Americanism

Lorikeet · January 31, 2024, 12:19pm

DiLorenzo:

Buckley successfully re-created the conservative movement in the 1950s by using his role as publisher of National Review to flush out many of the old, limited-government constitutionalists from the movement. In their place, Buckley promoted big government conservatives, known today as ‘neoconservatives.’ It turns out, however, that there’s nothing ‘neo’ about them: They’ve always been opposed to limited government, the defining characteristic of genuine old-fashioned conservativism.
Murray Rothbard expressed this in a January 25, 1952, article in The Commonweal magazine. He quoted Buckley, in his (Buckley’s) own words, as favoring

Buckley:

the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-communist foreign policy… we have got to accept Big Government for the duration [of the cold war]—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged… except through the instrumentality of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores (emphasis added).

We must all support, said Buckley, [i]‘large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards , and the attendant centralization of power in Washington…’ The founder of National Review was ‘a totalitarian socialist,’ Rothbard wrote, ‘and what is more admits it.’
What other label would one give an advocate of ‘totalitarian bureaucracy’ as his preferred form of government?
This is why Buckley personally repudiated Frank Meyer’s views on Lincoln, and why most conservatives have been Lincoln idolaters ever since. Lincoln’s dictatorial methods, and his creation of a consolidated, militaristic state, have long been the model for the American Right. When the cold war ended and there was no longer any need for a ‘totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores’ the conservative movement, which now calls itself the ‘neoconservative’ movement, declared that its new goal would be perpetual global warfare in the name of spreading democracy around the globe. Naturally, they constantly make use of the Lincoln legend in speeches and articles to attempt to ‘justify’ this quintessentially un-American policy. They are Lincolnite totalitarians.
[size=80][Lincoln Unmasked][/size]

Lorikeet · January 31, 2024, 12:25pm

Lorikeet · January 31, 2024, 1:03pm

Progress = revolt against natural order.
A movement towards divinity - a Jewish conception of Tikkun Olam.
The world must be “healed” from its multiplicity.
All will become uniform…expressing the divine in multiple divine ways.
All will become androgynous…sex being another expression of the singularly divine.

All biological identifiers reduced to consumer option.
All cultures reduced to menu options - fashion trends.

Lorikeet · February 3, 2024, 9:04pm

obsrvr524 · February 4, 2024, 1:25am

Useful idiots and ignorants – for awhile.

Lorikeet · February 4, 2024, 4:35pm

Lorikeet · February 5, 2024, 11:57am

Le Bon:

The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who the author of the repeated assertion is, and we finish by believing it.
To this circumstance is due the astonishing power of advertisements. When we have read a hundred, a thousand, times that X’s chocolate is the best, we imagine we have heard it said in many quarters, and we end by acquiring the certitude that such is the fact. When we have read a thousand times that Y’s flour has cured the most illustrious persons of the most obstinate maladies, we are tempted at last to try it when suffering from an illness of a similar kind. If we always read in the same papers that A is an arrant scamp and B a most honest man we finish by being convinced that this is the truth, unless, indeed, we are given to reading another paper of the contrary opinion, in which the two qualifications are reversed. Affirmation and repetition are alone powerful enough to combat each other.

Lorikeet · February 5, 2024, 12:27pm

“Manufacturing Consent” only makes the idea of manufacturing wants, in relation to organic needs/desires, a matter of subtle contextual modifications. Primal impulses can be synthesized and given direction, obscuring distinctions between their natural and their artificial origins.

Lorikeet · February 5, 2024, 7:51pm

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V16LTPe6a_o[/youtube]

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 11:36am

With no tangible standard to evaluate goods & services money becomes entirely abstract. Everything can now be purchased using money; everything, including love, respect, and truth, can be given a value founded on collective judgements expressed through purchasing choices.
Money is the representation of these collective judgements and choices: the accumulation of quantities determining an evaluation of qualities.

Seaford:

Stripped of all personal association, money is promiscuous, capable of being exchanged with anybody for anything, indifferent to all non-monetary interpersonal relationships.
Money (especially as coinage) tends to promote an indefinite network of indiscriminate exchange that transcends the defined personal relations to be found within family, within various social groupings, or within networks of gift-giving and barter. Whereas the Homeric gift is invested with the personality of its heroic donor, the only kind of person that money resembles is the prostitute. For Shakespeare it is ‘the common whore of mankind.’ The prostitute, like money, is impersonally promiscuous, transcending the restricted sexual relations required for the reproduction of the household. Further, she also actually exchanges her services for money – in an exchange that is therefore uniquely symmetrical in that both its elements (coitus and money) are impersonally promiscuous. And yet one of them, coitus, is otherwise generally accompanied by a restrictive personal claim, whether that claim arises out of emotional attachment or the institution of marriage (or both). Commercial prostitution is therefore an extreme case of the homogenisation and depersonalisation (rather than just the homogeneity and impersonality) characteristic of money. It may also have been actually facilitated by the advent of money. The greater ease of exchange and of storing wealth that came with precious metal money may have freed some prostitutes from dependence on the protection provided by specific males.
[size=80][Money and the Early Greek Mind][/size]

The two methods of human coercion, force and seduction, are amalgamated into the third, bribery, accentuating the power of both.

Spiritual traditional values are reduced to monetary market values, and quality is measured by quantity, obscuring their distinctiveness.

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 11:39am

The power of money is rooted in its potential to symbolically detach, before it seduces the mind back to attachments. Once it has been adopted as an agreed upon measure of exchange the participants can be comforted by its ability to correct (heal) personal failings, through its acquisition and hoarding – tangible evidence of a man’s piety and commitment to his lords and masters; evidence of his unwavering faith.
To acquire it the individual must enslave himself to a ritualized way of life – monistic in its stringent regimentations and sacrificial demands. Those who will be saved by its divine intervention are only those who sufficiently prove their devotion in the agora of human intersubjective exchanges.

As with all forms of semiotics, i.e., art, a projection of internal abstractions outward, extending individual will into space/time. Money is the tangible representation – abstract art form – of mathematical binaries projecting forth an individual’s aggregate energies – exposing through the gratification of his need/desire – his purchasing patterns – his true essence.

Through the act of monetary exchange an individual acquires self-knowledge concerning his/her social status, i.e., market value.
The collective expresses its appreciation through a sacrificial offering, and the recipient shapes his principles to accommodate their needs/desires.
Collective evaluations become individual values, and individual values determine collective evaluations; popularity and mass appeal become god’s approving grace; humanity is god and god is humanity, i.e., herd spirituality.

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 11:57am

The marketing fabrications, called swaps, are noetic constructs with no reference outside human brains, like the words some pseudo-philosophers use to disconnect their intellectualized musings from any phenomenal references, so as to obscure their meaning; cutting them up into manageable pieces, selling them to ignoramuses the world over.

Goux:

Gide’s The Counterfeiters (as will by now have become clear) seems to be a particularly fertile field for the application and verification of this complex set of homologies.
Gide’s novel provides the fiction of this theoretical numismatics. Its radical subject is the historical crisis of the general equivalent form that is, the crisis of the dominant value-form of the bourgeois world. The theoretical interest that the novel holds for the present purposes of analysis is evident even if, on other counts, this work of fiction is not entirely satisfying as to the æsthetic doctrine that it promulgates.
By building the novel, starting with its very title, on the monetary metaphor, and by subordinating to this metaphor all questions of ‘values’ and of ‘meaning’ (values now revealed to be false), Gide explores the homology that exists among all the registers of the general equivalent. Above all, it is the homology between money and language as befits a reflexive literary fiction that constitutes the metaphor’s most substantial core.
I have already emphasized this homologous pair, and I shall return to it. But these are not the only registers of the general equivalent that Gide invokes. By tracing certain other thematic threads woven throughout the warp and woof of the text, I shall now demonstrate that the other registers analyzed in ‘Numismatics’ are not absent, and that they are caught up in the same critical junction as language and money. For if the truth of language is contested along with the truth of gold, the truth of the father is also challenged.
Counterfeiting is also, and emphatically even first of all the demonetization of the value of paternity.
Fathers are not absent from Gide’s novel; quite the contrary, they are all over the place. But they have lost their legitimacy. The signs of paternity have been divorced from the being of the father.
The signifiers produced by fathers no longer refer to a Truth that, going beyond their appearance as signs, constitutes their transcendental guarantee. Such is Gide’s suspicion. It is not difficult to see this suspicion as corresponding closely to a certain crisis of linguistic and monetary legitimacy.
Language, money, father: simultaneously metaphorizing each other in reciprocal homological interplay, their fundamental crisis the crisis of a historical form of value is exposed. Monetary falseness confers a title upon the crisis of the dominant value-form, a crisis that affects language and the father as well.
[size=80][The Coiners of Language][/size]

Counterfeiters, are the new priestly class; shamans of shame. They replicate the original, modifying it ever so slightly, because a perfect copy always fails to totally convince. The counterfeit nomisma is worthless; founded on a ‘breaking of trust’ that cannot be returned to, having lost relevance, outside newfound abstracted relationships and their necessary reciprocal exchanges. [size=50][ Doc: The Coiners of Language][/size]
The counterfeiter stamps an image of some authority, some impressive icon, to legitimize his forgery, and those who cannot discern the difference are the first to buy the valueless copy.
Gold cannot be counterfeited, money can, and when disconnected from its gold/silver restrictions it can be printed, and continuously recycled, producing artificial surplus wealth – decadently overflowing full of unrealizable power – with no tangible resources backing it up. The stuff of “magic.”
What is true of money is true of all modern semiotics dominated by an infectious parasitical nihilism (usury).

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 12:05pm

What Jew would risk exposing the source of his magical powers?

Goux:

This ‘degradation’ could not find any better expression than Gide’s invention, which makes crystal the substance of a circulating currency. The eternal crystal of a thought that is faithful to the Archetype of things enters the language market, like ordinary money in everyday exchange. It would seem that here, in a nutshell, is a major evolution in Western thought.
According to an aphorism of Heidegger’s, Being is degraded to value. Let us say, in other words, that archetypal meaning ‘degenerates’ into conceptual meaning; in the movement of substitutions and exchange, logos becomes logic, the ‘money of the mind.’
Archetypal value descends into the market, participates in vulgar transactions, and thus, faded and worn through use, loses its sacred numen. The standard is no longer what measures, from its transcendent site, the meaning and value of signs and things that are compared and exchanged; rather, it enters into trade itself.
It moves from the sacred transcendental function of Measure (ideality) to the profane function in which it can gradually be replaced by simple signs of itself (pure symbolicity). As a result, inexorably, the ‘tokenization’ of the general equivalent stems from the very logic of intensified circulation, through the play of successive substitutions, with infinite displacements and delays.”
[size=80][The Coiners of Language][/size]

The reduction of phenomena to noumena; real to ideal; the tangible to the abstract, is a degradation of language as the mode of modern human intercourse.

Goux:

The history of value in the West is the inexorable shift from Archetypes to tokens, a shift that some, in language of a very different extraction from my own, would call a degradation, or even nihilism. The ‘history of metaphysics’ is the monetary history of the economy, the evolution of what used to be a divine, numinous standard, situated above exchange the inestimable source of what is valued into another value on the exchange mart.
In the token system, the advanced stage of the reign of general equivalence, the dimension of the archetypal measure soon becomes the most neglected dimension of all, the one most excluded by the very logic of signifying metabolisms. The numen has become idea, idea has become concept, and the concept itself is no longer signification but merely a pure value in the ‘arbitrary and differential’ system of the play of signifiers.
Gide’s fiction appears at a moment in the history of exchanges when the universal equivalent, shaken in its capacity as archetype of the One (the axis aligning Father, Gold, Language, and Phallus), begins to lose credibility in its role as the Representative, as a result of its progressive demotion from this function to that of a token, a mere signifying element whose convertibility is suspended, hypothetical.
Fiction, while trying to sustain a dimension of ideality in language (through reference to the archetype) imperceptibly moves this ideality toward a pure intellectual construction. The poem, adequate to the Idea, becomes the more prosaic novel of ideas. Pure crystal, which first (in the work of the young Gide) signified fidelity to the archetype, becomes in The Counterfeiters rather the crystal of understanding of which Hegel speaks – or even the ‘artificially composed’ core – that is the invisible substructure of every work of fiction, however splendidly gilded and inspired it may be.
In sum, Gide takes the position that the gold coin is no longer credible (its guarantees have crumbled), and that the task at hand is to seek a new ideality in the register of constructive abstraction (the crystal).
Here Gide foreshadows the crisis of an era in which structure tries to make up for the central collapse of all standard values. It was to take half a century for this aesthetic, philosophical, and epistemological configuration to realize its full scope.
[size=80][The Coiners of Language][/size]

Welcome to the Desert of the Real – a dystopic nihilistic world where words no longer refer to tangible, experienced phenomena but to noetic construct that can only be-come tangible as ‘tokens of exchange’ – artifices of human creation.
Money is the language of market intercourse, losing substantiality so that what is being exchanged are ideas/ideals with no empirical referents.

Goux:

Thus the formal crystal is both the inevitable result of a world that, having put into circulation tokens with no backing, has lost its authenticity, and already an attempt to replace this total devaluation of pure currency (economic and linguistic alike) with a structure capable of resisting erosion by wear and tear, an a priori construction capable of standing up to the non-sense of a representation that has become deceptive.
Formalism, structuralism, and abstraction are all effects of the loss of credibility of all representation, and at the same time they are attempts to counter the devaluation and discreditation of profoundly experienced meaning with the eternity and solidity of a geometry of the intellect.
Through its structural a prioris, the crystal of form attempts to regain the site of Ideas, but it can be no more than a rationalistic construction in the cultural milieu where capitalism and Protestantism have established the reign of the iconoclastic concept.
[size=80][The Coiners of Language][/size]

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 12:12pm

Value in utility, and value as symbolic representation – insinuated utility; vanity, and man trying to associate with rare materials, symbolizing his own uniqueness, becomes fashionable fetishism.
Man adorns himself with symbols of the rare, trying to raise evaluations of him in the eyes of those who accept the symbolism as a real representation.
Symbol becomes the correcting/healing representation, compensating for the wrongs man endures by existing. Representation acquires a value in itself: Platonic idealism meets Judeo-Christian nihilism.
The absence of an absolute is corrected by the representation; absence of quality buried within quantities alluding to value that need not be appraised but taken for granted. Accessibility lends itself to the concept of ‘world rupturing’ mass salvation – money reflecting paradise lost; the one-god is reborn as purified icon/idol, as a currency of exchange.

Markets ruled by psychology, not by reason. What is increasingly being exchanged are trinkets, accentuating an impoverished spirituality; ‘token’ of unattainable promise – trust is lost because the product/service cannot deliver a metaphysical alternative to the physical.

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 12:17pm

Hawkes:

Smith:

But value is not commonly estimated by labour, because labour is difficult to measure, and commodities are more frequently exchanged for other commodities, especially money, which is therefore most frequently used in estimating value.
[size=80][34–5][/size]

The illusion that money literally is value thus quickly takes hold among the populace. This is a false, or ideological, consciousness brought about by empiricist habits of thought:

Smith:

The greater part of the people to understand better what is meant by a quantity of a particular commodity, than by a quantity of labour. The one is a plain palpable object; the other an abstract notion, which, though it can be made sufficiently intelligible, is not altogether so natural and obvious.
[size=80][35][/size]

Smith thus sees a systematic disjunction between appearance and reality as an inevitable consequence of a market economy. ‘Labour,’ he repeatedly stresses,

Smith:

is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is their nominal price only
[size=80][36–7][/size].

According to this criterion, it would seem that in our society the nominal has replaced the real. This is what postmodernists mean when they claim to be living in a ‘hyper-reality.’

Once the word ‘value’ has been ripped from its association with utility, stripped of its real-world referents and converted to abstract symbols, liberating it from space/time restrictions – representing a diversity of nominal abstractions – the next step is to take it further, viz., converting it to an ontology in itself, is almost inevitable.
The noumenon simply alludes to the phenomenon if it remains representational, but if taken literally it can be used to negate the apparent world through the sheer psychological force of its positive malleability.
An activity requiring commitment, and a cost (labour/work), with uncertain rewards is expected to produce risks, whereas a representation freed from physical labour and time commitments becomes a matter of attitude and taste. Money purchases the right to believe in whatever fabrications you prefer, only abiding by market dynamics that preserve this as an innate part of its supply/demand balances. Money is the ideal representation of value – the ideal made tangible.

The iconography of money, its performative value is the result of an unspoken intersubjective agreement. Money, on its own, has no value, or value equal only to the material it is printed upon. The symbol is the value giver, and the symbol is magical. It can make others perform, heal natural injustices, convince the most sceptical mind, correct the determinations of centuries – it brings to bear the entire power of collective energies.

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 12:21pm

Sloterdijk:

If buying, selling, renting, letting, borrowing and lending are operations that affect all aspects of life in the Great Installation, it is inevitable that the accessibility of things through monetary mediation will produce a corresponding world feeling. First of all, one experiences an immeasurable increase in accessible objects, and last of all, the convergence of the world interior and the spending power space – with consequences for the status of the devices surrounding us on a daily basis. As soon as many previously non-purchasable things are pulled over to the buyable side, and some un-availabilities suddenly appear available and reversible, one feels forced towards the culture-critical exaggeration that all conventional values are subject to revaluation and devaluation. One should make it clear, however, that expanded commodity traffic does not automatically imply universal corruption: anyone who uses money to gain access to commodities, information and people substitutes irrevocable operations for lasting belonging.
After the shift towards monetarily determined conditions, access came about far more readily through acts of self-purchase and by following offers or open addresses. Today one expects the successful to be capable of putting their allegiances in the background. The subject of ‘belonging’ is primarily brought up when individuals and groups feel excluded from financial advantages, and therefore seek recourse to an advantage of identity that can be had for free – being German, being Basque, being Serbian, or similar plumes that can be worn at no cost. Belonging, Zugehörigkeit, appartenance – words like these have good chances of becoming the losers’ catchwords of the twenty-first century. Needless to say, it is not least this that makes them some of the most interesting terms of the future. The psychosocial hallmark of successful groups in the world interior of capital lies in the adjustment from allegiances to options. This reform in the ontological status of things and people finds its cognitive expression in constructivism. One must constantly show one’s awareness that whatever is presented as found is inevitably made. For any given thing or semblance of nature, brief instruction is sufficient to reveal its ‘construction’, ‘invention’ and ‘politics.’ This dismantling of the ‘natural’ has inescapable consequences for human self-relationships – which is why fixed identities do not receive a favourable prognosis in the constructivist climate. Only losers still require fixed natures. This does not, however, mean that we can stop saying where we come from and how we situate ourselves within a larger framework.
One can now understand why the way of life that weakens allegiances and reinforces options leads to a psycho-political rearrangement of clientele in the comfort spheres of the Western and Westernized world – extending to the post-monotheistic remodelling of religious sentiment. Let it be noted: the Christianity of today is part-time monotheism, and the same applies to Judaism and Islam – even though these stagnating religions, which are forced to fall back on self-regulation and the cultivation of traditions, also have pronounced fundamentalist elements whose spokesmen, usually professional believers, like to pretend that God still has a use for the whole human being. In truth, money has long since proved itself as an operatively successful alternative to God. This affects the overall context of things today more than a Creator of Heaven and Earth ever could. The most important metamorphosis of the modern psyche concerns the approval of egotism, which had been subject to an unshakeable ban during the entire age of lack and its holistic compensations. It was Nietzsche, the prophet of world-breaking, who gave the decisive response to this with his neo-Cynical doctrine of the revaluation of all values.
The revaluation applies primarily to the self-referentiality of human nature, the ‘curvature into oneself’ which had to be condemned as a betrayal of the Lord, the collective and the order of things during the era of agro-imperial morality and metaphysics. Since the citizens of modern, prosperous states began to understand themselves as voters and free money-users rather than minions, the duty to participate in the ‘whole’ of altruism for the sake of the Lord and divine norms has shifted towards an openness to commodities and public issues – with the inevitable side effect that a tendency to take oneself seriously as customers, opinion-owners and carriers of personal qualities has spread among the ‘subjects.’ This was registered first by the moral-critical authors from the eighteenth century onwards who discovered amour-propre and Vanity Fair as topics for endless commentary. The rich phenomenology of egotism in all social strata prepared for its moral neutralization. The analytical content of this literature led into Nietzsche’s Gay Science, while its human-shaping surpluses contributed to demands for the Übermensch, whose modern equivalent is the cosmopolitan consumer. In addition, what spirals out of control in the capitalist world interior is the inclination towards an end use devoid of ulterior motives; in the first uproar a hundred years ago, this had been termed ‘nihilism.’ The name expresses the observation that consumption and disrespect are adjacent phenomena. And indeed, the consumerist metamorphosis of the ‘subject’ did create an awareness of the right to destroy the objects of consumption. The model for the revaluation of all values is the organic metabolism. In so far as all that is the case is defined by its absorption through the consumer, waste becomes the universal ‘result of life in all classes’ – in the words of Rameau’s nephew, the forefather of neo-Cynicism.
In this framework, revaluation always amounts to devaluation. The same trend releases vague pantheistic and polytheistic forms of experience, as the global system favours persons without overly fixed qualities – and how could it be otherwise, when the task of the individual in the capital universe is to become involved in ever more numerous commodity offers, ever more diverse role play, ever more invasive advertising and ever more arbitrary art environments. The life of the market erodes convictions, monisms and forms of rugged primalness, replacing them with the awareness that possible choices and side exits are available at all times. The consequence is that the persons become paler and the objects more colourful; but it is the colourless who are called upon to choose between the colourfulnesses. To be sovereign is to decide the colour of the season. The discourse on the ‘flexibilized human being’ laments these facts, while that on the ‘new age’ and ‘net age’ beamingly acknowledges them.
Tomorrow’s ideal possessor of spending power would be the anti-Bartleby: the person whose training with long lists of options had taught them to respond to most suggestions with a ‘Why not?’ They would be the habilitated consumer. They could, to adapt the words of another of Melville’s figures quoted above, declare: ‘The global market was my Yale College and my Harvard.’
[size=80][The World Interior of Capital][/size]

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 12:28pm

A little symbolic piece of reality. Men gather it to feel substantial when the world tells them otherwise.

Hawkes:

Marc Shell has pointed out that part two of Goethe’s drama recapitulates the action of part one on the scale of the state rather than that of the soul.
This transition in scope also involves a step forward in history, for the role played by magic in the first part is occupied by money in the second.
What magic is to Faust the individual, money is to Faustian society.
Unlike modern economists, Goethe was not naive enough to imagine that the ‘economy’ constitutes a distinct arena of human experience; he recognized that a change in the mode of financial representation was part of a change in the role of signification in general.
Like Socrates, he often connects the quantitative, financial mode of value with the empty words of sophistical rhetoric, observing that ‘whether mathematics counts pennies or guineas, whether rhetoric defends truth or falsehood, is of no concern whatever to either.’

A transition from magical thinking to financial thinking; the magic being the detachment of words from their worldly referents; detaching noumena from phenomena.
The word/symbol has the power to transform reality on its own.

Hawkes:

This aspect of Goethe’s play has been explored in depth by Hans-Christophe Binswanger, who points out that interest-bearing capital is a continuation of alchemy by other means:

. . . the attempts to produce artificial gold were abandoned not because they were futile, but because alchemy in another form has proved so successful that the arduous production of gold in the laboratory is no longer necessary. It is not vital to alchemy’s aim, in the sense of increasing wealth, that lead be actually transmuted into gold.
It will suffice if a substance of no value is transformed into one of value: paper, for example, into money. We can interpret the economic process as alchemy if it is possible to arrive at money without having earned it through corresponding effort.

… in other words, if a genuine value creation is possible which is not bound by any limits and is therefore, in this sense, sorcery or magic.

“Magic” referring to the psychosomatic effect of semiotics that can convert dust to gold in the heart and minds of the mesmerised; a semiotic spell.

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 12:34pm

A symbol referring to nothing is but an artifice, i.e., noumenon with no connection to an experienced phenomenal world, is nothing but a promise dependent on trust. Institutional guarantees only ensure that this trust will never be broken.
The field is opened to grifters, and charlatans, manipulating trust.

Hawkes:

Money, in short, is the power that transforms human beings into objects: death. As Marx puts it:
[quote=“Marx” The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities—the divine power of money—lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind. That which I am unable to do as a man, and of which therefore all my individual essential powers are incapable, I am able to do by means of money.

Marx:

Money thus turns each of these powers into something which in itself it is not—turns it, that is, into its contrary.
[size=80][3.312][/size]

According to Marx, the effect of money on the natural, physical world is precisely magical: it overrides the laws of nature and abolishes the distinction between fantasy and reality:

Marx:

If I long for a particular dish or want to take the mail-coach because I am not strong enough to go by foot, money fetches me the dish and the mail-coach: that is, it converts my wishes from something in the realm of imagination, translates them from their meditated, imagined or desired existence into their sensuous, actual existence—from imagination to life, from imagined being into real being. In effecting this mediation, (money) is the truly creative power. (ibid.)”

Not only money – language of market exchange, intercourse – but all modern symbols/words – language of daily exchange, intercourse – e.g., number, letters placed in sequential patterns, i.e., codes, representing particular abstractions, have lost their meaning, i.e., their real-world references.

Masturbatory solipsism and the comforting pseudo-liberation from a world that remains indifferent to human contrivances.

Lorikeet · February 6, 2024, 3:10pm

[url=https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1754629262391321031]The movie Idiocracy was way too optimistic. It predicted that the world would get this crass and stupid in 500 years. But we’re already here.

Ice Spice performs “Think U The Sh*t (Fart)” for the first time at Spotify’s Best New Artist event.[/url]

Lorikeet · February 7, 2024, 10:53pm

Remember…
Tribalism bad…except Jewish tribes.
Biodiversity bd…except superficial consumer diversity.