The God-Like Powers of The Free Market Invisible Hand
Recent comments read about the marvels and wonders of individualism in the context of "Free Markets and Capitalism" started me thinking of passages from Ms Rand's strange and disturbing book Atlas Shrugged, which has had an influence upon quite a few males in the English-speaking world. If truth were told, probably too much influence from such an irrational and peculiar writer.
The tendency in some to allocate supernatural "God-like" invisible hand powers to the phenomenon claimed to exist known as "Market Forces" also sprang to mind. That willingness to transfer and projection of responsibility for unpleasantness onto something fundamentally and necessarily unproveable, as a means of avoiding personal actions or even consideration: "An Act of Market Forces". Nothing we can do about that. What cowardly throwaway nonsense.
At worst this could conjure up the old true meaning of the word “idiot” from the Greek “idiotes”, meaning “one’s own”. It pictured a completely private life with no public responsibilities. To be an idiot was to be without responsibility - to live almost childishly for oneself alone and not as a responsible member of a polis with a public role. Ironically, some modern industrial societies have made idiocy normative, with an aberrant emphasis on the primacy of individualism and the narrow dull mind's pursuit of naught but self-interest and shiny trinkets. It portrays the immense blanketing boredom of deadened minds, flaring only in the fury of the realisation of deathliness and waste, oft fanned by the self-rousing sullen despair of mildly mocking defensive anti-intellectualisation.
Back all that selfishness up with a good dose of new digital/clerical Fascism driven by a humongous and disgustingly well-funded upper echelon, throw in a pinch or thousand of Mike Judge's satirical "Idiocracy", the prophetic cult film akin to Michael Bywater's description of The Infantilism of the modern Anglo male (2). Add some deep targeted immensely powerful cultist style Cambridge Analytica brainwashing (see events Jan. 6th 2021), followed up by vicious enemies banded together to deliver some 4th Generation hybrid war and what prospects do you arrive at for Western Civilisation and Democracy. "No that's all wrong" they cry (see below on delusion).
What you have is a large problem avoided and denied the existence of by some "idiotes" in the subs and some alarming elements of Mass Psychosis (1). No doubt whatsoever. In reality what has steadily been created is a sort of 21st Century Battleship Potemkin (3) where the levels and extents of criminality and corruption "at the top", not the political top, although it is there, the MONEY TOP, have become so normalised and pervasive that it will not be maggots in sailor's food causing the discontent, but a slow-growing realisation that the ride that vast numbers of people have been taken on was very, very long and highly intended.
Cheer up. It might never happen. No-one need ever do anything. That would be too much. This is fine. CG
(1) "The Delusions of Trumpism and BARXIT — A Peak of Mass Social Psychosis"
(2) "Big Babies or Why Can't we Just Grow Up" - Michael Bywater: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1964456.Big_Babies
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