To be quite honest the Ancien Regime never really died, and its mutant legacy is currently busy snorting coke and fucking up the social, political, ecological, and economic systems of the world. The guillotines might have had a few busy years in the 1790s, but the next hundred years showed little improvement for the average European, Asian, African, or American (until slavery was abolished and new systems of degradation, fear-mongering, and suffering needed to be invented). Let's not even get into sub-geographical realities, reference imperialism, or do anything in fact. From this slightly more aware and gentler age, the past should look like utter barbarism and chaos, a time when suffering was life for the now much-ballyhoed "99%" without much amelioration of any sort. If anything, they were encouraged to be proud of their ability to endure by people much softer and wealthier than them. Back in the glory days, children were still widely exploited as little slaves and their parents were stuck in wage traps or servitude-by-any-other-name that make modern wage slavery in a midwestern McDonald's look like a paid vacation.
What is funny is that people look to the past as this time of glory, and some purveyors of history have repeatedly tried to whitewash the immense and crushing misery that the average human had to endure for thousands of years, and injustices and genocides and slaughters that went into it. To this day, there are people who would insist that World War 1 was just and necessary and not at all a mindless waste of millions of lives and tonnes of material, that taught the world no lessons at all. Every year we fail to learn from the past, and the few voices exhorting us to give a shit are ignored because modern culture is not about reflection or realistic undistorted perceptions, and especially not about revolution. Modern society is primarily about selling two things: distraction and delusion, which unite in blessed complacency and indifference. There are no alternatives, and Marcuse was right (not in any base or political 'Marxist' sense but logically) to say that postmodern society was one dimensional. Today we would be lucky to have one dimension instead of our kaleidoscopic non-dimension. Let's not even talk about the history we have of psychotic and irrational wastage of natural resources, or the insane and ruthless extermination of multiple species throughout history – which makes the current semi-apologetic/apathetic model of habitat destruction and ecological rape look almost benign.
Forgive and forget. This is the historical precedent of a humble majority browbeaten and dominated by a vain, smug, dishonest, opulent, and brutal minority. In the era of super-yachts, economic segregation, and billion dollar political campaigns, it seems quaint to try and agitate for anything. Why try to better anyone's lot who isn't rich, when you'll just get called a loser lefty hippy idiot? In fact, it often seems quaint even to try, and what's more: even to think about it. Everyone seems to have given up, the '99%' narrative wasn't discredited but somehow lost its chutzpah, the corporations are winning (and always have been) and almost every government in the world is colluding with the winning team (when the winning team isn't one and the same with the government). Free market capitalism as state religion is beginning to face challenges, and it only had to almost destroy the global economy and gut quality-of-life in the West (after years of pillaging the world and brutalizing its less-fortunate denizens) to deserve anyone's ire who wasn't a 'leftist hippy' or 'anarchist'. No, I'm not going to forgive, and I'm damn well not going to forget the truth and live in the growing modern nightmare as an infantalized, indifferent and lobotomized consumer, voting with my waste and my expenditure metadata.
Distraction comes in many forms. The number one distraction (beyond simply 'the internet') is the game of politics, which has lately become so tribalistic and partisan that it is quite clearly all bullshit with no progress. Left vs. Right is a rigged game, because both Left and Right are equally worthless, equally bankrupt, equally spineless and equally attractive to anyone who still believes in the political spectrum and needs slogans to yell and tired irrational arguments to get into. Money speaks most eloquently and loudly, policy needs to listen to money, and economic considerations tend to trickle up. All the social progress in the world will be worth nothing when the current constructs come crashing down, and it's revealed, for the millionth time in history, that the majority are largely divided and disenfranchised, except as labor/voter/consumer. The Inquisition was less invasive (and only maybe bloodier) than the modern security state; at some point dissent will be less than a byline joke.
I remember the big whoop-up about welfare recipients getting drug tested in draconian U.S. states. Let me get this straight: the moralist-idiot crowd actually thinks giving ~$10,000 to a (most likely not) drug-addicted individual struggling with poverty is a big waste of their tax dollars? What of the trillions of dollars' worth of tax breaks, kick-backs, and incentives given to corporations that, when they get big enough, don't even bother to file taxes in your country? Of course, it's easier to put a face on a hypothetical drug addict gaming the system, and use that to distract people. Multinational vultures, ever ready to gouge the wealth out of anywhere, actively destroying economic resilience for profit, are less dangerous and less hated than the poor and powerless bogeyman who might smoke marijuana to deal with the crushing opprobrium of life, just like how middle class people 'used to' drink heavily to deal with their middling wealth and its attendant stresses.
Consumerism and capitalism are enemies of the people, just as destructive and dishonest as the communist systems they despise, or any of the systems of elitism and privilege they replaced and integrated. It always boils down to the fear of the mob, some kind of resultant waste of human potential in the name of expediency, long periods of stagnant lassitude marred by hysterical ideological conflicts, and increasing destruction of nature in the name of material progress (backed by a largely ignorant populace too well-off and self-centered to care). How is the modern system so very much different from feudalism (don't shit me about better standards of living... a healthy workforce is a productive and innovative workforce)? The ratios of wealth have shifted a bit, but the people at the top are still the lords and ladies, and the rest of us are rightfully doomed to opprobrium and struggle in the name of progress, or idle contentment if we manage to hack it. Some day soon the question of 'Progress, for whom?' will be asked more eloquently and by more people than it is right now, and a good answer will be the difference between 'the future' and 'business as usual'. All told, I'm not feeling too hopeful about it right now.
Revolutionary politics are rightfully derided, mostly because they are the domain of idealists and never ended happily for anyone not in a position to profit from them. What have they really done for the world? Well, arguably, they ended feudalism, empowered the working class, women, and minorities, and as an added bonus made overt hatred of others a bit less palatable (unless it's hatred on political, non-personal principles). Revolutions drove apart the citizens of the world, murdered millions of them, improved the lot of nationalists, made a lot of kleptocrats rich, and helped bolster the same systems they decried. Those systems could then point to the failure of revolution as evidence of the superiority of the status quo. There needs to be a new way forward, and it needs to have more vision than 'bigger numbers of money', which need to be gouged out of the world somehow. It can't be 'combating the enemies' narratives' because those narratives are premised on different realities, and experiences of inequality and oppression. It can't just be 'fuck the system', even though the system is wicked and cruel and not particularly honest. The old ways won't dig us out of the predicaments of our era, and their practitioners need to accept it and stand down or be revealed for the deluded shills and hucksters they are. This is no time to push our luck with magic cocaine economics or insane political nostrums: this is a time for consolidation – potentially it's our last chance to end the disparity between our technological progress and social/ethical stagnation, before the stakes get too high...
There need to be more losers in public office: some representation would be a healthy change. Losers aren't chained to ambition, are conditioned by their lives to be humble and accepting of their lot, and if their disinclination to serve the public can be curbed and their loyalty proven, they would be able to drive a good percentage of the careerist winners out of office and into the private sector where they belong. If they can be motivated to take office in the spirit of selflessness and resistance, it could be a change for the better. Losers have first-hand experience of suffering in the midst of wealth, they know the sufferings of the ignored classes, what it's like to feel powerless, and they've taken it on the nose without complaining for years... all so that a wildly dishonest narrative could spring up which explains their alienation from society as due to drug psychoses and mental illness (which are arguably prompted by the very social system which created losers) instead of self-perpetuating poverty. Life is more than a sport, and there is actually only one team, which makes the concept of winners and losers dishonest. Was the Golden Toad a born loser? Was the latest extincted species just taking things too seriously, too full of self-pity and loathing to thrive? Shall we return to the Victorian/Calvinist perception of the poor and disenfranchised as immoral, lazy, and undeserving?
Some people may drop out because of their principles. Many movements, some as old as the societies that birthed them, are made up of people who put their principles before their comfort. The loser/winner narrative didn't apply to Gandhi, unless you were an imperialist shit... all of which goes to say that there are examples of potential in all people, and the arbitrary (though perhaps logical) classification of a two-tier unofficial social system only serves to empower one at the cost of the other. I'd sooner be let down by a loser than raped by a winner, any day. The only way to prevent the drop-outs of society, to harness their potential and enable a better future, is to make meaningful self-adjustments, and for once ignore the parochial crowd wanting to compare a fair, well-ordered, secure society to the modern 'everyone's a winner' mentality for kid's sports. Those things are not equivalent, not even slightly, because there are actual stakes involved.
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