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xoruffitup · 6 years

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BlacKkKlansman: Double Consciousness & Extremist Identities

I saw BlacKkKlansman last night, and I’m still trying to properly breathe around the cold stone it left in my chest. I’ve been thinking about it constantly, and whenever that happens I always feel the need to write some sort of analysis to try to articulate why I’ve reacted so strongly to something. So, here’s my half-baked BlacKkKlansman review.

First things first, I’m white. Of course, that affects the way I view the world and whatever art/media I choose to consume. I fully recognize that my experience and takeaway from this film are likely very different from those of a viewer of color. And sure, I can say that I try to be progressive in how I live my life and I took college courses on race politics and minority marginalization, but at the end of the day, this is a film about black voices and black equality and those are topics I have no right to discourse on. So please, if something I write below seems misguided or uneducated, please let me know so I can self-examine and adjust.

First of all: The simple fact that this movie had such an effect on me as a white viewer. I was in a crowded movie theatre, with an audience of diverse age and race, and never in my life have I felt such a powerful moment of silent, unified shock when the credits started. The ending left every single person speechless. White privilege means that when I read news articles or books about institutionalized racism in our country, I have the option of closing the book, walking away and thinking about something else for a while. Not the case whatsoever with this movie - It didn’t discriminate in its devastating impact. While I’ve read about Black Power ideologies, there’s always an aspect of such movements that are designed not to be fully understood by those outside of it. These are not for me. This seems as intentional as it is justified. Black communities are excluded from so many mainstream ‘white’ narratives or locuses of power, these movements are the sole spaces that belong entirely to them and which they entirely control. They are designed to alienate, the same way these communities are alienated from so much else in society. However, BlacKkKlansman seemed accessible to a multitude of viewpoints and cultural/racial positions. The film does not strive to tell the audience how they should feel, but leaves elements of interpretation up to the viewer by presenting a chorus of voices, rather than a single one; By presenting multifaceted characters experiencing conflicts of identity - Rather than a single protagonist with a single political message. This is certainly not to say that a film is only good if it panders to the understanding of white viewers, but in this case I was impressed by the multiplicity of narratives and perspectives that were portrayed.

What’s so thought-provoking to me about the film was the decision to tell the story from the position of the undecided and conflicted center. By following Ron and Flip’s investigation, we watch each character grapple with the opposite sides of extremism. While Flip has to ingratiate himself with the Klan members who would revile his Jewish heritage, Ron has to spy on his own community at Black Student Union events as they call for war against the police. Both characters must play roles in order to pretend to fit into the groups they look like they should belong to. In Flip’s case, feeling threatened and despised by the Klan’s ideals makes him re-evaluate the meaning of the Jewish identity he never thought much about. For Ron, he feels torn between his loyalty to his people, and to his own hard-sought and prized work as a policeman (an institution equally reviled by Patrice and Klan members). Ron and Flip both wear masks, and their feelings of separation from “their” respective communities makes them each consider the conflicting identities within themselves.

Aptly, Patrice speaks to Ron in one scene about double consciousness. She questions whether it is possible to be both a black woman and American citizen. To her, putting her country first would be a betrayal to her black identity. In juxtaposition, the Klan members dress up their intolerance behind the values of “America first” (I can barely describe the chills that went through me when the Klan members all started chanting it.) Ron’s struggle throughout the film is exactly this - His determination to be both a black man and a police officer. He and Patrice disagree on whether it’s possible to change a corrupt system from within, and the movie leaves ambiguous how much Ron succeeds in this front. It’s crushingly infuriating when, towards the end of the film, Ron is himself detained and beaten by policemen who don’t believe he’s an undercover cop. But shortly thereafter, he enjoys a triumphant entry into the police station where all his white colleagues congratulate his work and embrace him. The scene when he calls David Duke to reveal his identity with his three colleagues giggling on either side of him is downright charming in its camaraderie and gaiety. It looks like acceptance; But tempered by the fact that all his hard work on the investigation was ultimately scrapped in the end.

These themes of double consciousness and ambiguity permeate the film, and lend to its impactful success. Split-screen parallels are presented between Klan and Black Power movement meetings - Certainly not to equate the two, but to show in stark, unmistakable terms that these are the polar opposite, yet intimately interrelated effects of racism. This is how distantly racism divides our country - And how it leads to beliefs on either side that people will kill for. Towards the climax, a Black Student Union meeting listens to the horrific history of a young black man being brutally lynched, while the Klan members cheer and applaud a scene in Birth Of A Nation depicting the hanging of a black man. Neither side exists without the other to perceive it as a threat - And both stand firm in their respective beliefs that their hatred of the other side is justified.

Yet, the film wasn’t the story of the Klan, nor of the Black liberation movement - It was the story of the two men caught in the middle, looking for footing on quickly-shrinking ground between the two sides, as their mutual hatred brings the two warring sides to an inevitable conflict. It is the same story of many modern viewers, wondering how in hell we’ve come to the present moment with “Black Lives Matter” on one side and Trump proclaiming “America First” on the other - with not an inch of common ground or even common perception between the two.

Although I hope most viewers would intuit which side is truly more justified in their grievances, a strength of the film was its balanced, rather than caricatured depiction of the Klan members; Who believe that yes, they live in a racist country - “An anti-white racist country.” The chilling brilliance in the depiction of David Duke was how harmlessly normal he first seems - Cheerfully spouting off phrases like “you’re darn tootin’“ on the phone to Ron and ending the conversation with a chipper “God bless white America!” This is exactly how ideologies of hate become disguised as civilized, mild-mannered “values.” David Duke has given up the flashy title of “Grand Dragon” for the more innocuous “National Director” (or something to that end). The first time he goes undercover, Flip is quickly admonished never to call the Klan “The Klan,” but rather “The Organization.” In a conversation between Ron and one of his superiors at the police station, it’s even discussed how a high-ranking Klansman might have the long-term goal of placing “one of their own” in the White House, after they’ve disguised their intolerance and bigotry under the empirical rationales of policy. It’s one of the most painful moments of the entire film.

Yet, while Flip has to endure the Klan members’ talk of killing black people, and Ron hears Kwame Ture speak about race wars with inevitability, another stroke of the film’s thoughtful genius is the choice of individual who actually enacts violence - Felix’s utterly apple pie looking housewife. She looks like the plump, harmless woman you wouldn’t want to be in line behind at the grocery store because she’s likely to have fifteen coupons. She is the last person you would expect on sight to leave a bomb at the house of a young black woman. And yet, this is another powerful message: How the vulnerable and susceptible can so easily become radicalized. I certainly don’t have sympathy for her because she’s an adult who made her own decisions; But I’m also aware of the way her Klansman husband manipulated her into becoming what she was, and it’s an extra layer of nuance I appreciated.

Finally, I’ll wrap this up on a personal, perhaps silly, note. There were multiple layers of this film that really disturbed me, and it’s taken me a good 24 hours to put my finger on this last one: I’m not sure I enjoyed Adam Driver as Flip. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m all over that shoulder gun holster look and he looked 500% finer in flannel than any man has a right to. Also, I’m not sure I would feel this same discomfort if he’d been played by a lesser-caliber actor, or one who I don’t have such an attachment to. But I realized that on an instinctive level, it upset me to see his face under a Klan hood, and to hear him say vile racist comments. Rationally, of course I know that A) He’s acting, and B) Even his character is acting, but Adam’s an utterly convincing actor, playing an undercover detective who’s very good at his job. Maybe both his and Flip’s performances were too good. I asked myself why it didn’t bother me the same way to hear Ron spout racist bullshit on the phone. Part of it is because he isn’t played by an actor I happen to deeply respect and admire, but there’s more to it than that. There’s a passage in the NYT review that got as close to my nebulous discomfort as anything I could express:

"The most shocking thing about Flip's (Adam Driver's undercover detective role) imposture is how easy it seems, how natural he looks and sounds. This unnerving authenticity is partly testament to Mr. Driver's ability to tuck one performance inside another, but it also testifies to a stark and discomforting truth. Maybe not everyone who is white is a racist, but racism is what makes us white.”

Adam’s performance as Flip is discomfiting because it shows how easily a white person can take up the mask of extreme bigotry and intolerance, and how easily they can be perceived as supporting a hate movement, regardless of their true internal ideologies. I know Flip doesn’t mean the things he’s saying, but he’s damn convincing because he looks the part. His whiteness paired with his words - regardless of whether they’re genuine - is powerful and terrible. And racism is what lends him the ability to put on that convincing mask. And if racism is what “makes us white,” Adam as Flip makes me wonder if I could do the same. If, for whatever reason, the situation was such that I had to convince someone I believed in these things... Would I surprise myself by finding that I’m capable of saying things equally terrible? Is this a role that every white person is capable of, at a certain subconscious level, because of systemic racism and implicit biases?

In conclusion: This movie has fucked up my life. It’s genius and I think I need to see it again. (If I can stomach it...)

#BlacKkKlansman #Adam Driver #John David Washington #Flip Zimmerman #Ron Stallworth

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thetakenpokemon · 7 years

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The Visions of Sorrow [Part Two]

...

[PoV: Zen’Ro]

As the three siblings prepared for eternal war, going forth from Fundament to the Ammonite moons, they each had something to offer to one another and their spawn.

Auryx instructed that they were to become as numerous and fertile as seeds ‘in rich flesh’; Xivu Arath mandated they were to become tumors in this flesh, hungry and defiant; and Savathûn commanded that they drink the Worm’s poison, to grow in death.

At this point in time, the Hive biology had matured with their newfound power and began to leave behind their weak flesh.

Their names...I can’t pronounce the names of their species, but I can understand what other races called them.

Wizards are the fertile females, capable of sexual or asexual production. From their spawn come the Thrall, which grow into Acolytes, and if they survive by feeding their Worm...they evolve into one of three.

They evolve into Wizards, to produce more spawn.

Or they become Knights, the powerful backbone of the Hive army.

Or they become Princes, which eventually ascend into Ascendant Hive once they've enough offerings to the Deep.

The ruling siblings instructed the Hive that their purpose is to liberate the universe by killing all that is not free, devouring and eating everything that is not worthy of life’s ruthlessness.

Yet even then, Auryx wondered on how the Hive would survive They are dispersed among many moons, how would they stay in communication with each other?

Savathûn however reassured him. She told him that she had been studying their God’s movements between dimensions as well as Auryx’s own movement from his throne, concluding with that the movements were one and the same. She advised practicing the logic of the Sword so that they may imitate their Gods.

Xivu Arath laughed at this, she claimed that she was already proficient with this knowledge, and thus demonstrated by cutting a wound between her moon and another. Within these wounds is a realm that allowed them to walk between the fabrics of the material plane.

Through this the Hive discovered their own macabre of ‘faster than light’ travel, they described it as ‘green fire’ and ‘joyous screams.’

Armed with their newfound knowledge their kingdoms thrived within the ‘Sword Space’, in the Ascendant Plane, born from the sibling’s minds and worms. The glory of Auryx, the knowledge of Savathûn, the might of Xivu Arath, and all others were encapsulated within. It was described as coterminous with everyplace the Hive touched, they were thus united, ‘speech and food’ passing between them.

With this Auryx proclaimed the title of ‘First Navigator’. He declared that his throne is to be made of Osmium, that the sword realm was where he died, and that their thrones are to be established in this untouchable place.

And so over the next twenty thousand years, as reckoned by the Hive they made war upon one another. Savathûn flatly told Auryx not to forgive her for her betrayal, instead he must take revenge and prove himself. Xivu Arath however was merely annoyed at the two, thus also made war against them both.

This was how they established their religion and their love for each other, by fighting continuously in the abyssal planes and lightning palaces of their ‘sword spaces’, their ascendant realms. Through their fighting, they practiced and refined their deaths.

During their wars they sent out ships to seek out other worlds of the universe, searching for other species to cut down. Eventually they would find these alien worlds and the siblings would forsook their civil war, to suddenly fight united.

To reach these worlds they had to cross the intergalactic void, leaving Fundament far behind. Auryx took the chance to establish a court, calling it the ‘High War’. Savathûn named hers the ‘High Coven’; while Xivu Arath arrogantly claimed that the world was her court, wherever conflict existed. In these courts they would practice Sword Logic, to challenge one another in battle and learn from each other’s demise.

During one of Savathûn’s wars against an alien species, Auryx took the opportunity to kill her. As her fleet were chasing the last of the alien species, Auryx came upon her flank and destroyed her warship, thus killing her and some of her spawn. He told her that he did this to reprimand her for exposing herself.

After this they exterminated the rest of the alien species, in which Auryx felt both immense sorrow and joy. Sorrow that the species will join eighteen other species that have been exterminated in the past century, and joy because the Hive was putting down cancers. He felt vindicated, excited that the Hive was ‘cleaning’ the universe. He called themselves a wind of progress, tearing apart the scabs and parasites of the material world, shaping it to its final form.

He then asked a rhetorical question: ‘What was its final shape?’ A fire without fuel, asking the same question that was itself. It was self-vindication, something the Hive must strive for.

Auryx believed sorrow and joy to be one and the same, like love and death. His astronomers told him that they were nearing the Deep, nearer to communion. He believed them, for his worm was fat and contented with the worlds its host fed it.

The Hive were nearing perfection.

...

Centuries later...Auryx came to a realization.

He, his siblings, and the Hive itself.

They were slowly killing themselves.

By nature with their compact of the worm it would grow accordingly to the tribute it gained from their killings; but in doing so it lusted for more, going beyond their ability to feed it.

Auryx felt betrayed, he cried out that they would never be eternal.

The power of the Hive is so great that entire species are shattered upon first contact, and so over three hundred worlds had been exterminated to this efficiency.

But this was not enough. As Auryx’s curiosity grew - his wanderlust to explore and seek out new life to destroy, so did his worm. He would be consumed, yet he could not stop lest it killed him faster. He was trapped in a never-ending cycle of staying one step ahead of it. This would also happen to his sisters, for their cunning and conquest would expand past their worm’s appetites.

Auryx feared that one day they won’t be able to feed their worms, and so die unfulfilled by having not finding Taox. For despite having razed over three hundred worlds, they found no trace of the traitor.

That is...until one of their ships eventually found the world that harbored her.

The world contained a nation called the Dakaua Nest, the alien race discovered her frozen body within a ship dated back over twenty-four thousand years. Taox explained to them of everything, from the rise of the Hive to the extermination of the Ammonites.

Fearful, the Dakaua Nest contacted an allied world of the Ecumene and informed them on their findings. After looking over Taox’s interview and how that seventeen worlds of the listed worlds had noticeable disappeared over the past century, the Ecumene agreed that their world faced extinction if they don’t act against the Hive. So they rallied their weapons and immediately fought back when the Hive eventually arrived.

...

The battle lasted for hundreds of years, and yet despite the numerous victories the Hive had achieved in past wars...they had begun to lose. The Ecumene’s weapons proved to be far more powerful than they ever anticipated, capable of destroying entire ships upon touch.

Defeat creeping up their shoulders, the siblings realized that if they were to lose this war...their worms would consume them.

Within the sword space the three mutually embraced. The surrounding Hive looked upon them with contempt, seeing this as weakness. The Hive note to themselves that they’ve never despised their leaders before, they muse over whether they failed their gods due to the numerous setbacks in the war.

Savathûn admitted that she’s at her end. Despite her planning she cannot escape her worm’s insatiable appetite, no matter how hard she tried.

Xivu Arath added that the harder she slaughtered and fought, the more her worm demanded.

Auryx mourned his repeated deaths against the Ecumene ‘War Angels’; that he dared not go back into the universe for fear he needed his own strength to protect himself, instead of granting tribute to his worm.

Xivu Arath advised to her siblings that they should rest and regather their strength and Savathûn begged the silent Worms for answers. Upon hearing the desperation of their gods, the surrounding Hive wondered if their crusade had finally come to an end.

But then Auryx realized the weakness they’re showing, and thus rebuked with a roar. ‘Have you learned nothing?’ He shouted. ‘Would you deny our purpose? Whatever we do, we will do by killing, by an act of war and might. That is the final arbiter we serve, that violent arbiter, and if we turn away from it we deserve to be eaten. No! We must obey our natures. We must be long-sighted, and cunning, and strong. We must take this gift the Worm our God has given us, this challenge, and find a way to keep existing!’

Xivu Arath asked them how would they feed their worms; in which Savathûn chimed in that she knew a way, but it won’t work unless they increased their killing far beyond their recent attempts - the killing of billions. Xivu Arath then pointed out that the Ecumene’s sheer might dwarfed that of their own, that they can’t kill what is stronger than them.

Auryx then spoke, telling them he knew a way. However in order to pull it through, it required a power greater than their own.

And so Xivu Arath turned to him, telling him to kill her and use the killing logic to show that he’s mightier than her. Savathûn also tells Auryx to slay her, to use the killing logic to prove that he is smarter and more cunning than her.

So with his sword, Auryx cut down both his sisters. By the laws of killing logic he had proved to the Deep that he is mightier than Xivu Arath and more cunning than Savathûn, in doing so in the ways of Sword Logic he had inherited their combined strength for his own.

This all took place in the sword world.

Their throne world.

Thus meaning that his sibling’s deaths were true.

Were final.

...

Equipped with their combined strength, Auryx marched to one the Worm Gods deep within the sword world.

The Worm God named Akka, Worm of Secrets

...

Auryx approached Akka, telling him that he knew that he kept secrets, that the worm would not give them to him.

Akka responded saying that he does not ‘give’, for giving is the way of the Sky. In the ways of the Deep, one must take.

Auryx acknowledged this, thinking back to the bargain on Fundament with the Worm Gods. The worm larvae were given to them, not taken. That is why they ate at the Hive’s defeat.

The Worm of Secrets knew the truth, but held onto it till it became a lie. Auryx then declared that he will act upon the Deep’s wishes, and take the knowledge for himself, but Akka then said that the Hive King’s strength was not enough..

Auryx heard this, but knew this was a lie. He fought with his God, using his powers combined with the mind of Savathûn and the might of Xivu Arath. With his power he slew Akka, his god.

With the deed done he only took what was needed, a weapon to defeat the Ecumene.

He carved the knowledge onto the Tablets of Ruin and wore them on his waist, then he approached the Deep directly. He proclaimed to it that he was the King of Shapes, then he communed with it saying that he ‘desires to learn all secrets of our destiny’.

The conversation itself was not shown, but the Worm Gods were pleased.

And so rising with his newfound power, he was Auryx no longer.

He was Oryx; King of Shapes, Carver of Tablets.

He was Oryx.

The Taken King.

#zenroscizor #???#plot #act 3

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lilgingahphotography · 6 years

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Queer History: No Really, They Fucking Did It

“And if sexual minorities were historically central to the emergence of dance music culture, where are they now? If you take a look at who is running the clubs, managing the labels, booking the artists, and play the records, the demographics are starkly different from the crowds that got this music started. Considering how big a role the gay community played in the genesis of the music, it’s strange to see that the majority of the stakeholders nowadays are of the straight male variety. It would be great to see promoters, artists, producers and club owners take a stronger stand to be more inclusive of the culture from which they take profit so liberally.” – Loren Granic

One thing that brought me into the electronic scene was a vast acceptance and appreciation of everyone for who they were. Coming from a small Bible Belt town, I swear to god I found heaven as a young gay man. It was everything I hoped for, I could dance around, wear whatever mismatched outfit I pleased and adorn my arms, head and neck with kandi jewelry. It was a safe space for so many individuals. People came to dance to beats that created happiness and be surrounded by people who had nothing but positive energy to give and return. The more I delved into the scene the more curious I was about the history of what became a home for me. I wanted to know where this all began; how random places and venues could create such magical experiences and safe spaces to be yourself—how such happy places could exist in places where the outside world was not as accepting. That is when I found out about the underground parties in places like Detroit, Chicago and New York but not only were they underground they were pioneered by queer individuals, specifically queer people of color.

In times where it was not as acceptable to be outright queer or people were not accepted on a basis of melanin within their skin, these individuals were creating spaces and experiences that accepted everyone for who they were, what they were and who they portrayed themselves to be.

People were uniting and techno, very literally, was their song. Producers from Wendy Carlos, Honey Dijon, Ken Collier, Frankie Knuckles and so many more helped to pave a path of House and Techno that became the foundation of acceptance and freedom of self-expression. So many artists are looked to from the good ‘ole days as memorable and pioneers and inspiring yet when glancing at the industry today and what it has become you no longer see the warm embrace that was paved so many years ago. Wendy Carlos is given credit for the commercialization of electronic music back in 1968. She began producing with a synthesizer and flipped what we may know as Bach on its head into something brand new. This brought the genre so many of us have come to love into the commercial brackets of music which was a complete game changer. Pushing the genre into a mainstream medium that it was not in before by turning something so classical into something fitting new standards of music.

Honey Dijon is another pioneer in this community who played underground and learned under some of the greats in the techno and house game—she worked hard and has made a name for herself and is widely known within the music and fashion world. Honey Dijon commented in an interview “[…]the music that’s being made and played; It’s just not connecting with people of color. People are making tools, not music. It’s extremely monotonous.” Which in several respects I agree with. When attending a club or event the demographic is starkly white versus what I am sure the underground days in the beginning were. The haven that was does not seem to be anymore – a tool for money not a tool for creating an environment of acceptance and passion it is seeming.

The amount of openly queer and trans producers and DJs has diminished and dwindled over the years and so have the ones of color, at least within the American sector of electronic music. While incredibly talented musicians are at the forefront of the industry today and many women are beginning to receive the recognition they deserve I still have to beg the question, “Where the hell are my queer and trans peers?” It is 2017 and world-wide the idea of being queer and trans is becoming more accepted, it is shocking that now when things have progressed so far that an industry that owes its life to the queer, trans and black communities has little representation of these groups. I take issue with this for a few reasons. First of which being, for the work and livelihood put on the line by these early pioneers in Chicago and New York the credit is slimming and the legacies are being forgotten by little to no allowance of people in these communities to have the ability to rise to the top. Let’s face it, being queer or anything other than white doesn’t sell. The legacy that the new movie Wonder Woman left is much due to a powerful female lead but more importantly a female of color as the lead. The reviews of women exclaiming how nice it would have been to have this representation as a kid was insurmountable and the same extends into music. I longed as a younger guy to hear a song or lyrics that exclaimed what and how I felt about who I loved. That I could sing or listen to a song and it not just represent a heterosexual, cisgendered life that those in the Queer community do not always relate to. We long for representation, we always have. We fought for it legally and we don’t seem to be fighting as much within the arts—but honey, I want it and by god I will get it.

Within this discussion of where those representing the Queer and trans communities are—I think one solid point should be made: our community does not sell under capitalistic motives. A white man or white looking man will always sell before a queer man/woman and especially a queer man/woman of color. I think now more than ever we are beginning to realize a lot of underlying racism within this country and how it plays into our day to day lives. Those working within the circuits of social justice have long been proclaiming the unfair playing field between people of different genders, races, and sexualities. The world is not and has not been as fair as we are all lead to believe and it becomes extremely relevant when looking at our community. This scene went from being a place to find serenity and peace from the outside world to a place where it is more important to show off the financial stability one has and who can bring in the most money. Obviously, I understand this very literally is a lot of people’s livelihood—this is how they survive and live day to day but at the same retrospect why is it at the cost of losing everything this scene started as and was built for?

I long to know if those who pioneered this incredible scene and community would be content or happy with where it has come? Am I finding an issue with something that is not there or have we as a community completely lost track of what this was meant to be? https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/mbakvy/honey-dijon-profile https://thump.vice.com/en_us/article/53agdb/meet-wendy-carlos-the-trans-godmother-of-electronic-music

https://www.residentadvisor.net/features/1927

#queer #queer art #queer music #queer pioneers #trans #queer representation #electronic music #gay #gays #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtq pride #lgbtq problems #music #opinion #op ed #lilgingah #lil gingah

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garywonghc · 7 years

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Never Born, Never Ceasing

by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

The great pandit Shantarakshita, who was instrumental in transplanting Buddhism from India to Tibet, promised that one of his students would come one day to complete his work. Kamalasila (Tib., Padampa Sangye) fulfilled this prophecy, making three trips to Tibet during the eleventh century. This was the time when the great yogi Milarepa lived, and his autobiography describes a momentous dharma debate between the two teachers.

The story behind the teaching presented here begins when Padampa Sangye throws a stone magically bestowed upon him by the Buddha, saying that he would teach wherever it landed. The stone landed in the village of Tingri, in Tibet, and true to his word, Padampa Sangye founded his monastic seat there and proclaimed The Hundred Verses of Advice to the villagers.

Translator Matthieu Ricard requested that his teacher, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910-1991), considered an emanation of Padampa Sangye, offer a commentary on these pithy verses. A renowned Dzogchen master, Khyentse Rinpoche spent most of his early life in solitary retreat in mountain caves. He studied and taught tirelessly for many decades, influencing scores of teachers and thousands of students. He made several important teaching tours to Europe and North America and his works have been translated into many Western languages. In his final years, he was head of the Nyingma lineage.

Khyentse Rinpoche offered this commentary in 1987 to a gathering of students at Shechen Monastery, his seat in Nepal. John Canti of the Padmakara Translation Group translated Padampa Sangye’s verses into English. Matthieu Ricard provided the translation of Khyentse Rinpoche’s commentary. The entire one hundred verses succinctly survey the path. They begin with the miserableness of all aspects of samsara and the unavoidability of karma and death and end with the means of achieving enlightenment. The verses excerpted below, numbers 51 to 69, expound on the limitless nature of mind.

In a state of emptiness, whirl the spear of pure awareness; People of Tingri, the view is free of being caught by anything at all.

Our realisation, our view, should be as high and vast as the sky. Once the awakening of pure awareness arises within the vortex of emptiness, conflicting emotions can no longer obscure it, but instead become its ornaments.

The unalterable realisation of this view, which has no birth, duration or cessation, is accompanied by an enlightened consciousness that observes the movement of thoughts as a serene old man regards children playing. Confused thoughts cannot affect pure awareness any more than a sword can pierce the sky.

Lady Peldarbum said to Milarepa:

When I meditated on the ocean, My mind was very comfortable. When I meditated on the waves, My mind was troubled. Teach me to meditate on the waves!

The great yogi responded:

The waves are the movement of the ocean. Leave them to calm themselves in its vastness.

Thoughts are the play of pure awareness. They arise within it and dissolve back into it. To recognise pure awareness as the very source of thought is to recognise that our thoughts have never begun, continued or ceased to exist. At that point, thoughts can no longer trouble the mind.

As long as we run after our thoughts, we are like a dog chasing a stick. Each time we throw the stick, he runs after it. If we look at the enlightened consciousness instead, the source of our thoughts, we will see that each thought arises and dissolves in the space of that consciousness, without engendering other thoughts. Then we will be like a lion, which does not chase after the stick, but turns to face the thrower. You can throw a stick at a lion only once.

To conquer the uncreated citadel of the nature of mind, we must go to the source and recognise the origin of thoughts. Otherwise, one thought gives rise to a second, then a third, and so on. We will be constantly assailed by memories of the past and anticipation of the future, and will lose the pure awareness of the present moment.

A story is told of a practitioner who was giving some rice he had offered on his altar to the pigeons one day, when he suddenly remembered the numerous enemies he had had before devoting himself to the dharma, and conceived this disastrous thought: “If I had had as many soldiers then as I have pigeons at my door now, I could have easily wiped out my enemies.” This idea obsessed him until he could no longer control his hostility, and he left his hermitage and assembled a band of mercenaries to fight his former enemies, thus committing incalculable misdeeds. And it all began with one simple, deluded thought.

If we recognise the emptiness of our thoughts instead of solidifying them, the arising and subsidence of each thought will clarify and strengthen our realisation of emptiness.

In a state without thoughts, without distraction abandon the watcher; People of Tingri, the meditation is free of any torpor or excitement.

If our mind dwells in limpid awareness, with no thought of past or future, without being attracted by external objects or occupied by mental constructions, it will dwell in primordial simplicity. In this state, there is no need for the iron hand of forced vigilance to immobilise our thoughts. “Buddhahood,” it is said, “is the natural simplicity of the mind.”

Having once recognised this simplicity, we should maintain it with effortless presence of mind. Then we will know an inner freedom that has no need to block the arising of thoughts or to fear that they will spoil our meditation.

In a state of natural spontaneity, train in being free of any holding back; People of Tingri, in the action there is nothing to abandon or adopt.

Preserve that state of simplicity. If you encounter happiness, success, abundance and other favourable conditions, consider them like dreams, illusions. Do not become attached to them. If we are struck by illness, calumny, deprivation or other physical and moral trials, guard against discouragement, rekindle your compassion, and wish that the sufferings of all beings might be exhausted through your own. Fall neither into elation nor misery, whatever the circumstances. Stay comfortable and free in imperturbable serenity.

The four bodies, indivisible, are complete in your mind; People of Tingri, the fruit is beyond all hope and doubt.

The state of buddhahood may seem to be a distant goal, almost beyond attainment, but the natural emptiness of our mind is none other than the “absolute body,” or dharmakaya. Its luminous expression is the “body of perfect endowment,” or sambhogakaya. The universal compassion which emanates from it is the “body of manifestation,” or nirmanakaya. The intrinsic unity of these three bodies is the “essential body,” or svabhavikakaya. These four bodies, or dimensions, of a buddha, have always been present in us. It is only through ignorance of their presence that we consider them as something external and distant.

“Is my meditation correct?” we wonder restlessly. “When am I finally going to make some progress? I’ll never attain the level of my spiritual master.” Torn between hope and fear, our minds are never at peace.

According to our mood, we practice intensely one day, and the next day not at all. We cling to the agreeable experiences that arise when we attain some mental calm, but feel like abandoning the meditation when we are unable to slow the flood of thoughts. This is not the way to practice meditation.

Whatever our state of mind, we should constrain ourselves to a regular practice, day after day, observing the movement of our thoughts and following them back to their source. We cannot expect to be able to maintain the flow of our concentration day and night all at once.

When we begin to meditate on the nature of the mind, it is preferable to practice in short, frequent sessions. With perseverance, we will progressively realise the nature of our mind, and this realisation will become more and more stable. By that point, thoughts will have lost their power to perturb and enslave us.

The root of both samsara and nirvana is to be found within your mind; People of Tingri, the mind is free of any true reality.

Our own mind is what leads us astray in the cycle of existence. Blind to its true nature, we fixate on thoughts, which are nothing other than the manifestations of that nature. Pure awareness becomes frozen into solid concepts such as “self” and “other,” “desirable” and “repulsive,” and many more. That is how we create samsara.

If we can melt the ice of these fixations by following the instructions of a spiritual master, pure awareness will recover its natural fluidity. Put another way, when we cut a tree at the base, the trunk, branches and leaves all fall at the same time. Similarly, if we cut thoughts off at their source, the delusion of samsara will fall away entirely.

The phenomena of samsara and nirvana appear with the vivid clarity of a rainbow, and like a rainbow they are devoid of any tangible reality. Once we recognise the nature of phenomena, which are manifest and at the same time empty, our mind will be freed from the tyranny of delusion.

In substantive terms, to recognise the ultimate nature of the mind is to realise the state of buddhahood, and failure to recognise it is to sink into ignorance. In either case, it is our mind, and our mind alone, which binds or liberates us.

This does not mean that the mind is an entity that can be worked like clay, to which the potter can give beautiful or ugly forms. When the spiritual master introduces the disciple to the nature of the mind, he isn’t pointing to a concrete object. When the disciple seeks and finds that nature, he doesn’t lay hands on a graspable entity. To recognise the nature of the mind is to recognise its emptiness. That is all. It is a realisation that takes place in the realm of direct experience and cannot be expressed in words.

To expect that this realisation will be accompanied by clairvoyance, miraculous powers and other extraordinary experiences is to delude oneself. Let us simply devote ourselves to recognising the empty nature of the mind!

Desire and hate appear, but like birds in flight should leave no trace behind; People of Tingri, in meditation be free of clinging to experiences.

Generally speaking, we are strongly attached to our families, to our goods and to our position, and we feel an intense aversion to those who hurt us. So let us turn our attention away from external objects and examine the mind that clings to them. We will agree that desire and anger have neither form nor colour nor substance nor locality. If this is so, why do we fall so easily under the power of such thoughts? Ironically, it is because we do not know how to set them free.

If we allow our thoughts to arise and dissolve by themselves, they will pass through our mind as a bird flies through the sky, without leaving a trace. This method applies not only to attachment and anger but also to the experiences of meditation, such as bliss, clarity and the absence of thought. These experiences result from perseverance in practice and the expression of the inherent creativity of the mind. They are like the appearance of a rainbow as the rays of the sun strike a curtain of rain. For us to become attached to them is as vain as running after a rainbow in hopes of wearing it as a coat. We should simply allow thoughts and experiences to come and go, without grasping at them.

The unborn absolute body is like the very heart of the sun; People of Tingri, there is no waxing or waning of its radiant clarity.

Emptiness, the ultimate nature of the dharmakaya, the absolute dimension, is not a mere nothingness. It has a luminous cognitive aspect that knows all phenomena and that manifests spontaneously. The dharmakaya is not the product of causes and conditions; it is the original nature of the mind.

The recognition of this primordial nature is like the sun of wisdom rising in the night of ignorance. The darkness dissipates instantly; the shadows cannot remain. The clarity of the dharmakaya does not wax and wane like the moon, but is like the unchangeable brilliance that reigns at the center of the sun.

Thoughts come and go like a thief in an empty house; People of Tingri, in fact there is nothing to be gained or lost.

Convinced of the reality of an entity called “I” and its thoughts, we create karma, whether good or bad. In reality, such thoughts are like a thief in an empty house, where the thief has nothing to gain and the owner has nothing to lose. The realisation that these thoughts have never really taken birth, and therefore have never existed and cannot cease to exist, renders them harmless. Thoughts liberated in this way as they arise have no impact and bring no karmic effect. There will be nothing to fear from negative thoughts, and nothing to hope for from positive ones.

Sensations leave no imprints, like drawings made on water; People of Tingri, don’t perpetuate deluded appearances.

We are naturally attached to comfort and pleasure and bothered by physical and moral suffering. These innate tendencies lead us to seek out, maintain and enhance all that will give us pleasure — comfortable clothing, delicious food, agreeable places, the pleasures of the senses — and to avoid or destroy whatever displeases us.

Changing constantly and devoid of essence, the sensations rest on the ephemeral associations of the body and the mind. Becoming attached to them is perfectly futile. Rather than being dragged along, trapped by our perceptions, let them dissolve just as they form, as a letter written by a finger on the surface of the water disappears as it is being drawn.

Thoughts of attachment and aversion are like rainbows in the sky; People of Tingri, there is nothing in them to be grasped or apprehended.

We can become so dominated by our cravings and our hatreds that we are ready to sacrifice our lives to appease them. Wars illustrate this well. Our thoughts seem very solid and compelling, but if we examine them more carefully, we find that they have no more substance than a rainbow. Devoting our lives to trying to satisfy our impulses is puerile. Those who hunger for glory, power, pleasures and riches are like young children wanting to grasp a rainbow.

In practical terms, when a desire or a burst of anger inflames your mind, look closely at your thoughts and recognise their fundamental emptiness. These thoughts will dissolve by themselves if you allow them to. If you can do the same with the next thought and with all that follow, they will lose their hold over you.

Mind’s movements dissolve by themselves, like clouds in the sky; People of Tingri, in the mind there are no reference points.

When banks of clouds build up, the nature of the sky is not affected, and when they disperse, it is not improved. The sky becomes neither more nor less vast or pure; it doesn’t change. The nature of the mind is just the same. It is not altered by the arising of thoughts, or by their disappearance.

The nature of the mind is emptiness. The expression of this nature is clarity. These two aspects of the mind can be distinguished for descriptive purposes, but they are essentially one. Fixating just on the notion of “emptiness” or of “clarity,” as if these were independent entities, is a mistake. The ultimate nature of the mind is beyond all concepts, definitions and partial views.

A child thinks, “I could walk on the clouds!” If he could actually reach the clouds, however, he would find nowhere to set foot. In the same way, our thoughts appear to be solid until we examine them. Then we find that they are without substance. Thus we say that phenomena are empty and apparent at the same time.

Without fixation, thoughts are freed by themselves, like the wind, People of Tingri, which never clings to any object.

The wind blows through the sky and flies over continents without settling anywhere. It traverses space and leaves no trace. Thus should thoughts pass through our minds, leaving no karmic residues and not altering our realisation of fundamental simplicity.

Pure awareness is without fixation, like a rainbow in the sky; People of Tingri, experiences arise quite unimpededly.

Pure awareness, the enlightened mind, which is none other than the mind liberated of all delusion, transcends even the notions of being and non-being. “Where there is attachment, there is no view,” were the words that Jetsun Trakpa Gyaltsen heard from Manjushri, the buddha of wisdom, during a vision. Enlightenment cannot be said to exist, because even the buddhas haven’t seen it. Nor can we say that it does not exist, because it is the source of samsara and nirvana. As long as the concepts of being and non-being persist, we have not realised the mind’s true nature.

A rainbow sparkles in the sky, but it is nothing other than the sky itself. You could call it a manifestation of the sky. Likewise, the experiences that arise during meditation have no substance. Good experiences make us suppose that we have attained lofty realisation; bad ones discourage us. It is truly said: “Children are lured by a rainbow, meditators by their experiences.” If we attach no importance to them they cannot dupe us.

Realisation of the absolute nature is like the dream of a mute; People of Tingri, there are no words to express it.

A mute might clearly remember a beautiful dream but cannot express it in words. Likewise, we lack words to describe the ultimate nature of the mind, the dharmakaya, since the mind escapes all definitions. If we say it exists, we have nothing to show for it but emptiness. If we say it is nothing at all, we are refuted by its myriad manifestations. The ultimate nature of the mind pertains to the domain of absolute truth, which defies all description and cannot be grasped by discursive thought.

Realisation is like a youthful maiden’s pleasure; People of Tingri, the joy and bliss just cannot be described.

With the dawn of realisation, the mind becomes perfectly free, at ease, fulfilled, vast and serene. This realisation, however, is inexpressible, like the joy of an adolescent in the flower of youth.

Clarity and emptiness united are like the moon reflected in water; People of Tingri, there is nothing to be attached to and nothing to impede.

The perceptions of samsara and nirvana are simply the play of the mind’s natural creativity, the radiance of its emptiness. The essence of this radiance is emptiness, and the expression of emptiness is radiance. They are indivisible.

Take the moon reflected on the surface of a lake as an example. It is brilliantly apparent, but you cannot trap it. It is vividly present and at the same time utterly intangible. The same is true of the mind. By its very nature, which is the indivisible union of emptiness and luminosity, nothing can obstruct it and it can obstruct nothing, unlike a solid object, such as a rock, with a physical, exclusive presence. In essence, the mind is insubstantial and omnipresent.

Appearances and emptiness inseparable are like the empty sky; People of Tingri, the mind is without either center or periphery.

The mind has the faculty of apprehending forms, sounds and other phenomena, of experiencing happiness and suffering. Yet the world of appearances has never existed in itself. When you analyse it, nothing is there but emptiness. Just as space is the condition allowing worlds to unfold, the empty nature of the mind is the condition through which it can express itself. Space is without limits; no center or periphery can be assigned to it. Likewise, the mind has neither beginning nor end, neither in time nor in space.

The mind with no thought and no distraction is like the mirror of a beauty; People of Tingri, it is free of any theoretical tenets.

Once the nature of the mind has been recognised, we no longer need to constrain ourselves to a conscious recollection of that nature, nor to modify it in any way. At that point, the mind cannot even be said to “meditate,” because it rests in a state of serene equilibrium. There is no specific concentration on the details of a particular visualisation, such as the form of a deity; neither will the mind stray into the distraction and delusion that characterise the ordinary state, because it rests perpetually and effortlessly in its own nature.

Pure awareness is not affected by agreeable or disagreeable perceptions. It simply stays as it is, like a mirror, neither enraptured by a beautiful face nor offended by ugliness. Just as a mirror reflects all images faithfully and with absolute impartiality, an enlightened being clearly perceives all phenomena, without his or her realisation of the ultimate nature being affected in the least.

One can neither say that an image on the surface of a mirror is a part of the mirror nor that it is anywhere else. In the same way, our perceptions of phenomena are neither in the mind nor outside it.

The realisation of the ultimate nature of things is beyond the concepts of being and non-being. Thus Nagarjuna said in the Root Scripture of the Middle Way: “Because I affirm nothing, none can refute my point of view.”

Awareness and emptiness inseparable are like reflections in a mirror; People of Tingri, nothing is born there and nothing ceases.

The emptiness of the mind is neither nothingness nor a state of torpor, because it naturally possesses a luminous faculty of knowing, what we call pure awareness or enlightened consciousness. The aspects of emptiness and awareness are essentially one, like the surface of a mirror and the reflection in it.

Thoughts manifest within emptiness and are reabsorbed there, as a face appears and disappears in a mirror. Since the face has actually never been in the mirror, it does not cease to be when it is no longer reflected there, while the mirror itself has never changed.

Before entering the spiritual path, we dwell in the supposedly impure state of samsara, which is governed, in relative terms, by ignorance. When we are engaged on the path, we pass through a state where ignorance and knowledge are mixed, and at the end of the path, at the moment of awakening, nothing remains but pure awareness. But throughout the entire course, though it appears that a transformation has taken place, the nature of the mind itself has never changed; not corrupted at the beginning of the path, it is not improved at the end.

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horriblegif · 7 years

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LEVEL DRAMA 50

It’s not usually our style to respond to artworld dramas in any medium longer than a few tweets. They’re never particular exciting beyond the unholy fascination akin to watching some rats fight over a headless cockroach on the floor of a Subway. Moreover, they’re usually confined to a pattern - think of a writer publishing some text on something which upsets people by association and then using his/her social media to promote that text, thusly charging the gravitational pull of indignation and buying space for a pop-up arena of combative discourse below. An example of this would be Art in America’s 2014 piece ‘The Perils of Post-Internet Art’ by Brian Droitcour, itself a wavering diet-summation of a genre that seemed to evolve out of increasing access to technological means of image making and also began to historicise itself simultaneously. Weird right!!? Predictably, arguments followed on social media with responses from implicated parties and sideliners, running the gamut of indignant whiny rebuttal to carefully oriented endorsement. There’s a lot of wiggle room for staking out narratives, personalising them, claiming them or discrediting others, in other words a divine gift to every editorial intern for glossy art magazines that are half full of adverts for luxurious things and half full of tiny texts about arts beginning and ending with the authors name. Qualitative judgement and criticism in the Greenbergian sense is even more obsolete, obsolete accelerated, block-chained and stacked. The modern critique exercise garners no adhesion to the contemporary artscape even as an arse-aching literary nostalgia throwback. Old platforms haven’t all died and new platforms are not always replacing them, but reflective mediations serve commonplace delight regardless of the impossibility to predict.

Brexit and Trump, among many other unkind reminders given up to cultural onlookers, prove that despite our illusions of a slogging but mobile transition towards rectifying centuries of inherent vices within civilisation, there are still a lot of racists around. Not all supporters of Trump might have been racist, but nevertheless they did support one. Not all supporters of Brexit might have been racist, but the rise of hate crime against foreigners post-referendum says enough. Life goes on, whatever post-rationalised narrative you believe is the causation of this crisis in the west and until we’re in a full-blown totalitarian regime we have choices to resist without putting our lives at stake. These resistances can be boycotts, mild political integration or volunteering, adding to body count at protests, whatever.

The slightly shit TV adaptation of The Man In High Castle, which roughly follows a similar format to the Phillip K. Dick source material, does one thing quite well. It shows how many people can adapt or exist quite easily to life under fascism. Obviously the people that do are within regime-defined parameters of acceptable, something that Trump/May and the ukip scum keep trying to define with immigrants (first them, then us all). Most of the denizens of the art scene will not cease to exist, despite the general idea that fascist government wasn’t great for most art/artists. Over half of us fit into those parameters already! Futurism had a pretty big old boner for violence! But we think, given the tragedies within industrialised memory and after the late 60s that art is predominantly a progressive, liberal thing. Okay it has structural problems with insane gender and race bias, but that’s work in progress. As a concept, art galleries or institutions are not seen as part of a mechanism of state-sanctioned harm. Something like that, right? It’s the artists we turn to in dark times to offer cultural reflection and symbology for resistance. Yeah m9, not really so much. Post-vetements overstyled white art males of the curatoriat continue to offer smug “everything is shit” commentary in which they can never be proved wrong. Declining to offer any meaningful critique of tories/republicans but always ready with a hatchet for liberals when they fail. Staying aloof, hand wringing and never forced to contemplate more than jokes about self-employed artist tax returns or some hot take post-potato. Other artists who proclaim radical actions and aesthetics go on to exhibit at art fairs, work with commercial galleries and operate easily within a cultural exchange network built on un-unionised work and cheap labour. An independent project space goes commercial, takes money for anyone, talks about feminism but hangs out with Anita Zabludowicz on her Venice Biennale yacht. Curator does interview and talks about the nature of rigorous critique, but freaks out when it is suggested that putting only their mates in an arts council funded exhibition might be something that is twatty. Pointing out hypocrisy and bad art practices become anti-art, hatin’, jealousy or some kind of trolling without good faith (what trolling with good faith is, please tell us on a postcard addressed to BBC FOUR, PO BOX 80085, Arsequake Kingdom). Artists are not only often creepily “libertarian” but, in the case of LD50 Gallery, sometimes outright mini-fascists.

At this juncture we finally arrive at the point of this longform rant. LD50, a small project space in dalston junction, had some exhibitions of questionable taste and arrangement in recent months. The alt-right exhibit it staged using scavenged parts of the aesthetic and philosophical matter online wasn’t immediately partisan on the surface. It could have been bad satire, it could have been one of those things many adult-child digital artists do where they incorporate the very thing they critique. Obviously the depraved chasm which 4chan and allotments of reddit are located in is morbidly fascinating, to someone who feels they’re on an important media archaeology tip even moreso. Despite the Hitler quotes coupled with anime motifs and other bizarre conflations of alt-right imagery, the show itself didn’t offer a concrete position. This is a commonplace exhibition model that allows “racy” subject matter to be presented with critical immunity, because the art moves to within a viewers praxis. More often this is used with cultural appropriation, where a white artist will extract reference points and framing devices from culture they do not belong to and situate the art itself on the intersection of their gaze, etc etc. So the art is about the white gaze on other culture, that way it removes itself from, at best, being accused of ignoring postcolonial theory or, at worst, just being mildly racist. Very meta though, and you can extract 2000 words from meta quite easily. With the benefit of hindsight plus a screenshot of a private fb conversation, it became obvious the curiosity with the alt-right wasn’t coolly detached in the LD50 show. Given the social media output of LD50 runs along moaning lines about the apolitical nature of net artists and glib rejoinders to political/social occurances, strangely they might have found the blazing political net art they were looking for… just the bad kind of politics. HEY, bad is a construct in art that is irrelevant after postmodernism and pop art, so who is to say it is bad? It’s just neo-reactionary. Sounds like the working title of a group of Final Fantasy rebels. These dodgy politics weren’t always so clear, even in that classic uncertain/ironic way, so it’s possible it was a slippery slope slodden down.

As said in the beginning of this longform rant, the social media microdramas of the art cottage industry aren’t very interesting in themselves beyond the sorry online appearances of calculated hostility and contrived artjoke acumen. But with artist Sophie Jung posting in a public way a ‘call-out’ to a curator of a gallery holding quite dodgy fascist views, the fallout is more interesting than the usual bruised/inflated egos or comment flame wars. The gallery itself has responded by “archiving” the post and all the comments on the main page, as doxing (a strategy of online shaming perfected by the alt-right) bait to sentient pepe memes and twitter eggs. It’s an obfuscatory and aloof reaction, one that shows particular acumen to online psychological skirmishing. Take away the veneer of irony and you see only a few slimy individuals toying with repugnant ideas that most good artists would give no merit, even as illusory discourse.

Is it right to call out someone by posting private convos? Well, check the gallery events and talks - they were pretty public (albeit small and within purposely obfuscating platforms) call outs to those neon genesis authoritarians. A lighter discourse than “is it ok to punch a nazi?” but no less annoying. Of course the answer is yes. Do you argue the inverse that the alt-right should be given platforms? Do you agree with the BBC giving airtime to UKIP but not the Green Party, who have existed for longer/have more members/more elected MPs/have actually run a fucking area of the country? Logic has associations, and while you can spin them away, we fucking see you. The alt-right would legislate for the structural, hidden bureaucratic violence against non-white/foreign people but it is not OK to punch them? They’d happily punch you. It can be so easy if it doesn’t affect you, or to think it wouldn’t, to think that exposing their bullshit is better. Hindenburg thought Hitler wouldn’t be as evil when he finally was given power, the tories seemed to think appeasing the UKIP types was the best way to keep themselves in power. Fuck m9, punch tories AND nazis if you can get away with it. Yeah, if you can back it up, calling people out on something as basic as nazi sympathies is OK. Why did it take so long to be called out on? The alt-right are super zeitgeisty right now and net art dorks are into that because it can be processed into smug “political” diatribe and gestural academica. Things within the art gallery mechanica are afforded un-anchored critical protection at least until the management are revealed to think the muslim ban is fine.

It’s creepy that artist who have exhibited there previously, such as the fantastic Joey Holder and John Russell, weren’t aware of the dodgy politics. Some probably were, such as the Brad Troemel replica dubiously created by AMC network Deanna Havas. Some, like confused net art bro who makes net art that is a bit fash Daniel Keller coyly sits on the fence, crashing a nice-guy routine who isn’t allowed to be sexist. Sad! Other obsessive high grade opinion-merchants like Daniel Rourke attempt to turn everything into irony, glib spectator drama etc. In our limited capacity of visiting LD50 a couple of times for exhibitions and being involved in an event unrelated to the programming, it never was apparent to us there was batshit mental “eugenics isn’t such a bad idea” mind thematic brewing. We have to get used to being surprised in 2016 and 17, though complicit white men wriggling to force jokes out of “paleoconservatism” or something has stopped being surprising since 2007.

So all in all, it’s weird that Lucia Diego and by extension her gallery LD50 are so hot on nazi sympathisers or validating bigots. It’s less weird that a number of friends and collaborators gained before this right turn are just enjoying the spectacle as another performative event. Writer and curator Morgan Quaintance has written about the apolitical nature of the post-internet artist flotilla, the retreat into speculative reality depletes the apparatus to draw ethical lines and instead propels the artist/writer/whatever to pursue “gaming” the system instead. The autumn programming should be a public shame in itself, but the convo screenshot blew away clouds of doubt by direct admittance. But many white women still voted for Trump despite the “grab ‘em by the pussy” recording. Such is the dark art of spin. However, beyond LD50, this isn’t the first art gallery or curator with extreme ring wing views, no fucking shit. You’re aware the Zabludowicz Collection was built with arms dealing money, donates money to the tories and donates money to pro-israel lobby groups, right? To quote artist Patrick Goddard:

“Its been happening for some time and unfortunately artists and their work continue to be instrumentalized by ‘philanthropists’ with darker purposes and dirtier-than-usual money.

The Zabludowicz Collection is an artwashing operation designed to legitimate Israel’s systematic refusal of rights to Palestinians. (along with the BICOM lobbying group – also set up and funded by Zabludowicz money)

Zabludowicz’s strategy is part of a global shift to the right, and very much anticipates the US and UK state assault on arts funding, forcing culture increasingly to function as a vehicle of the right. Furthermore Poju Zabludowicz gives significant donations to the conservative party and a select few pro-Israeli Labour candidates. (Ruth Smeeth being a notable recipient of BICOM money – who kicked off the anti-Corbyn claims of anti-Semitism last year)”

The director of ZC doesn’t espouse any political opinion though, just a disturbingly banal desire to be press-shotted with artists and to fly around the world looking at arts. Their programming does not reflect the mechanism that the foundation operates, which apparently complicates the issue for artists enough that any mea culpa is fine. It looks like until some outright admission of fascist tendencies is made from the primary source, everything is up in the air conceptually. Another question is a worrying route into a sort of McCarthyism, where everyone who works with a place of dodgy politics is “besmirched” by association and the trend of the left attacking their own allies is further proof to right-wing nutcases like LD50 that post-internet art is trash. We can assume some people had suspicions of this gallery at the beginning, but no confirmation appeared in the absolute until the alt-right lovefest. Fair enough, net art people are often very weird anyway (which is fine!). Do you think the ZC doesn’t do similar things with Zionist interests, but without a programme of talks and some art to accompany it? Heather Phillipson, in a Nov 2016 interview with Adrian Searle says, and we quote ‘My next work will be furious. Fascism is on my doorstep’. Heather Phillipson has frequently worked with ZC beyond just exhibiting some work there. We really are at a loss to understand this kind of blindspot, how endemic it is among white artists in western cities. But without any provocation of fascist rhetoric it is unfair to start singling out artists and mudslinging - though we welcome all explanations as to how Heather Phillipson can be angry about fascism but be uncritical of an organisation that… ugh, just re-read what Patrick Goddard wrote. Research it, it’s not fucking secret. The mucus membrane between act and operation, is it that hard to see through? Is it really a massive, Trumpian stone wall? Would artists be ready to form a picket line outside LD50 if Richard Spencer was invited to speak? Even more neoliberal art apologists might refute that method of protest. Imagine the local community of Dalston Junction will hate artists in general even more if they notice white supremacist conferencing being held in a gallery. As if gentrification wasn’t enough! Do we all want to be associated with this kind of thing? Jake and Dinos Chapman are big fans of Nick Land and have shown work at LD50. The Chapmans are standard conservative reactionary britart hangover troll fossils. It’s embarrasing.The Guardian Newspaper employs a similar coterie of journalists that soften the dangerous ideologies of May/Trump et al. by zoning in and selectively extrapolating miniature nuggets of “leftism” (such as Trump’s opposition to TTIP) all the while crowing “he’s a monster he’s a monster but….” and looking at their political games with the detachment of an old cunt with a southwest london mansion who enjoys playing chess on their Gateway 2000 PC, their only brush with anything “liberal” being time spent in a minor theatre company during youth.

If you’re an artist doing some part-time teaching at art schools, tell your students about this! Make sure they don’t enter into the post BA/MA world as apolitical vessels thirsty for a myth-made-real version of ideologically dubious expression, based on a default assumption that artists are sympathetic to labour. If you don’t teach, perhaps consider it a good way to pay for those easyJet flights to European museums or Rat Basel Miami, unless you are too busy arguing about how Adam Curtis is the anti-christ while Theresa May closes our borders to the refugees of wars our state was implicit in funding or operating in. Understand that complications arise when the main financial sponsor of Frieze Art Fair is also the bank of choice for the Trump family. Maybe you avoid the Deutschebank events if you’re exhibiting there, because wouldn’t that compromise your ideology? If you’re in a union, make sure you vote for a union director who isn’t pro-trident. Write to your MP, don’t just screenshot your ‘delete my uber’ account dissertation. It’s OK to criticise your peers, hold them to account for some kind of progressive standard of ethics but piling hate onto an old lefty is not productive when you’re both just trying to unpick capitalist lineage to better understand power and it’s movements. JJ Charlesworth, a writer of ArtReview is a essentially a lobbyist for Tory interests, negging on cultural boycotts or protests against hate-speech! Evidence is in his dodgy slightly-closed-closet-door bigot attitudes, I’m sure lots of people have screenshots of a trans bashing comment or something that betrays a concience. But he might review your shows, has a family, so let him have his tory views in peace, right and don’t forget the afterparty invite. Manick Govinda, an Ayn Rand lovin’ brexiter working in an artists development studio?? What the fuck do you think will happen down the line? Because when they face criticism they complain that their comments receive criticism as a result of the “left” being the “real” threat to “free speech” it should worry you, despite the trenchant desire within your loins to be knighted by their credible notice, or whatever pressure boost your economy-of-prestige fueled trajectory needs for the sake of yr neuroses.

Now LD50 is out of the bag as too right-wing for the art world to swallow without criticism, but people still will fight over how it is bad to post private convos and publicly ‘out’ people even if a few months before they had a fucking anti-semite skyping in. And that will still be spun with tailored words.

Because a lot of us in the London art scene are white and generally not on the breadline of poverty we’re kind of unaffected by LD50s fascism, there is a reluctance to stake out a vocal position because we’re taught to court ambiguity as successful methodology, or something like that. The non-position position, the entrepreneurial cloak, logic mazes eating themselves as the apex form to attitude. The gallery have since changed their trading name to TIVERSE LTD but their prognosis can’t be long-term survival, unless their instagram weirdness really galvanises the turncoats and creeps or finds some very rich David Ike fanboy to invest. Ignoring bad smells is never a great idea, our whole biological purpose of smell to detect invisible malaise and thus act upon removing the harm it can do to our bodies. Not the most high-brow parallel, can we get a point across without retweeting our twitter bot making garbled Bifo and Deleuze references?

What is the fear that forces us to hold back on committing to our views… views that SHOULD by default be progressive, inclusive and reformative? It’s not fucking Serpico, it’s art, but the stakes aren’t wildly different. Beyond art, a place in Dalston has offered those with academic fascist sympathies a place to organise. How is that anything but awful?

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whatisonthemoonarchive · 3 years

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Confessions of a Deprogrammed Trump Supporter

Originally posted here: strategic-culture.org/news/2021/01/22/confessions-of-a-deprogrammed-trump-supporter/

As many people are aware, CNN recently aired a wonderful interview by former Moonie-turned-cult-deprogrammer Steve Hassan giving advice to Americans wishing to deprogram their MAGA-hat wearing loved ones, now that the age of Trump is coming to an end.

Video included in the original post: https://youtu.be/TnblPVMEYAc

I was fortunate enough to have read Hassan’s book and had the loving scrub-brush of truth wash my brain of all of its formerly pro-Trump sympathies and can honestly say that I am most certainly better off for having left those old delusions in the past.

For one thing, I used to enjoy my right to free speech… but thanks to the terrible events of January 6, 2021 that left 3 people dead, horned Q supporters doing photo ops for media, pro-Trump rioters let into the capitol building by guards, and busloads of conspicuous violent figures whom some say were “provocateurs” (whatever that means), I have come to realize that I was all wrong. Free speech is actually very dangerous. Words we took for granted like “patriot”, “nationalism”, or “vote fraud” are actually very racist and using them is a sure fire sign that you might be a domestic terrorist. At any rate, using them should at least be enough to get someone banned from social media and put under surveillance.

For a long time, I thought that record numbers of Black and Hispanic voters supporting Trump in 2020 meant that Trump was not racist, but I now realize that these poor folks just suffered from “multiracial whiteness”.

I thought that questioning voting machines that had been caught red handed manipulating elections across the world was patriotic and that somehow some conglomeration of Big Tech, the media, intelligence agencies and a thing called “deep state” were colluding to create a color revolution in the USA… but I now realize that I was actually supporting conspiracy theories and thus violence and thus domestic terrorism.

I was so far gone that my pre-deprogrammed self was actually persuaded in the crazy idea that depopulation agendas hid behind the cover of a “Great Reset agenda”, concocted by a shadowy elite of sociopathic oligarchs. I have now learned that this was either a silly conspiracy theory, the result of my own delusions or if it was true, then I can at least say with certainty that it is all for my own good.

The truth that I have now come to discover, is that free speech has just gone too far. This practice has reached its limits, and Twitter’s legal executive Vijaya Gadde is absolutely right. Social Media should do its civic duty and extend its censorship of “dangerous thoughts” to citizens and political officials outside of the USA in order to protect the world from itself. If other world leaders are worried about this new truth, then they should seriously do some soul searching and learn to think differently.

The old me is long gone, and now all I can say is “thank god” Joe Biden has found himself in the position of leader of the free world at this historic moment of change.

For awhile it was looking like Donald Trump would actually stop forever wars, and untie the U.S. military’s involvement from the CIA. That white supremacist actually came precariously close to destroying the foundations of globalization that many enlightened billionaires had put decades of energy into organizing- first destroying Obama’s Transpacific Partnership, then the Paris Climate Accords and THEN he had the nerve to scrap NAFTA itself by giving nation states a say in economic affairs!

He even committed the sin of criticizing NATO itself- the very foundation of western collective security from the obvious threats of Russia and China!

He called for insane things like “bringing back manufacturing to the USA”, “restoring protectionism”, and “making space exploration and arctic development a priority for the nation” and everyone knows that this is all so 1963.

But now the “disturbance” is over, and the age of Biden has arrived!

Joe Biden is a man who understands what liberal values and the “rules-based order” are really about.

He was wise enough to get onto the unipolar bandwagon before it was popular by drafting the 1994 surveillance bill that John Ashcroft later used verbatim for the Patriot Act after 9/11.

He was smart enough to know that Wall Street couldn’t lead America into the 21st century as long as Glass-Steagall was in place and voted for its repeal in 1999.

He was one of the loudest supporters of NAFTA which helped reduce carbon emissions drastically by exporting dirty industrial jobs oversees where they should be.

He also gave the Credit Card companies the political support they needed to stop citizens from abusing their generosity which went a long way to help Americans build character and take responsibility for their short sighted consumer decisions.

After 9/11, Biden also brilliantly supported the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (who may not have had anything to do with 9/11 but at least showed the terrorists who’s boss).

Unlike those cultish Trumping fascists, Biden was courageous enough to proclaim even before the horrible insurrectionary riots of January 6th, that a new Patriot Act/Domestic Terror Bill would be needed to purge the republic of dangerous terrorism and the insidious thought crimes which spread doubt in honest elections, and distrust in the benevolent political structures leading the western world. Thinking people know, that thought does sometimes cause action… and if we want to truly remedy wrong actions like the riots of January 6th, or dangerous COVID-denialism, then we should most certainly take the battle to the realm of the mind.

The brilliant Steve Hassan even recognized this reality in his CNN interview when he said that “the bottom line is all of America needs deprogramming because we’ve all been negatively influenced by Donald Trump.”

Sure, some people think that the 46 deaths and 32 riots caused by Antifa and BLM over the past six months might qualify as domestic terrorism, but that’s only because they are infected with racist wrong think and don’t realize that these groups were just fighting against fascism and racism.

Certainly, the first 100 days after Biden’s inauguration will be inspired.

Already, Biden has made commitments to sign the USA back onto the legally binding Paris Climate Accords to help us win the war against climate, and has shown the good sense to reverse Trump’s disastrous decision to break the anti-China TPP in 2016. Biden always said he would renegotiate the TPP in order “to hold China accountable”, and everyone knows Trump’s selfish decision only helped China by freeing up its neighbors to work together on the BRI. If only Trump hadn’t killed TPP, then the 14 nation strong Regional Cooperation Economic Partnership which China just finalized would never have happened.

Most importantly, our benevolent overlords who meet at Davos every year are happy once more and have even kicked off Biden’s inauguration with a special celebration entitled “the Davos Agenda” running from January 25-29. According to the WEF, this event will “mark the launch of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset Initiative and begin the preparation of the Special Annual Meeting in the spring. Each day will focus on one of the five domains of the Great Reset Initiative.”

The USA’s new Special Envoy on Climate, John Kerry, captured the excitement of this wonderful moment perfectly when he said: “The notion of a reset is more important than ever before… we’re at the dawn of an extremely exciting time.”

According to the Great Reset architects, this is definitely the right idea.

WEF President Klaus Schwab has taught us that the “age of owning things” is so passe, and we know that this obsolete relic of capitalism isn’t compatible in our new age of global peace and brotherhood.

Ownership of “things” just makes us selfish and forget about the real purpose of life.. which is really about sacrifice. Establishing new supranational organizations to manage the levers of consumption and production according to evidence-based standards and scientific realities of carrying capacity is the only remedy to the evils of populism and being ignorant to this reality doesn’t lessen the fact that boards of experts who are smarter than you say that it is so.

According to the WEF’s Great Reset website global CO2 output collapsed by over 7% during the 12 months of global COVID-19 shutdowns… which means the COVID-19 is more of a blessing than many dim witted selfish nationalists who like owning things realize.

So what if the world population will contract under the shutdown of the world economy under COVID lockdowns? And so what if we lose our capacity to support industrial civilization through the imposition of global green energy grid?

Didn’t the late great Maurice Strong (who was WEF Executive Director and father of the Great Reset), ask the question in 1991:

“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

So get ready for an exciting time in history, and hopefully China finally learns that the new world order is Unipolar – with a big green hug for all well behaved leaders who get rid of such silly ideas as “nationalism”, “industrial progress” or “ending poverty through development” which dangerous concepts like the Belt and Road Initiative threaten to unleash. Most importantly, China has to really deprogram itself from her belief that Russia is a worthwhile partner in the 21st century. Xi made a good decision to attend this month’s Great Reset conference and both he and Modi would do well to abandon dirty fossil fuels, their support of nuclear energy development or space mining in order to adapt their realities to the computer models which have been telling us how to hitch our destinies to a world of entropy and diminishing returns.

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dragons-in-bowties-blog · 6 years

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Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like

If you are one of the blessed few who has never known one, let me provide you with a short primer on how to spot a narcissist: A narcissist is a master of charisma who possesses the kind of social magnetism that easily draws anyone and everyone in. Conversations are somehow always about them and their ego knows no bounds. This is by no means an exhaustive list of their behaviors; narcissists exist on a nuanced spectrum that ranges from people who are mildly irritating to individuals who are toxic for your mental and emotional health.

My experience with a narcissist fell more into the latter as I steadily, but quickly, developed one-sided feelings for a man who reaped the benefits of my emotional labor for months while I turned into a destructive version of myself. I became okay with accepting whatever scraps of intimacy I could get from him and fell into questioning my self-worth. I battled persistent paranoia that I was just one of the many women he was entertaining. I had to completely purge this person from my life in order to realize that I was unrecognizable to myself and the people who cared about me. The situation I found myself tangled in was really just toxic time-wasting- masquerading as a man's potential “interest” in me.

Yet, now that I've removed this person from my life and gained perspective, I consider falling in love (or, rather, infatuation) with this person to be one of the best things to have ever happened to me. It pushed me to learn some valuable lessons.

My feelings are valid.

I met The Narcissist a few months after his ex passed away suddenly, and given the unpredictability of his emotional state, that should have been red flag number one. But my attraction to emotionally-damaged human beings went into overdrive and I made myself available to play “therapist” (funny enough, he was an actual therapist). He would frequently drop his traumatic life experiences at my literal doorstep, and then leave, and I could never verbalize that I didn't have the emotional space to carry his shit and my own. I now know that I am never obligated to bear the weight of other people's traumas. Being an empath doesn't mean that I deserve to be treated as an emotional sponge to sop up someone else's mess.

Unethical non-monogamy is not polyamory.

During our emotionally draining situationship, The Narcissist had a tendency to share unprompted stories of sexual trysts, nudes he'd received, and reasons why he was the self-proclaimed king of sexual liberation. He justified these actions by claiming them to be a progressive dismissal of monogamy. And while I've never been fond of the way society has told us to perform monogamy, casual dating and casual sex without communicated intentions is not polyamory. Polyamory involves consent, open communication, and trust. Should I ever decide to enter into a throuple, there will be clear and ethical boundaries. Deciding whether or not I want to hear about a partner's emotional or sexual intimacy with other people is one of those boundaries.

Picturenet/Getty Images

Being “exceptionalized” is not flattery.

Ever have someone tell you that “you're the exception?” The Narcissist was fond of telling me how exceptional I was in comparison to other women he dated, that I made him feel seen, that I was “chill,” and that I wasn't “like other Black women.” I now know that any propping up of one type of woman over another is usually BS that is used to explain problematic perspectives. I was not that different from any other woman this man had dated. His pseudo-praise of me as a woman who “went with the flow” was a way to remove himself from accountability for my confused feelings-and probably other women's feelings too. When I do find my romantic partner, they won't need to put other women down in order to appreciate who I am.

I never have to tolerate love that doesn't bring me peace.

Before this experience, I never really believed that you may be more likely to excuse someone's trash behavior if you have a powerful physical attraction to them. But now I understand how that can happen. The Narcissist became the trigger for a lot of my self-hate about my body and looks. During sex or going out in public, I felt like an impostor next to him. I was initially in awe of his holistic lifestyle, which included an unwavering devotion to the gym, but he was prone to fat-shaming women. He even once fat-shamed mothers who don't achieve the unrealistic post-pregnancy “snapback.” I got tired of feeling like my self-esteem was tethered to his approval, and no amount of physical attraction or orgasms is worth clinging to someone who does not make me feel at peace with myself.

Plush Studios/Getty Images

Empathy and accountability are my love languages.

Technically there are five main love languages, and my foremost love language is quality time. But after one too many attempts to convince a man to love me when he did not have the emotional or mental capacity to do so, I've realized how important it is to have empathy and accountability present in all of my relationships. The absence of those two things in previous relationships has resulted in me being more suspicious of potential suitors. I'm slowly learning how and when to be vulnerable with someone again.

In many ways, I'm reclaiming my time, my ability to love, and my ability to accept love that is authentic and nurturing, someday.

The post Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like appeared first on HelloGiggles.

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typhoonprecious-blog · 6 years

Text

Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like

My feelings are valid.

Unethical non-monogamy is not polyamory.

Picturenet/Getty Images

Being “exceptionalized” is not flattery.

I never have to tolerate love that doesn't bring me peace.

Plush Studios/Getty Images

Empathy and accountability are my love languages.

In many ways, I'm reclaiming my time, my ability to love, and my ability to accept love that is authentic and nurturing, someday.

The post Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

tothe-tooth-blog · 6 years

Text

Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like

My feelings are valid.

Unethical non-monogamy is not polyamory.

Picturenet/Getty Images

Being “exceptionalized” is not flattery.

I never have to tolerate love that doesn't bring me peace.

Plush Studios/Getty Images

Empathy and accountability are my love languages.

In many ways, I'm reclaiming my time, my ability to love, and my ability to accept love that is authentic and nurturing, someday.

The post Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

cowgirluli-blog · 6 years

Text

Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like

My feelings are valid.

Unethical non-monogamy is not polyamory.

Picturenet/Getty Images

Being “exceptionalized” is not flattery.

I never have to tolerate love that doesn't bring me peace.

Plush Studios/Getty Images

Empathy and accountability are my love languages.

In many ways, I'm reclaiming my time, my ability to love, and my ability to accept love that is authentic and nurturing, someday.

The post Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

ungracefulswan-blog · 6 years

Text

Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like

My feelings are valid.

Unethical non-monogamy is not polyamory.

Picturenet/Getty Images

Being “exceptionalized” is not flattery.

I never have to tolerate love that doesn't bring me peace.

Plush Studios/Getty Images

Empathy and accountability are my love languages.

In many ways, I'm reclaiming my time, my ability to love, and my ability to accept love that is authentic and nurturing, someday.

The post Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

theinternetismylyfe-blog · 6 years

Text

Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like

My feelings are valid.

Unethical non-monogamy is not polyamory.

Picturenet/Getty Images

Being “exceptionalized” is not flattery.

I never have to tolerate love that doesn't bring me peace.

Plush Studios/Getty Images

Empathy and accountability are my love languages.

In many ways, I'm reclaiming my time, my ability to love, and my ability to accept love that is authentic and nurturing, someday.

The post Falling in (and out) of love with a narcissist helped me understand what healthy relationships should look like appeared first on HelloGiggles.

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fivestarglam · 7 years

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A sign of strange times: 1984 by George Orwell has become a bestseller yet again. Here is a book distinguished for its dark view of the state, together with a genuine despair about what to do about it. Strangely, this view is held today by the Right, the Left, and even people who don’t think of themselves as loyal to either way. The whole fiasco happening in D.C. seems insoluble, and the inevitable is already taking place today as it did under the presidents who preceded Trump: the realization that the new guy in town is not going to solve the problem.Now arrives the genuine crisis of social democracy. True, it’s been building for decades but with the rise of extremist parties in Europe, and the first signs of entrenched and sometimes violent political confrontations in the United States, the reality is ever more part of our lives. The times cry out for some new chapter in public life, and a complete rethinking of the relationship between the individual and the state and between society and its governing institutions.

Origins of the Problem

At a speech for college students, I asked the question: who here knows the term social democracy? Two hands of more than one hundred went up. That’s sad. The short answer is that social democracy is what we have now and what everyone loves to hate. It’s not constitutionalism, not liberalism, not socialism in full, and not conservatism. It’s unlimited rule by self-proclaimed elites who think they know better than the rest of us how to manage our lives.

By way of background, at the end of the Second World War, the intellectual and political elites in the United States rallied around the idea that ideology was dead. The classic statement summing up this view in book form came in 1960: The End of Ideology by Daniel Bell. A self-described "socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture,” he said that all wild-eyed visions of politics had come to an end. They would all be replaced by a system of rule by experts that everyone will love forever.

To be sure, the ultimate end-of-ideology system is freedom itself. Genuine liberalism (which probably shouldn’t be classified as an ideology at all) doesn’t require universal agreement on some system of public administration. It tolerates vast differences of opinion on religion, culture, behavioral norms, traditions, and personal ethics. It permits every form of speech, writing, association, and movement. Commerce, producing and trading toward living better lives, becomes the lifeblood. It only asks that people – including the state – not violate basic human rights.

But that is not the end of ideology that Bell and his generation tried to manufacture. What they wanted was what is today called the managerial state. Objective and scientific experts would be given power and authority to build and oversee large-scale state projects. These projects would touch on every area of life. They would build a cradle-to-grave welfare state, a regulatory apparatus to make all products and services perfect, labor law to create the perfect balance of capital and labor, huge infrastructure programs to inspire the public (highways! space! dams!), finetune macroeconomic life with Keynesian witchdoctors in charge, a foreign-policy regime that knew no limits of its power, and a central bank as the lender of last resort.

What Bell and that generation proposed wasn’t really the end of ideology. It was a codification of an ideology called social democracy. It wasn’t socialism, communism, or fascism as such. It was a gigantically invasive state, administered by elite bureaucrats, blessed by intellectuals, and given the cover of agreement by the universal right of the vote. Surely nothing can truly be oppressive if it is takes place within the framework of democracy.

A Brief Peace

The whole thing turned out to be a pipe dream. Only a few years after the book appeared, ideology came roaring back with a vengeance, mostly in reaction to the ossification of public life, the draft for the Vietnam war, and the gradual diminution of economic prospects of the middle class. The student movement rose up, and gained momentum in response to the violent attempts to suppress it. Technology gave rise to new forms of freedom that were inconsistent with the static and officious structure of public administration. Political consensus fell apart, and the presidency itself – supposed to be sacrosanct in the postwar period – was dealt a mighty blow with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Government no longer held the high ground.

All that seemed to hold the old post-war social-democratic consensus together was the Cold War itself. Surely we should put aside our differences so long as our country faces an existential threat of Soviet communism. And that perception put off the unleashing of mass discontent until later. In a shocking and completely unexpected turn, the Cold War ended in 1989, and thus began a new attempt to impose a post-ideological age, if only to preserve what the elites had worked so hard to build.

This attempt also had its book-form definitive statement: The End of History by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

It was Bell 2.0 and it didn’t last long either. Over the last 25 years, every institution of social democracy has been discredited, on both the Right and the Left, even as the middle class began to face a grim economic reality: progress in one generation was no longer a reliable part of the American dream. The last time a government program really seemed to work well was the moon landing. After that, government just became a symbol of the worst unbearable and unworkable burden. Heavily ideological protest movements began to spring up in all corners of American public life: the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Bernie, Trump, and whatever comes next.

The Core Problem

Every public intellectual today frets about the fracturing of American civic life. They wring their hands and wonder what has gone wrong. Actually, the answer is more simple than it might first appear. Every institution within this framework – which grew more bloated and imperious over time – turned out to be untenable in one or another sense. The experts didn’t know what they were doing after all, and this realization is shared widely among the people who were supposed to be made so content by their creation.

Every program fell into one of three categories of failure.

Financially unsustainable. Many forms of welfare only worked because they leveraged the present against the future. The problem with that model is that the future eventually arrives. Think of Social Security. It worked so long as the few in older groups could pillage the numerous in younger groups. Eventually the demographics flipped so that the many were on the receiving end and the few were on the paying end. Now young people know that they will be paying their whole lives for what will amount to a terrible return on investment. It was the same with Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of fake “insurance” instituted by government. The welfare state generally took a bad turn, becoming a way of life rather than a temporary help. Subsidy programs like housing and student loans create unsustainable bubbles that burst and cause fear and panic.

Terminally Inefficient. All forms of government intervention presume a frozen world without change, and work to glue down institutions in a certain mode of operation. Public schools today operate as they did in the 1950s, despite the spectacular appearance of a new global information system that has otherwise transformed how we seek and acquire information. Antitrust regulations deal with industrial organization from years ago even as the market is moving forward; by the time the government announces its opinion, it hardly matters anymore. And you can make the same criticism of a huge number of programs: labor law, communications regulations, drug approvals and medical regulations, and so on. The costs grow and grow, while the service and results are ever worse.

Morally unconscionable. The bailouts after the 2008 financial crisis were indefensible to average people of all parties. How can you justify using all the powers of the federal government to feed billions and trillions overall to well-connected elites who were the very perpetrators of the crisis? Capitalism is supposed to be about profits and losses, not private profits and socialized losses. The sheer injustice of it boggles the mind, but this only scratches the surface. How can you pillage average Americans of 40% of their income while blowing the money on programs that are either terminally inefficient, financially unsustainable, or just plain wrong? How can a government expect to administer a comprehensive spying program that violates any expectation of privacy on the part of citizens? Then there is the problem of wars lasting decades and leaving only destruction and terror guerilla armies in their wake.

All of this can remain true without creating a revolutionary situation. What actually creates the tipping point in which social democracy morphs into something else? What displaces one failed paradigm with another? The answer lies with an even a deeper problem with social democracy. You can discern it from this comment by F.A. Hayek in 1939. “Government by agreement is only possible provided that we do not require the government to act in fields other than those in which we can obtain true agreement."

Agreement No More

Exactly. All public institutions that are politically stable – even if they are inefficient, offer low quality, or skirt the demands of basic morality – must at the minimum presume certain levels of homogeneity of opinion (at least) in the subject population; that is to say, they presume a certain minimum level of public agreement to elicit consent. You might be able to cobble this together in small countries with homogeneous populations, but it becomes far less viable in large countries with diverse populations.

Opinion diversity and big government create politically unstable institutions because majority populations begin to conflict with minority populations over the proper functions of government. Under this system, some group is always feeling used. Some group is always feeling put upon and exploited by the other. And this creates huge and growing tensions in the top two ideals of social democracy: government control and broadly available public services.

We created a vast machinery of public institutions that presumed the presence of agreement that the elites thought they could create in the 1950s but which has long since vanished. Now we live in a political environment divided between friends and foes, and these are increasingly defined along lines of class, race, religion, gender identity, and language. In other words, if the goal of social democracy was to bring about a state of public contentedness and confidence that the elites would take care of everything, the result has been the exact opposite. More people are discontented than ever.

F.A. Hayek warned us in 1944: when agreement breaks down in the face of unviable public services, strongmen come to the rescue. Indeed, I’ve previous argued that the smugness of today’s social democrats is entirely unwarranted. Trump won for a reason: the old order is not likely coming back. Now the social democrats face a choice: jettison their multicultural ideals and keep their beloved unitary state, or keep their liberal ideals and jettison their attachment to rule by an administrative elite.

Something has to give. And it is. Dark and dangerous political movements are festering all over the Western world, built from strange ideological impulses and aspiring to new forms of command and control. Whatever comes of them, it will have little to do with the once-vaunted post-war consensus, and even less to do with liberty.

Presidential advisor Steve Bannon is a dark figure – straight out of Orwell – but he is smart enough to see what the Left does not see. He claims to want to use the Trump years to “deconstruct the administrative state.” Notice that he doesn’t say dismantle much less abolish; he wants to use it for different purposes, to build a new national collective under a more powerful executive.

The institutions built by the paternalistic, urbane, and deeply smug social democrats are being captured by interests and values with which they profoundly disagree. They had better get used to it. This is just the beginning.

The partisans of the old order can fight a hopeless battle for restoration. Or they can join the classical liberals in rallying around the only real solution to the crisis of our time: freedom itself. These are the ideological battle lines of the future, not Left vs. Right but freedom vs. all forms of government control.

#fee.org #social democracy

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