BIG BROTHER: Surveillance Capitalism in Serial Experiments Lain
"While we struggled to settle the story to the conclusion,
the eighth episode was made to realize what the producer [Ueda] and I wanted to do from the beginning"
-Chiaki J Konaka, HK magazine interview (1999)
"(Ueda):There is no Japanese person who was not influenced by American Culture (in my generation).
(Yoshitoshi Abe): As you can see, the title itself is in English, 'Serial Experiments Lain'. Japanese culture itself has been influenced by American culture, so it felt natural to do so"
- Yasuyuki Ueda and Yoshitoshi abe, 2001 AnimeColony interaction
--------------------------------------------------
This essay is written in memory of Dave Graeber, who died during the 2020 pandemic.
Dave Graeber was not only a celebrated anthropologist and anarchist, but was also a true revolutionary, a true comrade, as well as a true friend to all of us fighting the good fight against the nefarious forces that try to silence those who speak up against it.
Rest in Peace Dave. You won't be forgotten.
--------------------------------------------------
Note: If you haven't read "Episode Titles", "Panpsychism" and "Culture War", it'll be a little difficult to follow this piece. So I highly recommend finishing those before you pick up this one, as it would make this one a much more enriching read.
Spoiler warning : Orwell's 1984, Berserk Manga, Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Final Fantasy VII, Neon Genesis Evangelion, One Piece.
--------------------------------------------------
"At the apex of the pyramid comes Big Brother. Big Brother is infallible and all-powerful. Every success, every achievement, every victory, every scientific discovery, all knowledge, all wisdom, all happiness, all virtue, are held to issue directly from his leadership and inspiration."
This is a quote from the final sections of "1984" by George Orwell, just before Winston is forced to not just obey Big Brother, but to love him.
The plot of the book revolves around a future scenario where an all powerful government is run by an organization called the "party", led by the cultist leader named "Big brother". The party makes sure that people stay in line through various mechanisms, such as totalitarianism, mass surveillance, "thought police", persecution etc. It's a very popular book, and was so widespread in American culture that Apple even made an ad inspired by it, posing IBM as 'Big Brother'. Nowadays, the CPC of China is framed as the "Big Brother" of contemporary times.
Konaka, however, doesn't seem to agree that it's China. He points at a very different culprit.
An omnipresent entity: Eiri as a metaphor
Take Note of Eiri's defining character features: Duct Taped bandages, A labcoat, a distinctively fairer appearance versus his tanned one in the real world, and the three colours Red, White and Blue
To cement SEL's politics of statehood, it must be made clear that this angle is not a coincidental speculation (as other parts of this blog can somewhat be), but very well the intent of the show from the very beginning.
Let's take apart Masami Eiri's rather eccentric yet deeply symbolic character design. We see Eiri wrapped in duct tape, presumably a way to hold himself together. But rather than this being simple duct tape, it is in fact an exaggeration of the Sarashi cliche in anime.
The Sarashi is a bandage that covered the torso of warriors in the age of the Samurai, and nowadays by the Yakuza.
In anime, you see this used as a symbol to denote someone who is a tough warrior spirit that is often willing to get into fights and shouldn't be taken lightly. One great example is Zoro from One piece
To a Western viewer his design comes across as cartoony and eccentric. But to a Japanese viewer, this signals a different kind of Cartoony: a hyper-exaggeration of the Sarashi cliche. In this manner, Eiri's first appearance shows someone who is so comically tough (with duct-tape as bandages being not only used to hold his body together but to also decoratively bind his long locks) that he is actually inferred to be invincible. It's strange to design a character this way, especially one who throughout the anime is barely seen to be doing anything or ever going out of his way to achieve his goals. The only time we see Eiri directly act is in episode 12, where transforms into the Cronenberg monster and attacks Lain.
Eiri's tape's pattern design is also not random, it's a deliberate choice (among others) to make him look like a clown. And not any clown, but specifically a Native American one.
Layer 13 vs Layer 9: Notice the significant whitening alongside the red stickers
A Pueblo clown vs Masami Eiri. Notice the horizontal striping and hair binding.
While in the obvious sense, Clowns do embody the trickster archtype that Eiri seems to represent, Clowns in Native American societies have additional functions:
"What we see in central California is in certain ways quite different. The most important spirit was known as Kuksu, or “Big Head,” the god who had revealed all the arts and sciences to humans long ago. Yet at least equal in importance were the clowns.
Clowns were a fixture of many Californian rituals....But if one picks carefully through accounts of the actual ceremonies, one surprising feature emerges that has largely escaped previous comment.
Clowns were also the only figures in those rituals, or, for that matter, in Californian life more generally, who had the power to issue direct orders to anyone else. Or at least, they were the only ones who could issue orders directly
backed up by threat of punishment—since clowns also had the power to levy fines or other penalties for misbehavior.
This might mean enforcing the various rules and regulations of the ceremony, though it might also mean whimsically making
them up, and sometimes “misbehavior” might mean just laughing at their jokes, since unlike in ordinary life, during rituals, laughing at a clown’s jokes was strictly forbidden. During Pomo Kuksu rituals, if anyone cracked up at the clown’s antics, the clown—who we are told also acted as “sergeant at arms” for the ritual—was allowed to (playfully) attack the culprit and then levy a fine"
-Dave Graeber, "On Kings", pg 382, 383
Eiri is then not just a charismatic Jungian trickster: He's also an enforcer of his ideals, although as we've seen throughout this analysis, not a direct one. He is, like Lain, an omnipresence in the Wired, a system that is effectively a planetary scale wiretapping device, the ultimate surveillance tool, and we see him use it to enforce his will through the shadows, using subordinates like the Knights, taking up the mantle of God, demanding worship. Masami Eiri, the Deus of the Wired, has his own name bear the truth of what he symbolizes:
"Masami Eiri", in Japanese, means "Beautiful government"
The blue tape is meant to signify the fact that he's a police force, a figure of authority, one who will make sure they follow the rules -or else. It's often noted that the original cowboys used to be Native Americans, who were also instrumental in policing their own elders, something that still happens today in Hawaii. There's a strong parallel here to how the LDP, Japan's most powerful political party and their longest reigning government, was created by the CIA. Thus, the American state is the original "Father" State (considering how the American constitution is the Defacto model that every democracy on the planet copied), and most other states are proxy "cops" meant to further American interests. The American State is the first "Deus", father and erstwhile King of all gods, gods who, in our world, are States.
" There is a class of people who, if they do not believe, must at least make a semblance of believing.....all will repeat in unison those words of Voltaire:
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." For, you understand, "the people must have a religion." That is the safety-valve.
God once installed, he was naturally proclaimed the cause, reason, arbiter and absolute disposer of all things: the world thenceforth was nothing, God was all; and man, his real creator, after having unknowingly extracted him from the void, bowed down before him, worshiped him, and avowed himself his creature and his slave.
Christianity is precisely the religion par excellence, because it exhibits and manifests, to the fullest extent, the very nature and essence of every religious system, which is the impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity for the benefit of divinity.
God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation.
But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds.
Slaves of God, men must also be slaves of Church and State, in so far as the State is consecrated by the Church."
-Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State"
Then, if Masami Eiri , the Deus of a planetary-scale information network, is therefore very explicitly a symbol of "Big Brother", made clear by his duct tape bindings of his hair and limbs representing the silencing of those who are deemed heretics of the state's ideology, then which state does he represent?
The answer is obvious by now, but if you're still confused, it's made clear by the three most prominent colors in his character design: Red, Blue, White. The colors of the American flag. And if you're still not convinced, look closely at the "To Be Continued" screencard.
If you look closely, particularly at the Red 'E', you'll notice whitish stripes that aren't present in the original 'Be inc' company logo
'Be' was a computer computer started by an Ex Apple executive. Apple, famous for writing 'designed in California', was at the epicentre of the computing revolution in the 1990's.
The inclusion of Apple is a very careful decision, especially considering how "Tachibana" ( a Japanese orange) is a stand-in for it.
The State and its smokescreens
Eiri constantly argues for the freedom of information, the "liberation" of information from human bodies. That is merely a platitude: He wants that information for his own ego.
This is not a throwaway line, especially when its accompanied by this dragon-like machine with the column of hearts to its left. (Also fun fact, those hearts were made by graphic designer Milton Glaser for the "I love NYC" campaign)
"In the mid-1990s, an American college student named Max Perelman was traveling through Sichuan, China, more than 1,500 miles from Beijing. While holed up in the southwestern province during the winter months, he encountered a group of Tibetan travelers heading to their capital, Lhasa.
The group embraced the young American, sharing food from their rucksacks, perhaps over a fire or in a hostel. The Tibetans had apparently never traveled far from their village before nor had they seen technology like Perelman’s camera. Yet at some point in the conversation, one of the Tibetans turned to Perelman and asked:
'How is Michael Jordan doing?'
----------
In 1946, [after the second world war ended], [American] President Harry Truman proclaimed to the U.N. General Assembly that “a concerted effort must be made to break down the barriers to a free flow of information among the nations of the world.”
A lot of the world agreed—who isn’t a fan of freedom?—at least in principle.
For the American delegates, the question belonged to the higher plane of moral principle. The delegation wanted to extend into the international sphere the classic liberal notion of press freedom, which would prohibit governments from censoring the news and enshrine the rights of journalists to access sources and to dispatch the news across borders.
But representatives of other states had more earthly concerns. The war had tilted the planet’s communications infrastructure to America’s advantage. In the late 1940s, for example, the U.S. consumed 63 percent of the world’s newsprint supply; to put it more starkly, the country consumed as much newsprint in a single day as India did over the course of a year.
Back in Geneva, delegates from the global south pointed out these immense inequalities. S.A. Brelvi of India called for the wealthier nations to equitably allocate the “supplies of physical facilities and technical equipment for the dissemination of information between all countries.”
But the American delegates refused the idea that global inequality itself was a barrier to the flow of information across borders. Besides, they argued, redistributive measures violated the sanctity of the press.
The U.S. was able to strong-arm its notion of press freedom—a hybrid combining the American Constitution’s First Amendment and a consumer right to receive information across borders—at the conference, but the U.N.’s efforts to define and ensure the freedom of information ended in a stalemate.
The failure to redistribute resources, the lack of multilateral investment in producing more balanced international flows of information, and the might of the American culture industry at the end of the war—all of this amounted to a guarantee of the American right to spread information and culture across the globe.
"
- How American Culture Ate the World by Dexter Fregie, TNR Magazine, March 2022 (lightly Paraphrased)
“Inverted totalitarianism, unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers.” - So writes the American Journalist Chris Hedges in his book "Empire of illusion", where he directly introduces the term in the first place. The term implies that unlike regular totalitarianism, where people are forced to obey, inverted totalitarianism makes sure that the oppressive aspects of the state are masked by a spectacle, a spectacle that is only made possible by the marriage of two entites that are on the surface diametrically opposed to one another: Corporations and the State. In America, these two powers, though they have their squabbles, are firmly in the cahoots together for global domination. But to understand that, we need to wind back the clock.
The year was 1945, and history was at a moment unforeseen by many of its greatest minds. The Allies had won against the Axis of Germany, Japan and Italy, but at great cost to many of the world's hundred year colonial empires, the biggest one being the British. The war's huge expenses are major reason why Europe fell into a massive debt crisis, and Britain, seeking help from the Americans like they did before with the Tizard misson, asked for a bailout. The USA relented, but not without a price. The USA was then instrumental post war for arguing for the dismantling of the colonial empires of old, such as France, the Dutch, Britain, Portugal etc etc. America could afford to do this because, post ww2, they were the only industrial country with some stability left standing, and based on this reputation, most of the world's gold reserves flew into their coffers. This decision to dismantle the former colonial empire of their former colonizer, made them the unquestioned leader post the second world war, and the richest country in the world.
Germany was a peculiar aggressor for the war, borrowing inspiration for many of its race politics, propaganda techniques and inhumane genocidal exterminations from the eventual winner of the War, the United States, who after the War ended decided to distance themselves from people they considered ideological allies by painting it as a grand war between good (themselves) and evil (the axis).
Karl Marx, a journalist for the New York Tribune 80 years prior, for example thought that Germany, facing the brutal economic conditions of the poor oppressed working class post the first world war, would take up the ideology of socialism or risk societal collapse. Instead, they took up they route of Nazism, a completely new ideology that sprang up under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, and the socialist revolution was instead taken up by Lenin in Russia and soon Chairman Mao in China.
The KMT, erstwhile ruling party of China, was then driven out by Mao and his forces, and this development plus that of China's bloody cultural revolution, the spread of communism's specter, forced America , the Dragon of the Atlantic, to make a huge decision: to cage the tiger before it goes berserk. In order to do this, the United States setup a plan: The Korean war would make sure the communist presence in Korea would be quarantined, and the country split up into two, a North Korean DPRK and the South Korean US vassal state. The South Korean state would , along with Japan, be a part of America's cultural flux being directly injected into the heartbeat of an alien land.
Japan was a little different, being their literal former enemy. However, America needed to maintain their control over the pacific, another along the lines of their own little project in the Philippines. To do this , the American government occupied Japan, wrote its constitution, set up a huge Military presence that later became the very reason why we have Anime and Manga today, and then pumped it full of money in what became its historical reconstruction project. This led to a massive creative surge in the former imperial empire, one that lost its former rays like a bird stripped of its wings.
Like Lazarrato would put it in Signs and Machines, this would lead to both creative surplus but also hyper-alienation, both being intertwined in a cold war era world fixed in a fierce battle between the United States representing the power of capitalism and the Soviet Union gunning for communism. Japan was convinced by the American position, and decided to, using ingenuity and hard work, create an industrial base as good as America's. They quickly succeeded, with the electronics industry having players like Sony, Atari, Toshiba and Sun directly competing with many American ones.
America wasn't happy with Japan taking more out of the pie than they supposedly deserved, and after the 1985 Plaza accords which already devalued the Yen to very low amounts, the US government imposed 100% tariffs on the Japanese electronics industry, causing the eventual Hessai period.
How could such an explicit, mean spirited bully retain such a powerful presence in the cultural hemisphere? The answer, said Herbert Marcuse, lay in America's mastery of the tool of Eros. You see, if there's one thing that the Americans learnt from the British, it's that holding down a global empire by force, is just too damn expensive, even for America. What if instead we could make people consent to governance? It was the birthplace of the field of advertising and marketing after all. So began a decades long intertwining of Corporate media and State Surveillance.
It's not enough to control information to became a "state" though, as Dave Graeber and David Wengrow would put it in "The Dawn of Everything". A State requires 3 things to become a state:
1) Control over information
2) Monopoly over the threat of violence
3) Personal Charisma.
It's this last point that has become the foundation stone of American Hegemony.
"Marcuse’s point is that advanced capitalism’s immense productive power and, already in 1964, media wizardry created a superficially richer yet strictly contained sense of possibility within the system. This is joined by and predicated on a profound mood of resignation about alternatives and a decreasing ability to think critically about the dominant way of life.
The totalitarian direction of the one-dimensional society is wholly compatible with civil rights, a free press, and free elections. In place of exploitation, Marcuse speaks of “domination” and “repression.” He rarely focuses solely on the capitalist class in his discussions, preferring to speak of the “interest in domination.” He conveys the sense of a smooth, comfortable oppression that has managed to exorcize or repress its contradictions.
Is the notion of totalitarianism an exaggeration? To be sure, Marcuse is hurling back at the “Free World” its own epithet for the Soviet enemy. But there is more here than an especially pointed barb. In describing capitalist societies as totalitarian, Marcuse has in mind “the total mobilization of all media for the defense of the established reality.” By this he means that the Cold War global political and military situation brought corporations and unions together to serve “national security,” enlisted all cultural institutions from Hollywood to the universities, marked the boundaries of tolerable and unsafe discourse, and generated spontaneous as well as organized policing mechanisms. During a period of seemingly endless prosperity, stabilized in the West by its welfare-warfare states, the people of the advanced and advancing industrial world were manipulated into going along with the threat of nuclear destruction and became unable to think in terms of alternatives.
Yet according to Marcuse there is a deeper source of the society without opposition. Such a society is an outgrowth, more fundamentally, of “technology as a form of social control and domination.” By technology, he has in mind Adorno and Horkheimer’s definition in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944): the instrumentalization of nature and of humans. This refers both to human oppression of other humans and to the project of overcoming scarcity by dominating nature. Certainly technical progress entails meeting the basic material needs of the vast majority, but it also entails something more: creating the false needs that sustain consumer society.
The manufacture of false needs predefines the universe of thought and experience; technology thereby becomes totalitarian. “Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nation, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.”
Marcuse stresses that the totalitarian world is dedicated to “the progress of self-perpetuating productivity on the basis of oppression,” endlessly expanding the consumer economy that “delivers the goods.” In serving this project “the established universe of ordinary language tends to coagulate into a totally manipulated and indoctrinated universe” in which the pleasures of consumption absorb political opposition. An alternative logic is possible, but it can emerge “only in the struggle against the established society.”
- 'Marcuse Today', Boston Review.
In short, by creating doofuses who consume like animals, salivating at the prospect of "hurr durr 2 consume!!11!" , the American Government make sure that its population stays complacent and is actvively stripped of any form of thought that is remotely revolutionary in its potential. This along with the establishment's encouragement of a deeply anti-intellectual culture that outcasts nerds made sure that those who can pose a significant threat to the machinations of the system are effectively silenced, without the support necessary to dismantle the American state, not just in America but the world over.
But American capitalism in the 21st century is not just satisfied with people constantly purchasing commodities. No, in the 21st century, American State surveillance and Corporate capitalism have both fused into one incomprehensible lovecraftian nightmare, the surveillance capitalist state, where both forces play off and feed into one another.
"Orwell did more than simply fictionalize and extrapolate the totalitarian project...his genius was to craft a story that embodies totalitarianism's essence: the ruthless possession of each individual human being, not as a distant known only from its behavior, but rather from the inside out. Big brother's vigilance is not restricted to the grand continents of armies and statecraft or the observable flows of bodies and crowds. Big brother is a panvasive consciousness that infects and possesses each individual soul, displacing all attachments once formed in romantic and good fellowship.
The essence of its operations is not simply that it knows every thought and feeling , but rather the ruthless tenacity with which it aims to annihilate and replace inward experience.
-------
Big Other does not care what we think, feel or do, as long as its million , billion, trillions of sensate, actuating computational eyes and ears can observe, render, dataify and instrumentalize the vast reserves of behavioral surplus that can be generated in its galactic uproar of connection and communication
Forget the cliche that if its free, you're the product. If its free, you are the carcass. The product derives from the surplus ripped out of your life."
-Shoshana Zuboff , "The age of Surveillance Capitalism".
We then see that the State in the 21st century , fusing corporate and government surveillance power, has now moved on from the previous notion of Foucault's definition of Disciplinary power to one determined by what he calls "Biopower", where entire populations of people are regulated as a "species". This lines up with the shift that Gilles Deleuze called a "Control Society", one where human beings believe that they are making their own free choices, but due to powerful feedback effects of AI and cybernetic processes, are increased locked into a singular predetermined paths that have been decided for them by the State. The best example of this is Instagram, where home feeds are regulated by algorithms that build a profile of your interests and activities and use it against you, either via advertising or by selling your information to the government.
Zuboff very cleverly expands on this in her book "Surveillance capitalism", whereby the transition from "Big Brother" to "Big Other" is marked by a similar change from forcible repressive state force to the ownership of behavioural modification, and the prediction of future outcomes playing a major role in the deployment of said power.
Machine learning, as Zuboff says in the book, is rendered here as a collective hivemind, in which each element learns and operates in concert with every other element, a model of collective action in which all the machines in a networked system move seamlessly towards confluence. The Machine hivemind is then the means by which there's an elimination of those chaotic elements that interfere with the final outcome desirable to the State. This is not mere speculation by the way.
It seems that Infomania, the search engine, is administered by the "Tachibana Media lab", a direct reference to the famed "MIT media lab". Joi Ito, former media lab director, on Quora has mentioned that a lot of MIT media lab graduates have gone on to work at Apple computer.
What is clear here is that Tachibana is in cahoots with the total monopolization of data on the net, similar to the likes of Google today.
In his amazing video "Why do you always kill Gods in Japanese JRPG's?", the youtube 'Moon Channel', outlines a fascinating deconstruction of the Japanese corporate conglomerate phenomena known as Keiretsu, whose power peaked in the bubble period before it all toppled down in the chaos of the Hessai. These massive structures were corporate "networked bodies" of power ( much like the MJ-12 , Knights and Tachibana web we see in SEL) that promised a beautiful hopeful future to a post-war Japan scarred by WW2 and overtaken by the new religious cult of Capitalism. At the center of every Keiretsu is usually a financial institution, often a giant bank that controlled the economy. At their height, the Keiretsu owned 20% of Japan's wealth in the mid 1990's making them all powerful defacto deities.
The struggle of most JRPG games, then, is of the protagonist's fight against an all powerful, unrelenting, ever thirsty God of destruction that eats human souls, their musubi, for sustenance. This looming shadow of Bubble period and the Hessai, however, isn't exclusive to JRPG 's.
Huge shoutout to Moon Channel for his video on this! Shin-Ra Electric Power is the defacto God of Final Fantasy 7, a mega-corporation that claims to be doing good via building a hopeful future, all the while suppressing the masses under its brutal dictatorship. "Shin-ra", meaning "God-Web", is a literal Keirestu reference, owing to the way these conglomerates caught and sucked out the living life force, the musubi of the living world.
Shin-ra as characters can also mean "Rakshasa", the word for devil in hinduism/buddhism. Thus, Shin-ra means "Devils posing as gods"
In the dark fantasy manga "Berserk" by Kentaro Miura, we see the "Idea of evil", a construct that dwells in the collective unconscious of humanity and came about as a manifestation of collective human desire to understand the reason why the suffer despite innocence. This Idea of Evil is sustained through the inflow and outflow of dead human souls.
In the story, the Idea of Evil has two enforcing parties: The Godhand and the Apostles. The latter are monsters who act as military enforcers of the idea's will in the physical world, creating brutal conditions of suffering. The former use these conditions of suffering to run a literal propaganda campaign from the shadows of the world, whereby they prop up "Griffith", the main antagonist, as a Christlike savior of Mankind via literally implanting these subliminal suggestions into their conscious mind.
In "Fullmetal Alchemist 2003", alchemy works on the principle of equivalent exchange, that one can only gain if there's equal value sacrificed.
But the 2003 anime differs significantly from the manga, and it's revealed by the end that equivalent exchange is a lie. Instead of the gate being this entity that acts in a fair understandable way, it's actually a lovecraftian entity that operates by its own mysterious logic, including being powered by dead human souls from the other side.
FMA 2003 is hated for its ending, because this ending, marked by the shadow of the Hessai, is reflective of a collective Japanese experience which significantly conflicts with the protestant ethic upon which American capitalism is based: That you can work as hard as you want towards a desired future, but it doesn't guarantee that you will receive the rewards of your labour.
The Evil cabal in the 2003 anime , then, are the Homunculi , who operate a military industrial complex from the shadows, creating the conditions necessary to birth philosopher's stones, the ultimate form of omnipotent currency to the States in FMA 2003.
SEL in Layer1 has a reference to "Think Blue, Count 2", a story by Science fiction writer Cordwainer Smith, set in his "Instrumentality of Mankind universe', a fantasy where a post-nuclear holocaust interplanetary authoritarian government called "The instrumentality" assumes responsibility for the future development of the human race, and acts as a galaxy size Police state.
We see another obvious reference to this series in Neon Genesis Evangelion's Human Instrumentality project, but the implications of that story are made clear: SEELE, a secret organization controlling the world, wanted to use the collective labour of humanity to force an event where, unlike their empty promise of a posthuman evolution, was actually meant to make sure that SEELE would live forever in the ark of EVA unit 01, so as to bypass any responsibility for bringing the climate disaster of covered-up Second Impact upon the world.
The point of this reference is to communicate a very direct message: The Japanese people in the time of the economic miracle were pressured to work hard to repair Japan and catapult it into a starry, almost cosmic future, and this desire for such a future was molded, its collectivism hijacked by the all powerful Keiratsu to achieve their own goals of omnipotence. Thus, a lost future of what could have been, now uncertain, looms.
The Hessai period casts a uniform shadow over most, if not all the anime made in decades that came after. In One Piece, the world is controlled by a federation called the World Government. While the WG puts on a face of equality, fairness and justice that it seeks to deliver via its military branch called the Marines, in reality it's a brutal sadistic organization that enforces its will through a dark underworld of violence. In addition, while the face of rule seems to be a decentralized democratic leadership split between all the nations, the true ruler is a singular totalitarian despot that runs things behind the shadows (and has been doing so since the very beginning)
"Christians are rare in this world; therefore the world needs a strict, hard, temporal government that will compel and constrain the wicked not to rob and to return what they borrow, even though a christian ought not to demand it.....This is necessary in order that the world not become a desert, peace may not perish and trade and society is not utterly destroyed; all of which could happen if we were to rule the world according to the gospel andnot drive and compel the wicked , by laws and use of force, to do what is right...
Let no one think that the world can be ruled without blood; the sword of the Ruler must be red and bloody; for the world will and must be evil and the sword is God's rod and vengeance upon it" -Martin Luther, the founder of Protestant Christianity, excerpt from "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Dave Graeber.
This line is interesting, because its specifically America, a country founded by Protestant exiles and marked by what Weber called the "Protestant Ethic", that birthed the spirit of capitalism itself, despite all the constituents of capitalism like paper money and reserve currencies being first made outside the West. Capitalism isn't just the hoarding of money, its the ability to create money out of money, a feature that wasn't present in Ming Dynasty China where governments tightly regulated credit, nor in Islamic finance, where interest was largely forbidden. According to Graber, Capitalism is not defined by markets, but instead Capitalism is defined by the power of the capitalist class to demand interest upon money loaned and by the State to enforce the collection of debt. Thus, there's no capitalism without a marriage of corporate and state power.
Since Capitalism is a system that runs on the motor of death, it's obvious that Capitalism is the ultimate egregore, a creature that forms from the collective presence of human beings. Not only is it a regular egregore, it's also one that gains its power from Necromancy: the magic one obtains from the power of the dead. Marx has always compared Capitalism to a God -like demon, and the capitalist is like a possessed "sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” (Communist manifesto). This is an uncomfortable thought, because as humans we are so used to the idea that humans possess free will that the thought of someone being an evil person out of his own free choice is more preferable to a darker more likely alternative: That capitalism is a planetary scale demon that possesses human beings to fulfill its own ends.
The system called Capitalism thus possesses the individual person much like how a Cordyceps Fungi possesses an ant: The Ant does the fungi's bidding unbeknownst to itself, until it has served its purpose, whereupon it simply dies and the fungi decides to latch on to its next victim.
It's always been fascinating to me that Marxism calls itself a science but also draws upon so many magical and shamanic metaphors.
"So what is Slavery? I've begun to suggest an answer in the last chapter. Slavery is the ultimate form of being ripped away from one's context, and thus from all social relationships that make oneself a human being. Another way to put it is that the slave is, in a very real sense, dead" -pg 168, "Debt: The last 5000 years" by Dave Graeber
In another very real sense, most of the world is America's slave, because while other Countries need to improve their markets or produce innovative products to make their own currencies (Their debt bonds) more attractive, America only needs to do one thing: print more money. Thus, America's biggest exports are threefold: Military interference, Cultural propaganda and hyperinflation (which is large contributor to many reasons of what led to the collapse of countries in the global south like Sri Lanka)
I don't know man, something about this video is so fucking weird and cult-like.
I just find it disturbing that Disney and the US government had to churn out something like this post 9/11.
Often, Corporate products are state propaganda. The first major Marvel Cinematic universe movie, Iron Man , was literally funded and edited by the Pentagon, in exchange for using so much real American military equipment. In doing so, the corporation benefits from record breaking profits, and the State benefits through its ever tightening charismatic deathgrip on the world's cultural exchange.
Red and Blue with Eyes all over
"The US Military, unlike any other, maintains a doctrine of global power projection; that it should have the ability , roughly through the 800 overseas bases , to intervene with deadly force absolutely anywhere on the planet.. In a way though, land forces are secondary; At least since WW2, the key to US military doctrine has always been its reliance on Air power"
-pg 365, "Debt: the first 5000 years" by Dave Graeber.
SEL has a very extensive palette, so it;s very easy to get lost in the very rich selection of colours it displays throughout all 13 episodes. But three colours stand out: Red, White and Blue. These are the colours of the French flag, representing the traits of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
But in SEL, these mean different things.
Bright Rose Red is often used to depict Eros, or intense desire, which may be represented as consumerist desire, sexual objectification, or the desire for control
Konaka's visceral hatred for America is so funny at times with way he just depicts Japan as possessed by the ghost of Black Friday. This is very obviously American Fast food depicted in L5 here (same episode we get introduced to cult group of the Knights), which is what young middle schoolers are eating instead of Japanese lunch
First rule of cinema: Everything is placed there on purpose by the screenplay writer, so there's ZERO reason to depict Taro wearing a french beret hat, a red soft drink that's obviously parodying coke, and Taro himself wearing the french flag as a t-shirt.
A better view of his T-shirt. We also a similar application with jacket on the man to the right: A red Nike jacket. This just goes to show how volatile this guy must have been, it;s almost hilarious that he chooses to deliberately introduce this stuff for kicks
A Japanese girl eats Croissants , Milk and Sunnyside up for Breakfast. This seems normal and innocent until you consider the fact that the majority of Asian people are lactose intolerant. The implication here is that the subjects of the American empire will go so far as to even poison themselves if it means they'll fit in with the cool kids.
If it's true that this is Lain and God, the funny joke made here is that even the spirit world isn't safe from the propaganda of American Soft power. What's really crazy is that Proust (who is the origin of the Madeleine reference) has very candidly confessed that American literature is what has held the strongest influence over his writing.
Blue and a bloody red represent something else: The passive disciplinary state which observes until the subject steps out of line or doesn't do something that aligns with its motives, in which case the colour turns blood red, symbolizing the violence that the state inflicts on them.
White, as a colour, is representative of Justice, which is often why Lain of the Wired is often draped in white. The desire to be "objective justice" is a very defining part of American culture, which is why Eiri is draped in a white labcoat. Unfortunately, this is only when those morals are in alignment with America's ideas.
Blue is often a Stand-in for the Governmental surveillance power, especially when its bathing the entire scene. We see the Sky draped in blue as the background, and the electric pole as the wires in the forefront. Blue is the representative of the State's involvement, in this case Eiri.
In the Tachibana headquarters, we see the entire lab bathed in blue, as Lain of the Wired herself emerges. Notice how the MIB on the left is wearing a blue shirt.
Check it out: Blue eyes. But this is also a funny joke, because the MIB, who are themselves spies and secret enforcers, come to realize that Lain is the ultimate Surveillance weapon who is far beyond their understanding. That's why he loves her, in the same way a Tech schmo loves the Macbook. The Deep State's erotic love for Kids and Surveillance in one neat package.
Blue as a colour on the Wired is a very different meaning, representing Tachibana's invisible passive surveillance that is often used to make sure the subject stays in line with the directives of the powers in the shadows. Eyes are often represented as the power of "Synthetic vision" as Paul Virilio would put it in his book "The Vision Machine", referring to the cold calculating gaze of AI enabled cybernetic systems
When a blood red is used however, it's often a sign that the Knights are using Violent force to enforce the Will of the State (Eiri). This is a different kind of surveillance, the one used to force outcomes via violent tactics.
The Accela kid's Red gun laser and the ambient light is a visual language communicating that two sides are working in conjunction: Tachibana and the Knights. This confluence is also representative of the intersection that lies between the two: Masami Eiri.
The esoteric intro lines
So now we get to one of the most ignored and albeit long time unanswered questions: What's up with the cryptic intro at the start of every episode? You know, the one that's played when the traffic scene pops up?
In this way, SEL is written like a Hermetic parable or Alchemic cypher: The normal person gets a cool story that they can use for any purpose , such as aesthetic, vibe, thought piece etc. To the initiate, however, a profound truth is then revealed.
Which is why the intro lines only make sense in the context of Surveillance capitalism. Layers 10, 11 and 13 don't have intro lines, so we aren't going to cover them
Layer 1 WEIRD script:
Voice: Why don't you come here?
Voice: It would be better to come here.
As you can see, this is pretty easy. The voice is calling out to those who feel alone, exiled by society, isolated with nowhere to go. Since this is the episode that opens with Chisa's suicide (a literal escape from a society from which she is alienated), it's clear that the Wired offers an escape, and fulfills that innate desire to escape.
The desire to escape is a very important phrasing, because it's really not just something that applies to the Wired, but the very nature of consumerism itself. Notice how the next episode directly transitions to Accela, a literal machine drug that bops you out of sync with time itself. Drugs are often a means of escape for those on society's edge, already heavily alienated and in deep need of release. What consumption and consumerism offers is a True world that a subject living in a disconnected society can escape to.
To illustrate this better, let's look at the famous "Rat Park" experiment by psychologist Bruce Alexander. When rats were placed in a cage all alone with no other rats, and were then offered two bottles of liquid , one being plain water and the other the drug morphine, the rats always chose the morphine. But when they were put in "rat park", a super ideal environment where they were free to socialize, play and run around, the rats rarely, if ever, touched the Morphine. And if they did, they never overdosed like when they were in the former cage. Does this provide insight into America's Opioid crisis?
Layer 2 GIRLS script:
Voice: What are you scared of?
Voice: You'd better just try.
This intro and Layer 1's intro combine to provide an interesting narrative. What we see here is what happens when one doesn't tag along with herd mentality. On one hands, this is very obvious when we look at the power that peer pressure has on young people, forcing them to pick up habits they know are bad for them. But it's also a mirror of Layer 1's condition of asking people to tag along, because if you don't tag along, you're "weird" and will be left out. We see this very obviously happen in Layer 2 when Lain is the only one who doesn't wear adult clothes
All four wear rose red, a deep desire to fit into social norms
and hang out with the cool adults
This also ties into America's soft power, as well as the pace of keeping up with trends in technology consumerism: If you don't tag along, you're going to be left behind, as well as left outside of the conversation.
This ties into capitalism very well. Rich people can afford to buy the latest equipment and be part of the latest developments in technology, thus increase their actual abilities/powers as human beings. People who are poor and can't afford technology are then locked out of the game and forced to remain on the outskirts of global conversation, a forum that is controlled by the pace of American culture. Remember that americans have some weird caste system when it comes to android message bubbles vs iphone message bubbles.
It may destroy you, it may be bad for you, but you still have to participate, or you risk being outcast.
Layer 3 PSYCHE script:
Voice: I've believe you've heard of Lain
Voice: Lain of the Wired
This is an implication that Lain's identity and PR has already been built up for her without her notice by the Knights and Eiri, a form of "Rumor". Eiri uses rumours to do one thins: control an image. He props himself as a self styled Deus, Lain as a "scattered god" (and later a peeping tom), and the Knights as connected to the "Knights Templar".
Rumours are a very powerful way to get controlled reactions that can play in your favour, even if it's not conducive to your image. Apple often uses rumours to generate hype about their latest products, creating almost mythical tales such as longstanding apple car joke. They also use these rumours to sniff out snitches in the company who sell data to journalists.
Ralph McGehee, a former CIA officer, stated that the CIA often placed news stories anonymously in news publications to spread false ideas favorable to CIA goals. Stories that CIA planted might be picked up and further spread by additional newspapers and other third parties, in a slightly altered form, or even picked up as news and then rewritten by a journalist.
Layer 4 RELIGION script:
Voice: I don't need parents
Voice: Everyone is alone
Voice: And connected to nobody
Parent-child relationship is a stand in for state-subject relationship. The isolated individual stands the most vulnerable to the preying of propaganda and disinformation, while also being the most vulnerable to the violence of the state and its enforcing of discipline. When someone is not connected to anybody else, they are, as claimed by various religions, still said to be connected to God, who as we have seen is the literal symbol for the State.
This layer is also interesting, because its when we see the game "phantoma". A phantom is a ghost (like how Lain appears to the guy hijacked by the phantoma game), but this can also be a reference to "The phantom", an American superhero who was called the "ghost who walks", and was the first superhero ever to feature in newspapers. Lain is a crime fighter, but so is the invisible state, just like God who punishes people through mysterious invisible (in the State's case, unseen due to its shadowy nature) justice.
Layer 10 has a very interesting sequence of events unfold , even if it is in tradition of Konaka's super dark humour. The reason why the kid is disconnected from the death of his mother just a few feet away, is because he already playing with his father, the American Empire's propaganda.
In a sense, because of parents being forced to work in order to maintain their existence, children grow up very disconnected and alienated from their families (notice the absent father trope in anime? It's because its a relatable experience, one that points to the father being somewhere in a cubicle working a 9 hours a day 6 days a week type gig).
Since the children are disconnected from their parents, they are raised by their media that they consume: videogames, movies, the internet, all of them being extensions of the american cultural empire. Kids are then divorced from their mother cultures as well, and are then happily raised by "Big Brother".
Layer 5 DISTORTION script:
Voice: If you can hear it, it is speaking to you
Voice: If you can see it, it's your.....
The word here is "prophecy". Here, the mask makes the claim that event can only occur when a prophecy is made. But this is not a any prophecy, but what Searle called a "Declarative statement", which is a speech act that immediately changes the state of the world. "I now pronounce you husband and wife". It's also an insidious reference to the idea of "predictive programming".
This was first described and proposed by researcher Alan Watt who defines Predictive programming as:
“Predictive programming is a subtle form of psychological conditioning provided by the media to acquaint the public with planned societal changes to be implemented by our leaders. If and when these changes are put through, the public will already be familiarized with them and will accept them as natural progressions, thus lessening possible public resistance and commotion.”
It's not just subtle tho. The Catholic church often made sure that its' biblical prophecies surrounding the end of the world provided enough motive for their Knights as enforcers to make sure their ideologies can spread in the "name of justice". We see a similar parallel in how the Knights enforce their "prophecy", and thus by force connect history's dots. Rather than distorting perception, this is a distortion of how the event should have played out in reality.
Layer 6 KIDS script:
Voice: When everyone is connected, small voices will grow larger
Voice: When everyone is connected, even life will grow longer
This can go both ways. The obvious interpretation is that when people are connected on the internet, fringe voices that were overshadowed by the majority can soon get a chance to speak up. Kids get to express themselves on the internet, since they aren't allowed to be free at school.
But this is a classic switcheroo, and the true meaning of the statement comes when we invert it.
When people are alienated from one another, the consensus of the state mythology takes hold, and excluded minorities are silenced.
And when people are disconnected from each other, since the very meaning of being human as a social creature is taken away, it's as if they've not really lived at all.
This is probably a good reason why SEL makes use of references to Ainu and Navajo. Indigenous people have often , as Pierre Clastres argued in "Society against the state", been keenly aware of the idea of a State hierarchy, and in fact built guardrails to prevent its formation as a conscious choice, a binding seal to prevent the entry of the demon from the getgo. Far from being primitives, it's indigenous wisdom that made sure their societies don't lock into state formations, which they always knew as evil.
The Ainu have been historically oppressed by the Yamato ethnicity who comprise the majority of Japan's population, via their control over the imperial Japanese State.
Layer 7 SOCIETY script:
Voice: I will tell you
Voice: you're the only one who doesn't know what''s happening in this society
It's interesting that this is the episode where we see three isolated Knights members: A NEET stuck at home unemployed, a bored housewife forced into a certain gender role and a corporate psychopath who literally cannot connect with anyone. But it's not just that alienation and consumerism have taken a hold of society , it's that people themselves are being turned into commodities.
Knockoff Bateman checks out his teasing secretary. He can afford to do so, because he's a rich corporate employee
The Delivery man can't afford to do so with the housewife, which is why he has to work hard to "afford her".
"Andy Ihnatko" , the text on the Hobo's headset, is a tech reviewer who has been reviewing Apple products since the 1990's
The joke here is that this Konaka's mockery of a Techbro in the 1990's. He's spent all of his money on the latest Tachibana Shlop and is now walking on the streets like a crazed homeless man.
What's happening to society is that its replaced human sociality with the American credo of buy-buy-buy, even extending this principle to humans. Women, especially, have also been reduced to commodities which can be bought and sold.
In the Beauty Myth, Naomi wolf makes the argument that the Mass media was responsible for turning the homely housewife who never left her room into the modern sex symbol commodity myth. This was a deliberate attempt to, by inventing artificial beauty standards out of thin air, then maintain an adherence to them via consensus, thus in a feedback loop reinforcing the validity of the standard.
It's also why we ignore female accomplishments and have them erased out of history, especially the history of computing. The founder of the CCRU was Sadie Plant (who writes really good books and is probably has the best of the the CCRU trio in terms of pragmatism, alongside her peers Donna Haraway, Gayatri Spivak and Katherine Hayles,), the first computer programmer was Ada lovelace, and the first woman to discover a computer bug was "Grace hopper". Even the title "computer" was one that originally meant someone who does mental calculations as a job, and this job was mostly occupied by women, only to be automated by men. Interestingly, it's the more cybernetic deviations of feminist movement's longstanding occupation with the idea of biopower and biopolitics (where the body becomes a place to fight an alien system trying to invade it) that provide our best shot at exorcising the spirit of Capitalism from our souls, which is why Felix Guattari proclaimed that in order to engage in revolutionary deprogramming, you'll have to undergo the process of becoming-woman first.
Often, people complain that dating apps have somehow ruined dating and made it transactional, forgetting that from the very beginning dating could only possibly arise in a society where people are so disconnected from each other that they don't have enough friends whose bonds could be taken further, and thus had to resort to a very intentional mimicry of the free market system to find partners. Dating has always been one of the first places where the capitalist system has entered and altered the minds of people.
Layer 8 RUMOURS script:
Voice: Do you want to be hurt too?
Voice: Do you want your heart to be scraped by rasp?
Voice: If so, don't look away.
This is a very simple inversion of "If you don't want to be hurt, look away", which is a sign of deterrence by the State to those who chance upon the truth about its less-than-PR-friendly activities. However, it can also be about the State and its nationalism: If you want to make sure your cherished ideal image of Big brother is intact, look away from the truth.
Layer 9 PROTOCOL script:
Voice: If you want to avoid pain you should believe in God.
Voice: Whether you believe in him or not, God is always with you
If you want to avoid pain, you should follow believe in the rules, the protocol, that the state has set for you and have faith in them. Whether you believe it or not, the state is always watching you. This is more or less Foucault's Panopticon, where the very idea of being watched by a Sauronic Eye can force the subject to self-discipline without the need for coercive measure. In this manner, the State becomes internalized as a belief system, and when many people do this in conjunction, the State transcends its mere physical presence as an administrative system and becomes pure metaphysics i.e the philosophy by which we interpret and navigate this world. God, that is the State, is now literally a part of you.
It's funny how "The government is watching me!" is one of the go to delusions of schizophrenic diagnosis, despite this often very blandly being the case.
Layer 12 LANDSCAPE script:
Voice: I see , so that's how it is. I used to think this world was a very scary place, but now it's all so simple!
(older ) Voice: See , I told you so.
The State's cultural protocol is like how a parent teaches a child how to navigate this world. In America's case, its cultural dominance has made sure the landscape of the entire planet is just like itself, so that children can find their closest Mcdonald's on every single continent. As long as you consent to the beliefs the State wants you to hold, the world will be easy to navigate.
America often prioritizes youth culture for specifically this agenda of cultural imperialism: So that everybody's beliefs defaults to the American ideal.
The Empire, like the medieval Freemason's, then engages in an act of landscape hypercontrol through its instruments of power, modulating thought, pain, desire, Machine Learning and financial debt to its own ends. Debt especially, as Maurizzio Lazarrato would put it in "The making of Indebted Man", is the best 21'st century tool of power and control, foisted on the vulnerable as a means of chaining them to lifelong service as capitalism's footsoldier. In doing so, a branching landscape of history is forced to connect into one uni-linear line, and the future , paradise being baited as a carrot on a stick, is thus a wholly predictable outcome. The Megamachine is then rendered the ultimate Basilisk, because since people are rendered locked in its cold gaze like a ball and chain., everything moves exactly according to its plan.
SEL as an act of cultural resistance.
"One of the fundamental causes of disintegration in society is copying, which is the worship of authority.
---------
The Artist is always an Anarchist, a revolutionary, a creator of new worlds imperceptibily going on in reality.
--------
Commercial [cinema] not only isn't creative, it actually destroys the audience's ability to participate in the creative process... To ensure the widest possible acceptance of his message, the commercial entertainer must speak in a common language. He copies, he repeats, or imitates what is within the grasp of the common man."
- Expanded Cinema, Gene youngblood
"The mass media are therefore the arbiters of human
evolution since they orient the culture that orients
behavior that orients the pressure of natural selection .
However, the intrinsic organization of the centralized
mass media generates a fundamental corruption of
culture through a process which I shall characterize
as nonadaptive perceptual imperialism .....
Inventions and refinements in communications technology reverberate across all the arts and sciences in
which men and women are engaged.
They constitute the major force which determines how human beings think and learn to think.
The underlying structure of the public communication system determines the total political and cultural reality of the society it
organizes, and any significant change in that structure
portends profound social consequences.
The industrial order endures not by conspiracy
but simply by default, simply because there's no
popular demand for a specifically-defined alternative.
And there's no possibility of such a demand because
the mass media, due to their intrinsic organization,
must necessarily deprive us of continuous and
pervasive access to alternative models of possible realities ....
This, I submit,is the very essence of totalitarianism : the control of desire through the control of perception."
-"The Mass Media and the Future of Desire", Gene youngblood
So what's the point of SEL? If there's so much depth, why refuse to explain it? Why keep so much of it obscure, away from interpretation, without reveal? Simply because it's an act of art against the spectacle of commodity, especially in the culture of anime, where the main characters make sure to shout down their most powerful attack's wikipedia page before they pummel you with it.
Any work that goes against the service of the Major power is, as Felix Guattari would put it in his interview "Not so mad", a minor art, that is a art that subverts the symbols of the majority to create possibilities of political resistance for a minority.
"When Mr. Konaka scattered mysteries after he finished the setting and story line, Mr. Konaka kept those mysteries vague or unanswered. Mr. Konaka wanted it a mystery because he believed giving the answer was not the purpose, so there can be different answers or analysis. This is written in a manner where there is not meant to be A answer"
-Yoshitoshi Abe, 2001 Anime colony interview
Human beings have a problem, a problem called representational thinking. This is when we default to stereotypes, generalizations or caricatures in order to make living an easier process. In doing so however, thought itself becomes one dimensional, and therefore rigidly stagnant, a symptom of mental decay. When thought is one dimensional and representational, Christianity is only seen as this oppressive religious feudalism, Islam is associated with anti-west terrorism and Hinduism is associated with the brutal hierarchy of the caste system .
Such thought doesn't allow for the reality that things can exist in many forms at once, like snowflake patterns. Christianity could also take the shape of contemplative Gnosticism, Islam can take the shape of sublime Sufism, and Hinduism can take the shape of caste-less, gender equal Lingayatism. It's when we adhere to only a single, all encompassing representation of thought that things get bad, for that's the beginning of rapid mental decay. ( For an inversion of this, Buddhism can take the shape of insightful Japanese Zen or brutal serfdom of Tibetan buddhism)
So when we encounter something beyond the normative, the surreal and the unclassifiable, what do you think happens? The answer is that thought allows itself to become multidimensional. Differences of thought and variety could arise, which is more important than the dogma of representation and one-dimensionality.
SEL doesn't take the temptation of appealing to the west. It stands firm in its adherence to its Japanese roots. In this shot, it pays subtle homage to Tanizaki's essay "In praise of shadows" which is a must read on the essence of Japanese aesthetics. He, like Tanizaki, rejects the modernity of artificial western light, and uses shadows and drone hmming noises to fully articulate these cultural roots: A minor art
But the path of resistance doesn't stop there, because the show offers a way to counteract the evil of Eiri, i.e the State.
Foucault, in many of the works, outlines two practices for resisting the "Regime of truth" of dominant social orders: One is the ancient greek practice of care of the self, of one's own body. In doing so, one can slowly, but surely, cultivate a self capable of critiquing the system. The second is the celebration of friendship as a way of life, as another practice to be cultivated. But this is one is such a powerful practice, it's no wonder that capitalism tries so desperately to make sure people are separate.
Ibn Khaldun, in his study of history, noted the concept of Assabiyah. Now Assabiyah is not just friendship, but the bond that exists strongest between nomadic tribes. And it's a very powerful force, because it has historically led to the destruction of even the most powerful of states: The huns against the Romans, the Mongols against the Chinese and the mysterious "sea peoples" who were single highhandedly responsible for the Bronze age collapse.
Not just any friendship, but the friendship of ostracized minorities is what Felix Guattari characterized with "the most potential for revolution". And this is true, when you conisder the fact that once upon a time Christianity was some nutty cult in some corner of the Roman Empire, to finally usurping and transforming the Empire itself, leading to its end. That's why hearts and minds, when they connect, are the best weapons we have against the many machinations of an inhuman state. It's through friendship that differences are overcome, and lines of flight are set free.
The return of Moloch and his Basilisk: A 2 year retrospective
I've timed the release of this final post with the results of the 2024 American election, an election whose outcome I feared many years ago, but knew deep down was inevitable, for a good reason. Two years ago, as a naive 21 year old, I included a Bhagavad Gita quote:
" From Anger comes delusion, from delusion comes loss of memory, from the loss of memory comes the destruction of the intellect.
And when these are destroyed, the individual perishes".
My intuition told back then that America is so caught up in a storm of hatred that it will eventually be the confirmation of my own bastardized interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari's 2 part project: That Capitalism, as a system, will inevitable cause mental instability mimicking the psychological conditions of Schizophrenia, and the internet was a large part of it.
Today, 2 years later, I get in my mailbox, from the esteemed Journalist Chris Hedges, an article titled 'The politics of Cultural Despair':
'In “The Decline of the West” , Oswald Spengler predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.
The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered.
The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity.
Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.
All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity.
They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence."
What's happening in America, a country started by Enlightenment influenced thinkers, right now is very easily explained by my other quote:
"All living entities are born into delusion, bewildered by qualities arising from the dualities of desire and hatred"
The connection between desire, capitalism and hatred are not immediately obvious, but aren't difficult to understand either. I didn't want to make such a statement because I was very unsure considering how Joe Biden won your election
The mimetic crisis, as explained by Rene Girard, is simple enough to explain, yet is a disaster that mankind has been dealing with since the dawn of time. It goes like this:
1. We live in an uneven imperfect world. Sometimes situations will arise where there is intense desire for a singular thing by multiple people.
2. In a capitalist economy, should resource competition be fierce enough for desire to converge on something out of the general reach of people, mimetic competition will appear, where people will copy winning strategies (because it's a cheatcode that saves you a lot of hard work)
3. This inevitably causes so much inbuilt frustration that the social group breaks out into a storm of violence, which society's leaders have learnt the hard way throughout eons (a great modern example being China's cultural revolution) is that once Violence is set off, the fires are extremely difficult to contain.
4. This has a larger and larger tendency to occur if society is alienated, feels lost and hopeless or has been a victim of hostile conditions (Erich Fromm has outlined this in significant detail in The Anatomy of Human destruction)
5. When this innate violent tendency is sufficiently high, the easiest way to redirect this tendency is through a "scapegoat", somehow who is a powerless victim that can't fight back. This not only quells the violent impulse for a short time, but also can mask the true perpetrator of society's scarcity of resources.
It's like the whole AI art war between techbros and artists, because AI art is in many ways peak capitalism.
False comparisons between humans and non humans? Check. Techbros say machines can learn and make art just like how CEO's argue that Corporations have a soul.
Profiting off the life force and labour of millions of people, alive and dead? Check. Techbros gain their artistic powers from the necromancy of millions of actual artists who put in the work, just like how CEO's reap the rewards of work they did not do.
Delusions of grandeur? You betcha.
The only problem is we worship one and despise the other, because capitalists make sure there are other people who take the hit of their own sins.
Deleuze and Guattari outline in the Anti-Oedipus is that the masses come to eventually desire fascism as a solution due to the crises in a capitalist economy, as seen in the fact that Germany post WW1 literally got its economic pair of balls ripped off in the Treaty of Versailles. The violent impulse didn't, according to Marx's prediction, move in the direction of revolting against the capitalists, but was instead redirected towards the Jews, causing a tragedy we all know so well.
We are seeing this tendency pan out in the current era of American politics, and even if it doesn't hit vulnerable minorities, it's very bad news.
The original enlightenment thinkers, those who gave us all the constructs of modernity, did so in a heroic fashion. Outcasts of their own time, their commitment to their ideals is what led to the end of Feudalism, a terrible evil and the prime sign of the dark ages.
But now Moloch's back, it's real, and it's riding the body of a still asleep Basilisk. Capitalism is slowly transitioning into Techno-feudalism (Watch Ashley's channel!), and as everyone should know, it's resource crunches (which in the future will be caused by climate change) that lead to conditions of actual feudal slavery to arise.
I hope to leave you with hope. Humans, despite having their life force sucked out, despite being slaves since before they could speak, despite being born into slavery and taught to be as robotic and machine-like as possible, are still capable of almost superhuman feats. The human spirit, despite what Moloch wants you to believe, is infinite, and it cannot be chained. There have been artists, scientists, technologists and more who were still able to break the system and remold it for a better future, despite their conditioning. This is proof that all is not lost.
I hate the American state, but the American people, to me, are one of the most bravest, compassionate and creative people I have ever had the pleasure knowing in all 23 years of my life, and to see you guys lose all optimism, the very thing you are known for, is very sad. Your enemy isn't each other, it's this evil machine that's trying to eat you alive for the sake of it. In pointing fingers at each other, your fellow Americans who need help as much as you do, you're only denying the true cause, an Evil entity who wants you to think he's working in your favour.
It's not just you, it's all of us, all over the world. Like Dave Graeber and David Wengrow write in closing sections of "The Dawn of Everything", we are approaching the Kairos of the Event: A concept similar to Teilhard Chardin's Omega Point, where even the unbelievable , the magical may be possible.
In the Hindu scripture the Rg Veda, Indra's story of his battle against Vrtra is recounted. The clouds were taken to be held hostage by the Dragon himself, who stood on top of the mountain masked in thick smoke, smoke that was emerging from the fire of his nostrils. As the world turned to darkness and drought from the Dragon's stockpile of the waters, all the gods and mortals cowered in fear, for this dragon was the firstborn of dragons, and was the sorcerer supreme. Indra, son of the Du, the sky, and Prthvi, the Earth, was the only one who would take a stand, but even he was shaken and could not find his courage.
But eventually, Indra had to, because he knew no one else would do it. So he chugged soma, a psychedelic drink, and gathered his friends Agni and Rudra, along with his brave footsoldiers, the Maruts. The Artisan Tvastr made him the ultimate weapon, a philosopher stone-like master thunderbolt: The Vajra.
Darkness grew over, and Indra fought a legendary battle, where he broke the dragon's jaw and threw it down the mountain, destroying all the fortresses it had built along the way. In doing so, Indra brought rain back to humanity, and life back to earth. He earned the title t of the King of magicians, and was heralded as the conqueror of all foes. Usa, the word for "Dawn" but also "truth" , was brought back to earth, as sunlight broke through the clouds, and humanity regained hope once more.
"Verily, there is still a future even for evil! and the warmest south is still undiscovered by humanity
How many things are now called the worst wickedness, which are only twelve feet broad and three months long!
Some day, however, will greater dragons come into this world.
For that the Superman may not lack his dragon, the Superdragon that is worthy of him, there must still much warm sun glow on moist virgin forests.
........
It is not enough that lightning no longer does harm. I do not wish to conduct it away. I shall learn to make it work- For me.
...........
The higher its type, always more seldom does a thing succeed. You higher people here, have you not all been failures?
Be cheerful, for what does it matter? How much is still possible!
Learn to laugh at yourselves as one ought to laugh!
What wonder that you have failed and only half succeeded, you half shattered ones. Does not humanity's future strive and struggle in you?
Humanity's furthest, profoundest, star- highest issues, their prodigious powers, do these not foam and swirl in your soul?
It's not a surprise that many vessels shatter. Learn to laugh at yourselves, for so much more is possible.
And verily, how much have you already succeeded! How rich is this Earth in small, good, perfect things. Set them around you, for their golden maturity heals the heart. The perfect, teaches one to still hope"
-Nietzsche, "Thus Spake Zarathustra"
The ChaosKampf myth is a universal human story as old as time itself: A cultural storm god must slay an evil serpent demigod hoarding up all of the resources necessary to their people, so that the Earth may see hope once more. Our Superdragon has made itself clear, apparating right in front us with no reason to hide any more. Will our Supermen rise to the occasion?