Progress
When Greta the gremlin, Elon Musk, and FJB use the word, they each mean something different
“Dialectic's shit, evolution's crap
Time and time again the masquerade is
Shown for what it really is
Progress, progress, a pleasant myth
Progress, a pleasant myth”
-Progress, Mission of Burma
Now you shouldn't be getting all your philosophy from music, but some is good. All the bad ideas anchored by catchy music just prove Plato's point, that the poets can't be trusted to use poetry responsibly. Then we run into a counter-example that people want to turn into a counter-argument, as if the mere existence of Mission of Burma makes it equal to the popularity of Ice Spice. This is like saying the existence of Charlie Hebdo makes up for the existence of newspaper cartoons. Therefore, get off this whole, “Nooo! Music is used responsibly! People can say whatever they want, you bigot!” As if I was saying they couldn't. We were talking about philosophy and what of it we should keep from our time spent listening to music. And I conflate music and poetry because the former is where the latter lives. Academic poetry can't stir any of the revolutions Plato fears. Nobody reads it. Nobody cares. But rhymes about bullying? About sex? Ass? Status? Violence? These are top topics. The sacred is made profane and soon the holy priestess in a temple becomes a sex-slave in a brothel. Therefore, beware the well of poetry, because the waters are sourced from different streams.
Beware poets in general: we can't be trusted. After all, how can you understand our motives when our own reality is so malleable due to our constant linguistic tinkering that we do not comprehend ourselves? We are forcing language to solve a problem. Sometimes these are problems we intuit or experience, like hunger, or desiring something. But sometimes these are problems that manifest from definitions—analytic concepts. We're constantly playing with words because we're playing with meaning. This makes poets bad philosophers in general, because synthetic concepts require a rigid analytic framework in order to produce useful/meaningful results. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction) Be it Mission of Burma, a 1950s Bugs Bunny Cartoon starring Elmer Fudd, or workplace project management, how you experience a word like 'Progress' determines the context with which you frame it. And when introduced to you poetically, you are much more likely to adopt the poet's biases without realizing it.
As discussed in the prior essay, we can think we are referencing the same thing, but mean different things entirely. My notion of Progress might be to make life on earth more resilient to mass-extinction events, your notion of Progress might be to cause mass-extinction events. To make things more difficult, you might believe your notion of Progress is doing the opposite: that you are preventing mass-extinction events from occurring. You might think that banning fossil fuels is a great idea, until the global supply chain collapses, leading to a rapid decline in living standards and resulting in war which causes far more ecological damage and death than the fossil fuels you believed were impeding Progress (I'm looking at you Extinction Rebellion). On the other hand, maybe you really think humanity is a pox and you seek its extinction, in which case the aforementioned scenario becomes Progress (Still looking at you Extinction Rebellion).
Progress, as in the completion of a goal in service of a Plan, is different from Progress as a generative notion, where we seek to improve what came before. No surprise then that the greedy and project-oriented have co-opted Progress and conflated it with their own selfish interests, in order to blur the topic, so that we cannot examine Progress without considering the opinions of people who own capital, or the government, as if they owned more than one eight billionth of the conversation, each. This is how The Borg control the dialectic on the topic: they make it muddy and messy. They merge it with special interests and authorities. They smother all other discussion and debate by more qualified examiners with their disproportionate control of capital and/or government. We can take this a step further and state that those with too much money or who derive any income at all from the government, are not qualified to participate in a truly neutral discussion on the notion of Progress. Special pleadings from freaks and tiny minorities hijack the conversation and we are left with disgusting Netflix and other streaming depictions of our future slavery and the ways we'll cope. And meanwhile the eighty year old riddle inside Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment has been unanswered: 'what is Progress?' Just because they had opinions doesn't mean it was answered. They despised Jazz! Obviously they knew fuck-all about Progress. But they asked some good questions and at least extracted Instrumental Reason out of Progress, differentiating the two. Inevitably their Marxist fixations lead to the same unprincipled dead end as Capitalism's. Statism cannot determine the destiny of a free people any more than pure capital can.
Perhaps the secret answer is that few individuals have a say as to what Progress means. The will of commerce means our time and labors are under the sway of those wealthier than us and the will of government forces us to consider the will of whoever is in control of it (not the people, for bureaucrats are never for the people and are only for themselves). More personal wealth makes it too tempting to conflate this bigger notion of Progress with one's own selfish desires, using the moral mythology of capitalism (that it makes wealth is not in question). Therefore we cannot wealth our way into a better examination of the topic. Likewise we cannot dictate terms of Progress through the government, because those who control the government have no social limit to their power, so they call all acts of power, Progress. Their acts necessarily disenfranchise all those who are not participating in the government. Through attrition, most would-be examiners of the topic are irrelevant. This leaves only a few groups. Academics for one, who are susceptible to coercion by both peers, and institutions—which are never controlled by academics and always by the government. Writers and poets for another, who are susceptible to poverty, cancellation, and censorship by both the government and corporate entities. When have you ever heard normies discussing Progress—a discussion where they're familiar with all the permutations and typical arguments that accompany the topic? They are deflected from examining it, for it is one of the most important ideas of all: what is the point of it all? Money and power want to keep you in existential hell, so you never take the time to think about it for yourself. You can go for a six pack of race war, or a family meal of class struggle, like some idiot, because these are not topics allowed proper discussion in public. So going for a ready-made product when the technology is so obviously lacking, is a dunderheaded notion. No answers. Serves an unknown master. A total minus.
Given all that, when you first heard “Dialectic's shit, evolution's crap...” did you underestimate these guys? Because I think that's pretty stupid, if someone is discussing Progress and brackets an argument with idealism and materialism, to dismiss them... especially if those ways of looking at it hadn't occurred to you. I'm not saying you did, after all, you're reading this. How dumb can you be? But I am making the point that a word that is as essential to our daily purpose, as the word 'game' is to our mind-games, has had virtually no proper survey since Postmodernism (and accompanying Marxists) took over the conversation. Or maybe you think Elon Musk owns this one now? That progress is defined by the things he wants to do. You are again letting the pendulum of the two forbidden poles drive your dialectic: capitalism and statism are not the axes that define Progress. This goes too for Ross Ulbricht style Singularity worshipers, who want to get rich and live forever and fuck the rest of us. How can that be Progress? How can you in good conscience work toward that goal when it necessarily means the worst of us will be immortal and the best of us will die serving these demigods? Isn't that scenario a case for Omnicide? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omnicide_(disambiguation)) If they, these Borg-types, are out to drive the rest of humanity extinct, isn't that the real race-war? A war between the humans and the would-be post-humans? This is why the conversation is obfuscated and again, the road leads back to The Borg. It is not monomania that drives my discovery, rather it is their urge to dominate all life which is why they are behind so much that is abhorrent.
"Progress" is whatever I am selling at a profit, because I want you let go of something, which will benefit me --- best as I can understand.
Politically-Progressive-Pimp