Dazzled Passengers On A Sinking Ship: The State of the World in Late Capitalism

I have to be frank here. I did not watch the recent SONA as I checked out a long time ago. As such, I only read and viewed some snippets of it. And they just confirmed my assumption that this is all hollow and empty. Besides, what everyone wants to see is the red-carpet fashion show. Perhaps, Amusing Ourselves to Death, the title of Neil Postman's book regarding the decline of our cognitive ability, is more relevant than it ever was when it was first released in 1985. Alongside the term late capitalism, which describes a capitalist system that can no longer innovate and share prosperity, these trends are looking bleaker than ever. 

We feel in some way or another that society is not doing well. What we refer to as contemporary politics today is none other than the nervous breakdown of the middle strata, or if we’re to be formal about it, the bourgeoisie. The middle class, propagandized by media and entertainment, has lost the plot. Thanks to the economic downturn since 2008 and the effects of this pandemic, they have gone astray.

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Bogged down by ill-allocated taxes, material decline, and current affairs, they, at least for now, are so lost in meaningless symbols that they can’t punch themselves out of their dream world made up of fantasies of unattainable freedom. Ruled by impotent, bankrupt, and spineless leaders, the global economy serves only those who are in bed with each other. This curse is nothing new, but the thing about ideology today is that unlike before, we’re self-aware enough to see the deep shit we’re in. We yearn for it to be fixed, but we know we’re too far gone to escape our fate.

Unsurprisingly, it is the same economic anxiety that fuels the rest of the current problems we face, namely political instability, social pathology, and cultural psychosis. As a people, we’re riding the seesaw of mass hysteria and mass neurosis, with one side edging toward anxiety and the other toward chronic stress. What a time to be alive.

This feeling is best understood by the middle class, who are perpetually stuck in the center of the economic ladder. They are, by every objective metric, safe and comfortable. Their fortunes won’t change in the near term, but one small act could plunge them down the ladder that once guaranteed them a bright prospect for themselves, and if they have a family, for their children and loved ones.

And these people, comfortable in their double-edged privilege, either feel guilt or rage at the state of the world created by this system. Many have tried to find solutions, but how can they when the foundations have become barren. For the working class, who’ve experienced the hopelessness of the situation firsthand, they have either checked out since they know that it’s been a fraud all along or they’ve chosen to play the game as everyone else.

Political views in general are not held on the level of faith. What is held instead is identity, and that is in a nutshell, the culture war that we are now living in. With that, it’s entirely unfounded to blame the growing mass of neutral citizens for their choices, or lack thereof, for what hope have they been given? You can still be apolitical in this country, yet harder than it was 10 or 20 years ago. It’s partnered with feelings of anxiety and shame, which are then offloaded in supposed intellectual discourse that attempt to assuage guilt.

As a last point, this is why the only available means that we have are protests, elections, and speaking out. Our culture has consecrated these tools as the only options, for we are all by default dependent on the broken institutions (government and market) that still stand. We cannot imagine an alternative to it, at least for the time being. As such, these methods tend to be performative and narcissistic at the same time, as a process of social validation. And this is not our fault, for we are all embedded with the fact that there is nothing to contrast it with. It is a different question, however, if we try to punch out of this mirage, and metaphorically get out from Plato's cave.

So, to bring this point to where we started, where does change come from? Change is already happening even without our intervention. Reality's unrelenting hand moves every day. The only concern is the matter of who will be in the driver's seat, individually or collectively, so we can steer this thing. I also need to point out that save for a few, the populist wave is still treated by a broad swathe of progressives as a repulsive current when this is merely the act of a group of people bashing their heads against the wall due to their profound unhappiness in the present social order.

In fact, the populist wave is the inevitable consequence of a 50-year-long process of us turning into tragic consumers, with every single political faction—left, right, and center—selling out their ideals so that they can still keep their cushy positions. Once again, this is nobody's fault: We only act in the confines of what we can immediately comprehend, and it takes a lot of effort to redirect that path that often involves a deep dive into historical, economic, sociological, and philosophical concerns.

All that I want to make clear from this long musing is that we must prepare for this system to fold and try to build from the rubble. And that preparation requires the forgotten role of something which is today lacking: a great vision or horizon of the future. We can only see real change in our agency if that great vision compels everyone to surrender, sacrifice, and cross the line of risk to approach it.

To escape the hell we’ve created, the first order of business is to open our collective eyes to the fear and ignorance in the atmosphere. The next is to do what we can to escape it without running away. And this is where we begin the task of building and striving for excellence—without the powers that be. Co-ops, labor unions, and mutual aid are just some things that need more attention. In the absence of top-down concern, collective consciousness will be the lever that gets things done.

For we are not utopians—true utopians are those who want to cling to the status quo indefinitely. We are dead-eyed realists.