The Rhetoric of the Damned: Will Most of Us Die as Losers?

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.