What fresh hell cometh?

Written by Rory Mo-ran

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Rory Mo-ran ·sedSopotnrahfgc2m9ha461ch9940llh0h5u0544l14g0335t5li820uaa97 ·

What fresh hell cometh?

The conclusion of a four-part article about cognitive dissonance under imperialism

Populations can't thrive under this level of cognitive dissonance. The whole system is screwed and everyone knows it. Those who are paid enough to turn a blind eye, will drive on, blindfolded, but for the rest of us, material conditions will continue to deteriorate. Regular workers have to deal every quarter with rapid inflation. That wouldn't be so bad if salaries were inflating at the same rate. But they are not. Stagflation is driving workers in the West to the point of despair but eventually something's got to give.

Either the working majority finds a way to reclaim political power through mass strikes and boycotts, through defunding institutions that serve only the billionaire class, through building parallel structures that answer to informed popular consensus rather than donor interests. Or the elites tighten the screws further, accelerate surveillance and repression, transforming this twilight into something far darker.

For the moment we are living in a reality where only comedians and disgraced journalists can call things by their proper names. They can tell the truth and when we hear it, we recognise the authenticity. The billionaires keep rolling out their imperial talking heads who gaslight the public every day, but nobody believes them. The media will not report reality as news because reality is bad for business.

As material conditions in the West continue to deteriorate, the population will continue to radicalise. Europe has one advantage, only a small portion of our population is likely be seduced by billionaire-funded right-wing populism. The United States does not share that luxury. The American billionaire class is banking on an uneducated populace squandering its energy on blaming poor people and immigrants. The Epstein class has devised a perfect dead end into which they can drive popular discontent.

It was shocking this week to watch the Unionist community in the north of Ireland March straight into that Dead end. There has been a rejection of academics and intellectualism among the Unionist community in the north.

I don't recognise these people rioting on our island. I don't know how you can claim to love your community whilst burning people's homes. Putting people out of their homes because of the colour of their skin doesn't add up in a place that's suffered decades of sectarian violence. And it really doesn't seem very Irish.

I get it that everyone is frustrated over the housing crisis. I get it that the world seems very messed up right now and we're all a bit scared about the future. The people rioting feel anxious, stressed, hopeless, depressed, alienated, through financial insecurity. Poverty is psychologically strangling. You're either overworked in a meaningless job or you're useless, disconnected from society.

Disaster capitalism has always been the elephant in the room when it comes to mental illness. Our minds have been colonised by an empire that hates us. I don't know how disconnected from reality you have to be to blame all that on the only people in your community with less going for them than you.

The billionaire class will always make money available to right-wing thugs. They love when one set of poor people gets violent with another set. For them, it's the perfect misdirection. People screaming about immigration are too distracted to demand wealth taxes on the billionaires.

As for the rest of us, we're supposed to watch on, scared, disgusted and distressed because people who are scared and distressed have a tendency to transfer their votes to parties on the right.

The same parties that the billionaires are funding in order to stop you voting for wealth taxes. You're supposed to vote for these new right-wing parties who are in place primarily to make us surrender our neutrality. If it wasn't all so obvious and heavy-handed, it would be genius.

There is no chance that this backward political chauvinism will take serious root across Europe. I say this in full knowledge of the billions spent every year trying to push the population in that direction. The European psyche can see clearly enough to identify the boots on our necks. It will take decades of defunding education across the Union to make us stupid enough to fall for this obvious ruse en masse.

The billionaire class speaks the language of slaves and masters. The workers speak the language of solidarity, repair and renewal through iteration. They are not two factions in a debate. They are two different species of consciousness occupying the same political space.

The rupture is already here. What remains to be seen is whether the majority can finally seize the levers of power that have been withheld from us for so long, or whether this twilight will deepen into a longer darkness from which even the memory of freedom vanishes.

People speculating about historical cycles often comment that we are heading into the 1930s. They imagine that people around the globe will wake up and deviate from the dystopic trajectory we're on before we get to the concentration camp end of business.

I'm saying we've already gone past that. We've seen the death camps, we've seen the genocide and most importantly now we can see that our leaders enabled it all because our protestations had no teeth.

The deeper we get into this dystopia, the harder it gets to reconcile the dominant media narrative with reality on the ground. The workers are going to have to start sharpening their knives and showing their teeth.

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Written by Rory Mo-ran

(Critical Theory)

Published on Substack