Capitalist globalization is a process of “becoming Same,” it a planetary process of capturing, not so much bodies, as it is minds, souls, and the human spirit into a network mediated by the synchronization of global capitalism and computational power.

The seeming diversity that we see and hear so much of today is actually an ideological distortion, a distortion that is being forced upon the population by the neoliberal-managerial class to make us blind to the fact that what is being lost today is precisely the reality of the Other and the tremendous, tremendous diversity and potential care that goes along with contacting the Other’s embodied reality.

This is a short film I directed a couple of years ago that I just made public this week for the first time.

It stars the extremely talented actor Jimmy LeBlanc who has been featured in films like “Spotlight,” “Gone Baby Gone,” and “Stronger” amongst others; the Kenyan bon actor Ted Ndinya, and James McCarthy. It was photographed by Jabari Canada and produced by Norman Lang.

The link is here

https://vimeo.com/466871011

I think Claudia Conway, the daughter of Kellyanne Conway who has become a recent TikTok star, is making a very strong case for being the symbol of the emotional, psychological, and spiritual devastation that excess social media is having upon the lives of American teenagers and their families of origin.

Unfortunately, much of the American media has uncritically praised her as “a whistleblower” and “a hero,” but in fact this young girl is doing something that resembles digitally pimping out not only her own mother, but her very soul for any click, like, or view she can generate for her rapidly increasing following. …

We are fast approaching a point in the intersubjective texture of American life in which if one does not find immediate agreement with someone else’s discourse or language, it will automatically be experienced as oppressive, violent, and privileged.

This does not point to something simple like, “The problem is we are refusing to really listen to each other and understand,” but rather the fact we have passed the point in which listening to the Other is even possible.(1)

The worst kind of violence, which is always an outward expression of internalized emotional and spiritual dysfunction, does not emerge from differentiation, clear and distinct boundaries in which one can easily relate to Otherness; but rather the terror of Sameness,(2) the horrifying feeling that you are losing yourself to the Other’s desire. …

The function of the sacred in indigenous communities and archaic societies across the planet was always the power to keep violence at a distance; the capacity to somehow protect the community from the specter of internal destructive violence.(1)

This sacred power was always accessed through ritual, ceremony, and in certain cases, the use of psychoactive plants, a point noted specifically by Terence McKenna in his theory of hominization and the early developments of human community.(2)

Today, the sacred, this mysterious power that keeps human beings at a distance from open violence against each other, is thoroughly rooted in the mechanisms of both technology and consumerism — the integration of global capitalism and computational power — versus formal rituals geared towards a metaphysical horizon. …

The greatest “social justice warrior” in the history of the West is perhaps St. Paul. And the reason why Paul’s words are so powerful regarding equality and justice is because Paul was very much in touch with his own corruption and violence; he knew very well his own weaknesses and his blind spots, thus his words carry so much potent spiritual power.

The Twitter social justice warrior in our present moment, on the far contrary, not only speaks from a place of subjective innocence the majority of the time, but also from an objective, pseudo-scientific viewpoint that draws on the contingent wisdom found in popular sociological texts of the moment.

The lesson from Paul is that a true “social justice warrior” is a person who wants justice precisely because he or she knows very well how profoundly unjust he or she is capable of being.

1.

The looming violence hanging over American, and for that matter global society, could not be more different than the Civil War.

In the Civil War, there were clear geographical demarcations, clear divisions that we see even in the split between the Blue/Grey uniforms that served to unmistakably inscribe difference into the conflict.

The problem today is not so much irreconcilable difference as it is irreconcilable Sameness. The problem today is not so much the possibility of a new Civil War, a clear-cut battle of MAGA versus Woke-ness, but rather a very messy Hobbesian “war of all against all.”

The more the Democrats and Republicans try to assert their ideology differences and policy disagreements on the level of content, the more they show us that they are locked into a structural process of the…

The political decomposition of America is both irreversible and irreconcilable.

The idea that liberalism, technological progress, and some kind of rational political deliberation will somehow overcome this rapidly deteriorating situation is dangerously naive.

Human agency and the political process itself have been progressively automated, coded, and subject to the logic of computational-capitalist power to the point that there is no way out other than a systemic breakdown, “an Event” of some kind, to re-polarize human consciousness so to emerge with a revitalized set of values, morals, and symbolic-linguistic awareness.

The point is not the fact that if either Biden or Trump wins, disaster will surely follow. The point is rather disaster is already here, it is present with us now, only waiting to fully mobilize itself into the sociopolitical domain so it can be really seen by human perception.