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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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To no end. This is whence the conflict comes. There is no end. It's very postmodern, which scorns the still-modernist futurists.

People always seem to speculate that the managerial class is motivated by money, power, ideology. They are all individually moved by such base human ends, but as a class these are immaterial. Adam Curtis describes this very well in Hypernormalization. The only identifiable goal is the maintenance of the current order, not of the principles of it, not of some fixed idea of it, just pure maintenance and management, with no vision, no goal, no real fundamental spirit.

This is how they are able to hold contradictory ideas and policies and turn on a dime whenever fashionable (as Covid made most conspicuous). Because the system in itself doesn't believe in anything. Not even the Promethean impulse that built it and which is embodied by this rival faction.

The current battle lines of elite and counter elite in the west are once again drawn on a precise difference between two modes of dealing with modernity. And that difference is quite exactly the one we are talking about here, between an individual desire of transcendence, escape and a collective desire of management, control.

...To no end. This is whence the conflict comes.

Then I have no idea what you are trying to say. Which side of the struggle corresponds to (A) individual desire of transcendence, escape, and which corresponds to (B) collective desire of management, control ?

It's all of course more complicated and blurry than this one simple cut but broadly:

A is the Paypal Mafia, accelerationists at large, the dissident right, class reductionist Marxists, private capitalists and generally people at the top and bottom of company org charts.

B is the professional managerial class, neoliberals, the DEI complex, state administrations, NGOs, various social clubs the likes of Davos, public fund managers and generally people in the middle of company org charts.