Cicero's Response

Sent originally by Cicero in response to my linking the original article over at Ecosophia

Good stuff for sure. I like Oswald Spengler's mind and ideas, but I am a modern American looking toward immediate results and winning, so analyzing the cycles of world history can only go so far toward adequately explaining what is going on. A general change from A to B can be caused by completely different phenomenon in one case/time versus another. At some point, the details become important to understanding the causes. For the relevant details today, I am wondering if it is necessary to go beyond Marx.

What is the most de-humanizing type of job? How about the examples of coal mining and factory jobs - mind-numbing, brainless work where a person is required to act just like a machine and no more; day in and day out - until the end. This is what we are shooting for apparently. Why? Is this are far as Manifest Destiny and the great American vision takes us?

Other than racism, the fuel for Trumpism is ultimately American consumerism. Trumpism is at root a political sales/con instigated by a salesman who cannot possibly fulfill the order he has taken from the working-class voters. The working classes don’t want factory jobs for any reason other than their will toward better stuff - which, in their cases, must be inexpensive.

What those who have more than enough money (Intelligentsia) want from the economy is essentially less, not more, than the working classes. The rich want for better stuff, while the working classes, in their lives/worlds, want for better and less expensive stuff - the latter requirement being all-important. Where did all the wonderful neighborhood book stores go? They went out of business. Why? Because the people who loved neighborhood book stores preferred to buy better (sooner in hand) and less expensive books when given the opportunity. If those who loved having neighborhood book stores could do the last 10 years over again with the benefit of hindsight, the same fucking result would occur. There you have it.  

It is the working classes that are demanding and getting the so-called globalism phenomenon and the associated loss of jobs, not the Intelligentsia who have no personal motivation to globalize other than what is demanded by consumers. This may sound improbable/wrong, but it is not - the ultimate driver is the consumer. Unlike the working classes, the Intelligentsia will pay more than necessary for products they consume (for many reasons), but the working classes will never be willing pay more than necessary; if they do, then in their mind, they have been conned and they are unhappy.

The percentage of working-class Americans who are willing to pay $2000 more for a $30,000 car/truck, or $250 more for their $2,000 heater/air-conditioner, or $50 more for their weekly groceries - for the purpose of providing good-paying jobs for American workers, is not 100% or 50% or 10% or 5%; it is zero percent. The enemy is us - not the Intelligentsia.           

Trump is a self-extinguishing flame - he is a con man whose plan must always include the final step of getting out of town at the right time. Trump has no sensible plan to help the working classes - everything he has done so far is destructive to creating long-term employment opportunities. Trump cannot survive beyond the point where American consumers realize that the benefits they have been blindly consuming from the global trough (see Walmart prices for example) have been lost. This may take a while - maybe a few years, but it is inevitable.

Post, Response, and discussion

So, as everyone who displays the poor time management skills required to say that one reads this blog knows, I am a Archdruid fanboy.  I realize that this may be seen as some as a pathetic thing, but, as I am of an age where such things don't bother me, they can add to the never inconsiderable number of people who aren't.  John Michael's thoughts and writing are by no means mainstream in our society.

This post, and hopefully a few of the following are an outcome of me pestering the two people who I consider my peers in their range of reading and thought, Cicero and Seutonius (noms de plume on these pages for friends in Kingston and Queens).

I routinely pester these two with reading from JMG.   This annoyance is taken with greater or lesser degrees of condescension/approval depending on the particular reading.  The string of posts here over the next couple of days are the outcome of JMG's latest post over at Ecosophia.  The name of the post is certain to raise hackles.  "The Twilight of the Intelligentsia" (Hereafter referred to as TOI), kinda takes a oblique stab at me and my friends, because truthfully, anyone who has read Derrida, Spengler, and folks like Feyerabend cannot usually be considered run of the mill Hoi Polloi.

I freely admit that I am kind of an intellectual snob.  I recognize that this is a failing of mine, but truthfully, I find the mundane day to day world hopelessly dreary.  While I participate in the shallow, greedy acts of “filching lucre and gulping warm beer,” so well described by Conrad, I have never fit in.  So I read too much.

In my mind, this makes me an intellectual or member of the intelligensia.  Alternately, it may just mean that I am just a poseur.  But I think that what John Michael describes as the intelligentsia requires careful attention.  Lets begin with the description within the TOI post:

The intelligentsia, in Toynbee’s terms, are those people who belong to one culture but who are educated in the ideas, customs, and practices of another.

 Right there is the key to the whole issue.  but I think that some more clarity needs to be applied to the definition.  Because with this definition, I am definietely a member of the intelligentsia, but, before my reach exceeds my grasp, let's go further into the discussion provided by JMG:

The intelligentsia are the foot soldiers of pseudomorphosis. They’re the ones whose task it is to take the foreign cultural forms they themselves have embraced and impose them, by persuasion or force, on other members of their society.

So, by this standard, I am most certainly not a member of the intelligentsia.  I guess I have now been reduced to a guy that reads too damn much.  Upon mature reflection, I have decided that I am good with that.  But that brings into play the idea of who is the intelligentsia.  I am nominating the news media and the educational system.

While I have read the works of a good number of the "philosophers" who define the Western European tradition, they have really never appealed to me.  I think that what the current and dominant flavor of American intelligentsia attempt to continue is the true philosophy of the European tradition, which simply put is Aristocracy.

Moreover, I don't think that the unwashed masses here in the USA want anything to do with such a thing and that is where things are going "wrong" right about now.  Of course, the "going wrong" is in the minds of the intelligentsia, not in the minds of the populace.

The aristocracy promoted by the media is a simple one, compounded of money and privilege and attempted control of the media.  Money is always easy to understand, greed is not that complex.  Greed is a piling up of power over others by means of the levers or production and distribution.  Privilege is even easier, it is an assertion of status by credentials and education, simply put, it is the priesthood pushing the idea that their education and their hard-won pieces of paper entitle them to a greater share of the pie and greater influence on the decision making process.  Control of the media is the unhallowed marriage of money and privilege, the money of the oligarchs and the privilege of the credentials.

So, after all this, we are back to where we stand here in the USA.  I honestly believe that the situation is more complex than the current oversimplifications offered by media, both mainstream and social.  The next post here will attempt to address this complexity.