Re: <nettime> Fw: Has the right gone full Alt

On Sun, Dec 6, 2020 at 5:24 PM Kurtz, Steven <sjkurtz@buffalo.edu> wrote:

Hey Brian, welcome to the wilderness my friend. I have been yelling about this for many years, but basically talking to myself. All the knowledge in the world about surveillance capitalism, postfordism, and neoliberalism doesn’t help much (a little with concepts of alienation and its other treks into psychology) when the question is best answered by the history of religion and comparative religion. My education was certainly deficient in these topics, although I have been trying to remedy this situation. Even while I witnessed the rise of the religious right at closing decades of the last century, I never thought it to be more than a political problem. Now it’s clear that the “political problem” is much more than that as we witness religious illiberalism taking over nations all over the globe, and unfortunately, the left doesn’t have the categories to understand this at the grass roots level, let alone act against it in any reasonable manner. We do well at understanding this phenomenon in terms of power constellations at the top of the hierarchy (our traditional comfort zone), but as to the rest of it the critique seems to consist of “Why are people acting crazy?”

I am the first to admit I have no systematic analysis of this “crazy,” but I do have a few scattered thoughts that I am trying to order. First, we have seen this crazy before, and have seen it for centuries. I believe what we are witnessing (particularly in the US) is a Gnostic revival. It’s just not in a form we are used to, or we wouldn’t see it as crazy at all, but just as another religious faith. The devoted are out fighting the demiurge—the experts, the deep state, scientists, and others rulers of the false real in an effort to get beyond the flawed knowledge of authority to that of deep esoteric knowledge derived from personal transcendental experience and shared in fellowship among those who know (those who have been red-pilled).

Many outlets for this way of being are readily available. It’s best if it’s able to survive virtually as social media platforms will help with expanding the fellowship over vast territories and with its separation from the forces of the demiurge. Gnostic groups do not require a messiah, although it’s fine if there is one. The cult of Trump is evidence of that. But they can also be decentralized groups such as in the yoga and wellness community* where an aristocracy of influencers lead the flock, or a distributed network like Qanon, which is fundamentally leaderless. All of these groups, and we must include the Evangelicals, LDS, and conservative Catholics, are concerned most with the elimination of ignorance even more than the elimination of sin. In fact, in this century sin has become much more tolerable than ignorance. (I should note that this list of groups is very intersectional and probably should also include the virtual social justice warriors cancelling people who don’t understand the difference between sexual orientation and sexual preference. Just not woke—the left’s equivalent of the red pill.) The reason knowledge is so important is that it can function as a virtual glue to build community and a way for many members to say I may not be educated like the members of the demiurge, but I am more intelligent and better informed, but most importantly, the goal is transformation—to be a part of a constellation that gives you the power to transcend the limits of a false given. Take the red pill and emerge anew. I don’t want to play down the former two reasons for becoming a part of the Gnostic front. They are significant. For Evangelicals and other conservative Christians the breaking of the spiritual consensus in the West in the 60s was traumatic, and the erosion of a national spiritual life has continued ever since. From their perspective, Gnostic revelation could bring back the consensus. The fact that yoga and wellness can commune with evangelicals through Qanon or anti-vax seems to be an indication of this possibility from a Gnostic point of view. For the greater Trump cult, being viewed as ignorant rubes by their educational superiors (now more than ever as Trump continues to loot and grift this class) has been a source of aggravation. Gnosticism proves their greater intelligence and their superior knowledge that in turn acts as a real power lift to their pride and well-being. The elite of the Republican Party understand this desire and are taking advantage of it. In part, this is why the Republican Party is becoming the working class party in the US.

We do need a new ecological aesthetic (CAE just did a book on that), and we do need a new political theology. I can’t help but think of the anti-vax motto—“You have data, but we have stories.” But none of that does any good if it is not accompanied by a massive intervention campaigns into the Gnostic networks of alternative reality. This is such a significant site in the lives of millions, and we ignore it at our own peril.

*I want to make clear that with the exceptions of Qanon and anti-vax I am not indicting every person who participates in these various groups—only a variable subsection is a part of the Gnostic front. Membership tends to happen in spiritually-oriented groups since they are most of the way there already.

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, December 4, 2020 8:29 PM
To: Max Herman; a moderated mailing list for net criticism
Subject: Re: <nettime> Fw: Has the right gone full Alt_?

The new aesthetic for the conservative base can be reasonably well-understood as a cooptation of the alt_ or insurgent aesthetic. It offers something like the liberating euphoria which progressives felt about 20 years ago. Conservatives can like, tweet, dox, spam, hack, and everything else which formerly were chiefly the playground of the other side. The surge of dopamine delivered by these aesthetic behaviors can be understood as a delayed version of the 1996 internet, specially branded and targeted at those who were not part of the earlier phase and resent both its participants and their value system.

This is totally true for the alt_right, and the survivors of those heavily dopamined days of the 90s should know it better than anyone else (unless they're still doped out on Intel, or just stuck wherever they landed). In my case I felt this turnaround with all the bitterness of the culturally displaced, starting four years ago.

You're right Max, this kind of thing always happens and one has to move on, that's the personal lesson.

However, the alt-right is only a hipster suburb of ultra-conservatism, and I think its aesthetics are a detail. Just as the big mistake of the dopamine binge was to think that everyone was about to join your wild high (precarious cognitarians as the leading edge of class consciousness!), so in our day, the alt-right is just another bunch of nerds with attitude. It looks big when you stumble into one of their chat rooms, or cafés if they actually have such things (maybe in the Milwaukee suburbs?). It's not really so big though, just as the counter-globalization movement wasn't.

I've moved on to different questions.

Here's one of them. It turns out that on closer examination, what has really metastasized over the past 20 years is the corporate capitalist grip on the sprawling, palpitating world of religious communitarianism. This is the cancer you can see in Mitch McConnel's eyes, this is what Amy Coney Barret embodies to extremes of smug pathology, and this is the only explanation for the kinds of insanities that have come out of Donald Trump's mouth over the last few days in particular. Only people who judge their daily lives by what some pastor tells them concerning God and the Devil could possibly accept the concocted drivel of pro-life, pro-gun, leader-cult nationalism that is now served up, to overwhelming effect, by the cynical pols of the so-called evangelical movement. It's not really a movement, though, but an exactingly constructed motivational machine, by far the most dangerous political technology in the world. White supremacy, neonazism, extreme libertarianism and the alt_right are just feeder streams that swell this foaming current and give it the complexity and power to dominate a declining imperial order, which it is still doing in the US despite Joe Biden's win. I think the old liberal/progressive hegemony has been all but overwhelmed by religious nationalism. We better fight for our worlds, folks, because if not we are going to lose them all.

On the left, we have always wanted to believe that the rapaciousness of monopoly capital would drive the workers and peasants to our side. "The real enemy is the Koch brothers and their dark money," we'd say, "and the rest of the confusion will disappear once that becomes clear." Now it's urgent to identify, not just the leaders and their aims, but the entire cultural/political complex that is giving the present its twisted and disheartening character. Because as conditions get worse, the veil doesn't fall. No, the religious fervor grows. Katherine Stewart has written what seems to be the best book on this stuff, and she puts the growth dynamic in a nutshell:

"That’s the way inequality works. On the one hand, it creates concentrations of wealth whose beneficiaries are determined to manipulate the political process to hold on to and enhance their privileges. On the other hand, it generates a sense of instability and anxiety among broad sectors of the wider public, which is then ripe for conversion to a religion that promises authority and order."

That's Karl Polanyi's double movement. The alienation of globalized capitalism grows by leaps but bounds - but the powers that emerge to stop it prove much worse than the disease they were supposed to cure.

On that basis, a gang of monopoly capitalists have created a national popular religion, and right now they hold the Senate, the Supreme Court and the Presidency of the United States. These folks have global reach, and anyone who was justifiably worried about Opus Dei a few years ago, has not seen anything yet. The cosmological battle is already three-quarters won, and we hyper-educated godless anarchists from the cities have barely even noticed it was happening. To fight back, we need something a lot more powerful than another tech-driven euphoria. Without a transcendent sense of cross-racial, multigendered community to match the horrid archaisms of the right - and without some new version of the Messiah, I'd say - we are cooked.

Walter Benjamin understood this kind of thing very well, but his categories are far too out of date to help us. It's time for the contemporary left to develop, not just a new ecological aesthetics, but even more, an updated version of political theology.

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