Why Is the U.S. Destroying Itself Now?

Facing flaws in the source code of Western civilization

Why is the U.S. destroying itself now?

There are multiple angle and many layers to this. We need to go all the way down to the deepest level, without neglecting the other levels. Let me try to articulate how I understand it.

First of all, we all should admit that there was something fraudulent, deeply wrong, inauthentic, and corrupt at the heart of the American — the modern Western — project, taken as a whole. This inauthenticity was corrosive. This civilization was destined to catastrophically collapse, as we are just beginning to experience now. What is false always dies eventually — hopefully that leads to a rebirth of what is true. However, it could lead to deeper levels of delusion. It might easily cause our physical or (just as bad!) moral/spiritual extinction as a species, at least in this particular time-space continuum.

This eventual fall was inscribed in the individualism, ego-centrism, and “I-focus” of Western language and thought; the shallow dualities inscribed in our syntax and rhetoric; our religious tradition that denigrates the Earth, instills a sense of personal guilt, puts off “redemption” and messianic return to some distant future; and drives a split between spirit and matter that exists only in the human mind. (This, by the way, is why I feel “monistic” or “analytic” idealism is a crucial element as we work together to salvage the Enlightenment project, about which more soon.)

As I wrote in 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, the fundamental flaw of our civilization was embedded in the Western system for measuring time, which created an irrational model of twelve months (moon-ths) with no link to the lunar cycle. On top of the patriarchal Gregorian calendar, we added a mechanized model of arbitrary hours, minutes, seconds, and milliseconds. In other words, we combined irrationality (months divorced from lunar cycles) with inhuman mechanization and enforced this as the meta-programming device for the collective consciousness. (Thanks to Jose Argüelles for this crucial analysis.)

The intrinsic flaw or fault in the Western cognitive apparatus led to secular materialism: We took a narrow application of rationality and empiricism and made it the measure of all things. This initiated modern Western Capitalist / consumerist society which elevates money, material progress, and technology as the only “gods” left in a desacralized, vacant universe, devoid of meaning or purpose. What remained of religion became tainted by this same materialism, foreshadowed by the selling of “indulgences,” etcetera.

The entirety of contemporary Western technocratic civilization is built upon drastic mistakes in our approach to reality and how we define value. This is why, while I absolutely deplore the Trump regime’s attack on the universities that represent the summation of the neoliberal technocratic tradition, there is, also, a small part of me that understands this from a different angle. It isn’t that I welcome it — it is terrible. And yet… there was something false underlying the basis of these institutions that needed to be addressed. It was never going to be addressed without a total shakedown, down to the roots and core.

What we needed to do for a long time — and what we desperately need to do now — is reckon with the basic principles and underlying ideology of our entire intellectual tradition. We must find a different angle — a different phenomenological / metaphysical approach. We need to rebuild our structure of knowledge, myth, and rhetoric on a more substantially sound foundation, even as the old paradigm collapses all around us.

Now, on another level (but it connects to the core issue), one essential reason the U.S. is tearing itself apart now is that the wealthy coastal elites took off in high-powered financialized rockets to enjoy lives of extraordinary privilege while they left their compatriots — fellow human beings — in the boondocks to fester in misery and despair, nurturing in these people the sensible desire for vengeance. Of course, the fantastic lifestyles of privilege (including not just yachts and country clubs and five star resorts but the elite experiences of spiritual communion via Burning Man, yoga, ayahuasca journeys, and so on) were only available to this elite because the U.S. was the beneficiary of the colonial and imperialist enterprises of the modern epoch. After World War Two, the military colonial empires of the 19th Century got converted, cunningly, to economic empires based on debt peonage. This allowed the U.S. and Europe to continue extracting resources and wealth from its former colonies for another half-century.

This privileged elite became entranced and stupefied by its privilege, as privileged elites often do, believing this was an eternal largesse on the part of the universe. As our crisis deepens, this liberal elite is turning out to be constitutionally incapable of shifting their mindset: They don’t as of yet understand they are no longer in a pretty picture where the world will prop them up as they float on the financial largesse granted to them by the invisible colonialist legacy. Right now, they (we) find ourselves in a war for literal survival with those forces who seek power and control, who want vengeance against them (us). The authoritarian Right knows they are fighting a war to the death; the liberal intelligentsia and pampered elite haven’t gotten the memo yet.

This is a big problem!

I remember I was already deeply concerned about the situation when Obama took power, when his “hope and change” rhetoric turned out to be nothing but marketing shtick, when it became evident that he was cunning installed as President to maintain the status quo. This included propping up the financial elite who had wrecked the economy in 2007. Obama made sure the Wall Street predators never suffered any repercussions, while millions of people lost their homes and got destroyed. Obama could have mobilized a volunteer army of tens of millions across the U.S. who were waiting for the opportunity to revitalize the country. Instead, he took the side of the financial elite against the people.

I remember when the neoliberal Democratic establishment was super-excited about self-driving cars and the further automation of other jobs like store cashiers. I was surprised there was no discussion about the fact that the U.S. has three million truck drivers — it is one of the better jobs you can get without a college degree — and these Blue Collar workers would surely perceive the neoliberal enthusiasm about self-driving vehicles and automation as an existential threat, an attack on their future, and turn against the World Economic Forum technocrats, as indeed they did.

One of the great ironies about our current moment — as much as it is a very critical threshold and no laughing matter — is that the first jobs to be annihilated by the rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence are White Collar jobs, not working class jobs (although that may change soon with AI-augmented robotics). There is a small degree of justice that programmers and engineers are among the first to hemorrhage jobs in massive numbers, as AI systems take over much of their work.

I also find a small degree of hope here, if we can somehow find a way to push against the psychological inertia and social gravity. Way back when, I was a massive fan of Multitude and Empire by the post-Marxist political philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. They acknowledged that Marx had turned out to be wrong about the proletariat as the revolutionary class who would unleash an egalitarian utopia. They proposed, instead, that the new revolutionary “subjectivity” could be the knowledge workers or cognitive laborers they identified as “multitude,” including programmers, designers, journalists, legal aids, accountants, and so on.

There is the chance that knowledge workers, confronting their own elimination as a productive class by AI, could not only band together and self-identify as a new revolutionary class, “multitude,” but also find their common cause with other underclasses, including dispossessed farm workers and factory workers in the U.S., and even the lower classes of the developed world as a whole. If that were to happen, our sinking civilization ship might start moving in a new, better direction. What would it take and how could this happen? I don’t know to be honest — would love to hear your thoughts and ideas in the comments.