In a sense, the intellectuals of the West live in the shadow of Marx, or possibly a hangover from Marx drinking booze he didn’t pay for (being a big bourgeois bastard). Indeed, when Lyotard talked about the fall of the grand narrative of emancipation, he was most obviously talking about Marxism, but I think he was also talking about Liberalism, in both the social democrat and conservative sense of the word. Indeed, I think he was talking about the whole politics of freedom, whereby society is a means to the end that is increased liberty for its citizens. And for what it’s worth, I don’t see people as being any more free now than they were a century ago, except in some limited examples which are countered by others.
The current account for the narrative of emancipation is at best breaking even.
And yet, despite this failure being recognised, we still maintain the rhetoric of the politics of freedom. Why?
I read a lot of somewhat odd websites, what are by the mainstream press termed ‘conspiracy theories’, but of course conspiracies are at the heart of normal life, particularly in politics, so this name doesn’t mean an awful lot. One thing I notice all too frequently is that the solution many of these sites offer is some or other notion of individual freedom. If only we could all be a bit more individual and free then we wouldn’t get suckered in by the shadowy elite, that sort of thing.
Personally, I think that’s a crock of shit, and simply a repetition of the same propaganda being sold to us by the shadowy elite many of these sites claim to oppose. The same is true of many popular protest/activism movements. But why? Why would a shadowy elite want to convince us of a philosophy of individual freedom? You might think it contradictory, or counterproductive. Indeed, as the saying goes, that’s what they want you to think. Ultimately, it works in their favour, and here’s how.
There are two key prongs to this philosophy, as far as I understand it. The first is a quasi-Hegelian confidence trick. If people believe they are all free individuals then they’ll become preoccupied with proving that, i.e. they will differ in arbitrary ways from even their closest and dearest, just to prove the point. I am free because I don’t listen to the same music as you. While this is, by itself, nothing new or particularly dangerous, one result on a large scale is the prevention from any unified human force challenging the authority of the state (and beyond the state, corporations, international government and so forth). This utterly works in the favour of the powerful. The Hegelian aspect is that this also primes people for conflict, as it is built into their very self-identification from the off. The elite needs conflict, so they can bring about the changes they desire. This is covered in some detail by historian Anthony C Sutton in his Introduction to The Order, a book about the Yale secret society, which brings me onto the other prong - the denial of conspiratorial history.
Any decent reader can find that modern conspiracy theories aren’t particularly outlandish given the historical examples we have on record. Many say 9/11 couldn’t have been an inside job, for example, because it couldn’t have been kept quiet. Well, even if we put to one side the various whistleblowers and leaks that are part of the public record, NATO was running an international terrorist network across Western Europe for four decades during the Cold War, and successfully kept it quiet. Like I say, history is full of this stuff. But they’d rather you didn’t realise this, they’d rather than whatever ‘facts’ you have about the history of human activity that you conceive of them as being the essentially abritrary actions of individuals, rather than the collective actions of a conspiratorial elite. Just to take one example - the current presidents grandfather, Prescott Bush, joined the Yale society in I think 1917, though I may be a year or two out on that date. Over the following couple of decades his primary acehivement was to lend money to and launder money for one Adolf Hitler. Hitler according to the official history (partly funded by the Rockefeller foundation) was a crazed fascist/socialist who hated Jews. Yet he worked with Jewish capitalists to further his ambitions.
One might interpret this as ‘just what self-interested people will do’. Or you might interpret it as ‘conspiratorial activity by an elite’. It depends, in part, on whether you buy the idea that humans are free individuals.