A New Years' Message from Roger Waters:
"My brothers and sisters all over the world are being slaughtered and sacrificed on the altar of the greed of all the Oligarchs in all the developed and under-developed countries all over the world. The Oligarchs are the enemy. They are the ones who order perpetual war, not for ideological reasons but for profit. None of them, during these days of celebration and reflection, will have any idea what I’m talking about. They are not like us, the Oligarchs who are destroying our world. The cancer of greed that seeks after wealth and power has reduced their capacity for empathy to zero. They have become sociopaths."
I put this here not because I am a fan of Roger Waters or Pink Floyd, or because I get my politics and philosophy from pop or rock music. I put it here simply because Roger Waters is right. Or is on the right lines. Because the problem is even worse than Waters' New Year message would have it. Behind the sociopaths is an entire social fabric of sociopathology, itself generating sociopaths indifferent to normal human emotions.
Resistance and building the capacities for resistance.
Against the comfortably numb.
This problem runs deep, very deep indeed, in the very social and psychic fabric of a world that proceeds “without regard for persons.”
'The “objective” discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and “without regard for persons.” “Without regard for persons” is also the watchword of the “market” and, in general, of all pursuits of naked economic interests.'
Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H.H. Gerth, C. Wright Mills, p. 215
New idols and surrogate gods, the very thing Nietzsche anticipated and feared – human beings as 'playthings of alien powers' (Marx), Weber's renascent gods as impersonal powers.
We live in a world in which even the powerful are mere personifications of economic categories and relations. The world is organized around the pursuit of exchange value in abstraction from the realm of use value, generating, entrenching and extending conditions that are sociopathological, psychic as well as institutional.
If we continue to fail to address, let alone resolve, the question of mediation, then we've had it. It's as simple and as brutal as that. For all of the effort and noise of our politics, we are just talking past the issues, and past each other, making appeals to a social identity that does not exist (an identity in which individual good and social good, short- and long-range, coincide). We lack commensurate values, hence the increasingly violent and angry nature of a politics that is prosecuted from the position of particular identities. Through the lack of common ground and common identity, we will be overwhelmed by circumstances. And that we includes the sociopaths as well as those subject to their rapine.
In 1904 Max Weber characterized the age as a "mechanized petrification embellished by a convulsive self-importance." You see, as individuals, we are free to do as we please, so "we" do, as individuals - and that failure to supply a voluntary self- and social constraint rationally and institutionally will result in an involuntary external constraint embracing each and all. And the grass won't pay no mind (a favourite song of mine, from a short list of a million).
I have a substantial work on this to come, entitled Morality and Modernity.
In 2018 I issued a couple of works pertinent to the theme abumbrated above:
Hey, Baby I just got back from town
Where the bribes are paid
Honey, they turned my offer down
They say the deal's already made
So now I gotta stand and watch
While it all comes down
And the buzzards and the hawks
And the judges and the mob
Circle round
Now if I were the queen of all the world
I would go in chains just to see you free
Of the ropes that bind you
And the role you play
And the pride that hooks you
While the big ones get away
Love junkies wanna change the world:
It quickly stays the same
Money junkies hire all the smart ones
Power junkies run the game
One step at a time
Polarity Hill
If the bad guys don't get you, baby
Then the good guys will
With angels on the take
And the gangsters in the yard
Hey don't the wars come easy
Hey don't the peace come hard
Now if I had a way to reach the sky
I'd grab that crescent moon
Wield it like a knife
Save you from the lies
From the ropes that bind you
And the role you play
And the game that hooks you
While the big ones get away
Songwriter: Buffy Sainte Marie
Nice song, but there real situation is so much worse than this. The 'power junkies' are mere personifications of social categories and relations that are themselves sociopathological - they run nothing, they are not in control: they are controlled by a system that proceeds without regard to either persons or planet. Fail to address that, and we can kiss goodbye to the future.