The most crucial element to the success of a moral order (anti-political space) is that it accurately represents (or close to) the values of those who choose to live in it. That these values support human thriving is of also of vital importance – but that issue is fiendishly difficult for a political order to make judgments about. The choice of whether to live in a community or not is one that a political apparatus can unambiguously support – but the fact that we don’t have a common definition of human thriving and what values are truly important to live out is why we need a diverse ecosystem of moral orders in the first place.

While it had a very mixed record of utilizing them in practice, Western modernity clearly had developed many of the tools necessary to help people create communities that share their values. To the extent that the challenge of setting up moral orders is a lack of prosperity and logistical support, Western modernity was in fact the most advanced civilization in history at generating prosperity and solving logistical issues. Those tools should not be abandoned.

But we must likewise learn from its failures, and this is as true, or even more true, in the bastions of progressive politics as it is anywhere else. Continue reading The Apocalypse Cabaret Manifesto – Part 10: The Community Design Principles We Don’t Yet Have →

 We are now ready to address the first of the questions asked before: (given the human condition and the nature of culture) what kind of society should we be trying to create if we want this to turn out well?So far we have established:

• That you cannot “win” a culture war – even hegemony only creates counter-hegemony; and
• That the character of a population is a crucial component of its cultural destiny, and that character cannot be learned on behalf of future generations: they have to learn it for themselves. You can only set the conditions in which the horsemen of cultural apocalypse (laziness, selfishness, alienation, historical amnesia) can be more easily identified and struggled against.

The process of reasoning that has brought us to those two observations implies a third, one which was essentially first made by Plato: that all political systems, unless they are checked, become oligarchies. All oligarchies, however beneficent their beginnings, become ruinous. Oppression, colonialism, and political violence – at a minimum – follow.

Yet politics is unavoidable in human affairs.  Any time a sufficient number of people live in proximity – with “sufficient number” sometimes being as low as two – a political system, however informal, will develop.

The only way to preserve the longevity of non-ruinous political systems (which we’ll provisionally call “legitimate”) is to keep their tendency towards oligarchy in check.

This is done not by the optimization of politics – which leads only to the more efficient creation of oligarchies – but by the use of politics to create anti-political spaces.

Continue reading The Apocalypse Cabaret Manifesto – Part 8: The Purpose of Politics is Anti-Politics →

There are three different levels at which the question “what do we do?” can be answered in this context.

They begin at the most abstract level: “what and of society are we trying to create?”

They move down to the level of collective action: “what kind of civic virtues and institutions do we need to encourage to get there?” Which implies what kind of systems we want to build, and what kind of behaviors they will incentivize.

Finally, they come to the most grounded and direct: “How do I, personally, act?”

We’ll look at these questions in that order, moving from the most abstract of our collective goals to the most specific of our personal actions, and therefore begin with the question: if Western modernity is failing, what kind of society do we want to replace it with?

But first, we must admit explicitly what we’ve only implied: there is no turning back. “Western culture,” as we have inherited it, is a dead culture the same way that Latin is a dead language, and prog rock is dead music.

Continue reading The Apocalypse Cabaret Manifesto – Part 6: It’s The End of the West as We Know It, and … →

What we’ve seen so far is that the wave of “Trump-like” politicians in the West emerged (beginning significantly before Trump) because what are their vices, from the perspective of hegemonic consumer-capitalist modernity, are in fact virtues from the standpoint of people whose primary goal is to veto that modernity. Likewise the rise in Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism has occurred not because of any innate appeal of those doctrines, but because they are things that modernity has so far refused to (or genuinely cannot) co-opt. Trump-ism and neo-Nazism and “Islamic fundamentalism” are not at this point themselves coherent ideologies – they are the form that the tactics of anti-modernism takes. Coherence is beside the point.

Now there’s no guarantee that this precise state of affairs will last – and in fact, the particulars are bound to change at some point. It is horrifically possible that consumer capitalism will decide to co-opt Nazism … or that Socialism will be seen as truly dangerous again, or that the hegemonic system will develop some kind of political antibodies that neutralize politicians in the Trumpian mold. Or we’ll all blow ourselves up.

One way or another, at some point, these specifics are going to change. And most likely either modernity will triumph and become even more of a hegemony, or its hold will start to crumble and what was once ridiculous and impossible will begin to happen next door.

What do we do? Continue reading The Apocalypse Cabaret Manifesto – Part 5: There is No Winning, Because Hegemony Becomes its Own Deathwork →

Before we start putting all this together, it’s worth noting that while I think the incoherence of much of our most violent ideologies is an important element of our current situation, that it is not a unique one.

In fact, it appears to be a rule of thumb that times of significant upheaval produce both incoherent ideologies and even mass delusions about basic facts.

In some ways, this is a “fog of war” phenomenon applied to “culture wars,” which appears to have been the case in Nazi Germany, as seen in this passage from Erik Larson’s book In the Garden of Beats, about the American Ambassador to Germany in the first year of Hitler’s chancellery: Continue reading The Apocalypse Cabaret Manifesto – Part 3 (Addendum): A Short Meditation on Incoherence →