Beneath the Turmoil
Palestine, the U.S., and an Endeavor for Evolution
25-thousand people marched in downtown Chicago today to protest how the United States and Israel are handling the conflicts between Israel and Palestine, and I'm experiencing haunting echoes of 2020. Social media is permeated with posts and videos explaining the historical exploitation of the Palastinian people, questionable theories espoused by influencers, and groups of people linking their group identities to supporting the Palastinian cause ("Queers for Palastine" and the like). People question the intentions and historical proficiency of the people protesting. Some people see "Queers for Palestine" and think the Queers supporting this must be woefully uninformed because Hamas is a violently homophobic organization. Others think the people protesting are righteously indignant automata who will protest anything as long as they're influenced to care. Others believe the protestors to be anti-American, and any cause that opposes the United States is a reason they're willing to coopt. Let's lay these skepticisms aside if you feel any of them because there's common ground we need to work from: 25-thousand people are unhappy and desire change.
Many activists show that supporting Palastine isn't only supporting Palastine; most people with personal ties to Palastine also see a deeper cause. One man connected the rampant police brutality in Chicago to the US sending police officers to Isreal where, he claimed without reference, they learned their methods of brutality by practicing on the Palestinians. Others are reposting a video of Noam Chomsky explaining that the Palestinians are bound to be abused by the world because they have little money and power—this is, of course, a bad thing—Chomsky sees it as an example of how the government's international values lead directly to unnecessary human suffering. Others don't mention Palestine as much as they speak directly against genocide and discuss their broad liberation work. These varieties also have a common ground: the people see Palestine as symptomatic of a larger, systemic failure, and that failure doesn't only affect Palestinian people; it affects everyone.
We now have two general statements about the people who marched in downtown Chicago today and many others who were with them in spirit: the people are unhappy, and they see our systems failing. It doesn't matter if you agree/disagree with the content of the protestors' message. It doesn't matter if some protestors are disingenuous, and in a way, the minutia is a distraction. There's something else that should command our attention. It's this that is haunting me from 2020. The protests of 2020 had a similar plot arc; the root event (the murder of George Floyd) is indicative of deeper issues, and many people saw the deeper issues. However, it's been over three years since George Floyd's murder, and substantive change has failed to happen. Awareness has spread, but real change remains elusive, and we find ourselves here again.
Mark Fisher was able to see something like this in Capitalist Realism,
"Some of Nietzsche's most prescient pages are those in which he describes the 'oversaturation of an age with history'. 'It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself', he wrote in Untimely Meditations, 'and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism', in which 'cosmopolitan fingering', a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche's Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness."
Real change remains elusive is because people need to figure out where to focus their energy and then do something about it. We live in a world of distractions and multitudinous voices, and there's no exception when it comes to things that need change. Some people find themselves unable to direct their focus to one cause because there are so many valid causes. Any good-natured person would like to fight for them all, but that's impossible, the good-natured person knows it's impossible. Therefore, the detached spectatorialism and enfeeblement by an excess of self-awareness can take hold, and nothing changes. Ironically, the antidote starts with awareness, first, of the situation we're in, second, what it is we should be fighting.
We already know about our situation, but it's often difficult to describe. In his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative, Mark Fisher does an incredible job of putting into words the social and political climate we're embroiled in. As a cultural diagnostician, Fisher reviews the dominant aspects of our 21st-century lives succinctly and with proper depth, exemplifying a deep understanding of the issues. His message is clear on page 80,
"The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity."
Capitalist Realism was published in 2008, and regardless of how much understanding Fisher had at the time, he could not predict the future. Capitalism has changed into something else, so a book to follow Capitalist Realism is Yanis Varoufakis' book Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism. These two books and some time away from the distractions will illuminate what kind of predicament the world is in from a higher level, systems-centric approach. However, reading them risks adding more to the significant stack of social causes and exasperating the spectatorialism and enfeeblement of excessive awareness. Therefore, if nothing else, take a moment to unplug and feel the feelings that arise within you instead of feeling the feelings someone has prepared and served you online.
The metacrisis or polycrisis is a term that describes the ineffable nature of the larger system(s) causing and perpetuating many of the things currently going poorly. There are many systems-level critiques of society, but one deserves special attention and is often the genesis of other systems-level dysfunction—incentive structures. Society does bad things because people do bad things, people do bad things because they are motivated to do it, and incentives are the things that motivate. People can be incentivized by gain or the avoidance of a loss. The problem is some costs don't factor into the gain-loss equation of specific actions that people do. How would you value a tree to decide whether to cut it down? Would you account for the value it provides for other living organisms in nature or just how much money it costs to go and get it? If one only accounts for the cost of retrieving the tree, they externalize the cost of the lack of utility the tree once provided and can quickly destroy entire ecosystems. Similar incentive structures encourage police to abuse their power, the US to dump oil in the ocean, and countries to engage in arms races. Working to change incentive structures and forcing accountability for externalized costs should be the primary battle fought because it stands a chance to address many issues at once, and resolving many issues at once is going to be necessary for nothing less than the survival of the human race.
This is a little dark, and I've been trying to avoid current events, but there are some things I feel a moral obligation to talk about as much as possible, and this is one of them.