“They hypnotized the summer” aka – “bye-bye to the Enlightenment”

If you don’t know the song Ignoreland, by REM, here you go.

Here are the lyrics.

It’s about the “Reagan Revolution” – the successful attempt to weaponise race-hate, anti-feminism, anti-environmentalism, by creating the appearance of a grassroots counter-Sixties movement. The then-new technology of direct mail marketing (started by Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern and then dialled up to 11 by Richard Viguerie) meant that the good things that might have come out of the the Sixties – more consumer protection, more regulation of polluting industries, more equality – did not.

And the tools learned then, of think tanks and shock jocks and so forth, creating overlapping fields of fire, have been honed ever since.

The Atlas Network never shrugged, never stopped. And their pawprints are all over the latest victories of the pushback against collective solutions that would impinge on the scope and scale of our Lords and Masters’ power. Have a read of Jeremy Walker’s research on this.

So the Uluru Statement from the Heart got told “Nope.” The Israeli Government is going full meshuggah (and then dialing it back a couple of millimetres to look ‘reasonable) and seems intent on some sort of Nakba 2 (as with all sequels, the body count is always higher, the death scenes are always much more elaborate).

It’s not looking good for our species. The thing that might have inoculated us, that might have set up baffles against the sloshing of the fluids of hate and rage that will capsize the oil tanker (see the documentary Inside Job for the source of that), was social movement organisations.

But creating and maintaining social movement organisations that can help individuals gain, maintain and spread shared situational awareness, help them process their feelings of anomie, confusion, fear, dread etc, is simply too difficult. People are drowning in data, in spews of anger, vitriol, bile. They want to lash out, to punch down.

It’s a pity, because the species had potential. Yes, I know the Enlightenment was complicit in (built on?) slavery, massacres, mayhem; but all the same, some of the advances – especially in the fields of public health, medicine, natural scienceetc – were impressive, and we are going to miss them when they are gone. (I don’t buy that the Enlightenment had to lead to the extermination camps. I do buy the view that the extermination camps were an extension of the colonial impulse, however).

Those advances are going. You can see them being killed off in real time. Life expectancy after COVID. Freedom of speech. Educational attainment. And we feel powerless to fight back, because our mental vocabularies of how to fight are so attenuated. A few de-contextualised flashes – of Rosa on the bus, of Martin at the microphone, of Greta on school strike.

But those images are so partial, so misleading. Also, they sustain an information-deficit model.

The ecosystem of potential resistance, such as it is, is full of organisations (including well-funded institutes in the university sector) that are more interested in preening and advertising themselves than in helping connect individuals and get those individuals sharing their skills, swapping ideas etc.

These outfits don’t even see that some mobilising is not helping to movement-build (and many of these organisations don’t even really ‘get’ movements anyway. Because the vocabularies are so small.

Some puff on the hopium pipe. Some preen. Hardly anyone is talking about who is going to bell the cats, or how.

Thank Gaia I did not breed.