This post is about the artificial identities which mass society sells you.
This means that instead of meaningful religion, traditions, culture and customs we are intended to inhabit a world of products.
These products function as consolation prizes for what we have lost.
You can buy a pair of shoes or a personality pattern - you can do so at the same time. Products are a promise attached to a pitch. If you buy them, you can be like them - and less like you. Products promise an exit leading nowhere.
This is the story of the fools’ bargain hunt that is the mass technological society.
It begins with some remarks about the nature of mass society today, and talks about the need for identities it supplies in place of all the meaning it has destroyed.
There are two brief paragraphs on “transactional” and “relational” society in the middle.
I describe some synthetic identities at the end.
Post was delayed because I blew my car up. Lol.
CONTENTS
CLOSING DOWN SALE - LIBERAL ENDGAME
SYNTHETIC IDENTITY POLITICS
PART TWO
WHAT IS A “TRANSACTIONAL” SOCIETY?
WHAT ARE “HUMAN SCALE RELATIONS”?
A RANGE OF SYNTHETIC IDENTITIES
CLOSING DOWN SALE
The Liberal idea since the fall of the Soviet Union is inextricably linked with mass consumerism.
In fact, the man who announced its victory in the “end of history” said so himself. He defined the Liberal system, which he said was supreme, as a combination of elections and cheap consumer goods - “democracy plus VCRs”, in the idiom of the 90s.
This is what The Guardian had to say about Francis Fukuyama’s End of History and the last Man in 2014:
In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama writes that the "enormously productive and dynamic economic world created by advancing technology" has a "tremendous homogenising power": global political harmony is the "ultimate victory of the VCR".
But are consumerism and technology, as he suggests, really progressive?
The question is not whether this combination is “progressive”. It certainly is, if we understand “progress” by its effect in destroying meaning and the traditions and customs from which it was derived.
I have coined the awful term “onticide” for the effects of progress, which means the murder of the nature of being itself.
All categories of reference to the world outside the self are collapsed by progress, whose cancel culture simply cancels culture: all of it.
Is the formula of consumerism plus elections meaningfully democratic? That is a better question.
I would argue that it is not. It refines the technique of social control - propaganda - in the production of the person-as-product.
The individual consumes a ready made identity to confer on them the connections, significance and sense of value formerly conferred by ways of being settled over centuries.
This is a revolution in the head, a fire sale of civilisation taking place at the speed of information.
How has this phenomenon displaced authentic human personality? Let me count the ways.
SYNTHETIC IDENTITY POLITICS
Jennifer Bilek is a writer who has done more than most to expose the transgender trend.
In seeking to expose the workings, financing and transmission of this technologically enabled cult, she has coined the term “Synthetic Sexual Identities”.
She means by this that the identity of the trans is an artifice made possible by following the The Science.
It is a form of technology worship.
“The Science” here is the surgery and hormones which facilitate “transition”. Crucially, it also contains the means of contagion and transmission of the condition - mass electronic media.
Thus, the most obvious example of the synthetic identity parade is that of the transwoman or transman.
As I have explained in my series on the transgender cult, the aim is to transcend the self and its limitations completely in a combination of purchase power, erotic desire and technology.
This makes the transgender trend the pinnacle consumer experience, combining desire with technological possibility to offer a form of transcendence aimed directly at the replacement of God.
There is a “trans religion” which states this goal as one of its tenets. You can read about this here:
The synthetic identity of the trans individual has become obviously politicised.
It also demonstrates that adopting synthetic identities can confer tangible benefits.
Trans people are awarded legal and professional privilege as well as attention - even glorification - for their adoption of a synthetic identity. This confers status and the a sort of fame, which is the most prized reward.
Fame is the debased coin of the consumer society, and many people would do anything to get even a little of it.
PART TWO
What is a transactional society?
The transactional society is the system of human relations as deals. In this model you are an atom, connected only by the means of actualising desire through exchange. There is no dimension beyond the reconciliation of wants.
What is meant by human scale relations?
Human scale relations are the basis of the opposite of transactionalism - the relational society. This is the world imagined as the structure of friendship, kinship, and the sense of common purpose united in what the Greeks called “agapé” - the love beyond the self for others, and for God.
Real life relationships outside deal-making are the basis of the relational model.
A Range of Synthetic Identities
Where human relations wither or fail, many substitutes arise to fill the hole of the isolated self.
Some are obvious, others are not. As has been said before, where ideology is victorious it is invisible: people mistake it for “just the way things are”.
Why does your boss talk like a robot?
Managerial identity - fake professionalism
Managerial identity is the use of jargon and officious protocol to confer the protection of “professionalism” on the self - against the human scale world.
Human input is coded as a dangerous infection to the efficacy of a system which promotes people who most closely resemble components. The managerial role is most obvious when it is treating normal human input as an error.
Talking like a robot indicates that you have become the fungible factor which the machine selects to suit itself.
The Credentialed Self
The credentialed self is cognate with the fake expertise of the jargon-jukebox above. In the transactional society, expertise is purchased - not earned by aptitude combined with experience.
Selling credentials flatters the obvious lie that all are equally capable provided they buy the right papers. This is a scam, but it is more appealing to believe in it than to see how easily you are duped.
Finally, the credential industry has great margins. It is hugely profitable, and produces the false positive of a “highly educated” society. You can be educated and not a sucker, of course. However, it takes an education to be an exceptional one.
The Midwit
Most people are of average intelligence. Those in the middle of the Bell curve are the likeliest to overestimate their intelligence. To the limited, their horizons are obvious. The brightest also see their limitations clearly.
Those in the middle do not. These are the most common people, and they commonly attach social status to the possession of credentials.
To secure these credentials they will believe anything the others do not. They will display the strange plumage of contrarian fantasy as the outgrowth of their credentialed identity.
There are midwits of “left” and “right”. What marks them out is not their politics but their conceit.
Something of the midwit is present in Chichikov, the self important empty vessel in Gogol’s Dead Souls.
The Consoomer
The Consumer (memed as “The consoomer”) uses products as the animist does the lion skin. Clothes, cosmetic surgery, gender reassignment hormones, and collections of games toys for adults - or kidults - are a few pathways of personal purchase power.
To the consumer it is as if their buying gives them purchase on life itself: the transaction is the interface with others, neutralised by the perpetual and sacred rightness of themselves as the customer.
They wield the power of benediction and malediction through online reviews and threats to see the manager.
Possessions become totemic to the consoomer. Their choices display their identity, their unique self - manifested in brands.
The Professional Person of Colour
The moral inversion of mass society results in strange habits of worship. Those considered “marginalised” are now revered.
When applied to race, which is at once real and not real under the Regime, this concept confers the same advantages as the transgender option.
To become a professional POC is a good career move. Like the trans identity, the Professional Person of Colour option affords professional and legal privilege and can be parlayed into a sort of fame.
Preference on the basis of superficial characteristics is a virtue when practised by the management, which has adopted a sort of outgroup-preference. The Professional POC surfs this wave of antipathy to the norms of kinship.
The Conservative
Bruce Jenner is a conservative.
The Eco-Warrior
The chiliasm of the technological age, planetary doom-saying is a response to a growing sense that something has gone deeply wrong. What is actually wrong is that humanity is increasingly patterned on machines, which gives rise to weird behaviours.
To fight earth crime is to accuse others of uncaring. It ennobles the climateer and damns the indifferent. Again, the appeal lies in that of self-magnification: those who scream the loudest are those of the highest consciousness, their lament for the dying planet a whiny lovesong to themselves.
The Science Follower
Science followers magnify themselves in the act of derision. These Followers are led not by Science, which has no guiding purpose whatsoever, but by their own appetite to pronounce themselves better by default.
People who were circumspect about a novel treatment for a disease with dubious origins, involving the near total suspension of their civil liberties became the idiots.
Common sense was ridiculed by the “wise”. The cost was the worldwide hatred of the unvaccinated and the unconvinced, and the benefit was entirely imaginary to those who practised it.
Aside from the obvious benefits of novel mRNA/DNA injections, of course. And economic ruin, suicides, depression, injuries, mysterious heart attacks, turbo cancers, the precedent of legalised house arrest, and so on.
Science Following has shown us there is no sane limit on the content of the Current Thing.
It told you that thinking for yourself is stupid.
What was the personal reward of Science Following? Mental illness.
People who stuck by Covid lockdown rules the most strictly have the worst mental health today, research has found.
But wait! These people are still better than YOU.
They identified that people with “communal” personalities – who are more caring, sensitive and aware of others’ needs – adhered the most rigorously with the lockdown protocols
You could just say “emotional” and “feeble minded”.
However, people with “agentic” personalities – who are more independent, more competitive and like to have control over their lives – were least likely to exhibit those behaviours.
“Adults”, then.
The moral of this story is that Science Followers are better than you, and sacrificed themselves (for nothing) to prove it. To themselves.
War Flag Wavers
People who wave flags for wars in which they will never fight are not merely stealing valour. They are celebrating death and destruction.
To them it seems noble to do so, as the wars are always framed as liberation struggles. To display the flag of a nation of which you know nothing is akin to wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt (whilst being unaware of his spicy opinions on “diversity”).
War is a meme to these people and the symbols they adopt point to themselves. Women of both sexes wore yellow flowers to display their support of one of the most corrupt governments in the world because the US was using it to smash Russia.
There is a campaign going on at the moment to normalise the total destruction of the meagre Palestinian “homeland”. Making massacres make sense is the business of our management, whose permanent war economy requires these horrific moral inversions.
I find the practice of war managers leading the national worship of the war dead obscene, and think the Cenotaph should be turned into a Starbucks.
The feminist
The apex of female liberation was the sacred right to murder your own offspring. That this has been replaced by the celebration of men dressed as grotesque prostitutes demonstrates that feminism has liberated women from womanhood.
There is no collectivism in feminism, it being an identitarian movement - one of extreme individualism based on attributes and not essence. This is the reason it has been easily hijacked by impostors.
Cuckoo! Says the trannington - this is my nest now.
The Social Justice Warrior
Rights-based activism is the most effective means of dissolving any organisation. This was demonstrated by the injection of the “progressive stack” into the Occupy movement, which died as a result.
Whole societies are rapidly corroded by their division into incentivised and antagonistic factions.
Again, the self is magnified in this notional crowd of the enlightened, who heroise the leveraging of advantage in person or by proxy - which is perverse.
The result is not harmony but a scramble for rewards. These rewards are usually secured by the most incontinent, who are the least confined by decency or the recognition of the entitlements of others. It is a mad cult of the self, which is obvious from the tribal signifiers many of its members display.
There are more fake identities of course.
I hope to have shown they have nothing much to do with the left/right dichotomy. They are business opportunities for the motivated self.
These identities are a form of media. They mediate your experience of yourself with that of others. In this way, your face is replaced with an interface.
These personae - which means “masks” - will become less convincing as the reality around them breaks down. Artificial intelligence “news” is just one aspect of this. The greater dimension is the total collapse of the fantasy ideology.
Liberalism is like a man in a straitjacket whose idea of escape is to call everyone else insane. I have already chewed through the straps and vaulted the high walls in my hospital gown, and I expect to meet you all as I run, laughing, through the fields.
Life is not just about me, about you, about what we can get for ourselves.
There is a higher purpose to life and that fact unites us in the zeal for the real.
I think most people will realise that unmediated life is preferable to a hall of mirrors.
Reality is going to come back, in a big way.
Thanks again for producing something that is thought provoking and somehow reassuring. After reading your stuff I always feel more grounded. Please continue.
Got people stocked in every shade, must be doing well with trade.
Stamped, addressed, in odd fatality, that evens out their personality.
With profit potential marked by a sign, I can recognize some of the production line,
No bite at all in labor bondage, just wrinkled wrappers or human bandage...
The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
When all this revolution is over, he sits down on a highly polished floor while his dizziness fades away. It is an empty modern hallway and the dreamdoll saleslady sits at the reception desk. Without prompting she goes into her rap: "This is the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, those you are about to see are all in for servicing, except for a small quantity of our new product, in the second gallery. It is all the stock required to cover the existing arrangements of the enterprise. Different batches are distributed to area operators, and there are plenty of opportunities for the large investor. They stretch from the costly care-conditioned to the most reasonable mal-nutritioned. We find here that everyone's looks become them. Except for the low market mal-nutritioned, each is provided with a guarantee for a successful birth and trouble free infancy. There is however only a small amount of variable choice potential - not too far from the mean differential. You see, the roof has predetermined the limits of action of any group of packages, but individuals may move off the path if their diversions are counter-balanced by others."
"It's the last great adventure left to mankind"
- Screams a drooping lady
offering her dream dolls at less than extortionate prices,
and as the notes and coins are taken out
I'm taken in, to the factory floor.
for the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- All ready to use
the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- I just need a fuse.
Got people stocked in every shade,
Must be doing well with trade.
Stamped, addressed, in odd fatality.
That evens out their personality.
With profit potential marked by a sign,
I can recognize some of the production line,
No bite at all in labor bondage,
Just wrinkled wrappers or human bandage.
Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- All ready to use
it's the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- I just need a fuse.
As he wanders along the line of packages, Rael notices a familiarity in some of their faces. He finally comes upon some of the members of his old gang and worries about his own safety. Running out through the factory floor, he catches sight of his brother John with a number 9 stamped on his forehead.
The hall runs like clockwork
Their hands mark out the time;
Empty in their fullness
Like a frozen pantomime.
Everyone's a sales representative
Wearing slogans in their shrine.
Dishing out fail safe superlative,
Brother John is No. 9.
it's the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- All ready to use
it's the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- I just need a fuse.
The decor on the ceiling
has planned out their future day
I see no sign of free will,
so I guess I have to pay,
pay my way,
for the Grand Parade
it's the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- All ready to use
it's the Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging
- I just need a fuse.
Source: LyricFind
Songwriters: Anthony Banks / Michael Rutherford / Peter Gabriel / Phil Collins / Steve Hackett
The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging lyrics © Concord Music Publishing LLC, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging from the 1974 album, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis