Flash Mob Generation

The youth street riots in England show us what happens when government flat out ignores the needs of young people for too long. When government no longer seems to work for the people, regardless of age or social class, the people become disillusioned with it, and angry with it, and angry with the society that embraces it. The behavior of the rioters is reprehensible and by no means do I wish to endorse it, as there is no doubt it has nothing to do with legitimate protest. There's been a lot of speculation about the cause though, and a lot of accusations against indirect cultural influences, but no inciting incident or clear motivation can be tagged. This is simply because the uprisings are instead the inevitable product of years and years of pent-up social frustration with a civil society that has continuously sidelined the millennial generation.

It comes with great shame to me, being a member of that generation, that they have resorted to this, but while I can't endorse their unbridled destructiveness, I can at least sympathize with the spark of frustration that caused it. I seem to remember a year or so prior to this unrest, the UK government unequivocally shouting down mass youth protests--legitimate, non-violent protests--against the government's insistence on shutting down student loans and increasing interest rates on them, all while tuition in the UK is set to double by next year, and all while youth unemployment is up to 20% in the UK.

The old guard in government, who rode through college in the age of state-paid, free tuition, effectively see nothing wrong with sending young people out into the world with debts reaching up to six figures--and while that is good news for the same "old guard" special interests (who never have to share any of the fiscal burden), it is bad news for young people who would have to make the sacrifice. So the young people fought, and the government refused to listen, and when the government no longer listens, the young people got frustrated.

And they have a right to be frustrated. They've been given no reason to think the government actually works for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, and it's because it hasn't worked for anyone other than the wealthy and the corporations, for decades. It hasn't because it has surrendered its duties to the wealthy and the corporations, who have done nothing but pocket the benefits for themselves. With average citizens being unable to affect change against massive special interests who pay their way into politician's pockets, they lose faith in the system, they lose faith in democracy, and they lose faith in civil society. Once that happens, they constitute for themselves a civil disorder--and it may very well be a psychological release of pent-up energies, a joy ride of smashing and looting--but it has its roots with the unresponsiveness of society.

What shames me about the riots is the indiscriminate path of their destructiveness, affecting small business owners and other private property in particular. These local merchants and residents did not deserve being so much as touched, as they had nothing to do with the government being unresponsive to the needs of young people. The young should have been using their social media to a call for non-violent resistance and organize walk-outs and sit down strikes. All they accomplished in pursuing violence was to throw their oppressive government into overdrive. Thousands of arrests have been made, and youth curfews have spread all over the world (Philadelphia for example). Instead of dismantling civil society, young people should stop it from being able to function. The government has to be starved by its disaffected until it realizes why it needs them.

If government no longer works for you, you ought to no longer work for it. It's called the social contract.

The Zeitgeist Cult

The Zeitgeist films and the Venus Project have captivated the children of the information age. They have played right into a demographic who has been reared on the internet and knows little else but. They have attempted to claim science without the benefit of hindsight, for every movement that has ever attempted to claim science has led to atrocity. They have toured too long in the foreign land of history without the benefit of a guidebook and have lost themselves to fitting together its disparate themes into neat and orderly conspiracies. They worship the guru they see in Jacques Fresco, rather than apply the principles of evidential argumentation to his bold-faced assertions. They have become drunk on their own propaganda of flying cars and futuristic city plans and have yet to sober up to the oppression inherent in the technocratic, totalitarian globalist, machine-driven superstructure they envision with utopian simplicity.

Given all this, every cult has its kernels of truth. The Zeitgeist films are best described as propaganda vehicles to assert a political agenda that is anti-free market, anti-democracy (as we know it), anti-human nature, and anti-freedom of religion. They fabricate the lore and mythology of human antiquity to fit their schema for the baselessness of religious ideas, and build upon those outright fabrications intricate truths about the state of the planet and humanity. We are lead to believe these various pathways and narratives are somehow related when they are not--the Egyptian god Horus was never considered to be a Christ figure, and even if he were, it would have nothing to do with how consumerism is destroying our global ecology. The shortest distance between two points is always a straight line, and that's the only line the filmmakers wish to present, because it's the only line they want their audience to know about. In Nietzsche's terms, these are but castles built on spider webs.

We are, once again, led against scientific rigor. There is a contempt for science which is all too predictable in movements that stress absolute certainty--perhaps it is because science stresses no such certainty, merely, beliefs based on evidence. It is not as if the claims being made are of the same degree of fabrication as was the case with their historical narratives, it's just that in their presentation of genetics and behavior, of environmental science, of sociology..etc., they present information as if they alone are the ones busting the lid off this information--as if none of what they say hasn't already been the main argument of researchers in the scientific realms for decades. They then use that presentation to make it seem like they alone are telling the truth while suggesting that all of science is make believe consumer-driven hocus-pocus.

When the scientific community is invoked, we see images of outdated 19th century dioramas with the implication that they are still accepted beliefs, and then when they bring up what 21st century science has uncovered, it is always in the context of their movement (once again, as if they are responsible for the progress science has made in the past 50 years). It is effective propaganda for the masses, but unconvincing for those who know how propaganda works. For instance, they would be hard pressed to find a developmental psychologist who disagrees with their supposed "claim" that nature vs. nurture is a simplistic view of development, but that doesn't stop them from touting it as if they've just stumbled onto this discovery for the first time, and that they'd be decried as heretics for even suggesting it. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is not to say that science is not corrupted, or that corporations are not corrupted, or that governments are not corrupted. They make these points and they are valid points, but what they desire to do is utterly destroy our current civilization and rebuild it along their own half-baked principles (vehemently opposing all perspectives and evidence that is contrary to their assumptions). Just as the Marxists, just as the Bolsheviks, they believe that only after society has been dismantled and reconstituted to match with their ideal, that we might finally see Utopia--that all the disparate people of the earth will somehow unite around their vision and we'll finally all be free from the grip of [whatever we distrust in the present]. These are fantasies, illusions, flights of incomprehensible naïveté  no matter how genuine they may be felt.

It is not freedom, or even the rights of human beings they are after though, for they treat human beings as secondary to their technological and environmental pursuits--and one can only imagine the atrocities that would be rendered if their contempt for human vice were brought to full-scale fruition. One has only look at the history of uncompromising extremism to see where this thinking leads ('extermination' always factors in). There is absolutely nothing new about any claim or statement made in the Zeitgeist films, they are simply dressed up to look as if they are presenting a new ideology. One could even argue that another term for the political ideology being espoused in these films is a technological National Socialism, only on a global scale rather than within a country, where the needs of the individual become secondary to the needs of the "world citizens." It seeks to subjugate human interest and channel those energies toward perpetuating the utopian vision, carried out by machine-driven enforcement. The individual comes second to the centralized global state. The undesirables (those who might disagree to living under this system and lash out at it) would naturally have to be eliminated.

It's a cult because it fails to subject itself to the same standards of critique it reserves for society. Instead of working to create solutions out of the system, it diverts attention towards formulating some grandioise vision for a utopia where no one is allowed to work, no one is allowed to practice faith, no one is allowed to be evil, or good, or even human. This is a sad distraction, but such seems to be the case with the information age--the age of distraction--which is why solutions are so tough to come by to begin with. Progress can only come from that which allows all things, and promises little. The Venus Project and its propaganda is a cult because it allows so little, and promises everything.

Coming of Age

"In the suburbs I learned to drive, and you told me we'd never survive." 

It is only a matter of time before all living things come of age, and it is no different for human civilization itself. Civilization is a living thing played out over the course of generations. Just as an organism is a collection of cells that duplicate, exist, and deteriorate over a course of the organism's lifetime, so too are individuals within civilization. It was only a matter of time then before the same uncertainty of directionless ambition befell civilization as it does to individual human beings, when they become conscious of the need for self preservation in the face of a seeming non-existent reason to be doing such. This is to say that in coming of age, our reason to continue on both as individuals and as a species comes from our own directive, rather than by the guiding intervention of higher authorities.

It is now up to us to go to the doctors when we are sick, go to the movies when we desire entertainment, or go to pray when we desire some direction, and we accepted this new found responsibility with unsteady enthusiasm, slowly learning how to possess it but never truly understanding fully how or why we must. Why must we grow, go to school, go to college, go to work, get married, buy a house, have children, raise children, grow old, and die--always in that order? Where is this cycle of our existence taking us, these technological advances, the growth of cities, the automobile, the spread of suburban sprawl, the instance of communication? Does any adult know where their life is headed? The only inevitability is death. Does the certainty of death mean we need to fill the brevity of life with something rather than nothing in order to make use of time? Is our civilization destined to die too?

The ages of mankind are testaments to the fact that civilizations rise and fall, that there are periods of life and periods of death, where even in death there is life in relative limbo. The only constant over the spans of centuries is change, a change of relative societal place from one time to another with the same human nature dictating our choices. There was no more certainty we were making the right choice all the time, as when it was dictated to us absolutely, so there spread only fear that we were constantly making the wrong one. The 20th century was so ruled by uncertainty that it inspired more visceral demagoguery than any other era. Any study of parenting advice in the media, for instance, would unearth a world where everyone had their own certainties in the absence of one universal one.

The internet has magnified this phenomenon. For evidence, all one needs to do is conduct a simple search for the words "your kids" or "your children," and you'll inevitably find many diverse things preceding those words: how to do X for your kids? how to keep X away from your kids, what does X mean for your kids?, and other abstractions, all reinforcing the notion that all things invariably pertain to your kids just because yours are the ones being addressed all the time, every day. Coming of age in a culture that has itself come of age means accepting enslavement to the will of the consensus. Where certainty creates ignorance, uncertainty produces anxiety. We live in the age of anxiety, and it's a crippling force on civilization.