Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “At times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The
quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate
greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s
version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to
exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a
collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the
self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those
who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the
lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as
exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health
Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States
suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems
to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide.
Welcome to the asylum. READ MORE
