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One way to win is to stop “playing.”
You can still be in the game, and technically, the regulations allow you to stall, filibuster, or use the rules to maintain possession (of the ball) with immunity.
However, winning on a technicality is uninspiring. In the sense of fairness, it is always an asterisk of legality rather than achievement. A loophole of bureaucratic cleverness seldom inspires, which reduces victory until we bleed away what it means to have a hero.
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You must reiterate who you are to self-narrate what you will and will not tolerate.
These behavioral mantras, pronounced in public, exhibit:
1) our malleability to talk ourselves into being what we are naturally not
2) a fear of losing our “place” (which we have confused with ourselves).
Consider this: By intermittently (occasionally, randomly) repeating your frailty or anger, you manipulate others into not only paying attention but obsequiously submitting to your voice. This is attentional power. You are using their kindness/compassion/empathy to shore up your faltering sense of self.
You may consider your pronouncements as “standing your ground,” as a moment of strength when it is truthfully the opposite: a social ploy of “acting out.”
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When Deleuze and Guattari discuss deterritorialization, Mark Fisher notes that a new form of capital immediately reterritorializes any deterritorialized space.
Similarly, when a group attempts to reclaim colonial spaces (decolonization) to challenge systemic injustice, they often reproduce the very colonization tactics they oppose: new rules and regulations.
This creates an inherent hypocrisy: revolutionary tactics are absorbed by the entrenched system, rendering rebellion contradictory, foolish, and futile.
So what is the rebellion to do with their angst? An antagonism does exist but lacks a logical recourse to a non-contradictory outcome.
Ultimately, this points to the intended outcome—only by embracing illogic can one disrupt indoctrinated traps.
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Reading Foucault and Nietzsche convinces us that power relations and the “will to power” underlie all dynamics and institutions.
However, this revelation reduces everything to a single drive of importance, ignoring the traditional binary of secular/profane versus holy/sacred.
The acceptance of “power” instead of “sacred/profane” collapses the binary; it flattens humans back into utilitarian monsters, entirely secular.
More interestingly, to accept that there is an unattainable realm of ideals and hold them sacred creates a universal hypocrisy: we cannot achieve perfection and must remain humble and merciful given our failure to achieve the unattainable perfection. Yet, acceptance is not condoning.
Instead of limiting hypocrisy through attempting sacred alignment “power” sees hypocritical behavior as necessary and useful, valid as a stratagem. This denies justice and civility to reinstate “might is right.”
In this sense, power as priit macy only reverts humanity back to animality.
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Slavoj Zizek says that declaring “God is dead” leaves standing the edifice of religion, our ideological faith in divinity itself. Because even with God dead, the Christian God can be revived. (If we only kill the idea, we know that the concept survives to be resurrected. How do you kill the concept?)
Much more damming is to consider God is either evil or stupid. This means the route of destruction lies inside divinity, so the enactment of evil stupidity is immanent to the faith, bringing about its own corrosive implosion.
The way to undermine faith is not to kill it (drown, outlaw, or silence it) but to point out its fundamental contradictions that align with our cultural bias: We hate nothing more than stupidity and will even claim that the root of evil is idiocy.
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"There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled." ~ Martin Gurri
To extend: There are only two options today: a lying state working hard at the appearance of control, and an obviously lying state proudly out of control.
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When trying to make up for mistakes, we become vulnerable to new forms of manipulation. In looking for immediate solutions, we tend to choose flawed solutions that are easy to hand.
To releive tension between the faulty self and the our cultivated self-image we attempt to correct our error quickly, or if impossible to correct we mus tflee the old self and remake our self-image in a way that accounts for our past errors.
For example, recognizing our past anger or controlling behavior can make us overcompensate by becoming too lenient and allowing others to take advantage of us, declaring we deserve it or it is karma. Alternately, we may become too rigid (and brittle) in an attempt to regain control, isolating ourselves from that frivolous self. These repressions can be a means to punish the self, even creating opportunities for abuse from others, to attone for previous mistakes.
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We are witnessing a shift in political power. Sovereignty is moving away from traditional democratic systems and into the hands of a new elite, what might be called a "Humanitarian Party." This entity consists of "technical experts" and "moral authorities" from corporations, universities, media, and NGOs, who use their influence to reshape governance. (aka the "managerial elite.")
Their legitimacy is based on the idea that they protect vulnerable groups—racial and sexual minorities, the immunocompromised, and others—whom they elevate as mascots of social programs driven by compassion. While these programs claim moral high ground, they centralize power in the hands of technocrats and bureaucrats, eroding common sense and traditional practices.
As a result, the majority’s voice is increasingly sidelined in favor of the expert-driven rule, which expands managerial control and concentrates authority in a sprawling parastatal network.
Like any infestation that becomes destructively parasitic, this transformation risks undermining democratic accountability while advancing a biased vision of moral superiority, which disguises self-serving motivation, all confounded with technical and linguistic arcana.
from Matthew Crawford
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Our political regime is transforming, with decision-making authority shifting from a constitutionally based majority (democracy) to a coalition of technical and moral elites (managerial and clerical overseers.) These elites support a state-like entity that expands through the “woke” revolution and the encroachment of technical expertise into daily life.
Both movements (though seemingly unrelated) undermine traditional practices (meritocratic learning) and promote an anthropology of vulnerability (victimization mining). Thus, the oppressors and oppressed need help, justifying expanded managerial control and discrediting classic common sense. (i.e. You can’t manage yourself, what you know is wrong.)
Power in both movements is centralized in the Humanitarian Party, encompassing corporations, media, universities, and NGOs. This coalition champions protected classes, but is using them to advance social control and empower a new class of social managers and political opportunists. (The compassion may be authentic, but converting the clients of recognition into mascots repositions marginalized people as shields and prybars for unscrupulous both machinators and the well-intentioned.)
paraphrased from Matthew Crawford’s “Minoritarian Moralism“
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Today, we can see science sociologically: rather than its function of falsification to increase comprehension and extend knowledge, its "casue and effect" mode of inquiry has been reversed upon it.
The left insists you must "believe in science" with religious fervor lest you blaspheme, while the populist right over-indexes its fallibility in the face of corrupt practices and incentives. The most ironic for both sides is decrying science’s groupthink tendency.
Today, science is politically used as "authority," not a process. Much as having a prophet as a mouthpiece, science is used to legitimize transfer away from the democratic into the technocratic: that is, sovereignty is moved away from individual debate into managerial expertise and handling. To invoke almighty science is to proclaim "truth" but from an inaccessible language backed by powerful corporate and academic institutions. Increasingly, this authority extends into everyday life, the better to manage us: Believe or be purged. Submit or be declared an "anti-science" idiot.
idea from Matthew B. Crawford
