Karma City

Wafers-
Well, nothing much to report, but I'll stick with the blog for the time being. America is like an almost-dead fish, flopping on the deck. No idea what it's doing, or why. But Wafers know why: you set yourself against Nature, and against Reality, and what do you think is finally going to happen? Ditto, if for 400+ years, you marginalize or reject those critics who tried to give you valuable input. The dominant narrative reigns supreme, until it hits a wall; which is the story of our time.
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Muddy Waters

Well, at this point, it looks like the GOP will have the House, and the Dems will have the Senate. We may not know until the Georgia runoff on Dec. 6. But hopefully, if the GOP has the house, they might stop the fueling of the war in the Ukraine. These times are pretty murky; no one seems to be sure of anything. All I can do, myself, is throw up my hands and cry KAMALA SCHMAMALA!

The Midterms

Well, folks, the midterm election is something like 2 weeks away, and while most midterm elections are typically a big yawn, this one seems to be set to determine a lot. All year long I was saying it was a slam dunk for the GOP; now, the abortion issue/Supreme Court decision has muddied the waters. The Dems believe it could be an important playing card for them, possibly drawing voters away from the GOP and into the Democratic camp. We won't know the answer to that until the dust settles.

Hovering over all of this is a mad paradox, perhaps more than one. The GOP has already signaled that if they take the House, they intend to review all of this $ being pumped into the Ukraine. My own view is that this is absolutely necessary, since the Ukraine war is an illusion, a pile of shit cooked up by Biden and his admin to revive the Cold War, inasmuch as when it comes to foreign policy, the guy as no imagination whatsoever. The drawback of such a victory, however, is that a large % of GOP candidates believe Trump really won in 2020, and if this MAGA crowd takes over, a complete lie becomes the official "truth". In a larger philosophical arena, it pretty much destroys the notion of truth altogether, as something rooted in empirical evidence. Postmodernism, once a weird French fetish, would now be the order of the day. Plus, this would bring us much closer to a Trump victory in 2024.

This would not be the case if these folks are defeated. Sanity would reign if the Dems win, with one important exception: Biden is a warmonger, and this absurd resurrection of the Cold War would continue to be our daily reality, possibly even pushing the edge of going nuclear. We are, then, screwed either way, the choice being between absurdity/surrealism and brinksmanship/potential holocaust. Yuck, is all I can manage to say about that.

Maybe comedy is all that is left to us, at this point. Survey the public field: what could be funnier than Kamala Schmamala, Tulsi Schmulsi, Kanye West/horse-ass-face/Marjorie Taylor Green toting her Jewish space lasers, Herschel Walker, etc.? It's getting to the point that Bill Maher might as well rename his show "The Parade of the Grotesque," because that is literally what is on display in the US these days. That prescient film of 2006, "Idiocracy," is now with us, except that we could probably use a remake and call it "Buffoonery Unleashed". At the end of the day, only 4 people were correct about the real story of America: H.L. Mencken, Gore Vidal, George Carlin, and of course--moi.;-) As we used to say when I was a student at Cornell, SMF; Sayonara, Mother Fuckers. (Which also translates as Whee!)

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Meatball

There is a game, which I think is called meatball, in which you have to choose between 2 horrid alternatives; like Biden vs. Trump, for example. No sex for 10 years, or being beaten with a rubber hose for 30 consecutive hours? You get the idea. The meatball I'm going to propose is: Gisele Bundchen secretly directing our foreign policy, or Kamala Harris? Wafers, you tell me.

Permanent War for Permanent Peace

I don't know who first coined that phrase, but it describes our "grand strategy" since 1945. It also echoes Orwell's 1984, where there was always, in the background, a war going on that made no sense; it was just war for the sake of war. The Cold War was like that, and Biden, with this new $3b shipment to the Ukraine, seeks to revive it. He has told the Ukraine that he's thinking long-term: the war with Russia will probably go on for years.

One possible problem, however, is that the American people don't have very much upstairs. Their attention span is extremely short. What they want out of a war is quick destruction of the "enemy," such as they got when we destroyed Iraq in 2003. They lose interest if things start to drag out; the prolonged war sinks into the background. Their enthusiasm for this proxy war in the Ukraine already seems to have waned, although not for Biden, apparently. That Russia wants to protect its borders from America and NATO is not on his radar screen. This obvious fact eludes him, and in any case, he prefers to follow the old American playbook of forcing the "enemy" into a corner and then blaming them when they fight to protect themselves. Meanwhile, the $3b that could be used at home for so many badly needed things is pissed away on an illusion, one that we are desperate to maintain. One has to wonder if the American people even care, at this point. However, there is a larger playbook operating here, one that finally sent Rome to its grave: imperial overstretch. If we had a brighter populace, they would see that permanent war is self-destructive, and that we are witnessing our last days. It's not likely they will see that; in fact, it wd require an Act of God--something in short supply these days.

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Stupid People-->Incompetent Leaders-->Foolish Decisions-->National Collapse

Wafers-

OK, here is how it actually is. This is finally the only narrative worth entertaining.

1.The American people are basically out of it. They are clueless and stupid. If you don’t believe me, just go up to one—any one—in the street, and try to engage them on any issue of substance. They will just stare at you, uncomprehendingly. Most of you have already had this experience. The truth is that there is nothing of consequence in their heads. (The World Series, how to make more money, sex, etc.) Ask them what the initials FDR stand for, for example, or what is the capital of New York State (they’ll say, “New York”). 2.As George Carlin told us, stupid people elect stupid leaders. How in the world do we have the likes of Greene, Boebert, Schmamala, Tulsi, Trump, Pelosi—it’s a long list—in office? These people are little more than jokes, and millions adore them. They have no self-transparency, and no real understanding of American history—why the US does what it does. The best they can do is repeat slogans, and think that that’s thinking. 3.Not rocket science: stupid leaders make stupid decisions, ones that are programmed from centuries ago, and that are ultimately self-destructive. (I discuss some of this programming in QOV. For example, the age-old need to have an enemy, and thus to constantly live in a war mentality, and to make war when there is no genuine cause for it.) 4.Bad decisions involve living reactively, from moment to moment, whereas our “enemies” are smart; they play the long game, and they will, as a result, eclipse us. Meanwhile, most nations no longer take us seriously. We look like fools because we are fools. These nations have to tiptoe around us, because we are like a baby waving a bazooka. But they know we have force, not strength. (We don't even know what strength is.) Meanwhile, even our force is draining away, on a daily basis. We have no spiritual purpose; we are just drifting, without any meaning at all. 5.What country decides to take on 2 great powers simultaneously? Ukraine is a proxy for our totally unnecessary war w/Russia, and Taiwan a semi-proxy for an unnecessary confrontation w/China. Who does this, except governments run by people who are effectively brain dead? And who believes this “democracy” crap except the American people, who will believe anything? Anyone w/half a brain knows that Schmiden doesn’t give a shit abt the Ukrainians, and that Schmelosi cdn’t care less abt the Taiwanese. It’s all posturing for the sake of posturing—the refuge of the impotent. 6. Arnold Toynbee demonstrated that civilizations don’t collapse by being invaded from the outside. No, he said; instead, they commit suicide by making all the wrong moves. There is simply no other way to (accurately) interpret what is happening to us. Meanwhile, intelligent civilizations, such as Russia and China, are biding their time. Why attack America when it is doing a bang-up job of attacking itself? 7. Just a ps: Exactly what *is* American civilization? It is a culture only in an anthropological sense; in our case, a gun culture; which is, really, a death culture. In terms of culture in the sense of creativity: Where is the American Dostoevsky? The American Verdi? The American Picasso? 0. What, exactly, will be lost to the world as America slides down the chute to oblivion? Democracy? Ha! Basically, a cover for capitalism, which Americans, like Milton Friedman (a high-IQ moron), equate with freedom, even as it crushes the life out of them.

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What Am I Living For, Anyway?

Wafers-

I think it's time for me to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge. What am I living for, anyway? I tell the Dems and the wokes, "Stop beating off!" Their reaction? Increased beating off. I tell the general public, "This is a phony war. Biden couldn't care less about the Ukrainians. What he is doing is resurrecting the Cold War, i.e. attacking Russia." The response? They run around waving the Ukrainian flag, removing Chekhov from university curricula, and insisting that restaurants serve Beef Zelensky instead of Beef Stroganoff. I tell them, "We're not No. 1. We're actually way down the list, in almost every category you can name. The place is disintegrating before your very eyes." What do they do? Run around waving the American flag, chanting "We're No. 1!" They actually think we won the war in Vietnam. There simply is no reason for me to go on, amigos; I need to give some serious thought to packing it in.

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An Anatomy of the World

Poor America! Not much left of it these days. A phony war, increased poverty, serious inflation, runaway drug use, massacres, suicides, a sick and dishonest Supreme Court, and a bitter, clueless population. One party hankering for violence, and the end of democracy; the other thinking that diversity appointments and 'correct' language constitute an adequate response. Of course, I predicted the end of the US 22 years ago (in the Twilight book), but I never imagined it would look like this--so bleak, so stupid, and so sad. I think of T.S. Eliot's "vast, impersonal forces," History rolling over us like an Abrams tank, with literally nothing that can be done to stop it. Trumpi in the White House will be the final act of this tragedy, but Schmiden in the White House hasn't been able to do much better. And on the microlevel, a deep unkindness Americans have for one another, also unimaginable 22 years ago. Although John Donne had it right in 1611 (An Anatomy of the World): “Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone, All just supply, and all relation; Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that then can be None of that kind, of which he is, but he.”

What is the female of "doofus"?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6UJO3nGitY

Honestly, folks; what can ya say? "Doofusette"? I'm speechless.

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453

I don't have much to say today. Instead of 453, I could have written "Heads Rammed in Rumps," which seems to summarize both current foreign and domestic policy. Biden's disapproval rating is now up to 55%; the possibility of the Democrats not getting buried this November is quite small. In addition, when asked what were the most pressing issues for them, something like 60% said the economy (read: inflation), and 3% said US foreign policy. Which is to say that the war in the Ukraine is not big on Americans' hit parade. Biden is doing nothing to curb inflation, and is trying to send $40 billion in military aide to the Ukraine. So do the math, as they say.

Doomer Optimism

So, Waferinos, there are these folks, Americans but intelligent, who had the sense to flee the US and resettle in Uruguay, where they are trying to employ the idea of my "Dual Process" essay, and create alternative possibilities. Good folks, you'd like them. Anyway, they call their enterprise "Doomer Optimism," and they did an interview with me a short while back, which I thought some of you might enjoy. Here's the link, chicos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFvneFIlLZc

Perhaps, in this case (out of America), Onward and Upward!

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The Sadness of War

It’s quite a sight, across America, Americans waving Ukrainian flags, boycotting vodka, petitioning universities to cancel courses in Russian lit, and so on, while the MSM feeds us a daily stream of pro-Ukrainian propaganda. This is not to discount the massacres perpetrated by the Russian army; all that is horribly real. Although the US also continues to massacre civilians (via drones) on a daily basis, in the name of “fighting for democracy.” Americans have no objections to those massacres, and are happy with the military euphemism for the slaughter of innocents: “collateral damage.” So Putin is Hitler, a madman, a butcher, etc.; no further analysis of the situation is required.

What the MSM, especially the social media, also does is block out (i.e., censor) empirical studies and alternative narratives. Keen political analysts like John Mearsheimer, Scott Ritter, Glenn Greenwald, and Michael Brenner are not welcome on its sites. And what do these scholars and journalists point out? Among other things, that Putin was trying, for 15 years, to sit down with the US and discuss its concerns regarding Russian border safety. After all, when JFK discovered that Khrushchev had planted nuclear missiles on Cuba in 1962, 200 miles from Miami, he displayed no Putinesque restraint: he rightly hit the ceiling. So now, NATO and the US want to do the same in the Ukraine, near the Russian border, and America refuses to discuss it. Only our concerns count, apparently. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that America, and Biden, prefer war to peace, détente, and negotiation. A black-and-white, Manichaean narrative is much easier to grasp, and, in fact, much more satisfying. Why would that be the case?

The typical American carries a huge load of sadness within him/her. For reasons I have explained in various articles and books, s/he is pretty miserable. Their lives did not turn out as planned, and they are bitter, angry, and hurting way deep down. In such a case, what would be the sensible way to deal with this terrible constellation of emotions? You go to a therapist, you admit your pain, and you learn how to work through it. But this is not what the typical American does. Instead, he or she turns to opioids, alcohol, suicide, cell phones, television, food, drugs of all kinds—and especially, the self-righteous energy of war. This is not an original observation on my part; many writers have pointed it out. War mobilizes tremendous energy, such that all of that internal pain gets repressed, and deflected into rage against a cartoon ‘enemy’ who is barely understood.

So today, the mistake of the Cold War, which devastated both sides of the fight in so many ways, is now being resurrected and replayed. Americans are certainly not open to Mearsheimer’s argument (for example), that it is the US that bears responsibility for what is happening in the Ukraine. Americans barely know what facts are, and in any case are not interested in them. What gets their attention are emotions, which they stupidly confuse with ideas. And when the dust settles, their inner pain will still remain, because repressing it through war finally will not work. This is the immense sadness of war, and one thing is guaranteed: we will not pursue a different path. Hiding out, so to speak, whether on a microlevel or a macrolevel, can only work against us; it is the latest development in the ongoing, and inevitable, disintegration of the US.

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450

So, Wafers, what can I tell you. This is from the last thread:

https://www.newsweek.com/karl-marx-study-room-name-changed-due-ukraine-russia-war-officials-say-1690072

College students, no less! Does it get any dumber? You know, when Toynbee did his assessment of collapsing civilizations, he was not able to name one that went under because it had turned into a joke. Honestly, I love this stuff. What next? Students burn an effigy of Tolstoy in Harvard Square? Don' laugh! A nation of clowns.

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Eminent Post-Victorians

Wafers-

It is with some joy that I can announce the publication of my new book, Eminent Post-Victorians. I'm very happy with this; it was a labor of love, and (I think) represents some of my best writing to date. It's similar to my book on the Italians, Genio, except in this case it deals with the galaxy of British writers and thinkers prominent during the first half of the 20C: Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Isaiah Berlin, and the like. I hope you enjoy it.

https://www.amazon.com/Eminent-Post-Victorians-Portraits-Morris-Berman/dp/B09TYW8HXY/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1647180715&sr=1-26

448

When I was an undergraduate at Cornell, I studied Russian for 2.5 years. The first year was so rigorous that by the end of it, I was able to read Pravda without a dictionary. It was, however, rather boring, because the daily headline was always some variant of MILLIONS ENSLAVED BY CAPITALISM. (No mention of how many were enslaved by communism, for some odd reason.) I think at this point it's time the NYT did an American version of this: MILLIONS HAVE HEADS RAMMED IN RUMPS. Variants could include AMERICANS WILL BELIEVE ANYTHING, 332 MILLION IDIOTS, COULD WE BE ANY MORE STUPID?, ETC. Wafers are encouraged to contribute potential headlines for our outstanding flagship newspaper, whose true motto is "All the News that Fits Our Views." The editorial page and the front page have effectively merged, and they don't even seem to realize it. Maybe the best headline for the NYT would be WE ARE A JOKE.

447

We drift toward Nov. 8, when the Dems will have their rumps handed to them on a platter. This could then pave the way for Trumpaloni in 2024, or perhaps some Trump-like candidate. On a daily basis, the nation seems more stupid, more violent, and more full of rage. Schmiden's resurrection of the Cold War, complete with America's eternal unwillingness to see the other side's point of view, is all of a piece. Arnold Toynbee's observation, that in the final phase of empire, the empire will double down on precisely those behaviors that were eroding it in the first place, is there for all to see. Bill Maher continues to try to wake the country up; talk about a wasted effort. Meanwhile, millions of Americans worship Kanye West, whose face closely resembles a horse's ass. This even more so now, when Kim's buttocks are in other hands. Covid deaths are moving toward the 1 million mark; entire communities are being wiped out by suicide, alcoholism, opioid abuse (fentanyl especially), and numerous other drugs. The rich fly off to Mars (or wherever); the poor are ground into the dirt. What is left of the middle class now reads cell fones instead of books (except for diet and self-help books). Randomly stopped on the street and asked elementary questions (e.g., What does Y-E-S spell?), Americans haven't the foggiest idea. The data of our demise comprise a very long list; our citizens more closely resemble jokes than human beings. Meanwhile, Jewish Space Lasers circle the globe, inoculating gentiles with covid, and probably collecting blood from little Christian boys to bake in matzoh; while Whoopi Goldberg tells us that the Jews are not a race. Yet another high-IQ moron, but then the US has millions of them, dutifully reading the NYT every day to be reassured that all will be well. Honestly, what left is there to say?

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Well, we've had a good time discussing Tulsi, Tulsism, chicken sandwich suppositories, and the staunch refusal of Dems/progs/wokes to stop beating off. As we slowly crawl toward Nov. 8, the inevitability of the 'left' (there's a joke for ya) getting creamed at the polls looms clearly on the horizon. At the conclusion of the last thread I posted an article suggesting how the US could, or 'should', do something intelligent (which is to say, counter-intuitive) during its twilight years. But this is where savvy historians know better, because the historical record, as Arnold Toynbee clearly demonstrated, is that this is not what dying empires do. What they do is keep on with what brought them to the point of self-destruction in the first place, because that's really all they know. And as 'exceptional' as America likes to regard itself, it will not escape its fate. It will even accelerate its self-destructive trajectory. Declinists just shrug.

The Post-Collapse Scenario (Maybe)

Pankaj Mishra has a very insightful discussion of that famous book by Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in the 6 December 2021 issue of the New Yorker. The book is the classic statement of anti-colonialism, and has been an inspiration to millions of the “Global South.” Fanon argued that the (European) bourgeois ideology of “equality and dignity was merely a cover for capitalist-imperialist rapacity” (quoting Mishra). I take this to be obviously true, and in Why America Failed I argue that our so-called democracy has largely been a cover for hustling, for consumerism, and for economic and technological expansion. The theme comes up again in my forthcoming book, Eminent Post-Victorians, which includes a chapter on Sir Isaiah Berlin. Berlin was the poster boy for liberalism, or “negative liberty,” by which he meant the freedom to do as you wished so long as it didn’t interfere with others (which he admitted it would). But what really emerges from a study of Berlin is that he always came down on the side of the status quo, in particular the British capitalist, and hierarchical, way of life. During the 1960s, he was extremely skeptical of decolonial liberation movements, and I’m guessing he detested Fanon’s essay. Still, his doubts were not completely off-base, and can be found in Fanon’s book as well.

Pankaj refers briefly to experiments conducted by elites in Asia and Africa, who “saw it as their duty to devise non-exploitative economic and social systems for their people.” My own version of this is what I have called “Dual Process,” discussed in the final essay of Are We There Yet?. Fanon was concerned that the dispossessed might adopt a “psychology dominated by an exaggerated sensibility, sensitivity, and susceptibility” (quoting Fanon). He coined the phrase “curse of independence”: the possibility that the newly liberated states might become a “receptacle for ethnic and tribal antagonisms, ultranationalism, chauvinism, and racism…[that the] new ruling classes in post-colonial nations would fail to devise a viable system of their own” (quoting Mishra). And so Fanon’s conclusion regarding decolonialization was ambiguous, even bleak; open-ended at best.

I have often said that I don’t have a crystal ball, and cannot predict how the future is going to play out. But one thing I am sure of is that the United States is finished, and that its collapse will come as a relief to much, if not most, of the planet. But “finished” can take many forms, and one possible scenario, discussed often on this blog, is secession: the breakup of America into various different sociopolitical entities. The hope I have is that some of these new regions will earnestly engage in Dual Process, the devising of non-exploitative economic and social systems. Who can say? But Fanon’s warnings about the “curse of independence” are quite relevant here. If these new regions and new experiments are infected by wokism, they are sure to fail. What if they are, in fact, dominated by the ethnic and tribal antagonisms (etc.) referred to by Mishra, or the psychology of exaggerated sensibility and sensitivity referred to by Fanon? For this is precisely what wokism is all about.

“Don’t fall in love with yourselves,” Zlavoj Zizek warned the excited youth of the Occupy Wall Street movement in its heyday. Which is exactly what they proceeded to do. Why? Because it is very hard for human beings to resist the temptation of proclaiming, “Look how wonderful I am.” Wokism, virtue-signaling, is a religion, and thus acts as psychological glue, providing the mind with (pseudo-)integrity. Dialogue with a woke is about as fruitful as dialogue with a bubba: once you’ve got The Truth, you are no longer capable of dialogue. Doris Lessing pegged this syndrome for communists in the 1930s, in The Golden Notebook, where she wrote that communism literally served to create a psychological existence for its adherents. If new secessionist sections of America are going to avoid the pitfalls referred to by Fanon and Mishra, they need to divest themselves of wokism from Day One. Don’t fall in love with yourselves, for fuck’s sake; just do what’s needed to be done, and be grateful for the opportunities offered you in the wake of the American collapse. If you are unable to, all you will wind up with is old wine in new bottles.

What are the chances? We are a nation of extreme individualists, all trying to show we are better than the next person. To Americans, other people are rivals, not potential friends or comrades. To put it bluntly, we are jerks, and the process of de-jerkifying ourselves, even if undertaken, will not be a smooth ride. Do you want to find yourself? Then—Buddhism 101 here—forget yourself. Hey, it’s worth a shot.

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Overdetermined: A Thought for the New Year

“Overdetermined” was a word coined by Freud. It referred to the convergence of factors that made personality, or neurosis, a sure thing. By age five, he argued, it was all over: what we were at five was what we would be at eighty-five. Of course, most of us evolve a bit, knock the rough edges off, manage to become a bit more mature. But fundamentally speaking, we remain the same person for all of our lives. “Overdetermined” suggests that serious change is nearly impossible, because coming from a number of sources, the various factors converge to “freeze” one into a particular constellation, as it were. Freud believed that his “talking cure” could effect such a change, but I’m skeptical of the notion that intellectual approaches to emotional problems can accomplish this. The result is that for the most part, we are who we are; the underlying structure remains intact.

Freud also argued, however, that neurosis could be a good thing. Self-transparency could work against us, render the “fixed” self unable to do its work in the world. In the same vein, Isaiah Berlin pointed out that if Van Gogh had had access to therapy, so that he might become a “well-adjusted” individual, it isn’t very likely that we would have the benefit of all of those stunning paintings—among the greatest art in the history of the world. “Normal” might not be such a positive thing, in short.

I sometimes consider my own situation, and realize that by the age of eight, if not before, I looked around me and decided I really didn’t want to be normal. America is the ultimate hustling, competitive, put-down society, and on a visceral level, I understood this. So unlike Frank Sinatra, I really did do it my way, and the result is a “career” that I’m fairly proud of. But there are costs to doing it your way, namely, that the creativity can emerge from a neurotic base (something I explored in the final chapter of Coming to Our Senses), and that you can expect to be alone. Oh sure, I have good friends, and have had a number of girlfriends; but in the end, you really are by yourself, if you take this path. But you take it because you are convinced that the alternative is much worse, and I am so convinced.

However, suppose you decide that you want to alter the trajectory of your life, which is to say, your destiny. I explored this in a collection of stories I wrote in 2010, Destiny. The first story (really a novella) concludes that any effort to make such a change is bound to fail. The second story says that change is possible, but that one would be faced with a lot of anxiety, as a result. And the third story asks the question: Why bother? I have thought a lot about all of these options.

Facts—the intellectual approach—are pretty much powerless against mythologies, and our individual mythologies are a big part of our destinies. There are by now a number of studies showing that when someone holds irrational beliefs, and is presented with hard evidence that disproves them, s/he will reject that evidence so that the neurotic constellation can be preserved. A typical (social) example is the religious cult that predicts the end of the world on a certain date. The date comes, apocalypse doesn’t occur, and rather than deciding that their belief system is a load of hooey, the “true believers” simply move the date ahead. One down side of this (among many) is that these types of groups rarely produce any Van Goghs.

In any case, at the micro, or individual, level, we all do this, so as to protect ourselves against change, and against any serious soul-searching. There is a gain in this, of course, but also (inasmuch as most of us aren’t Van Goghs) a very real loss: we wind up living mechanical, programmed lives, without even realizing it. Dialogue with others is not real dialogue; it’s just mutual affirmation of a common value system. In America, bubbas talk with bubbas, progs and wokes talk with progs and wokes, and very few people venture outside of their comfort zone.

Freud also pointed out that neurosis was hardly limited to individuals. Whole societies, he argued, whole civilizations, could be neurotic. And in such (macro) cases, the same stuckness applies. Some examples from my own experience:

My first book was a study of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and more generally, the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the development of science in England. It focused particularly on the most obvious feature of British life: hierarchy, and class society. But if it’s obvious, the British certainly don’t want it pointed out. The book remains a mainstay of graduate programs in the history of science, but beyond that, it made no difference whatsoever. There was no serious discussion, in its wake, of the nature of class society. Instead, a few scholars associated with the Royal Institution banded together to refute the claims of the book (a bit hard to do, given the mountain of footnotes and data I provided), and the result was a bit of a joke. Their book was about heat, rather than light (e.g., one writer called me a sixties counterculture person). Oddly enough, they never mentioned the name of my book (I guess they regarded it as hexed, or contagious in some way). If they had taken my argument (and that of many other critics) seriously, it could have possibly led to a public or media discussion of class society in England, and how damaging such social arrangements are. But no: let’s just take a defensive position, live in denial, and protect privileged arrangements at all cost. British institutions must remain sacred.

Of course, this national neurosis, amounting to institutions such as Eton, Harrow, and Winchester, was the backbone of empire, and helped to make England the de facto ruler of the world. For at least a century, the sun never did set on the British Empire. This was perhaps a good thing (unless you talked to Indians and other victims of colonialism), but the whole configuration finally worked against England, in a number of ways; and as the 20th century wore on, it couldn’t maintain its hegemony, and finally became largely irrelevant on the world stage. Yet class inequality didn’t change one iota; under Margaret Thatcher, for example, England, utterly unwilling to engage in any self-transparency, crushed its working class. No surprise, Freud would have said.

A second example: Japan. The most obvious feature of Japanese society is group consciousness and behavior, which has both positive and negative aspects to it. Hence the name of my study of the nation, Neurotic Beauty. But when it got reviewed in the Tokyo English-language newspaper, the Japan Times, it was clear that the Japanese media wanted to hear about the beauty, but not about the neurosis. The original reviewer, who was not Japanese, gave it a rave review (he told me). This got thrown out by his Japanese boss, who wrote his own (tepid) review, so as to preserve a positive self-image. Again, this was an opportunity for a country to examine its basic assumptions. (Not that I am its only critic.) As in the case of England, it chose not to do so. Japan limps along, not really able to solve its problems.

And finally, America. God, what could ever penetrate the American skull, whether that of its public intellectuals and so-called “critics,” or of the wo/man in the street? These “critics” are basically phony: at heart, they continue to say that America and its value system are more or less sound, and that we will pull out of our current downward spiral, reverse the trajectory. To take a hard look, as I did, at America’s most obvious feature—hustling, endless economic and technological expansion for its own sake—and to come to terms with it as being destructive and self-destructive: that just ain’t gonna happen. So, quelle surprise!, my work is almost completely invisible, I’m not on the radar screen of any intellectual discussion, and the country can and will continue to (inevitably) sink into the grave, by doing what it has been doing since age five, so to speak. “Change” in America consists of diversity appointments, tearing down statues, and “editing” Mark Twain—all window-dressing. It never goes to the heart of the matter, and there are no indications that it ever will. (The only real alternative to the hustling way of life is the world view of the Native Americans, and they are politically irrelevant.)

It’s worse elsewhere, of course. Write a serious critique of Russia, or China, and if you are a citizen of those countries you could get yourself killed. Journalists in Mexico are routinely bumped off. Those few in England, or Japan, or the US, who write such critiques don’t get killed; they just get marginalized and ignored—killing of a different sort, I suppose. Killing of a voice—and of an opportunity.

I realize this is pretty deterministic. I’m saying that for the most part, individuals don’t change, and that countries or civilizations never do. As W.H. Auden famously put it, “We would rather be ruined than changed.” Historically speaking, however, change does occur: we are not hunter-gatherers anymore, or living in the Middle Ages. And we are certainly better off in some ways as a result of that cultural evolution. But it seems to me that we are also worse off in certain ways, and that as a planet, we are not headed in a healthy direction, even leaving the question of climate change aside. Technology and its associated values are doing us in, and the resistance to this trajectory is pretty feeble. How, then, does change occur?

Let me give it to you in a word: pain. On the individual level, a person changes when the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing. Then s/he will make the leap, as in the second story of Destiny. Then s/he will seek therapy, say to the therapist: “I’m suffering. My life is a mess. I need to get to the bottom of this, and try to become a different person.” Of course, change might not necessarily occur, but if it does happen, this—intolerable suffering—is ultimately the starting point on the road to a better life.

And for nations? No such luck, I’m afraid. Arnold Toynbee, many years ago, chronicled how every civilization rose and fell, and in the falling stage did precisely those things that got them into trouble in the first place. Change can come, but only after the system crashes, the point at which it becomes impossible for these countries to keep doing what they’ve been doing all along. In the case of America, it will fall apart, perhaps into separate sections of the country (via secession), and this might offer the hope of some regional rejection of the American Way of Life, which has become, truth be told, a Way of Death. This is probably a few decades down the line, but as far as I can see, it offers the only glimmer of hope possible. Dum spiro, spero, wrote Cicero: As long as I breathe, I hope.

©Morris Berman, 2022