When Thinking Changes Nothing
“The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.” — Guy Debord The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
Introduction
There is a specter that haunts our world. It hovers over the deep like an invisible hand. It sets limits invisibly. It hovers, wantonly, watching, waiting. It is patient; a phenomenon few if any see. And those who perceive it, perhaps accidentally, turn their gaze quickly away in existential horror. This ghost is protected and feeds off of fear; indeed fear feeds and unfolds this ghost increasing its power until all are blind, forever. Darkness. This ghost is the resurrection of ignorance — a celebration of stupidity so loud that intelligence itself is mute: the moorless dumb.
Lately, this ghost has grown in power– it has become a god; literally the unthinkable divine. It is the materialization deifying the neo-liberal order. This enforcer god pounces like the gestapo on its enemy: difference, singularity, and, above all freedom. And the genius is its power is rendered not by and through itself (it is an inherently impotent force), but through the undead brains and bodies that obey and worship it. The very meaning of words like, “think” “reflect” “assess” have been inverted so the Enforcer Spirit can be worshipped with ease. The god of unthinking, the unthinking god.
A man says, “I don’t trust authority. I think for myself.” So he turns on the news — just to see what he thinks. Then he checks his phone — to make sure his thoughts are up to date. He scrolls his social feed — to confirm his independence is kosher. Relieved, he discovers that his opinions align perfectly with the headlines, the algorithm, and moral consensus of the hour. Satisfied that no one told him what to think, he repeats it — loudly– I am a free thinking man.
The ghost unthinking god is not an evolutionary accident. It materialized in history: birthed within the context of authoritarianism. And once the authoritarian monster erupts in history it cannot be fully destroyed as Albert Camus nicely put it in the concluding paragraph of his novel, The Plague.
“And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperilled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the band and the enlightening of men, it roused up its rats again and sent them forth to die in a happy city.”
The undead monster is a trend: as the ignorant internalized obedience as morality. “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people’” (Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
In the midst of the first fascist regime in history, the resister-cum-educator, Antonio Gramsci was persecuted and imprisoned in Turi, Italy. In his cell, in 1930-31 he wrote the oft cited quotation, “The old world is dying, the new world cannot be born, and in the meanwhile a great variety of morbid symptoms appear — now is the time of monsters” (Prison Notebooks – Notebook 3 sec. 34). Gramsci’s morbid symptoms, the so-called “monsters” were of course authoritarianism, fascism, Mussolini.
Over the next year, this blog will identify, characterize, and describe the emergence of this unthinking god that not only erases critical thinking, philosophy, and education, but threatens the very foundations of life itself lived out in everyday life. This is the story of the death of philosophy and an act of resistance that is at the same time, the construction of creating a countervailing space in which thought and philosophy itself is reborn. This is not utopianism but a sheer act of survival.
Context — The birth of monsters
The old European order–still shaped by aristocratic empires– collapsed catastrophically in the First World War (1914-1918), a conflict rooted not only in dynastic rivalries but in imperial competition, nationalisms, and industrialized warfare. In the Great War’s wake, profound power vacuums emerged. Many European states proved unable to consolidate democratic institutions capable of protecting citizens admit economic collapse, social upheaval, and elite resistance. In Italy, the crisis was exploited by Mussolini, whose fascism emerged out of a break with socialism and fused nationalism, with authoritarian rule. Crucially, fascism was not only a mass movement but was actively financed and supported by industrialists, landowners, and business capitalist elites who viewed it as a bulwark against labor movements, socialism, and democratic redistribution. Germany followed a similar trajectory in the late 1920s and early 1930s as the Weimar Republic and as major industrial and financial interests increasingly backed National Socialism to restore order and protect their capital interests disintegrated under economic and political pressure. Spain’s Second Republic attempted a democratic transformation but was destroyed in the Civil War (1936-1939), culminating in the dictatorship of General Franco, whose victory likewise depended on elite support and foreign fascist like Italy and Germany and by business class interests and interventions.
France’s parliamentary republic survived the post war epoch without capitulating to the business class and thus falling into the monster of fascism, but it crucially failed to produce a robust new order. The victory of Britain was at the same time the start of the end of their colonial empire. Britain didn’t panic and run for a “strong-man” but reformed from within– the labor party emerged as the liberal party dissolved.
Russia on the other hand emerged from World War I not as a weakened state but as a collapsed one altogether. The military was defeated, the economy barely existed, and the loss of imperial authority produced revolution rather than reform. Between 1917 and the early 1920s, the old order was destroyed through revolution and civil war, giving rise to an absolute centralization — a one-party state held together through coercion, consolidation, and the suppression of political pluralism. Another monster alighted – the flipside of fascism.
All of these factors gave rise to resolving differences again just a generation later: World War 2. Monsters were everywhere including the Japanese empire.
What World War II revealed above all was the strength and the limits of a liberal democratic republic: Fascism was defeated not by democratic republics alone, but by a coalition that included the Soviet Union’s enormous military and human sacrifice. In the United States, the postwar settlement transformed that victory into sustained economic growth and an unprecedented expansion of higher education through the GI Bill, integrating universities into the project of democracy itself. For the first time, those drawn from the working and poor classes who sacrificed the most in the war, were able to enter universities as a matter of public policy rather than privilege. So, rather than responding to the crisis through authoritarian consolidation, the United States predicated on Roosevelt’s New Deal framework, expanded public education at public expense, offering an alternative to the far-right “monsters” about which Gramsci warned. This investment coincided with sustained and historic economic growth, advances in civil rights, and technological innovations that grew the postwar economy.
With more access to higher and critical education the public consciousness awoke. New forms of art, music, social relations, fundamental religious reforms and political mobilization were unleashed. This culminated in a social critique that created a counter-culture in the 1960s materialized in opposition to the Vietnam war and the military industrial complex. Unprecedented global protests erupted calling for peace and justice. Universities were the cultural locus of learning and empowerment.
To be continued…..
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