Month: August 2021

Change the past tomorrow while living the future today

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The mess we find ourselves in, this wretched apocalypse of climate chaos, is nothing short of a grandiose demonstration of market failure, a spectacle of capitalism’s absurdist tragedy. In the grim landscape of economic theory and environmental destruction, one might say that market failure is not just a malfunction; it is the defining characteristic of our present dystopia. We are not merely witnesses to a malfunctioning system; we are trapped in its inevitable collapse.

The Farce of Allocation: A Farcical Theatre of Loss

Let’s talk about allocation, the great lie of the so-called efficient market. This sham of optimization parades itself as a system of value, yet it’s a tragicomedy of errors. Goods and services, supposedly allocated to maximize utility, are instead distributed with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop. The irony? The net gain promised by these economic policies is nothing but a mirage—an illusion we chase while the sands of value slip through our fingers.

Herein lies the crux of the matter: no individual or preference criterion can be better off without causing harm or detriment to another. This is the cruel joke at the heart of market dynamics, a cynical joke played on the collective psyche. What’s worse, the market perpetuates a fiction where success and value are synonymous, while in reality, the true measure of value is nothing more than a grotesque caricature of monetary worth. Everything that costs money—well, it’s cheap, isn’t it? A planet’s worth reduced to the price tag of its destruction.

The Present, the Future, and the Unfortunate Joke

The great divide between normies and sci-fi scribes is that while the former revel in the present moment, they are blissfully ignorant of its fleeting nature. Sci-fi writers, on the other hand, are trapped in a future they cannot touch, a vision they cannot make real. And therein lies the rub: neither the normies possess a present, nor the sci-fi writers a future. Yet, everyone’s in on the joke, even if they don’t realize it.

If the future is not the love of your life, then you’re stuck in a perpetual state of existential limbo. The future began yesterday; it’s the present that’s merely a tool to distort and manipulate the past. Let them have their present, for tomorrow belongs to those who can embrace the farce of changing the past while living the future today. The future, at its core, is made of market failures. In fact, it is market failures all the way down, an endless spiral of economic dysfunction.

The Dimensions of Market Failure

The market failure you have, this dreadful spectacle of economic absurdity, is not the market failure you want. The market failure you want is not the market failure you need, and the market failure you need is not the market failure you can obtain. This grotesque triad of dissatisfaction is the essence of our condition—a relentless cycle of unmet needs and unattainable desires. The market failure you can buy, often through the grotesque theater of war, costs more than you’re willing to pay. It’s a futile endeavor to invest in destruction when the cost outweighs the benefit.

The dimensions between memory and expectation are riddled with market failures. Every attempt to reconcile past mistakes with future promises only exposes the futility of our economic fantasies. The present becomes a mere stage on which the absurdity of our aspirations and failures plays out—a stage where we perpetually reenact the same disastrous scenes.

Conclusion: Embracing the Farce

In the end, climate change as a manifestation of market failure is not just a commentary on economic ineptitude but a reflection of the inherent absurdity of our existence. The market’s grotesque failure is not an anomaly but a fundamental aspect of our reality—a nihilistic truth we cannot escape. So, let us not delay the future by clinging to our last versions of market failure. Let us instead embrace the farce, recognize the futility of our economic endeavors, and accept that the dimension between memory and expectation is a void filled with the failures of our market-driven dreams.

The future, like a cruel joke, remains forever out of reach, crafted from the detritus of our economic blunders. And so, we continue, bound by the chains of our own making, perpetually failing to rectify the failures of a system that was never meant to succeed.

“Everything Is Fine, Except When It Isn’t”: The Ideological Catastrophe of False Equivalence

In the image before us, we encounter a political compass that deftly captures the underlying absurdities of our contemporary ideological landscape. Each quadrant satirically reduces the moral and political concerns of a particular ideological position to a singular, paradoxical statement: everything is framed as a dire issue except for the most egregious examples of that issue, which are somehow deemed acceptable. This visual satire speaks volumes about the state of modern discourse, where ideological purity often leads to the absurd sanctioning of the very atrocities that the ideology ostensibly seeks to prevent.

The Perverse Logic of Ideological Capture

Let us begin by examining the upper left quadrant, labeled “Authoritarian Left,” where “Everything is revisionist propaganda except actual revisionist propaganda, which is fine.” This statement encapsulates the Marxist critique of ideology in its most distilled form. The revisionist, often accused of betraying the purity of Marxist doctrine, becomes a convenient scapegoat for those who refuse to confront the revisionism inherent in their own practices. The denunciation of revisionism itself becomes a form of ideological revisionism, where the true betrayal lies not in the content of the revision but in the very act of accusing others of revisionism while engaging in it oneself. This is a classic example of the psychoanalytic concept of projection, where the subject disavows their own ideological impurity by externalizing it onto the Other.

Moving to the upper right quadrant, the “Authoritarian Right,” we find the statement “Everything is genocide except actual genocide, which is fine.” Here, we confront the most chilling aspect of ideological obfuscation: the ability to label almost anything as genocide while remaining utterly blind to—or worse, complicit in—actual genocidal practices. This reflects a deeper problem in the way language and moral categories are weaponized in political discourse. The term “genocide” becomes emptied of its historical and ethical weight, deployed instead as a rhetorical tool to delegitimize political opponents. In this perverse logic, the very concept of genocide is rendered meaningless, which in turn makes the real thing more acceptable, more palatable. The accusation of genocide becomes a cynical maneuver, a way of maintaining power rather than a genuine concern for the lives at stake.

In the bottom left quadrant, the “Libertarian Left,” we encounter “Everything is theft except actual theft, which is fine.” This statement, in its simplicity, exposes the contradictions at the heart of libertarian socialist thought. The critique of property and capital often takes on a moralistic tone, where every instance of economic exchange is viewed through the lens of theft. Yet, when confronted with actual theft—whether it be the exploitation of labor or the expropriation of land—this moral outrage is conspicuously absent. The concept of theft is thus ideologically neutered, stripped of its radical potential and reduced to a vague sense of injustice that never fully confronts the realities of economic exploitation.

Finally, in the bottom right quadrant, the “Libertarian Right,” we find “Everything is slavery except actual slavery, which is fine.” This encapsulates the libertarian paradox, where the rhetoric of freedom is employed to justify conditions of extreme unfreedom. The libertarian critique of state intervention often hinges on the idea that any form of regulation or taxation is a form of slavery. Yet, when faced with actual conditions of servitude—whether in the form of wage slavery, debt bondage, or human trafficking—this critique evaporates. The obsession with abstract freedom blinds the libertarian to the concrete realities of exploitation, making them complicit in the very forms of slavery they claim to oppose.

The Ideological Suspension of Ethics

What unites all these quadrants is a common thread of ideological perversion, where moral and political categories are evacuated of their meaning and repurposed to serve the interests of power. In each case, the most extreme example of the issue at hand—whether it be revisionism, genocide, theft, or slavery—is rendered invisible, precisely because acknowledging it would undermine the ideological coherence of the position. This is what Žižek refers to as the “ideological suspension of ethics,” where the most egregious violations of moral principles are tolerated, if not outright endorsed, in the name of maintaining ideological purity.

This suspension of ethics is not merely a theoretical concern but has real-world consequences. It allows for the perpetuation of violence and exploitation under the guise of ideological consistency. The leftist who denounces revisionism while engaging in it, the right-winger who decries genocide while committing it, the libertarian who bemoans theft while profiting from it, and the anarcho-capitalist who condemns slavery while upholding it—all are participants in a broader ideological project that seeks to maintain the status quo by inverting the very values it claims to uphold.

Conclusion: Towards a Radical Re-engagement with Ethics

The challenge before us, then, is to break free from this ideological capture and to re-engage with ethics in a way that refuses the false equivalences and moral inversions that dominate contemporary discourse. This requires a radical rethinking of our political categories, a willingness to confront the contradictions in our own positions, and a commitment to the difficult work of ethical consistency.

In the end, the political compass before us is not just a satire of ideological absurdities but a mirror reflecting the deep contradictions and moral failures of our time. It calls on us to recognize the ways in which we, too, are complicit in these failures and to strive towards a more honest and ethical engagement with the world. In this sense, the image is not merely a critique of others but a challenge to ourselves: can we confront the actual revisionism, genocide, theft, and slavery that persist in our world, or will we continue to find comfort in the ideological lies that make these horrors “fine”?

In typical Žižekian fashion, this analysis exposes the ideological mechanisms at play, revealing how moral and political categories are often manipulated to sustain power structures, rather than to challenge them. The image thus serves as a starting point for a broader critique of contemporary politics, one that demands a more rigorous and ethical approach to the issues we face.