I don’t think the above image is true - I don´t think not everyone on the polital right is by default an adherent of national socialism, nor everyone on the left a implicit follower of communism. These were broad social movements of times that were so different from ours that we can barely conceive of them or fully understand them now. To imply and project them onto our idological enemies shows some lack of historical knowledge, and a kind a lazyness to understand the times we are currently in and to create some new labels that have more panache to it.
I believe though that the image is true enough to highlight a specific and well-known phenomenon from sociology called ‘interdependence’. Whether it be the Hatfields vs. McCoys, Montagues vs. Capulets, Israelis vs. Palestinians, Democrats vs. Republicans, there is rarely a clear-cut case of who is the good one and who is the bad one. Interdependence means a recursive confusion in cause-and-effect attribution in the form of tribal consciousness, a phenomenon that every married couple knows by heart: He claims he did B because she did A, but she claims she did A because he did B. Now what?
In addition to a doomsday clock, we should have a shrill-o-meter, signaling the extent to which people engage in interdependent communication, commonly referred to nowadays as ‘culture war’. No, this is not ‘both-sidesism’, but simply a matter of social hygiene. The only thing that matters in culture-war debates —for example whether Sidney Sweeney’s giant tits in denim jeans are fascist or not, or whether a rainbow flag should be raised atop the German Reichstag instead of the German flag—is that attention is captured that should be diverted or invested in other things, and that the shrill-o-meter has reached an all-time high. We don’t have much time left to deal with the important issues. And the more we engage in these silly topics, the more we foster a culture in which actual politics can be drowned out by these ‘discourses’.
It´s a media-discourse that has been created completely within the media-machinery. In case of Sidney Sweeny this is especially baffling, because a short look into the content of X, Instagramm and OnlyFans (or just guys phones) — has well as ‘traditional’ publications like Playboy shows that the ideal of the Blonde Bombshell with a figure of Marylin Monroe or Scarlett Johannsen was never out of fashion — quite the contrary. The whole discourse is constructed and arbitrary, and just designed to allow the social-media-machinery to go on in perpetuity.
But because of social media we have lost the ability to collectively distinguish between important and unimportant information.
Allow me to make a left turn here. Whatever you might think of Curtis Yarvin and his ideas to reconstitute the West in forms of entrepreneurial-designed monarchies (because in his mind hierarchical businesses are more effective at solving problems than democracies), we can’t deny that the siloedness of a pre-democratic aristocratic political class—unfazed by the opinionated drunk folks screaming at the taverns (which basically was the antiquated version of Facebook and X)—protected policymakers from the whimsical and foolish ideas of drunks, ruffians, and idiots. Sure, there were issues of accountability and nepotism and inbreeding. And other stuff. But, thrown into a multitude of crises as we are, if you had to choose a course of action for the next 50 years—and between democracies led by figures like Trump, Biden, Starmer, Trudeau, or Merz, or aristocratic ‘good’ or even great kings like Alfred the Great, Ashoka, Louis IX of France, Ramses II, or Edward III—well, I’ll let you ponder that question.
Just in terms of the climate crisis, if you observe the behaviour of our democraticly elected ruling class, you have to come to the conclusion that they either won´t do any serious about it (because of system-inherent limitations), or that they know that its already to late to do something.
Personally, I don’t respect anyone with an IQ over 110 who is engaging in political discourse on social media. It should, like spirituality, be a private matter. If someone is genuinely inclined to become a politician or engage in local policymaking, be my guest. Instead, self-efficacy should be the moral maxim of our age: find out what you can actually do, and do good, and then do it. Don’t talk too much; don’t debate. Don’t be shrill.
It’s no wonder that, in the whole integral/metamodern discourse, the question of ethics is mostly frowned upon, evadet and by-passed. At least the modernists had some ethics and morals, and so did the postmodernists. The intuition suggests that a post-postmodern, integral, metamodern ethic should be a strong one, given the crisis we are in, but nobody dares to delve deeply enough into metaphysics to actually develop a functional metamodern or integral ethic that is clearly distinguishable from everything that came before and that is able to adress the ecological-political-medial-economical-educational situation that we are in. Try it: make up an ethical framework and create some moral rules for the “time between worlds.” Present them on Facebook. See what reaction you get from the intelligentsia.
Instead, people will applaud the 27th book-iteration of the ‘evolutionary paradigm’. But what does that even mean in terms of ethics? Evolution, as I’ve said before, is a messy business. Does an ethic based on the evolutionary worldview mean a complete affirmation of the selfish gene, violence, and war? We should be careful with these stories, because we can’t cherry-pick these things. A philosophy only make sense if one can derive an ethic about it, and therefore some concret directives. It´s like the insight from science of science: If a theory has no application, it´s a useless theory, how asthetically and cognitively appealing it might be. So what are the Top-10 moral directives for our age?
Exactly because we have lost the ability to distinguish between imortant and important information, we can´t create a metaphysic from with we can infer an ethical framework and some morals. But this thing, this causal confusion between important information and ethics, is itself a gordic knot, and interdependent entaglement. Where do we start to untangle it? Create an ethics that helps to sift though the information-chaos, or arbitrarily define which information is more valueable than others - thereby apparently alienate hal the population -, and derive an ethics from that?
A democracy would let the populus decide. An aristocracy its king or senators. How would you solve it?
(Incidentally, writing this piece, a Newsletter from Cadell Last is coming in, about the resurrection of metaphysics. So at least he is doing something!)
Tom Amarque is writer, philosopher, podcast host, editor & publisher. His recent book is ‘Phenomenology of will’. He founded the German publishing house Phaenomen-Verlag in 2009 and Parallax-Media in 2019. Tom currently lives in Palma, Spain. Contact him a tomamarque@yahoo.de
This is helpful!