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Jebus-Zeus
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The Death of Civilization

" Today the West is the GI who dashes into Fallujah on an M1 Abrams tank, listening to heavy metal at top volume. It’s the tourist lost on the Mongolian plains, mocked by all, who clutches his credit card as his only lifeline. It’s the CEO who swears by the game Go. It’s the young girlchchases who chases happiness in clothes, guys, and moisturizing creams. It’s the Swiss human rights activist who travels to the four corners of the earth to show solidarity with all the world’s rebels – provided they’ve been defeated. It’s the Spaniard who couldn’t care less about political freedom once he’s been granted sexual freedom. It’s the art lover who wants us to be awestruck before the “modern genius” of a century of artists, from surrealism to Viennese actionism, all competing to see who could best spit in the face of civilization. It’s the cyberneticist who’s found a realistic theory of consciousness in Buddhism and the quantum physicist who’s hoping that dabbling in Hindu metaphysics will inspire new scientific discoveries.

The West is a civilization that has survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole, from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addition to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness; so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throws sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form.

The fragmented individual survives as a form thanks to the “spiritual” technologies of counseling. Patriarchy survives by attributing to women all the worst attributes of men: willfulness, self-control, insensitivity. A disintegrated society survives by propagating an epidemic of sociability and entertainment. So it goes with all the great, outmoded fictions of the West maintaining themselves through artifices that contradict these fictions point by point.

There is no “clash of civilizations.” There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid, primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye everywhere in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A century ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble.

No social order can securely found itself on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure. Applying the concept of “security” to everything these days is the expression of a project to securely fasten onto places, behaviors, and even people themselves, an ideal order to which they are no longer ready to submit. Saying “nothing is true” says nothing about the world but everything about the Western concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an attribute of beings or things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to experience is held to be true. Science is, in the last analysis, this empire of universal verification. Since all human behavior, from the most ordinary to the most learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly formulated presuppositions, and since all practices start from a point where things and their representations can no longer be distinguished, a dose of truth that the Western concept knows nothing about enters into every life. We talk in the West about “real people,” but only in order to mock these simpletons. This is why Westerners have always been thought of as liars and hypocrites by the people they’ve colonized. This is why they’re envied for what they have, for their technological development, but never for what they are, for which they are rightly held in contempt. Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldn’t be taught in schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not discredited in advance. Containing all affirmations and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light-such is the long labor of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, means to this end.

Of course, this imperialism of the relative finds a suitable enemy in every empty dogmatism, in whatever form of Marxist-Leninism, Salifism, or Neo-Nazism: anyone who, like Westerners, mistakes provocation for affirmation.

At this juncture, any strictly social contestation that refuses to see that what we’re faced with is not the crisis of a society but the extinction of a civilization becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation. It’s even become a contemporary strategy to critique this society in the vain hope of saving this civilization.

So we have a corpse on our backs, but we won’t be able to rid ourselves of it just like that. Nothing is to be expected from the end of civilization, from its clinical death. In and of itself, it can only be of interest to historians. It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To decide on the death of civilization, then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse."

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Since writing this post Jebus-Zeus may have helped people, but has not within the last four (4) days.
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point, order, society, west, civilization
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Cliff notes???

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Jebus-Zeus
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aeolians.revenge wrote:
Cliff notes???

Be

Electric
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Hhmmm.
Where to begin....
Or even if I should.

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Jebus-Zeus
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I am a professional turnip telepath, I can get you a call right now from one that just fell off the truck.

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Jebus-Zeus
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Take a flight on the demented skies

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