Risk and Extortion XXV: Red Pills and Blue Pills

The Cyber-Fossil-War-Machine (c) (CFWM) may provide an alternative explanation to why we find ourselves under the Rule of Kakistocracy. Of course, we may still analyse the ideological operations of the culture industry as modes of brain-washing and this may enable us to retain hope in elections, but if we are serious about thinking, we are obliged to consider the operations of Deflection, Distortion, Diffusion and Deception as processes of neurological alignment that are not obeying the political ideologues of the PMC, but are governed by forces that those ideologues do not understand themselves.

This calls for a closer look at “interpellation”. Those who believe that the Matrix is a film about “what is really going on” are like the prisoner in Plato’s cave you – by some magical force – is able to unchain himself. This magical force, a special gift, sets him apart from the rest of us. Plato’s hero thereby instantiates himself as a teacher. Philosophy becomes Education.

Those who believe that they are like Plato are interpellated by a magical force that tells them to become teachers: spread the good news, for example through the distribution of red pills and blue pills. The choice that is being offered is then between living a comfortable lie or an uncomfortable truth. This is the kind of “critique” that often resonates with right wing political ideologies. The problem of course is, that the good news (that there is a red pill) is also the bad news (an uncomfortable truth does not set you free, it only makes you anxious).

Plato, being way smarter than contemporary right wing ideologues , therefore did not stop with revealing an uncomfortable truth. He did not stop when the “deception” of the production of shadows and resonances was described; instead, Plato’s heroic subject continued, he went out of the cave and experienced an orgasmic aletheia. That this revelation of truth was due to the light (and energy) of the sun, is not a minor footnote. It tells us that Plato’s sense of truth requires an external source of light and energy, to which he remains indebted.

Let us return to the cave and think about the Matrix. Who is offering the red and blue pills? Where were they manufactured? Under whose authority are they being made and distributed? Is the idea of red pill versus blue pill generated by red pills or by blue pills? Why are there purple pills, or green pills or yellow pills or orange pills?  Who is tricking whom? Whose interests are served by offering only two pills?  At least Plato took us out of the cave, to show us something better than mere cynicism. All that the right-wing ideologues have to offer is self-gratification.

The masturbatory and sadistic mind-set of right-wing ideologues is not any better than the self-serving masochistic vanity of the PMC. They are sides of the same proverbial coin. Both operate with red and blue pills, but hide who is ordering their distribution. And this brings me to the central issue. If we want to understand Kakistocracy, we have to understand that it exists exactly because of the “both sides” of this proverbial coin. Neither of them are the authors of their scripts, because they are two falsehoods parading as a “debate”. Kakistocracy is not exclusively rooted in infantile religious nationalism, it is also rooted in the institutionalized corruption of self-valorizing ideological vanity of those who claim not to submit to religion or nationalism.

Instead of the ideology of this fake opposition, we must look at the CFWM for answers. What is this concern with ownership of territoriality of the estate about?  It is about access to resources and above all about galvanizing energy. What is important about access to energy sources, especially fossil fuels? The easier answer is to point to capitalism. Energy is required for economic growth. There is no limit to energy needs as there is no limit to economic growth. There is never enough wealth. But why is this so? Is it because of the “greed” of a few? Yes, we might learn a lot if we ask the question, what rich white men want? Indeed, they are never satisfied; their greed for wealth, power and (sexual) affirmation is boundless. However, is this a moral imposition that comes with being male, white and rich? Probably not. What if rich-white-mascunlinity is a merely conduit of something else? An anti-conatus? Entropy?

The CFWM is a force not of life but of death. It exploits dead life (fossil fuels) for the creation of a universe in which control (cyber) exceeds life. The entropic force of industrial capitalism accelerated with the digital revolution and the expansion of cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Whereas Marxism attunes us to the needs of capitalism for cheap energy, food, labour, raw materials and care, Virilio reminds us that this may itself be only in service of pure war: the expansion of the capacity to wage war and destroy one’s enemies. So in the end, the hunger for fossil fuel and rare minerals that seems to motivate the kakistocratic desires of rich, white men, may actually be generated by another matrix: pure war.

It is not a matter of who is right: Kakistocracy as fed by Capitalism’s Eros versus Kakistocracy as fed by the CFWM’s Thanatos. What is obvious is that whoever is using the other, they both need each other like red pills need blue pills and vice versa. Superficially speaking, one might consider this to be merely systemic conatus: the drive for self preservation has led to greed and destruction, but that would defy exactly that, which Spinoza has tried to show. Conatus is not individual self-preservation in some kind of zero-sum game. Instead, it is a force that understands preservation as completely relational. These relations may of course have different modalities from harmonization to usurpation, with entropy being the consequence of usurpation. Capitalism and the CFWM are both entropic forces, that together perform the libidinal self-annihilation that manifests itself today as kakistocracy.