Thursday, April 10, 2014

Closing Time in the West

People are always trying to close time. It seems to me that a singular cosmic achievement of man was to enter time, but as soon as he did so, he began searching for ways out.

This is understandable. Indeed, I've plotted a graph into the next 100 years, and if present trends continue, it looks like we'll all be dead by then. Unless we can somehow arrest time.

What is Marxism but a quite literal attempt to close down time? For Marx, "history" is just the side effect of ironclad laws, and the sooner it ends, the better.

One reason the Marxist has no qualms about stealing your slack is that you don't actually have any slack to begin with -- similar to how you didn't know how substandard your health insurance was until Obama took it away.

Morson writes of the fall of the Soviet Union, a nation we might think of as a kind of parentheses within TI(ussr)ME.

In other words, the Soviet Union came into being with the idea that the end of history -- or the beginning of the end -- had been reached. But then, in the blink of an eye, it was all over, and history came crashing back in: "Statues of the man [Lenin] who established the final system," which was "destined to survive forever, were overthrown in a kind of ritual return to 'history'" (Morson).

Of course, history had been taking place all along, just as Michael Jackson was still aging despite the decades-long attempt to freeze his development at age 12.

So, who goofed? Who caused this obnoxious return of history? Ironically, one thing you can't have in Marxism is "responsibility," since responsibility is a consequence of freedom. To affirm that consciousness and behavior are determined by class is to exonerate one of all responsibility. And yet, the Moscow Times reports that Marxist and leftist lawmakers in Russia want to investigate Mikhail Gorbachev "for his role in the 1991 collapse of the USSR."

Indeed, what is a Marxist "lawmaker" anyway? If everything is determined by the laws of scientific materialism, isn't this analogous to investigating the head of the biology department because some animals are so damn ugly?

Ho! "We are still reaping the consequences of the events of 1991.... People in Kiev are dying and will continue to die at the fault of those who many years ago at the Kremlin made a decision to break up the country."

If this is true, then Marxism is untrue. But there is no cognitive dissonance, any more than an American liberal has cognitive dissonance in believing increased energy costs will reduce demand while increasing the minimum wage won't reduce the demand for labor.

Ironically, the Clinton years were called a "holiday from history," when they were quite the opposite. Rather, the fall of the USSR "was a kind of metahistorical act, in this case asserting the openness of time" (Morson) and of history -- just as the murder of the Tsar had been a kind of blood sacrifice to the god Chronos, initiating a system of sacrifice for keeping history at bay.

Mmmm, bourgeois long pig:

So, with the implosion of the USSR, "for good or ill, the future was no longer guaranteed. After decades of certainty, the possibility of possibility was reborn..."

However, the Marxist parasite is embedded deep in the human soul. It is a retrovirus, always waiting for favorable conditions to attack the host. We will never be rid of it, because it is an expression of human nature -- that part of our nature with which it is our task to do battle, this battle being the primary drama of life.

Once one forecloses vertical space -- as do all secular fundamentalists, by definition -- then this battle is over. You might say that eliminating the vertical is to individual development what Marxism is to history. In short order, maturity becomes history, a thing of the past, gone with the tradition that nurtured it.

Our Ten Commandments provide a summary of how we are supposed to carry on the battle with our(lower)selves, especially the latter five that govern human-to-humam relations; in short, honor tradition, and don't lie, steal, envy, and fornicate. Liberalism turns each of these on its head and celebrates the mirror image.

Obamacare, for example -- probably the most steaming pile of liberal legexcretion ever -- is built on a foundation of envy, theft, and the obliteration of tradition, and at this very moment the Supreme Court is deciding whether businesses can be compelled by the state to subsidize sexual license. And if the whole catastrophe works as it is supposed to, then the death panels are coming, AKA rationing of services to eliminate the unworthy.

So the progressive succeeds in stunting history and therefore progress. For the ones who have been waiting for themselves, the wait is over, and closing time -- and therefore freedom -- may proceed apace for the rest of us.

8 comments:

julie said...

Marxist and leftist lawmakers in Russia want to investigate Mikhail Gorbachev "for his role in the 1991 collapse of the USSR."

I'm pretty sure the American left would blame Bush for that. I was going to say Reagan, but today's leftists only have the vaguest memories of that guy, whereas we are always at war with Bush.

One reason the Marxist has no qualms about stealing your slack is that you don't actually have any slack to begin with...

It occurs to me that at least initially, part of the siren song of Leftism is the implication that in the promised worker's paradise, nobody will really have to work. I mean, they may envision having to take a turn in the communal kitchen on occasion, or maybe spend an idyllic afternoon reaping wheat in the fields or something, but mostly think they'll just be able to sit around a drum circle and play folk music while children gambol through the fields.

julie said...

Speaking of arresting time...

Gagdad Bob said...

I just read a book that argues that rock music revolves around vulgar romanticism, i.e., checking out of time and merging with the world. Terribly written, but that sounds about right to me. However, so long as one preserves the vertical, then rock doesn't necessarily lead one down and out.

Gagdad Bob said...

One reason why rock was banned in the Soviet Union was that it was a competitor in the business of stopping history.

julie said...

...rock music revolves around vulgar romanticism, i.e., checking out of time and merging with the world.

True enough. I've also heard it argued that every love song is actually an ode to God. How it strikes you depends a lot on your orientation.

mushroom said...

Ironically, one thing you can't have in Marxism is "responsibility," since responsibility is a consequence of freedom.

I just had a conversation about the rejection of responsibility this afternoon. This is pushing the West to the brink.

I think the thing that will tip it all over is when people realize that the government is refusing to be bound by their own laws. When a critical mass wakes up to the fact that the rule of law is dead, it is going to get ugly fast.

Dougman said...

To me, Ozzie preserves the vertical in his music. YMMV.

Van Harvey said...

Mushroom said "When a critical mass wakes up to the fact that the rule of law is dead, it is going to get ugly fast."

Keep an eye on Nevada.

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