John Wooden advised against mistaking activity for accomplishment. Substituting activity for accomplishment has become a U.S. national pastime, especially in government. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:
What Kafka got right is how societies can become busily dysfunctional.
For self-evident reasons, the fictional visions of Orwell and Huxley resonate as maps to the present distemper. Orwell’s account of full-spectrum technological totalitarianism maps Big Tech’s mastery of Surveillance Capitalism and governments’ full-spectrum surveillance powering the fine-grained coercion of social credit scores and related tools.
Huxley’s vision of a doped-up, med-dependent populace that loves its servitude also maps the present. Indeed, not only do we love our servitude, which manifests in our endless addictions and dependencies on everything from debt to junk food to painkillers, our servitude has been so normalized that we don’t even recognize the servitude that underpins “normal life.”
What Orwell and Huxley got wrong is the limits of these nightmarishly effective systems of control. Full-spectrum technological totalitarianism can certainly enforce compliance with the desired behaviors and expressions of consent, but it can’t force individuals to have ambition or creativity, to marry for love and children, or possess values or beliefs beyond the superficial lip-syncing of compliance.
The coercive structures of the Surveillance State and Surveillance Capitalism are intrinsically inauthentic, ersatz, hollow, demanding an entirely artificial and easily faked appearance of consent that mimics devotion to the principles and narratives being shoved down the throats of the populace.
Activity for accomplishment sounds like the social media hive?
This just in from Kierkegaard, postulate that theorem.
Big dumb drunk hillbillies aren’t supposed to know about that are they but I love kicking against the pricks.
Sartre was right about hell being other people and this just in from Albert Camus:
“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.”
Tip of the hat to AC for getting banished from the Algerian Communist Party.