As China's Yuan continues its weakening trend against both the Dollar and Ruble zones, one must question why China advocates correlate financial crisis in the West with Chinese ascendancy to hegemony, despite financial data to the contrary? One answer is they have a flawed sense of zero sum competition. America's loss is China's gain. This ignores all the other powers, their interests, their networks, their sources of power. Ignorance is the short answer, but it's not useful and doesn't lead to falsifiable theses we can use to make predictions. Very smart people think China and the Yuan zone are going to replace the dollar zone. Unfortunately, these people uniformly seem to have no real understanding or appreciation for the value of a fully convertible currency. The Renminbi isn't even close to convertible. Californians know that PRC Chinese desperately try to purchase whatever real estate and fine art they can. They don't believe in their own currency, but you do? To quote a senile: C'mon man! A citizen of a trading nation who believes in China without first understanding how money works has bifurcated consciousness on the topic. On one hand, this citizen enjoys the ability to hold many different asset classes and may or may not convert out of them. But on the other hand, this person thinks that China is going to be so great, even though Foreign Direct Investment into China is rapidly declining (https://tradingeconomics.com/china/foreign-direct-investment) and they personally probably don't own Yuan as savings. This failure to put their money where their mouth is demonstrates a clash of worldviews. Their geopolitical analysis fails because of a misunderstanding of financial and trade dynamics.
When two competing theses fail to synthesize, but rather just sit in opposition to each other inside the holder's belief sets, they will contradict each other and produce failure. The person who believes China is replacing the USA as we speak ignores that China has already declined from 85% of the USA's GDP in 2020 to 66% today, and falling fast. They will just ignore, hoping that their existing belief systems will find a resolution to the contradiction at a later point. In short, they abdicate predictive power, without recognizing that's a refutation of their belief system. Why can't their belief system contain the new information? Because the new information contradicts the system, fragmenting and defeating it. Containerized thinking creates islands of thought designed by fixed obsessions, impervious to challenge. These biases come from fear of ego death: a refusal to accept new information that contradicts a dearly held belief.
Where do these beliefs come from? Dogma is one for sure. But old dogmas have fallen away, and yet the intractability of flimsy beliefs seems stronger than ever. Since Covid, there is significantly less participation in institutions such as Church, work, or family in the US at least. (https://archive.is/8VEAH) (https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values-that-once-defined-u-s-wsj-norc-poll-finds-df8534cd) Yet we see the rise of a woke ideology that appears to have a singular origin: mass media. And still, though skeptics have been able to identify the correlation, they have been incapable of isolating the causation. Sure, they can say it's bad for xyz, but there is no framework or model offered that explains HOW visual media persuades.
Video bypasses holistic thought by censoring presentations (edits & cuts) and vantage points (point of view). Visual storytelling media removes visual cause and effect, because the whole pleasure of cinema is what we used to call 'tv magic.' Characters teleporting. Fast forward. Computer graphics. Reality doesn't work like that, yet emotional expectations are anchored in this pretend medium. Expectations drift far from the possible, and the delusional foist their delusions into public discourse. This is by design.
Galileo introduced causality into the Western intellectual paradigm that would later be known as The Enlightenment. Causality started with Galileo and the Catholic Church was threatened by rationalism's threat to their authority. Considering The Borg seeks total authority, they must eliminate and destroy the Enlightenment.
https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/the-borg
To do so, they must first destroy an individual's ability to comprehend reality. This leads to Bezmenov's point that what starts with subversion, leads to demoralization.
When a person cannot respond effectively to a real stimulus, they will suffer until crisis destroys what was once normal. The Woke Mind Virus is demoralization on a mass scale and it comes from expectations that are not anchored in reality (intersubjective phenomenology for all those 'what is reality' assholes).
Propagandists early in the 20th century understood the possibilities. Hitler was an innovator (https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/hitler-rehearsing-speech-front-mirror-1925/) long before he even heard of Leni Riefenstahl.
The Modernists in the 1920s tried integrating this jump-cut style of reality into their poetry, but just wound up alienating the readership. Take it from a lifelong poet: people may say they like TS Eliot's The Wasteland, but they sure don't find it very quotable, notable, or useful in their daily lives. But whenever I feel life kicking my ass, I remember to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. I'm not going to lecture you on the virtues of Tennyson, but that's only because life's but a walking shadow, a poor player who struts and frets his time upon the stage and then is heard no more. Literature aping visual media lost most of the readership in forty years. That refutes almost any argument pro-Modernists and post-Modernists want to levy, to claim these movements were improvements. It was their audience to lose and they lost it.
The post-Modernists being even worse, since they don't even believe in context. These damned ideas stayed in English departments where they belonged, until modern hermeneutics came along. Fuckers like Jameson and Fish are the grandparents of this woke shit. What first annihilated strict textualism, by using Marxist and Reader Response criticism, devolved into extreme solipsistic criticism. Most Ethnic Studies departments for example, formed around a fad in English departments and somehow, these disciplines found a way to issue diplomas, despite being pure derivatives of Philosophy and English and lacking any falsifiable body of knowledge... much less acknowledging their antithesis. A strict textualist such as myself can find a Feminist Critique counterpart in an English department and have it out. But there is no likewise counterparty in any Ethnic Studies department. Such bodies of knowledge are not systems of knowledge, but rather anti-rationalist dogmas. I thought I had left this nightmare behind in undergrad, but the fuckers followed me into the real world and started attacking its institutions. At first, I cheered them on, because the condescending money and tech fucks refuse to believe that literature has power. I liked pointing to them and saying, “look, the English department kicked your Computer Science ass.” But wrong lessons were learned by all. There is English Major Omerta: never admit English has power or agenda. It's one of the higher IQ disciplines, now that all the ethnic studies idiots have left it. And they love defacing the culture, one cutting quip at a time. They are fully aware of how much power they have over the overton window and I too liked to use shitty English major tricks to shut down conversations I didn't like. And because most of the doer-types didn't even enter English departments, these losers and twerps were able to demolish large chunks of culture... because it was left unguarded. And that's the key thing here. My whole literary career has been a fight against these people. When they came for the Poets, nobody cared. I have been shadowbanned by Google for 13 years and counting. Many thinking people stopped caring about literature and moved-on. Smart people like you and me continued reading underground literature that kept burrowing deeper and deeper underground. Only now that Matt Taibbi is being censored do principled thinkers realize what has happened. But when I used to complain about not getting published, they'd just tell me, “Git gud scrub.” And when I'd complain about being blacklisted despite being in the top 10 most widely read English language poetry publications of 2010, and top 50 even now, (https://toylit.blogspot.com/) I'd get contemptuous silence from my peers, who worried my outspokenness would contaminate their own ambitions. But at this point, I can safely say that with over 400k pageviews in the last 13 years, I was good and there was something dysfunctional with the publishing system.
Literature is medicine. Dostoevsky is loved by young men, because he finishes their Raskolnikov thoughts for them. Loved by the outsiders, for we are also Underground Men. These long thoughts by great thinkers fill in our beliefs and can help us form a belief system. The reason ChatGPT hasn't transformed our consciousness is because it generates word salad devoid of a belief system. It cites different logical paradigms and doesn't align them by parity. For example, Kripke Semantics, and Classical Logic and Vector Logic are not compatible. But this is just an island inside the belief container of Rationalism. And for ChatGPT that might be in another container of “Run ChatGPT” which includes pathological lying, intellectual property theft, channeling the wisdom of crowds, and borrowing from the intelligence of the language itself. To this point, ChatGPT is just a subordinate function to The English Language or even All Semantically Meaningful Language, which is another way of saying it just borrows from the intelligence of the language. Just as time is what keeps everything from happening at once, literature is a singular embodiment of the universal semantic in Language.
Is France falling apart right now the result of prolonged exposure to Post-Structuralism? I say yes. That kind of stupid shit destroyed the academic ability to claim objective reality. Once that was abandoned, it was Demoralization time. This refusal to cohere a structure was basically the same as abandoning ship. No cultural standards meant power could impose its own. I predict that the military coup will coincide with a move toward 'Realism' in French discourse. The counterrevolution is always an overcorrection.
Marshall McLuhan fixated on this fragmented media reality, and how consumerism was used to isolate rational thought in the mid 20th century.
“This Ad has been selected as hinting at a new social pattern emerging in our industrial world. Mr. A earns $25,000 [$375k] a year “but he’s heading for failure.” Mr. B earns $100 [$1500] a week “and he’s heading for success”… But really he is just like the happy grasshopper in the fable who made no provision for the future… Why should half the population exist in a semi-leisured state when it might be put to work and thereby bring down the scale of men’s wages? That, we can now see, was the economic logic in feminism. The woman of leisure might wear long skirts, but the working woman was put into adolescent short skirts and told in big press campaigns that the age-old tyranny of men was at an end. Today she is told every few months to shorten or lengthen her dresses [buy consumer products] in accordance with market exigencies [Social Media], and she obediently does so. And by this type of operation all superfluous cash is removed from people who might otherwise find means to provide for their later years without analagraphing their future.”
More nefariously, Paul Linebarger (https://www.pdfbooksworld.com/bibi/pre.html?book=1100.epub)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith), Jose Delgado (
)(https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/tribute-to-jose-delgado-legendary-and-slightly-scary-pioneer-of-mind-control/)(https://cognitive-liberty.online/jose-delgado-implants-and-electromagnetic-mind-control-stopping-the-furious-bull/), and Skinner (
)(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner) are no longer publicly discussed figures. That's because their research is carried on secretly and the results of their discoveries, implemented. If you read Linebarger's books, you can see that he had an intensive interest in the powers of hypnosis. Most of the ideas credited to Dune appeared first in his Instrumentality of Mankind continuum. You can see that Linebarger basically codified the tools of mass psychological control and died at a suspicious age, just as the consequences of his research became evident to him. Remember:
https://aaronlee.substack.com/p/poisons-slow-and-fast-gambits-against
Delgado's research was from the 1960s & 1970s and we know that all sorts of modern electronic media stimulates the brain. Is it such a far stretch to consider that in fifty years, given what we know about how to specifically, remotely stimulate areas of the brain, that media has been shaped to this purpose? Merely to fragment thought initially, not to implant thoughts. A legato mind filled with a coherent belief system is difficult to subvert; first it must be fragmented, in order for it to be vulnerable to beliefs that do not connect to anything other than the fragmented universe of visual media. And Skinner shows us we can condition the desired response.
That's where wokeness came from. Cult is a belief container inside a person that like a cancer replaces the original belief system. One's 'real' frame of reference is replaced by unattainable, fragmented video references and finally all sanity is lost.
In Short, Death to Videodrome! Long Live The New Flesh!
“Cult is a belief container” … and evidently, even morally and ontologically bankrupt “container” known as Liberal Democracy is a slave to the necessity of atonements, totems and sacrifices. From that angle “wokenes ” seems nothing more then manifestation of such atonement in the face of pure horror as experienced in its most primitive form, and is an attempt to a flight back to the safety of the primordial Das Man.