A Revolution Above and Beyond Politics
(NOTE: THIS POST IS OFFICIALLY TOO LONG FOR EMAIL. IF YOU ARE READING THIS IN YOUR EMAIL INBOX PLEASE CLICK THE “VIEW IN BROWSER” LINK AT THE VERY TOP RIGHT OF THE BODY OF THE EMAIL.)
Some of my posts on here1 have no news hooks. This one has five (some older than others):
1) The self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell: I am going to take
’s approach in talking about this by describing my thoughts on watching the full video and suggesting how to decide to watch it if you haven’t already. Agreeing with her logic, I also decided to watch the full video because if an active duty member of our military decided to set himself on fire, the least I could do is watch. Besides the dark humor of watching the Secret Service officer aim his gun at a burning man, I most recall Bushnell falling to the ground. I am used to the burning monk footage from 1963, where you see him sitting the whole time. Watching him fall was like watching a building fall. I have never seen such a dramatic demise of a person in a motion picture, let alone a viral Twitter video. Haunting.I have a link to the full video here. You can bet at some point it will be taken down, in which case you would have to search it yourself. I take for granted that if you have trauma issues you will not watch it. But even if you THINK you are ready, make sure you are. Just ask “Am I ready for my whole life to change?” Whenever I hear the name “Aaron Bushnell” now, I imagine him screaming “Free Palestine.” then falling to the ground while still consumed with flames.
2) TikTok being used to build IRL communities: Turns out TikTok is not only being used to organize protests. Film clubs and book clubs in NYC are also being organized by using the location tag. Most interesting to me: many of these are not influencers (which kinda reminds me of this *ahem ahem*), yet another symptom of personality exhaustion.
3) AI’s gentrification of the Internet: And I say that with precision. Like actual gentrification, this digital gentrification is meant to increase the economic yield of the Internet while replacing the local, organic culture with grey homogeneous slop. This past week, Erik Hoel wrote about the specific ways this is happening.
and wrote two great responses.4) The oppression narrative stalemate: Sam Kriss’s latest piece articulates far better than I can the oppression narrative stalemate happening between Israel and Gaza2 (made all the more dramatic by the bizarre reporting on the Flour Massacre).
5) The political gender divide: This last one was reported more than a month ago. But its implications — how heterosexual mating is shrinking in the drab cold shower of The Discourse — are too far-reaching to be written off as yesterday’s news.
What do these five items have in common? If you guessed “these all form the breeding ground for a psychic revolution,” you get a prize.3 We need a revolution above and beyond politics. God may be dead, but politics has rushed to take its place. Yet another odd paradox about the Gaza conflict: the traditional holy war between the Muslims and the Jews is being overlaid by the new political, sectarian holy war between Internet wokescolds that are furious at the occupation and the MSM wokescolds that cry “antisemitism” less as a response than as a Tourette’s reflex. Never mind the splintering within those camps, within the right…this is why I say a revolution ABOVE and beyond politics. For centuries, the revolution above politics happened on the religious level. Now that religion has gone, politics seems to have firmly taken its place, especially online.
But what on Earth can we look at beyond religion and politics? Consciousness. Which religion was ultimately alluding to this whole time anyway. In the late 18th century, the decline of religion, along with the psychic pressure of the times due to industrialization, and a stark confrontation with the limits of Enlightenment-era reason, was the context in which the Romantic Era began. Not looking above to God anymore, Romantic era thinkers and writers like Blake and Goethe looked to nature and to the inner life as well. The irrational and the spiritual were valued above science and reason. Or, as Shelley wrote:
The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world.
For this reason, the Romantics focused their attentions and passions on the internal world.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Dadaists created revolutionary anti-art to articulate their disgust with the atrocities of World War I. The Surrealists of the ‘30s and ‘40s drew power from dreams and the unconscious. The Beats delved into spirituality, jazz, marijuana and sex for their automatically written novels and rhythmic free verse. The last major group of psychic revolutionaries, the hippies, as Hunter S. Thompson said, rejected “plastic” America just like the Beats. But the Beats had a greater impact on high culture. I’d add that the hippies, though having a greater impact on pop culture and thus paving the way for pop’s hegemony that courses throughout the postmodern era, infused it with much of the ambition and formal art innovations of the modernist era.
But wait Mo, are you saying we should be apolitical? How cowardly! Even without being political, you are being political!
This is precisely my point! In the early 20th century, many Communist aesthetes were literal and praised the awful Socialist Realism of Stalinist Russia. Trotsky was wise enough to understand that modern art, while not literally being agit-prop, helped create the conditions to ferment all sorts of revolutions. No wonder the fascists hated it so much.
As I’ve mentioned numerous times, the boycotts of films from Zionist Hollywood as well as the boycotts of pop stars that are quiet about genocide can only go so far. If I am being asked to not watch Dune 2 because it stars Timothee Chalamet, am I watching a better version of Dune instead? If there are alternatives that pop up, can I be assured they won’t be literal and club-footed?
Brad Troemel has an excellent video on what he calls “literalists,” whom are people that want everything they consume to directly reflect their beliefs. There is a spirit of revolution in NYC that makes me wonder: “Is this was what the ‘60s was like or what the ‘30s was like?” I hope it’s like the ‘60s, with its myriad lasting contributions to culture and consciousness. It would be a shame if it ended up like the ‘30s, with a movement that only had manifestos to show for it. All while Hollywood entranced the world with opulent fantasies.
There is a hunger for art that is as crazy, if not crazier, than the times by the way. Just look at this TikTok:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
The caption says enough: “The disconnect between the art & society is becoming very dystopian.” To watch news about genocide on a Chinese lip sync app while Beyonce prances in a cowboy hat truly does come across as “dystopian.” And while I am better at autopsies than I am at helping cultivate new life, I should at least mention that we may be going through a Romantic renaissance. It’s been mentioned by
here as well as by Ted Gioia, Ross Barkan and even myself.Let me make an analogy that may distinguish this possible Romantic rebirth with that of the 1800s:
SOUL:NEW ROMANTICISM
NATURE: ROMANTICISM
In the Romantic era, industrialization had many pine for the greener pastures of yesteryear. Now, in our algorithmic dystopia, we have this meditation from Chris Claflin on how Millennials may have been the last generation to truly connect with the beauty of life.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Millennials may also, unlikely as it sounds, be the last generation to get in touch with its warrior spirit. This disturbing post by
goes in-depth into how AI is devaluing glory on the battlefield, with new AI drones killing people as dispassionately as a can of Raid.I know we started this piece with a disturbing video. If you have already gone numb, perhaps you can watch one more that is in Han’s post of a drone killing a man. Again, similar to Han’s caution this time, I advise not watching if you either have trauma issues or if you want your life to not change forever.
OK watch or skip this.
Forward March?
Leave it to the American mainstream center-left media to downplay the horrors of Gaza while brandishing a fine-tooth comb to go over Shane Gillis hosting Saturday Night Live. The Slate piece I just linked to is one of the few that is relatively accommodating of Gillis’s funny, though not groundbreaking, comedy. The major issue the writer seems to have with him, though, is that he is not officially announcing what side of the aisle he is on. Apparently this is a ticking clock situation. If he doesn’t announce his stance, he will be claimed by the right.
Between his continued engagement with the dirtbag left (Stavros Halkias will have a main role in Gillis’s upcoming Netflix sitcom Tires) and his continued support on Marxist-themed subreddits like /r/stupidpol, I don’t think it’s that serious. Perhaps this is even a way forward. The main cultural contribution Gillis has to offer us: a general spirit of anarchic irreverence that has been gone from mainstream comedy for far too long.
I have no idea if this anarchic spirit will spread throughout the culture. I am rallying for it though. Every truly revolutionary cultural event was not brought to life by a dispassionate plea for voting Democrat. It was always something riotous, borderline demonic.
Hyperpop, or perhaps the subgenre of hyperrock, may also usher in the psychic revolution we need. Hyperrock in particular appeals to me because it sounds like the glorious, fiery end of dance pop and rock. Of course. Everything is on fire. In the revolutionary synthesis of hyperrock, both genres are smoldering, much like a McDonald’s and a Burger King are both on fire during a riot.
Right now, a large number of people are indifferent to people burning,
In the above screenshot from a story that postp0stpost shared on Instagram, we have one more reason to have a revolution beyond politics. Mainstream media outlets, trying to downplay the carnage, prefer aerial photographs of the devastation to, say, a soldier burning himself, a baby starving to death, the Flour massacre or a picture of a man run over by a tank, as detailed in the TikTok below.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
These horrors are modern-day versions of the horrors that Europeans saw during World War I. The Dadaists didn’t respond by making plays about the horrors of warfare. They created works that were childlike and bizarre in response. Today’s horrors are beyond politics. That’s why there is so much apathy for the upcoming election. Looking back at the screenshot, I am reminded of this great passage from God, Human, Animal Machine where Meghan O’Gieblyn quotes Hannah Arendt:
The desire to send humans to space was for her a metaphor for this dream of scientific transcendence. She tried to imagine what the earth and terrestrial human activity must look like from so far beyond its surface: “If we look down from this point upon what is going on on earth and upon the various activities of men, that is, if we apply the Archimedean point to ourselves, then these activities will indeed appear to ourselves as no more than “overt behavior,” which we can study with the same methods we use to study the behavior of rats. Seen from a sufficient distance, the cars in which we travel and which we know we built ourselves will look as though they were, as Heisenberg once put it, ‘as inescapable a part of ourselves as the snail’s shell is to its occupant.’ All our pride in what we can do will disappear into some kind of mutation of the human race; the whole of technology, seen from this point, in fact no longer appears “as the result of a conscious human effort to extend man’s material powers, but rather as a large-scale biological process.” Under these circumstances, speech and everyday language would indeed be no longer a meaningful utterance that transcends behavior even if it only expresses it, and it would much better be replaced by the extreme and in itself meaningless formalism of mathematical signs.”
I showed you two disturbing videos. Yet it is this view that, commonplace though it is, has proven the most damaging for us. Not the gruesome, horrific images of people burning. Rather the clinical, scientific aerial shots of rubble piles on sand. In one of his last Facebook posts before he set himself on fire, Aaron Bushnell said:
Many of us like to ask ourselves, “What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?”
The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.
Why do we need a revolution beyond politics? Because a black square on Instagram is not enough. Why do we need a revolution beyond politics? Because a runway drag reboot of the Fantastic 4 is not helping anybody. Why do we need a revolution beyond politics? Because no president will stop callous CEOs from recommending corn flakes for dinner. OK fine when do we need this revolution? Before we are all just dots on an aerial map.
UPDATE: I had a false memory that Surrealism started in the 30s. It actually started in 1924, 100 years ago.
I prefer to call what I do on this Substack “longposting.” I would never have the gall to call it “analysis,” let alone “journalism.” The vibe I want for everything I do here is “something I would say at a cafe or on the phone.” All the same, way too long and impersonal to be called a blog.
Kriss’s first footnote for the piece also does a far better job than I do explaining why the dissident right’s shock jock schtick is irrelevant at this time
The prize is a free subscription to this Substack.
I pretty much agree. Just a few things: as far as Bushnell goes, there is a world of difference between him and the Atlanta incident. We don't know that person's name and there was no mention of their death. Short of it: that story was buried. The press has tried to bury this story, to be sure. But a few things that distinguish it from Atlanta as well as Vietnam and from the Who Cares Wins Olympics. This is an active duty US officer who said they will not participate in genocide. Meaning US troops HAVE been used in the conflict, despite what the US press has been reporting. Also, the video of this has been widespread and easy to watch. Photos were popular of Duc. Footage was nowhere near as widespread. Certainly not on the evening news lol. As far as calling an act of self-immolation "guilting people," yeah it's not the same thing as guilting people into watching Abbot Elementary.
And now we are back to the crux of my piece: a revolution in consciousness. A revolution in consciousness is not like a military coup much like a coup is not like a tech revolution. Having an organized revolution in a revolution of consciousness is not necessary. Propaganda is the exact opposite of what I am advocating here.
I saw you mentioned postmodernism. Please read my posts on the end of postmodernism (No PoMo) and thanks for the comment.
I’ve not published before, but I’ve written to others that politics functions as a religious substitute within secular societies that have collapsed the distinction between the political state and civil society. I think what you’re referring to is ideology - the general American philosophical orientation is one of postmodernism because that is the discourse that was bred by the academics who now permeate our institutional intelligentsia. This groundwork is what informs hegemonic social discourse, and in a society that has collapsed the political into the personal, political identity fills the void where religion once resided. Religious jingoism only fans the flames of that discourse with its own aims and goals.
I agree that we’re at a social turning point that seems to be embracing a New Romanticism and Neo-Enlightenment rejection of the more-or-less dystopian political propaganda established by capital interests and reinforced by the culture industry. But alienation has taken its toll. While it’s helpful to reflect upon and pass analysis of the emergent gestalt culture we find ourselves in, we must situate ourselves clearly and understand what parts are at play in the social strata we wish to focus on.
What’s the difference between Duc and Bushnell? The Buddhists were organized. Bushnell was a lone actor, a viral martyr to be forgotten by the public consciousness in the next war, just like how the Atlanta Immolator was forgotten last year. I don’t intend to downplay the viscerality of one’s ideological self-sacrifice, but this is a matter of scale and strategy. People guilting each other online over Who Cares More will do nothing for the people of Gaza, and one more life lost to the hopes of Something Bigger Than Myself is pissing in the wind.
Anything that dares to call itself a revolution requires organization, and there is simply no social consciousness currently organized on a scale enough to revolutionize our social psyche. Our larger society can’t even agree upon definitional facts at the moment. I say this not as a pessimistic or cynic, in fact I’m the opposite - propagandizing any politics, artistic aesthetic or otherwise, is a deathly risky business when left unrestrained by clearly achievable purposes and goals.
Isolated self-immolation is an act of moralism, not one of revolutionary praxis. What good is one ghost to another across the River or the Sea. It only hopes to be an idealistic beacon that can attract the fervor of its supporters - and then what? What Is To Be Done? Encouraging and spreading support for the kinds of life-giving culture that is worth cultivating merits enough respect on its own for how it impacts the individual and local grassroots scenes. But that is not enough to challenge hegemony; how does an underground scene become popular? How did Punk become Pop? How does a political movement not become corrupted away from its goals, and make itself distinct from its member’s civic life?
These are the questions we must be asking.