I see bad things coming at us. Fukuyama was wrong. History did
not end in the nineties.
The confirmation bias of social media at this point in history
seems to me to be the most dangerous threat to civilization. And
I am aware that these seem big words considering that the pandemic
is still rolling.
The white racists have been talking about the "coming race war"
for a long time. I thought they were insanely far from reality.
I thought people would find a way to coexist. Then there
was social media and the post-truth.
Even on a "normal day" you can't trust social media. It distorts
what you see. Now we are in a situation where the news feeds of
both sides have been exploded with extremely emotional material.
I am not even watching this stuff since basically I have started
to think that these audiovisual experiences can be somehow
traumatising. I only take in information through text or audio
these days, because in that way I feel I can remain somewhat
objective. Image speaks more subliminals than a thousand words.
Anyway. The way I see this situation is reflected against
different times in my life. I have been in anarchist protests
and discussion groups and such at one point of my youth. I have
been to countries that were in deep humanitarian crisis. I have
felt strange elation at the prospect of tearing the 1% system
down. I have travelled quite a bit as well and seen a lot of
different ways of life.
One thing I can tell for sure: If you tear the system down, what
you get is shit. Real anarchy is not pretty. What anarchy speaks
to is the feeling that everyone should have a voice and similar
means of expressing themselves in the world. This cannot be done
without some system protecting that voice.
I think there might be some instinct that makes us likely to
tear something down instead of reharnessing it. It is also my
experience that there is extremely strong institutional memory
in these systems and their reharnessing might be very hard.
But this inertia is also why the system does the useful things
it does. It isn't like a puzzle you can tear down and build
up, it is something living.
Being something living it has a past that has instructed it.
Having a past it has guilt.
Guilt repels.
The unconscious choice is to kill the guilty
and bring forth the new.
The new will look clean because it is fresh.
It inherited the guilt in a different form.
