Sensitive Amygdala! Is That the Best You Got?

Location of the Amygdala in the Temporal Lobe

 We've seen how Friedrich von Schlegel, the German Romantic and horn-dog, as well as Sir Kenneth Clark, of Television, Civilization and other lordly spectacles both turned into super conservative and extremely irritating puddle-ducks in their later years. One way to look at it, they both felt an emptiness, an existential gap they needed to fill.

 We've asked the question "why" hundreds of thousands of times, shrugged a bit before having low down and cynical thoughts about the character and guilt ridden nature, the spoilt brattiness of the better off and advantaged who suddenly decide they need a life after death. We've bravely tried to understand approaches to the workings of the mind that sees it as a neurotic bundle of unfulfilled passions.  We've looked for answers in a number of other places and have essentially decided that Hunter Gatherers loved the moments of life too much to ever get bored.

 What we haven't done is turn any kind of corner that leads us down the path toward a visit to the priest, followed by an engagement to a triadic religious compromise, an embrace of conservative cultural norms. Tomorrow, if my sums are right, I'm 74 years old and I'm a person who has felt empty for at least 69 of those years and I still have an allergic reaction to the phrase conservative cultural norms . 

 The theory of an inevitable surrender to these norms would probably have better traction if we could find an alternative way of saying "conservative cultural norms." Currently the definition of conservative cultural norms is a tad inadequate, it includes, "The protection of the cultural heritage of a nation state" and the idea of culture "not defined by state boundaries" such as Welsh. What it needs to include is an idea of surrender exemplified by Schlegel, Clark and billions of others. If we do that it allows for the question "Is that the best you got?"

 My own favorite answer to this problem at the moment is: "I have a sensitive amygdala." 

The Spectacle and the Fetishism of stuff

1968 Barricades in Bordeaux 

 The lessons of "I love you! Oh! Say it with paving stones!" requires us to look at the night of May 10th, morning of May 11th 1968. It was the Night of the Barricades, when French Students and French Riot Police engaged in a battle of astonishing fury which resulted in a wave of public sympathy for the student cause and great dishonor for highly armed and brutish Police. French Industrial Unions declared a General Strike. In anticipation of the confrontation the students had built obstacles some of which could be set on fire, they tore up cobble stones, these were the paving stones of the "I love you" slogan.

 The Next two slogans refine the Situationist influences on 1968 relate to the workers and their unions:

 "Since 1936 I have fought for wage increases. My father before me fought for wage increases. Now I have a TV, a fridge, a Volkswagen. Yet my whole life I've been a chump. Don't negotiate with the bosses. Abolish them."

 "Worker: You are 25, but your union is from the last century."

 In 1968 there were a number of large production facilities in and around Paris employing a huge numbers of unionized workers. Many of these workers had a Marxist sympathies, they were inclined toward a more socialist society and had been since the second half of the 1800's. There was an active Communist Party in France which had made up a high percentage of the French Resistance fighters in the Second World War. The French Communist Party along with other European Communist Parties had traditional and fraying ties with the Soviet Union. By 1968 Marxist thinkers had moved on from the corruptions of the Soviet Union and French Students contemptuously referred to members of the French Communist Party as The Stalinists. 

 "Down with the Stalinist carcass! Down with the recuperator cells!"

Recuperator cells in this context came from the Situationist understanding of the way in which often subversive and radical ideas were co-opted, absorbed, basically neutralized by mainstream, bourgeois society. And indeed, in the years that followed the uprisings of May '68 was widely commercialized.

 When thinking about the differences between student and worker action in that year, the workers addressed the desire to improve terms and conditions of work. The students many of whom were aware they were bound for middle management, not greatness, wanted society to change.

 The French Sociologist Alain Touraine, who taught at a new university built in the 1950's outside Paris called Nanterre, in his study of 1968 made the observation that as the structure of the Economy moved away from Industrial Production to Services, a post industrial society would be characterized by Social Movements rather than the industrial actions of unions looking for better working conditions.

 "In a society that has abolished all adventures, the only adventure left is to abolish society."

 We have the stuff, the Situationist influence suggested, what we want is a different sort of Spectacle. What's a spectacle, you ask. It's an understanding of stuff that doesn't see it as the work, the hopes, dreams, the essence of a man, but as an appearance, a spectacle, an image that can be both fetishized and as a commodity it can be bought and sold in a market place. It traps us in an eternal present by breaking down time and history and putting us in a continuous, unchanging, superficial now.

"We are pacified by distractions!" Alain Touraine saw in the revolt of his students, not a struggle for the power of the state but demands for cultural autonomy and a fight for self-management. It was an uprising against conservative cultural norms.

  

Bypassing the State

May '68 Poster:

"Start of a prolonged struggle"

 We've come a long way from the irredeemable doom of "The Children of Sodom Cannot Petition Fate," but let's try not to vomit, hold our noses and continue to address the habit of far too many German Romantics to devote their later years to the radicalization of White Christian Nationalism by continuing our deep dive into the stone tablet of "Conservative Social Norms" by rejoining our memories of May 1968's Situationist Slogans and the social uprising they gave rise to.

 In our world today, where literacy in history is very limited and more often than not written by Hollywood screen writers, there's a good chance May '68 and the Night of the Barricades means nothing in the English speaking world, the Situationist International means even less and meanwhile Conservative Social Norms and White Christian Nationalism have been redefined as MSOs or "Merch Selling Opportunities." 

 The French, refer to the years between 1945 and 1975, when France rose from the ashes of the Second World War, as The Thirty Glorious Years. Their country had experienced rapid modernization and economic growth, but inequality of income and opportunity along with increased urbanization had resulted in the sort of social tensions Conservative Social Norms were ill-equipped to manage especially in a country with a glorious tradition of street protest. This time it was anti-imperialist, counter cultural, passionate French students and workers protesting De Gaulle's repressive government, stagnant wages, poor working conditions, the universities overcrowded, academia a bunch of stuffy old farts. In those days of course "students and workers" meant exactly the same to the social conservatives of our world as they do today, free-wheeling troublemakers who if they didn't know how lucky they were should be rounded up and publicly flogged.

By the end of May, France's national government had ceased to function and when that happened the danger of government collapse became unnerving and there was a demand for someone to do something. Negotiations led to Concessions. De Gaulle's threat to resign led to a resurgence of support for De Gaulle's administration, almost a million supporters of the administration marched through Paris and this resulted in new elections which De Gaulle's Party, the Union of the Defense of the Republic won. It was a massive victory at the ballot, but something has changed, De Gaulle would soon retire, his party seen as having become tired, old and unimaginative.

For many May 1968 was the end of collective action as a revolutionary tool of the Industrial Age and the beginning of what are called New Social Movements. Many of the social movements born during the outrages of 1968 were inspired by Situationist ideas manifest in the slogans and Graffiti adorning the French Agora.

 So what do we have. On the one end we have Conservative Social Values on the other end we have what can be called Movement Culture. The one devoted to Professional Wrestling, blood sports getting fat and kicking-ass, the other devoted to quality of life and a post material world.

"I love you! Oh! Say it with paving stones!"

"Whos," "Whats" and "Ones."

Hamilton and Burr Duel 1804

 The Persia that produced Zarathustra had entities called Daevas, they were disagreeable gods of chaos, disunity and the lie. Daevas, as the monotheistic fevers of empire builders and farmers predicted their own bountiful and plentiful future through enforced unity, became Demons who had to be written out of the Zarathustrian Scriptures. To summarize, these "One God Freaks" represent a failure of imagination and of history.

 The questions to ask yourself is : What is Honor? If I am to be honorable do I need a heaven in my future to reward me for being honorable?

Let me put it this way. Honor is a quality of the "Who." The "What" of you can have high status and "Zero Honor," as in the banal CEO. Or, the "What" of you can have high honor and "Zero Status," as in a Luddite Weaver.

And yes! Of course Ned Ludd has been branded Daevas.