Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - We are Already in the Dystopia

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Oct. 7, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

14:21

We are Already in the Dystopia

The dream of Utopia becomes the reality of Dystopia. Get Islander #2: https://uk.shop.lotuseaters.com/

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	The term Utopia entered the modern English lexicon from the abbreviated title of Sir Thomas Moore's 16th century work A Truly Golden Little Book not less beneficial than enjoyable about how things should be in a state and about the new island Utopia.
	Utopia is a Greek word meaning no place which Moore chose over the Latin nusquama, which in my opinion was the right choice as it's far more catchy.
	Moore served as Henry VIII's Lord High Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532 and was a distinguished judge, theologian, philosopher, statesman and noted Renaissance man in the literal sense of the word.
	Utopia, as envisaged by Moore, was described as a communistic island nation in the New World, in which the population was instructed as to how and where they would live, with houses rotated between them every decade and no property ownership.
	Each person must take up a necessary trade to ensure that they can live what would be essentially a Spartan life of work to provide for the whole.
	Utopia would contain a slave class of foreign captives or criminals weighed down by golden chains until they are eventually and symbolically freed as displays of wealth were something from which people were to be liberated.
	Travel across the island required a papers-plea system of internal checkpoints and passports.
	Other innovations would include a welfare state, euthanasia, and communal dining halls in which everyone ate the same food.
	Pubs and taverns were not permitted and personal relationships were policed by the state, rendering premarital sex and infidelity criminal acts, while divorce is easy to obtain.
	There was to be no such thing as privacy in utopia.
	Each person's behaviour was expected to be on full display so that the whole might serve as a check upon the individual to maintain a strict regime of public virtue.
	From this, the term utopia entered into modern discourse as a description of a fantastical perfect country, well governed and populated by good and virtuous people.
	This puts into context what a dystopia, Greek for bad place, actually is and how it's brought about.
	A utopia is created when the state and its class of philosopher kings are given unlimited license to rationally recreate society to produce outcomes which are outside of the normal consequences of free human action by introducing artificial barriers to behaviour that serve to support the system itself rather than the good of the people it rules over.
	A dystopia is when this system produces undesirable results.
	Now, it might not surprise you to learn that this is not my ideal vision of the future.
	In fact, to me it seems that the term utopia and dystopia would simply be synonyms given this level of top-down social organisation.
	However, this is the paradigm of the 20th century, and I think the proliferation of dystopian literature during this time reflects the subconscious fear of what has been set in motion.
	I've noticed that dystopian fiction doesn't seem to be nearly as popular as it once was.
	Wikipedia has a convenient list of notable dystopian fictions, and if this list is accurate, then it seems that the genre properly began in the 19th century and fully matured in the 20th, which produced hundreds of notable works.
	This cultural production of the deepest fears of the modern mind carried on at pace into the 2000s, apparently expanding in parallel into the young adult genre right through to the end of the 2010s.
	But in the 2020s, it all but stops.
	It seems that the cultural appetite for dystopia has dried up somewhat, I suppose.
	Perhaps Wikipedia's list isn't accurate or exhaustive.
	I'm not personally a tremendous reader of dystopian fiction, and I don't follow the genre.
	But one can't help but notice that the collective psyche of our civilization no longer needs to fantasise about what things are like when they start getting bad.
	Everyone seems to expect that a dystopia would somehow be announced, or that the people living within one would be conscious about the fact that their world was oppressive, anti-human.
	But it's evident that dystopias begin in optimism and end in unfathomable sorrow.
	And I think we're arriving at that place now.
	There are so many things that were taken for granted that are just missing from our lives at this point, and we didn't even notice them disappear.
	It's just that, one day, you realise that things have changed and not for the better, and it isn't readily apparent how they might be fixed without substantive systemic change, and the system's control is so solidified by this point that it would require something truly radical to bring about a different state of affairs.
	Because these were often intangible things that have simply been taken away from young people today, we didn't imagine that the utopian liberal experiment of the latter half of the 20th century could go so very wrong.
	For example, safety on the streets was just a given.
	Of course, our towns and cities are safe.
	Nobody really questioned why they were and assumed that it would always be this way because, as far as anyone could remember, it had always been this way.
	However, now, people do not feel as if the streets are safe, and this feeling appears to be validated when you consider the composition of the people on our streets and of our government's willingness to treat criminals as if they were the best of us.
	It's hard to believe that an actual army of murderers has been allowed to illegally enter the United States and has been given leave to remain at large indefinitely, or that the British government decided one day to simply let out criminals early because they had become an inconvenience to keep.
	But here we are.
	Did we really expect at the end of the 19th century with the advent of the socialistic mindset of command and control over society that it would create a depressing, unaesthetic, grey plastic world of petty bureaucracy and an entire culture of zombie workers who aren't even sure why they exist?
	Our cities are more like ant colonies.
	They are for work and people live there like drones until they can't take it anymore and have extracted enough sap from the system to be able to escape to the countryside.
	Why are we trapped inside of a system everyone is attempting to flee?
	Can we not put a pause on the degradation of our own towns and cities and have a conversation about whether we are heading in the right direction or not?
	This is clearly not a wholesome state of affairs.
	Why is it that nearly a quarter of Americans are on therapy and God knows how many others are on antidepressant drugs?
	This trend is only likely to grow as the total society continues to expand its reach over increasingly minute aspects of daily life.
	But we never question the nature of therapy itself, which is to train people who know they are living an unnatural and unhealthy lifestyle to accept this fate and not fight against it.
	The very nature and purpose of therapy is to make sure they continue to do it anyway, but to what end?
	This clearly doesn't serve the person who needs the therapy, it serves something else external to them.
	What the hell are we doing?
	The purpose of our civilization is revealed in the way it is designed to relate to us.
	Let's take McDonald's as a paradigmic example of how things have changed.
	When I was young, in the 80s and 90s, McDonald's buildings were inviting and revolved around families.
	They were bright, cartoony, and often had a playpark that the kids could go and enjoy.
	They had character, and the purpose of them was for something a family could do on a Saturday afternoon, go and enjoy some junk food and get out of the house together for a few hours.
	All fast food restaurants were like this.
	Indeed, most public spaces either revolved around the needs of children or made some accommodation for them.
	To be an adult is to realise that life really isn't about you, it's about others.
	And that's what gives you purpose and meaning.
	It's what prevents you from needing therapy.
	That all seems natural and right, doesn't it?
	A civilization that is built around children is a civilization that believes it has a future.
	It is a civilization that is working for itself and not something else.
	However, a civilization built around adults, trapped in an extended state of adolescence, who expect to enjoy their adult activities without consideration for the sensitivities of children, is a civilization which has basically given up.
	Compare the old McDonald's to the modern McDonald's that you will see in every town and city.
	Why does it have to look like this?
	Who are their prospective customers?
	It is certainly not inviting and evidently represents a spirit of efficiency, which wants to get you out of the door as quickly as possible, preferably serving people who don't want to stay in there in the first place.
	People who have no responsibilities beyond sitting in their cubicle and doing their unimportant email jobs in order to afford junk food and Funko Pops until they go home to their tiny bedsit and sit alone until the next day.
	What is the plan here?
	Just exist until you die?
	Remain in the Soviet-style McDonald's as a consumptive unit until you expire and are composted to become the fertilizer for the other drones.
	What are we doing?
	The warmth of our civilization has been drained out because it wasn't clear how this contributed to productivity.
	Nobody is going to think to complain about this state of affairs as they wander around their bland modernist streets to collect their cheap food assuming they didn't just have it delivered to their tiny neon pod by an immigrant anyway.
	It's no wonder that a quarter of young people aren't intending to have kids.
	Look at the world they're inhabiting.
	Why would they want to inflict that on someone else?
	And this is all the consequence of the maintenance of a system that our modern philosopher kings believe will bring us into utopia.
	It's the only tool they recognise as even having the capacity to improve the world, and so they are determined to use it to their utmost, despite the fact that the more top-down control that is exerted by them, the worse things are getting.
	And ultimately, this is the crux of the question of replacement migration.
	Much has been made of the UN's replacement migration study, which approaches the problem of population from the position of the system itself.
	As they say in the executive summary, they are interested in monitoring our societies as if they had a duty to maintain themselves for the system itself.
	Why are they doing this?
	Well, to maintain the required number of workers that would uphold the system's welfare commitments.
	That's it.
	Not because it will make human life better, not because it will make the world more pleasant to live in.
	The dystopia has been created because the system demanded it.
	In the conclusion, they explain why replacement migration is a good and necessary policy.
	Quote: In the absence of migration, the size of the working age population declines faster than the overall population.
	As a result of this faster rate of decline, the amount of migration needed to prevent a decline in the working age population is larger than that for the overall population.
	They need workers, and as far as they're concerned, workers are basically all the same.
	So we can flood our countries with foreign peoples, regardless of the physical and psychic damage this does to us and our civilizations.
	Because otherwise, the system through which they intended to bring us to utopia will fail.
	But when we leave the managerial world of abstractions and look at the world as it really is on the ground level, we find it a deteriorating, unwelcoming, and alien place, devoid of beauty, of harmony, of happiness.
	In putting the system over the people themselves, we have created a nightmarish world in which atrocities have become normalized, misery is our daily habit, and terminating our own family lines becomes the only way out of what has otherwise become a prison without walls.
	This is the dystopia in the here and now.
	We are living in it.
	If you would like to support me and help keep me out of the dystopia, I would like to support you too.
	This is why Islander magazine exists, to help you on your journey through our modern dystopia and hopefully out of the other side.
	And Issue 2 is on its final week of sale this week.
	We have assembled the finest dissident minds of our generation to pierce through the mysticism of modernity, to understand the human cost of everything.
	Each magazine has a theme, and Issue 2's theme has been the lifting of the veil, the apocalypse, as it were.
	It is clear that we are moving into a new world in which utopianism is reaching its final terminus, and each of the articles in Islander reflects on a different aspect of that.

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