U.S. Midterm Election Day, and Other Irrelevancies
Over the next forty-eight hours, the United States Federal Government is either going to become substantially dumber and more unhinged from reality, or substantially more Marxist and inclined towards the coercive silencing of all alternative thoughts or ways of living. In either case, however, the U.S. is about to become more overtly authoritarian (which is saying quite a lot given the recent trajectory), since the critical mass of the younger generation within the establishments of both major parties is utterly hostile to the Constitution, to the principle of limited government, to freedom of speech, and in the end to anything that the crowd, which is to say their side of the crowd, is collectively shouting for today.
Russell Brand is a moderately clever comedian, a degraded and faint hippie-guru echo of Britain’s golden era of comedy, the 1960s and ’70s. Recently, he has found greater fame and of course greater profit as an alternative media pontificator, one who has positioned himself politically roughly as Elon Musk has done, i.e., as an anti-establishmentarian without portfolio who can therefore play on the fringes of both political extremes and hence maintain a large audience of fans or idol-worshippers who are able, through the convenient vectors of willful blindness, to convince themselves that he is on their side. In many ways he resembles Jordan Peterson, except that they came to their dangerous fame as political-entertainers-for-profit from opposite directions: Peterson from earnest intellectualism down to popular salesmanship, Brand from popular celebrity up to spokesman-for-the-people pseudo-intellectualism.
Today, my YouTube algorithm, which likes to think for me so that I don’t have to, recommends that I watch Brand’s latest political commentary, consisting of a sympathetic interview presenting “the truth” about the war in Ukraine as framed by Jeffrey Sachs, whom I have recently, and with admirable restraint if I may say so, dubbed “Columbia University’s occupant of the prestigious Mao Tse-tung Chair of Anti-West Propaganda.” Since Brand is a self-absorbed publicity hound rather than a serious social thinker of any kind, and therefore simply flattered that such an eminent academic figure would appear on his podcast (or whatever it is), he is oblivious to the fact that the only proper way to listen to or read Professor Sachs’ opinion on any topic is to ask yourself why the Chinese Communist Party would favor this view. Needless to say, I will not watch the recommended video. I already know what Sachs will say, and more importantly why he will say it.
So thoroughly sucked into the moral vacuum of celebrity champions and populist profiteers, the peoples of the advanced world have truly embodied at last the once-fallacious Marxist premise of treating a billion individual human beings as the masses for all practical political purposes. Such, indeed, is the current state of popular “discussion” (aka chanting) and “thought” (aka anger), that one may search far and wide throughout our new world order, which is to say virtual reality, and find nary an individual in the heap.
