patrick.net

Neoliberalism has created a ruling-class society of monsters for whom pain and suffering are now viewed as entertainment.

Everywhere we look today there is the looming threat of totalitarianism and the eradication of those public spheres that produce the critical and energizing formative culture necessary for a radical democracy. Schools have been modeled after prisons, a range of social behaviors have been criminalized, especially in the public schools where young people are arrested for violating a dress code or doodling on their desk. A war is being waged not on poverty but on the poor as they are subject to laws that increasingly put them in jail for their debts or for simply being Black and poor. The recent killings and then demonization of unarmed Black youth and adults in cities throughout the United States by white police officers have made visible how a kind of military metaphysics now dominates US life. The police have been turned into soldiers who view the neighborhoods in which they operate as war zones. The earth is now viewed as a resource to be plundered, on part with the extraction of wealth, labor, hopes and dreams taken from other spheres of social life. A mad violence now rules US life.

Outfitted with full riot gear, submachine guns, armored vehicles and other lethal weapons imported from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, their mission is to assume battle-ready behavior. Is it any wonder that violence rather than painstaking, neighborhood police work and community dialogue and engagement becomes the norm for dealing with alleged “criminals,” especially at a time when more and more behaviors are being criminalized? At the same time, violence becomes the DNA of a society that refuses to deal with larger structural issues such as massive inequality in wealth and power, and a government that now unapologetically serves the rich and powerful corporate interests, and makes violence the organizing principle of governance.

Barbarism is not simply a political concept; it is a practice forged in war and violence. Incapable of self-reflection, it smothers ethical considerations in the language of tactics so that the killing of children at home and abroad through the mechanisms of state terrorism is justified under the pretext of a military necessity – a notion of fear forged in the bowels of the rising surveillance and punishing state. Turning poor neighborhoods into war zones is the metric of the financial elite and ethical zombies who without any semblance of moral conscience, merge power and violence, and wage war against those increasing populations now considered disposable. Under such circumstances, the distinction between civilians and combatants disappears. This is truly the logic of disposability central to state terrorism and the new totalitarianism.

It is hard to disagree with a growing consensus that what we are witnessing in the United States is the legacy of slavery and the criminalization of people of color reasserting itself in a society in which justice has been willingly and aggressively replaced by racial injustice. And it is precisely this militarization that should inform any analysis about the growing dangers of totalitarianism in the United States. Racist killings, the loss of privacy, the rise of the surveillance state, growing poverty and inequality, and the increasing corporatization of the commanding institutions of the United States point to something more than civil unrest, spying, police violence and other specific anti-democratic issues. What is truly at work here and unites all of these disparate issues is a growing threat of authoritarianism – or what might be otherwise called totalitarianism with elections.

But there is more at work in the madness of neoliberal capitalism than the oppression caused by its economic structures and the iniquitous gap in wealth, power and income that it produces. Americans also live in an age of death-dealing loneliness, isolation and militarized atomization. If you believe the popular press, loneliness is reaching epidemic proportions in wired advanced industrial societies. The usual suspect is the internet, which isolates people in the warm glow of the computer screen while reinforcing their own isolation and sense of loneliness. The Facebook notions of “friends” and “likes” become disembodied categories in which human beings disappear into the black hole of abstractions and empty signifiers. Yet, blaming the internet is too easy when one lives in a society in which any notion of dependence, compassion, mutuality, care for the other and sociality is undermined by a neoliberal ethic in which self-interest becomes the organizing principle of one’s life and a survival-of-the fittest ethic breeds a culture that at best promotes an indifference to the plight of others and at worse a disdain for the less fortunate and a widespread culture of cruelty. Isolated individuals do not make up a healthy democratic society.

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