this fear of shame determining the politics of other races?
According to this woman, white men feel “left out” of diversity, equity and inclusion - soft, fuzzy and warm words whose appeal western women find irresistible. Why? Another woman says the reason why women “value DEI” more than men is due to “Empathy”:
“Empathy is a cornerstone of effective DEI efforts. Women, historically associated with empathy, tend to connect deeply with the experiences of marginalized individuals.”
Pew Research said in 2023
“About six-in-ten women (61%) say focusing on increasing DEI at work is a good thing, compared with half of men.
And larger shares of women than men say it’s extremely or very important to them to work at a place that is diverse when it comes to gender, race and ethnicity, age, and sexual orientation.”
Why do women feel such “empathy”? Perhaps it is itself a displacement - and a drug induced pathological one at that.
In a process mirrored throughout the technological society, the human appetite for meaning and emotional reinforcement is repatterned upon the substitute options of the workplace and its rewards.
Feelings traditionally reserved for mothering and raising a family can be substituted by career opportunities and the emotional jargon prescribed to secure them.
Women who have killed their own babies transfer their grief on to Mother Earth, and identify with her. The planet, however, has not taken a monthly abortifacient which produces a sense of unfathomable loss with each extinguished cycle.
It does not take pills which drive itself mad, or hormonal coils which also massively increase depression, anxiety and mood disorders in its formative years.
This is because hormonal contraception suppresses testosterone in women.
The planet does not simulate miscarriage every four months, and it does not compensate itself with aggressive retail “therapy”.
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Nor does it transfer its feelings on to the alien and exotic to secure a momentary reward attached to permanent consequences, as women do when advocating for open borders, for diversity, for any of these emotionalised fantasies whose real world results do not interest them.
The interest lies in the reward, whose neurochemical effect is both fleeting and intensely personal. Socially, its significance reduces to “look at me”.
Finally, the planet does not hunger for credentials to validate its unstable personality and the consistently terrible takes it calls opinion.
The degree system is inflected with the degraded thymos of our time. These are not qualifications but status papers for the stateless.
Credentialism is just another form of consumerism, making a product whose imaginary appeal is banalised by the universal access to debt.
Why am I so unkind to women? These in my view are facts, and you can be certain that the people who design or exploit these mechanisms are aware of them too.
Many men also fall into these categories these days. The pinnacle of eroticised consumerism, the trans cult, has seen men demand to be taken seriously when they claim to menstruate. Our culture has itself transitioned, from one in which men made things, into one which makes men want things - in order to feel like men.
MASS-CULINITY
Men are largely similar in their consumption of machine-generated content.
Manly brands have compensated for the vanishing traits of the masculine. Male-to-male transsexuals manifest themselves through beard oils, bacon, Black Rifle Coffee, lumberjack shirts, work boots which have never walked on site.
The tremendous loss to male identity which is downstream of financialisation includes the absence of traditional male labour. It is an absence answered by the presence of product.
Lifting heavy things produces more testosterone. Grip strength correlates with a longer life. Test makes you maler. Why do most men have a fraction of the test of their grandfathers1?
Sperm count has halved too, since the 1970s. In the US and Canada, 40 percent of men over 45 have “low test”, being under 300 nmg.
This is “not part of normal ageing” according to a 2012 study, but due instead to “lifestyle” and diet.
Why does test matter? It is not only about strength, vitality, longevity, confidence, energy, mood and independence of mind.
Lower test makes men more suggestible and pliant. Low-T men are weak in mind as in body.
This is a coefficient of a system whose power and legitimacy is guaranteed by moulding the will of its population to that of its management.
If you would like to become ungovernable, lift weights.
I will continue this snapshot of our democratic and liberal system in the next post.
Coming soon: why you are all (probably) antisemitic, and a review of the best book on propaganda I have ever read. And SCALE.
Test levels are said to have dropped by 25 percent between 1999 and 2021 in the US here, and the graph shown comes from this paper - “Is Rising Obesity Causing a Secular (Age-Independent) Decline in Testosterone among American Men?” from 2013.
“About six-in-ten women (61%) say focusing on increasing DEI at work is a good thing, compared with half of men."
This alleged 50% of "men" are merely trying (probably unsuccessfully) to curry favor and get laid . They are not to be listened to in most cases . 100% of women should be ignored in any case not concerning childbirth .
A brilliant analysis of "Liberal Democracy".