As capitalism gets more and more mask off brutal and it becomes harder and harder to ignore that the democracy people thought they had is at best very limited and easily revoked, the paradigm shifts more and more to a sort of internalised existential self reduction. A very natural response to life under capitalism, after all, life under capitalism has very little meaning for the average proletariat so why wouldn't people come to the conclusion that life is meaningless? I see a very tired, nihilist society.
It's like watching someone in an abusive relationship. People have been conditioned by their abuser into a state of submission via exsaution and erosion of their identity, their agency and their self-confidence. They want to escape, but are controlled by their abuser via financial, emotional and even the threat of physical abuse. This works well for the ruling class, as such victims are understandably very hard to organize. There is an attitude of "I don't matter and nothing I do matters, how would organizing change anything. It's unrealistic, egocentric even, to expect better." That we have to contend with and keep in mind when we try to mobilize people living in these conditions. I've struggled with such thoughts my entire life, and it's very strange to see such a thing slowly become so normalized.
Anyway, don't ever let the ghouls make you feel like you don't matter. The workers of the world deserve better than this
One of the things that clicked in my head the other day was with this “look maxing” business. It’s like it’s some sign of how far the kids have given up that they think their value can only be maximized based on physical appearance. Then there’s the gambling. These are like the pathways that they think they can manage. These are the tiny rivulets where they think their boat will be tiny enough that they’ll be the captain of it. They’ve settled for some really small dreams here.
It’s utterly hopeless and that weirdly gives me hope because this can’t continue, it’s gonna break, you can’t eat the youth like this and not break something so deep that the slow simmering infection is fatal.
Another vibe I’m feeling is that a lot of people are experiencing what I must call a spiritual anguish. The last thing colonized by late capitalism is the self, the soul, we are the last frontier being exploited and this anguish is the natural reaction as it envelops us. This is just a fever, a symptom, of a deeper thing going on in our souls, as even our human ability to adapt is being outpaced by our consequences. That’s causing an unbalancing of a scale that has very rarely or never tipped against us and I think we can feel that.
This, god. 100% this.
Now I’m really ruminating on it and the abusive relationship angle you talked about and if we combine them we can see how, for example with this gambling thing, it’s totally the behavior of a person who is hoping they aren’t a victim. They can’t be a winner, not a real winner, the house is the real winner and they know that but they think they can manage to not be the 99 suckers that get fleeced so the house can kick out one jackpot. They’d rather roll dice on those odds. It shows how narrow they think the future is. The closing of the horizon is the thing I’m fixated these days, Mark Fischer’s Capitalist Realism talks about this too, maybe that’s what planted the seed but the psychology of the moment we are in is fascinating.
“Well of course he doesn’t let me own a car, but he lets me go to the store to shop.” Closing the horizon is the first step of an abuser. We recognize that sentence for what it is, now, but it was once a sentiment that was common in society when women had less rights. I can’t not see these parallels between how we are twisting ourselves into shapes under capitalism and the way for millennia women twisted themselves into shapes to conform to patriarchy, including the self-rationalizing of the victimhood.
The slow erasure of boundaries is another thing analogous to what we see in toxic relationships. Breaching of privacy isn't even something the ruling class even bothers to ask consent for anymore and the consumer has stopped even asking for it or considering it a breach of boundaries. Someone installing a tracking app on your device was once considered a form of abuse, something a controlling boyfriend would do. Completely normalized now.
Same goes for no longer owning things (having the right to your personal space and property) people will slowly get used to the idea of nothing belonging to them and their things being taken from them without notice. The abuser owns everything and allows you to have them for a while if you ask permission
All of these things are normalized through threat of ostracism and abandonment, among other things