From When Fools Rule:
The people in charge are running around spouting crackpot conspiracy theories because they know little about the people they govern. They are easily fooled, because they are so ignorant. Why would they question the Russian conspiracy? Everyone they know thinks it is true. Those ants they see through their telescope, the people the rest of us call neighbors, sure seem to be doing what the Russian experts have claimed.
This is why they are so certain of these crackpot theories. They have barricaded themselves behind razor wire and armed men because they are absolutely sure the crackpot theories are true. Again, people are most certain of the things they least understand. The Cloud People know so little of the Dirt People, they will believe anything about them, because they have no way to know otherwise. It is why we find ourselves ruled by increasingly foreign fanatics spouting bizarre conspiracy theories.
With this as a suggested remedy: Only through generative culture can we recover from sterilized liberalism.
There are two groups of thinkers who claim the mantle of growth today, but neither fulfills the criteria of a generative worldview. The first is the corrupt and opportunistic neoliberalism that obsesses over statistical artifacts of growth but practices, in fact, the dominant culture of sterility and suicide. The now 14-year-old false economic recovery, in which GDP goes up while life continues to get worse for everyone outside a small number of megacities, illustrates the facile mindset of neoliberal claims to support growth and prosperity….
The second alternative which explicitly claims the title of vitalism is the growing fringe of neo-Nietzschean thought revolving around self-perfection and mastery. These groups do make the valid argument that they are advocating for things that are genuinely good and useful. Exercise, good diet, and self-education are not net negatives comparable to the consumerism, obesity, and materialism promoted by neoliberalism. However, many neo-Nietzscheans do not seem to understand is that the plethora of fertility imagery in Nietzsche’s work is not simply a stylistic flourish. Nietzsche recognized that a Will to Power which doesn’t generate offspring is mere masturbation.
His answer. Become parents.
It is the power of parenthood that focuses and forces the mind to approach the problem of reality rather than pursue various sterile intellectual playthings and vacuous political agendas. The challenge of begetting is the struggle to bring people entirely new into the world, and to strengthen them, in their vulnerable youth, for the harshness of life’s conditions. Until philosophers beget families or family men learn to philosophize, there will be no end to the nihilism at the heart of modern philosophy.
Self-interested nitwits who make a pile of dough is now the domain of politics. This is no solution and there may be no solution beyond an actual collapse. Sounds bad, and it will be bad. It shouldn’t take more than a century or so for things to fix themselves up.
Pingback: Why politics is filled with crackpots - The Rabbit Hole