Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

I think I vaguely recall learning that Alan Greenspan...dead Alan Greenspan...

...see normally, when I am in the middle of writing on the Internet, my good friend and advisor in the Pnictogen Wing #plurality, Hassan of Serenity, one of the Haššāšīn depicted in Fate/Grand Order, usually speaks up internally to remind me to be respectful. She's from a culture and a historical era which took courtesy extremely seriously; hence Serenity has acted as a gently corrective force upon my rough-hewn "Western" American temperament. Unfortunately, the culture which has chiefly shaped me is socially crude by Serenity's standards and very bad at courtesy. I have been very bad at courtesy.

...so when I write about Alan Greenspan and do not feel a little inward push to speak a few words of respect for the dead ("peace be upon him" is the form I tend to use most often) it's rare. I guess there really are some human beings who don't even merit that bare minimum.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

Starting over. I vaguely recall learning once that Alan Greenspan was into Ayn Rand and "Objectivism", but I didn't know the full extent of his worship until reading a recent obituary—which reminded me, among other things, that while Rand was alive her cult had a lot of deeply unsavory features. Anyone familiar with the sexual dynamic (just one, no "dynamics" here) of Ayn Rand's women characters, marked chiefly by an extreme thirst for brawny male confidence that had a terrible effect on Patricia Neal when she embarked on a desperate affair with dour Catholic hypocrite Gary Cooper during the filming of King Vidor's film adaptation of The Fountainhead (scripted by Ayn Rand herself), can probably guess what the sexual climate of her cult was like.

I don't think it's idle or prurient to bring up these sexual politics when it comes to Objectivists and other reactionary persons. Their politics are profoundly sexualized. The fascıst heroic myth is largely a sexual one: the muscular manly exemplar of fascıst manliness, square-jawed and statue-like with bulging biceps and a discreet amount of bare sweaty skin, explodes onto the world scene and...spreads his seed in every direction. His social success and genetic excellence takes the form of idealized children. (The real-life children fare worse.)

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen

Because that's the core and throbbing heart of the reactionary myth, the one universal principle which ALL fascısts and authoritarians can agree upon—it's good to have strong patriarchial families with lotsa kids to outbreed the Bad Guys™—there's not the faintest hope of political equality or liberty to exist in their worldview. It's simply not possible: their model of humanity is built upon fundamental inequalities, most flagrantly the purportedly logical and scientific notion that women's only social purpose is being a carrier for the hero's magical spunk. Women are pushed permanently into the unseen background of the reactionary myth, Men usurp the creative and generative role completely, and all other inequalities asserted by fascısts are anchored to the central lie: MEN ARE MEN and then there's women.

I suggest that this fundamental imbalance is, in fact, untenable. Fascıst societies are too preoccupied with extreme inequality to be stable. But this is difficult to show in practice. We're in the middle of a period of fascıst predominance and while we're in the middle of it, it seems like it's lasted forever. Hasn't the United States of America been cooking away with these fundamental inequalities as part of her original structure?

(cont'd)

Jun 28 at 9:41pmWeb
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

I'm no expert but as I see it, proper fascısm requires a society to have attained a certain degree of mass industrialization and reliable mass communication (thus permitting nigh-instantaneous distribution of propaganda, bringing a sense of unity to a scattered whole) before you can really say it's fascısm and not some other sort of authoritarian government. So the United States was perhaps proto-fascıst as founded.

There's a necessary part of this process of developing fascısm, the creation of a powerful and yet necessarily vague and semifantastical national myth. That can't actually happen right away. There needs to be some sense of a national past that's long enough in the past to feel permanently gauzy and thus capable of being elevated into a mythological Golden Age.

But there's been a further process, one that's slowly stripped fascıst movements of their specific national character, reducing all that stuff to a bare minimum so that fascısts in different nations can find common ground and build the illusion of being part of a global popular movement.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

This is about where Ayn Rand becomes important. Ayn Rand and Objectivism are central to contemporary reactionary diatribe because her writing is almost 99.9% fluff built around an extremely simplified heroic narrative, one so slight that it can't support realistic characters. John Galt can pose as somehow Everyman because he is no man at all; he's a little bundle of self-contradictory traits, the non-heroic hero who gets to flee the scene in spite, gloating in private rather than actually doing anything heroic.

There's a universality in this sort of crap, sad to say. It can appeal to anyone, anyone who's small-minded enough to embrace spite and self-interest as virtues.

There are many other such simple little fables that help to keep the reactionary forces of the world glued together, fables that all boil down to impossibly virtuous heroes who are guaranteed to win out against ridiculously villainous bad guys, but only after being pushed to the very brink of disaster.

You know...like in #Tolkien. sighs.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

This Good vs. Bad narrative has been projected onto the world of #business and the #economy and therefore #politics. Good means the "free market" totally unimpeded by any external legislation and regulation, which is cast as Bad i.e. communistic. Because the core value of capitalism means hoarding, the skimming of business in order to build hoards of capital instead of spending revenues on wages and operations, any interference with this hoarding, especially #taxes, is called "Marxist" and other such Bad things.

Complaining about fraud in this system is Bad, because of the absolute Good which hoarding wealth is said to confer: ANY means to build the hoard are regarded as valid, so anyone complaining about being cheated is told that it's their fault and they just need to smarten up and learn how to scam people themselves instead of whingeing about the honesty of dealing.

Similarly it's Bad and communistic and evil to tell people of business what they should do with their money, even in a strictly advisory way. Again this is consequence of deeming the hoarding of wealth to be unquestioned Good: any criticism of the hoarders might interfere with their subsequent hoarding, scaring away business or whatever, and that is always deemed to be a heinous crime and one which entitles capitalists to sue for gigantic damages.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

Indeed the lawsuit is probably the chief instrument by which wealth-hoarders increase the size of their hoards and protect them against outsiders. Wealthy persons and corporations depend upon governments' administration of civil law proceedings. Despite this fundamental reliance upon government to enforce corporate wishes (including also labor relations, for corporations demand that governments use lethal force to insure that people don't walk off their jobs) the defenders of the "free market" stick to the lie that governments are mere parasites and leeches on capitalism and the economy. After all...governments spend money, and spending money is Bad whereas hoarding profits is Good. Check and mate, liberals!!

This is the main problem with sustaining the dishonest self-images of people like Objectivists and #libertarians. Their declared principles aren't wrong, but nonsensical. The thing which libertarians say is happening, i.e. government parasitism on business, simply isn't true. Instead, businesses are (roughly speaking) parasitical upon governments.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

It would be more correct to say, at least in a society that wasn't as thoroughly dysfunctional as that of the United States and "the West", that businesses are dependent upon governments, subordinate to governments. Governments need to define all the structures and guarantee the integrity of all the laws which contribute to the very existence of "the economy" and the world of business. Governments guarantee transactions and insure bank deposits and do all sorts of other little things, millions of them probably, which permit the existence of things called "corporations" and "businesses".

In turn, these organizations expect the law to back them up at every turn. They expect liberal and unchallenged use of massive slices of government-administered resources (i.e. "utilities" regulating the distribution of many essential services) and government-administered infrastructure and government-administered telecommunications. Moreover, the corporations and business lobbyists are CONSTANTLY bribing politicians and scheming to get favors from governments—legislation and regulations which are designed, more or less, to guarantee the continued existence of corporate business models.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

The least they could do, in exchange for all this largesse, is stop whingeing so much about taxation to the point of pretending that taxation is "theft" (as opposed to an expected routine expense) and attempting to destroy #democracy and institute police-state regimes merely because that assures them of an even bigger slice of government power and collusion.

But this is where we get to the sticky subject of sin and that particular sin known as avarice, which seems to be one of the most destructive of sins in terms of laying waste to the person's old personality. It really is like in Das Rheingold in which Alberich, spurned in love, curses love so that he might seize power. Seizing power means hoarding wealth but in a deeper sense, the avaricious person can say that it's not about the money. The money loses its specific meaning, replaced by a monstrous shapeless hunger for more.

More what? More anything! One can always feel that one doesn't have enough of...whatever.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

Elon Musk seems rather obviously to have devoured by this hunger. He likes to boast that he's not interested in money or wealth because of his purported devotion to lofty virtues, such as "the light of consciousness" and "making life multiplanetary". But all those positive values he claims are exceedingly vague and ephemeral to the point that it's not clear whether he believes in them, or merely puts them about for a laugh. Yet at the same time he's constantly fussing over quantities of money and trying to cook up schemes for raking in more with a simple deal or two, as with that #SpaceX IPO business. So does he care about the money? Or merely about the appearance of scoring another win, as symbolized by some gigantic dollar figure?

People who have been reduced to such straightforward desires aren't good at getting along with other people or making good decisions, and so Elon Musk has survived mostly by being constantly managed. There have been reports out of SpaceX in the past about how Musk required considerable delicate handling, with many underlings giving the thankless job of screening Musk away from others and attempting to steer his chaotic activities.

(cont'd)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen2d ago

There may be hope in that. As unlikely as it may seem to people who have been watching Elon Musk stagger around the world stage for decades, his career ought to be self-limiting. He'll get more and more uncontrollable until finally the support network round him will break under the strain and we'll get a taste of Musk's reputed "Demon Mode" that will flatline his reputation, and with it the ability to beg for investors and lenders of money.

Any day now. Right? 😬

~Chara of Pnictogen