Just to be clear: I am not elaborating on my own philosophy or politics here, I am just explaining false-consciousness in the terms its adherents would prefer to use to explain it, which I believe is fair. A lot of Marxists, either openly or in secret, subscribe to the accelerationist doctrine. They seek to deliberately magnify the problems of social stratification and capitalist inequality in order to reveal the suppressed truth of capitalism, which is oppression; hence accelerating its evils in order to make them clear enough for the average person to admit to himself and embrace as a viable impetus toward revolutionary political action, over and against the instinct of false-consciousness,- an instinct which, by internalizing the stratification or class-struggle that has emerged, reproduces it at the level of psychic organization (mirroring the superstructure in the structure, to cite more from their own lexicons) and convinces man that his own oppression under the regime is actually his freedom, or that the inequality under which he suffers so ignobly is merely the result of the ‘game’,- a meritocratic game of course, on whose account any apparent injustices in the system might be explained away. This is phrased most powerfully in good old Adorno. Borrowing from the negative philosophy of history straight from the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno sought to pursue the logic of capital to its assumed self-cancellation, just as Marx himself had. He tells us that we must “cast the world in the profane light of the apocalypse in order to reveal its “true truth”, and in the cracks and fissures thereof, usher in the Messianic consciousness.” That is all just his pseudopoetic way of saying: we must deliberately misinterpret and exaggerate Western culture and the related ‘problematics’ of its sociological reality, for this is the only way to make clear what we already know is the truth of the West: the oppression of the species-essence as Marx would say, that is: man’s alienation from his own human essence. For such revolutionaries, every man contains within himself the entire plenitude of the species-essence: simultaneously male and female, simultaneously scientist, poet, philosopher, architect, etc. etc. It is only the process of industrialization, which forces us to assume a specific trade and specialize in it, playing our role as a cog in the machine and factory line, that distorts this essence by (to shift over to Steiglerian analysis) absorbing ethos (culture) in the image of techne (technology) and thus induces alienation from our own nature,- a nature which, for the Marxist, is so nebulous a thing that it might include all things within itself,- replicating like a conceptual tumor with no internal structure, just a seething redundant protoplasm leveling the ground up Promethean stone of human history like the dust gathered under the wings of Benjamin’s angel in the ‘light of the apocalypse’.
I’ve mentioned the Frankfurt school as first in the line, but to the chopping-block you can add: (1) the Frankel-Snell school: here we have the origin of a trend called normative historicism, that is, history taught on the basis of a certain ecumenical and universalizing modus fit for the modern attitudes that find questions of cultural identity in general to be troubling,- or, in particular, the comparison of cultures in their respective placement on the scala ad gradum of man’s total moral evolution, eg. the superiority of one culture to another on whatever basis; (which they would of course find slightly more than troubling,- ie. ‘problematic’) a modus on which account our academies have all devalued- no, that is too mild a vocabulary,- on which account our academies have all execrated as an abominable hypothesis, the slightest tentative suggestive of one of those so hopelessly out-of-fashion, grand narratives of a collective people- that is, any idea of an over-arching pattern in history (by which the formation of a distinct cultural ethos and identity could be accounted for and defended) as being merely a residual idealism inherited from the Romantic era, for of course, following Heidegger, Hegel, Adorno and Lacan, such a pattern does not exist. A… pattern in the historical narrative that connects different elements of a society into one distinct, meaningful structure,- a collective story that people utilize to find their place in their social environment,- one usually cast in the form of a myth; a formative virtu and aretaics; an ethos; an… Identity? No, none of that exists; it’s old theory, old-hat; it’s bygone, it was before the almighty enlightenment of critical-theory; it’s out-dated; it’s just another thing dreamed up by old, white men in the 1800’s to defend their old, white man privilege. … Right? Well, that’s what my professor said! The tragic individualism of the Greek mind is subjected to historical-dialectical materialist reduction, along with all else; the movement from pre to post-Socratic philosophy is conceived of, not as the result of the emergence of the ontos from logos at the dawn of the Western mind,-- at the first morning of Western civilization, a white star torn and thrown out like seeds across the island-studded waters,- among the Doric proto-Greek tribes who inherited the kingdom of the mad Herakles after he was said to have immolated himself and, leaving his domain without heir, proclaimed that it belonged to whoever had the strength to take it, as the Dorics did,-- that is, not the result of that grand revelation of Being which, in my philosophy, had prompted that aforementioned tragic individualism to begin developing, (which in my account, is what produced all the first philosophers with fully formed, independent systems, emerging without precedent out of a historical void: Parmenides, Heraclitus, Empedocles, etc etc.) which our modern peers of course resist as well, but rather, but merely the mistaken product of semiological lacunae in the historical record,- shards of a broken past into which we have introjected our own obviously racially supremacist assumptions about the Greek mind to serve our attempts at resuscitating what, in their view, amounts to the archaicism of the accursed heterosexual white man as the prime motivating force in the movement of world-history, etc, etc. and: (2) a trend in all of modern academia- statistical analysis. This trend emerged as a result of the others, that is, out of their interaction, and for this reason it has many different Schools associated with it and lacks properly an original formulation like that ascribed to the other modern-trends in academia I have been addressing, making its development a bit harder to pin down and decipher,- especially now, given the fact that it has, over the decades, had time,- and time in no short abundance to profligate itself and infect everything; however, to sketch a few good examples of it at work: in political science, it is called World-Systems Theory. They don’t teach anything about the abstract principles underlying the US constitution for example, no; in social studies now, the state-issued curriculum just tabulates all the data on surveyed nations and compares their shit to our shit and spits out a list of mechanically extrapolated analyses, by which world-systems theory literally derives the construction of different Constitutions and political-frameworks, not based on the metaphysical grounding and extrapolitical ethico-philosophical undercurrents of the society in question or even the era in history to which that society belongs- but based on the geographical location of the country in question, what grows there, the ecosystem, economic trends and trade-routes and how far away it is from this other state, etc.- in other words, they use all of this aforementioned information to predictively model the formation of a state in such a way that all extrapolitical information can be excluded from the analysis, rendering it suitably emasculated and “politcally correct”,- meaning the ethics, religion, philosophy, etc. of the that group of people is devalued and excluded, as much as possible, from the discussion. For the next example, we have modern psychology, which I just call clinical psychology in order to quickly differentiate it from the true psyche-ology of the past: modern psychology sends out their goons to collect information on patients, then they tabulate it and produce lists of statistically inter-related phenomena in the expression of different personality trains thus far fit into their categories, and when they find a statistically relevant co-relation of malignant traits that can be educed from a threshold percentage of a population in comparison to a control, they then call that structure,- entirely composed out of statistical analysis,- a mental illness and proceed write it down in the DSM diagnostics manual that has to get reprinted continuously because they just keep doing this and “discovering”, that is, adding more and more ridiculous mental illnesses. The newest one I bothered to read about, that they did include in their diagnostics, was video game addiction. That’s political science and psych. but it’s in every single branch of academia. I won’t even bother getting into the economics version of this.
