Or when will it finally clock to the average lib that the Great Opponent isn't Reagan-era Christian conservatism but the amoral self-indulgent hyperreality that we currently inhabit
In Revelation, there is a mention of the “Whore of Babylon” which is largely interpreted as a corrupt global system or religion that dominates earth before it’s destroyed.
Working in finance and observing the world around me, I’m convinced that nothing embodies this system more than modern Neoliberalism.
It’s what underlies the push for engagement and content above all regardless of meaning, impact, and ethics.
The only unifying “moral compass” across all ethnicities, cultures, and religions in the 21st century is increasing profits for the sake of consolidating power and wealth.
The wealthy oil sheikh, midwestern right wing senator, onlyfans pornstar, tech executive and even the struggling Substack poster—are all ultimately driven by this system whether they realize it or not.
The book of the 'revelations' is a book of word-salad insanity. 'Christians' have been interpreting its contents to mean whatever they wanted it to mean for over a thousand years. It's utterly vacuous as a source of anything useful.
What breaks the spectacle is unreasoning within it. The Bible is just as much a part of the spectacle as advertising campaigns for fake meat.
Usually I’d engage in meaningful discussion but your comments seem like they’re meant for you to blow off steam than anything else and I’m not gonna indulge you in that.
I think Trump is best explained as a consequence of neo-liberalism.
There is a certain fool's wisdom in recognizing that neo-liberal democrats and neo-liberal republicans ultimately have the same first order objective, and so choosing between them is about picking the flavor of neo-liberalism, but nothing else.
That the MAGAs didn't recognize that chaos is not an improvement to neo-liberalism is where the fool's wisdom runs out.
They were sick of the same, but didn't understand that "change" can be many things, and many of them aren't good.
I won't excuse the disease of racism and xenophobia that has accompanied these "populist" movements, even if they arise from a tired and disenchanted public.
But the emptiness of the world is not something we've done to ourselves, it isn't something we chose, and it isn't something detached from the material realities we find ourselves in.
Baby boomers have rigged the game in their favor in every sense, in every aspect of life, and their moral degeneracy is societally cancerous. It has poisoned everything and is killing everything.
Life is too expensive. Marriage is too expensive. Kids are too expensive. We don't have enough time to live a meaningful life, and if we did we wouldn't have enough money to afford it.
It is also becoming painfully obvious that America is not "good." We are not "the good guys." We are a terrorist nation that murders people all over the world.
And so it shouldn't be surprising that we recede into distractions. The only way to "make it" in America is to abandon your soul and become a demon driven purely by money and status.
You will be a vile abomination, but society will consider you a winner. That society is drenched in blood, but at least it isn't your blood.
The alternative is checking out. And checking out is essentially resigning yourself to the void.
But.
The baby boomers are going to die. We might have a lifetime of work to do when they're gone, and only half a lifetime to do it in, but their neo-liberal death cult will die with them.
And perhaps then we can ask questions, like, "should governments serve corporations, or citizens?" "Should we work toward a society that provides for everyone, or one that only rewards greed?" "Is international law a good thing?"
It's farcical at the moment to think we could meaningfully move the needle on most of these things.
It's intellectual laziness to place all the blame at the feet of Boomers. Have you no familiarity with pre-Boomer history? Wake up. It wasn't "the Boomers" who rigged the game. The game was rigged long before the Boomers came into existence, and it's being rigged even now by Millenial and Gen Z tech overlords with things like surge pricing and data brokering, not to mention the "Air BnB effect" that has decreased housing affordability by removing supply from the long-term rental market.
The only difference between Boomers and ensuing generations is that the improvements to tax structures, banking regulations, and labor that started with FDR in the 1940s and improved Boomers' lives have been steadily rolled back. It began slowly in the 70s, then gained warp speed with Reagan cutting taxes for the ultra-rich from 70% to 50% in 1981, then down to 28% in 1986 in service to "trickle-down" economics. You can also thank Reagan for busting unions so that now almost everyone is in a so-called "Right to Work" state, which basically means workers are at the mercy of their employers with zero collective bargaining power.
Reagan didn't run on doing those things. He ran on lowering 18% interest rates, getting hostages home from Iran, and the vibe of "Morning in America." Do a little research next time before mouthing another boring, incurious cliché about prior generations maliciously fucking everything up for poor little you. It isn't a generational thing - I hardly think a Boomer plumber or waitress conspired to pull the ladder up behind themselves; they wanted their kids to succeed, too. It is and has always been a class thing - the 1% demanding a bigger and bigger piece of the pie while they laugh at the ignorant plebes fighting each other over the crumbs instead of pointing the finger at them.
Each time someone accuses "the Boomers," the "Jewish cabal," or anyone besides billionaires and their bought politicians for causing today's economic woes, they are doing volunteer propaganda work for the very ones who call them "useless eaters."
Reagan literally worked with the hostage takers to get elected. Reagan was a flare up in an age old American disease passed down hereditarily from Europe. Shows up in the form of religiosity, patriarchal values that don’t actually help most men but give them enough incentive to keep it so they’re better than women (extends to lgbt issues) as well as racism, ableism, etc
He was the very con that built this bullshit at the behest of the corporatists and theocrats who want control over everyone’s personal lives to better extract from them.
What she said. This boomer-hating person appeared on my Substack feed recently. “Intellectual laziness” is the perfect description for what is being written by whoever or whatever this is. Thanks for stating it clearly. The boomers I know live on fixed incomes, still work into their 70’s so they can pay their bills and buy food. They outnumber younger generations 10 to 1 at Black Lives Matter and No Kings protests and rallies. They struggle to survive. Who are these people riding on the inherited wealth of the silent generation of WWII? Because they sure as hell don’t live in my neighborhood.
Sorry but no. The Silent Generation largely fought for an America that created and then strengthened the middle class. They voted for their children to have incredible advantages, and then those children grew up and voted those advantages away from their children and grandchildren.
I was internally pushing against your thesis as I read until you examined Trump, and I’m convinced you’re absolutely right. He’s legitimately amoral, I don’t believe he believes in anything. He pursues engagement and intense feeling and because he’s better at it than all the rest, he gets to wear the biggest hat. I’ll be thinking about this a lot…and nothing will change? Maybe not until enough people reject these images.
You do realize that it’s OK to learn new things and change your mind based on new informational input right? That’s a big problem with most of the voting public as well as the politicians they vote for… they have come to believe that changing your mind is a sign of weakness without acknowledging that not changing your mind in the face of better information is stupid. A mutated, inbred chimera of sunk cost fallacy and confirmation bias…
Are you pro-GOP? GOP has been decreasing White life expectancy for decades, e.g. farmers continuing to be pro-GOP despite GOP-Trump increasing farmers' bankruptcy and suicide rates. Southernized White Americans voting for spectacles over substance and then scapegoating Others is why both White separatism and White supremacism sound stupid. https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_26989902-6a4b-4f40-8dc7-98298bf16029
Your non-thinking is locked into the idea that the struggle has been between the GOP and something not-GOP. I don't see the difference between the GOP and the DNC on racial matters: Both are race-communist parties that hate White people.
As for 'White separatism' I'm all for it. And I wonder why Whites shouldn't be supreme in their homelands? Would you expect Nigerian blacks to be second-class citizens in their homeland?
As for 'Southernized Whites Americans' voting for 'spectacle over substance', I don't see any part of the country that isn't just as guilty of 'spectacular politics'.
As for 'scapegoating'. You're scapegoating 'Southernized Whites' aren't you?
Numerous data shows Southernized Whites keep voting for bad policymakers like Trump, causing themselves to die of despair. Pointing at evidence is the opposite of scapegoating/BSing. But I don't think you care about evidence if not fitting your BS narrative.
Mother Jones is a bullshit leftie rag of the absolute lowest sort. The Anti-White Left doesn't care about White 'deaths of despair', in fact they applaud it. Phrases like 'Southernized Whites' is just a way of making New Yorkified Whites feel smug in their jewishness.
Both parties are functionally the same thing. Just painted different colors. A steaming, tightly coiled pile of poo with a blue flag, vs a steaming, tightly coiled pile of poo with a red flag.
Our only hope moving forward is eliminating the two party system…and frankly political parties in general. Parties are nothing more than separatist factions operating towards their own ends, within our broken system, and neither have any interests other than continuity of the status quo.
Here’s one avenue I feel strongly is worth exploring. (Yet I always reserve the right to get smarter)
Brilliantly stated. I read Society of the Spectacle last year and had a very similar realization. When you realize that they're letting you protest because it adds to the spectacle, it breaks things down to an absolutely heartwrenching conclusion: there is no end, all that we are is the means. The means to profit, to performative faculties that don't function in any sort of capacity other than to uphold the spectacle of all that is and isn't real. If everything is essentially the equivalent of performance art than how can we really know any sort of identity outside of that?
This is, hands down, the most to-the-core diagnosis of the whys and hows of our era I've read or heard. So damn well said too. I had to move from my chair to the couch so I could read it better... for some reason. All that to say, I'm joyfully envious because this is the article I wished I could have written.
Adam Curtis does this very well in his BBC film “Hypernormalization.” All of his work is available on YouTube. After reading this piece, I’m super aware that I’m sitting in front of my screen alone being performative right now for all of you. Thanks for the astute analysis of what we’ve become in the US.
Yes and, as debord describes, even our critique of capitalism and the totality the commodity form imposes on life (or "non-life"), has been captured by images of itself. We can only center the interests of the working-class if they are made up of hard-hat-wearing, truth-talking, rough-around-the-edges community bolsheviks. We can only continue the Permanent Revolution if we wear red, cry out Rosa Luxembourg catchphrases, and elicit applause from those who have read the same books as us. Our understanding of capital itself is wrapped up in the realities of the production process of the late 19th and early 20th century, and critiques are only valid if they are draped in the language of that time's witnesses. We do not allow ourselves to deepen the criticism, to tackle totality, because the path has not already been carved for us. There is no dictatorship of the proletariat, because there is only a dictatorship over the present by the past, and nothing more. Need we doom ourselves to repeating the same losing tactics that have lost, and keep losing? Or must we, as this article suggests, re-shape our strategy, reframe our opposition, and refocus our efforts to materially manifest a future?
The part about pre-digested experiences really hit me hard. I really think you are unique and correct with your take on Trump being an amoral figure and why that put him where he is.
But part of not believing in things means he’s not really against things as long as they don’t restrict his power. So he sides with the Handmaids people, the TechBro Crypto nihilists, the Military Industrial fascists, the Armageddon crowd, the conspiracy nut jobs, every brand of crazy. He pits them all against each other like Kaiju in a monster movie and let them fight for his attention.
The most cathartic and articulate characterization of the time I’ve yet to read- thank you. I can understand Debord’s change of course. It can be overwhelming and make it easy to give way to nihilism, but it’s then that we must remember the words of Bucky Fuller when he said: do not fight the existing system. Instead, build a new one that makes the old one obsolete.
There are needs the system does not provide. Give the people what they need. They will go to what’s life giving and this monstrosity can wither and die.
The only thing patriarchy values is the fascist consolidation of power and control. Everything else is instrumental to the purpose of self-perpetuating (and therefore intensifying) systemic stratification. That's why, eg, the powerful use faith, religion and spirituality to set up cults, and why they promote horizontal conflict through the "culture wars" of identity politics, and why they can't tolerate diversity of perspective and thought or feedback, which threatens to expose their dysfunctional stupidity and hold them accountable.
"He dissolved his own movement, moved to the south of France, drank heavily, and eventually shot himself..." Yes, that's one way out but there are others. Paul Kingsnorth's "Against The Machine" has some more positive suggestions (https://egghutt.substack.com/p/blessed-are-the-barbarians) as do many other writers. I once paid $8 for the blue checkmark and felt nothing. I felt much better after deleting my account entirely.
With all due respect, Paul Kingsnorth's neo-luddism bordering on primitivism still leaves a lot to be desired IMHO. Occasionally he makes some good points here and there, like a stopped clock being right twice a day, but at the end of the day it's essentially a cop-out.
Stop the train, I’d like to De-bord
genuinely best analysis i've read of "our times"
Wasn’t it shockingly perfect? Dang.
Now I’ve gotta read Debord…
Great essay.
In Revelation, there is a mention of the “Whore of Babylon” which is largely interpreted as a corrupt global system or religion that dominates earth before it’s destroyed.
Working in finance and observing the world around me, I’m convinced that nothing embodies this system more than modern Neoliberalism.
It’s what underlies the push for engagement and content above all regardless of meaning, impact, and ethics.
The only unifying “moral compass” across all ethnicities, cultures, and religions in the 21st century is increasing profits for the sake of consolidating power and wealth.
The wealthy oil sheikh, midwestern right wing senator, onlyfans pornstar, tech executive and even the struggling Substack poster—are all ultimately driven by this system whether they realize it or not.
The book of the 'revelations' is a book of word-salad insanity. 'Christians' have been interpreting its contents to mean whatever they wanted it to mean for over a thousand years. It's utterly vacuous as a source of anything useful.
What breaks the spectacle is unreasoning within it. The Bible is just as much a part of the spectacle as advertising campaigns for fake meat.
That’s like, your opinion bro
Your opinion is, like, your opinion.
At least my opinion doesn't rely on jewish schizophrenic nonsense.
Usually I’d engage in meaningful discussion but your comments seem like they’re meant for you to blow off steam than anything else and I’m not gonna indulge you in that.
Bye now!
You can't engage in meaningful discussion because you cannot generate meaningful discussion.
And yet here you are.
I think Trump is best explained as a consequence of neo-liberalism.
There is a certain fool's wisdom in recognizing that neo-liberal democrats and neo-liberal republicans ultimately have the same first order objective, and so choosing between them is about picking the flavor of neo-liberalism, but nothing else.
That the MAGAs didn't recognize that chaos is not an improvement to neo-liberalism is where the fool's wisdom runs out.
They were sick of the same, but didn't understand that "change" can be many things, and many of them aren't good.
I won't excuse the disease of racism and xenophobia that has accompanied these "populist" movements, even if they arise from a tired and disenchanted public.
But the emptiness of the world is not something we've done to ourselves, it isn't something we chose, and it isn't something detached from the material realities we find ourselves in.
Baby boomers have rigged the game in their favor in every sense, in every aspect of life, and their moral degeneracy is societally cancerous. It has poisoned everything and is killing everything.
Life is too expensive. Marriage is too expensive. Kids are too expensive. We don't have enough time to live a meaningful life, and if we did we wouldn't have enough money to afford it.
It is also becoming painfully obvious that America is not "good." We are not "the good guys." We are a terrorist nation that murders people all over the world.
And so it shouldn't be surprising that we recede into distractions. The only way to "make it" in America is to abandon your soul and become a demon driven purely by money and status.
You will be a vile abomination, but society will consider you a winner. That society is drenched in blood, but at least it isn't your blood.
The alternative is checking out. And checking out is essentially resigning yourself to the void.
But.
The baby boomers are going to die. We might have a lifetime of work to do when they're gone, and only half a lifetime to do it in, but their neo-liberal death cult will die with them.
And perhaps then we can ask questions, like, "should governments serve corporations, or citizens?" "Should we work toward a society that provides for everyone, or one that only rewards greed?" "Is international law a good thing?"
It's farcical at the moment to think we could meaningfully move the needle on most of these things.
But.
The baby boomers are going to die.
It's intellectual laziness to place all the blame at the feet of Boomers. Have you no familiarity with pre-Boomer history? Wake up. It wasn't "the Boomers" who rigged the game. The game was rigged long before the Boomers came into existence, and it's being rigged even now by Millenial and Gen Z tech overlords with things like surge pricing and data brokering, not to mention the "Air BnB effect" that has decreased housing affordability by removing supply from the long-term rental market.
The only difference between Boomers and ensuing generations is that the improvements to tax structures, banking regulations, and labor that started with FDR in the 1940s and improved Boomers' lives have been steadily rolled back. It began slowly in the 70s, then gained warp speed with Reagan cutting taxes for the ultra-rich from 70% to 50% in 1981, then down to 28% in 1986 in service to "trickle-down" economics. You can also thank Reagan for busting unions so that now almost everyone is in a so-called "Right to Work" state, which basically means workers are at the mercy of their employers with zero collective bargaining power.
Reagan didn't run on doing those things. He ran on lowering 18% interest rates, getting hostages home from Iran, and the vibe of "Morning in America." Do a little research next time before mouthing another boring, incurious cliché about prior generations maliciously fucking everything up for poor little you. It isn't a generational thing - I hardly think a Boomer plumber or waitress conspired to pull the ladder up behind themselves; they wanted their kids to succeed, too. It is and has always been a class thing - the 1% demanding a bigger and bigger piece of the pie while they laugh at the ignorant plebes fighting each other over the crumbs instead of pointing the finger at them.
Each time someone accuses "the Boomers," the "Jewish cabal," or anyone besides billionaires and their bought politicians for causing today's economic woes, they are doing volunteer propaganda work for the very ones who call them "useless eaters."
Reagan literally worked with the hostage takers to get elected. Reagan was a flare up in an age old American disease passed down hereditarily from Europe. Shows up in the form of religiosity, patriarchal values that don’t actually help most men but give them enough incentive to keep it so they’re better than women (extends to lgbt issues) as well as racism, ableism, etc
He was the very con that built this bullshit at the behest of the corporatists and theocrats who want control over everyone’s personal lives to better extract from them.
What she said. This boomer-hating person appeared on my Substack feed recently. “Intellectual laziness” is the perfect description for what is being written by whoever or whatever this is. Thanks for stating it clearly. The boomers I know live on fixed incomes, still work into their 70’s so they can pay their bills and buy food. They outnumber younger generations 10 to 1 at Black Lives Matter and No Kings protests and rallies. They struggle to survive. Who are these people riding on the inherited wealth of the silent generation of WWII? Because they sure as hell don’t live in my neighborhood.
Sorry but no. The Silent Generation largely fought for an America that created and then strengthened the middle class. They voted for their children to have incredible advantages, and then those children grew up and voted those advantages away from their children and grandchildren.
I remember that Silent Generation boosting Nixon and Reagan to the horror of their boomer children.
Some people are picking up the current cues promoting generations to fight each other instead of recognizing common cause.
Plot twist: the baby boomers discover the secret of immortality.
Gen Z is right now their adequate replacement, with only half their smarts.
I was internally pushing against your thesis as I read until you examined Trump, and I’m convinced you’re absolutely right. He’s legitimately amoral, I don’t believe he believes in anything. He pursues engagement and intense feeling and because he’s better at it than all the rest, he gets to wear the biggest hat. I’ll be thinking about this a lot…and nothing will change? Maybe not until enough people reject these images.
Yes. The author leveraged Trump to get you to emotionally agree with something you actually don't understand. Pure spectacle.
^ white supremacist, don’t waste your time
I'm a White separatist. I have no desire to rule over non-Whites at all.
On the other hand, you *are* a supremacist. An anti-White supremacist.
Nobody has ever loved you. You are worthless. Kill yourself.
It other words, you're too lazy to make an argument so you just blather and insult and pretend you've done something.
Does your breath smell like darkie butthole?
Do the first and only worthwhile thing you've ever done with your pathetic life: shoot yourself in the head.
Are you a jew?
You do realize that it’s OK to learn new things and change your mind based on new informational input right? That’s a big problem with most of the voting public as well as the politicians they vote for… they have come to believe that changing your mind is a sign of weakness without acknowledging that not changing your mind in the face of better information is stupid. A mutated, inbred chimera of sunk cost fallacy and confirmation bias…
Yes, I do. That's why I became a White Nationalist.
Are you pro-GOP? GOP has been decreasing White life expectancy for decades, e.g. farmers continuing to be pro-GOP despite GOP-Trump increasing farmers' bankruptcy and suicide rates. Southernized White Americans voting for spectacles over substance and then scapegoating Others is why both White separatism and White supremacism sound stupid. https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA_26989902-6a4b-4f40-8dc7-98298bf16029
Your non-thinking is locked into the idea that the struggle has been between the GOP and something not-GOP. I don't see the difference between the GOP and the DNC on racial matters: Both are race-communist parties that hate White people.
As for 'White separatism' I'm all for it. And I wonder why Whites shouldn't be supreme in their homelands? Would you expect Nigerian blacks to be second-class citizens in their homeland?
As for 'Southernized Whites Americans' voting for 'spectacle over substance', I don't see any part of the country that isn't just as guilty of 'spectacular politics'.
As for 'scapegoating'. You're scapegoating 'Southernized Whites' aren't you?
"I don't see a difference" Did you even read what I linked to, which incl. multiple sources? Another source: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/10/a-reminder-deaths-of-despair-are-mainly-hitting-white-women-in-the-south/
Numerous data shows Southernized Whites keep voting for bad policymakers like Trump, causing themselves to die of despair. Pointing at evidence is the opposite of scapegoating/BSing. But I don't think you care about evidence if not fitting your BS narrative.
Mother Jones is a bullshit leftie rag of the absolute lowest sort. The Anti-White Left doesn't care about White 'deaths of despair', in fact they applaud it. Phrases like 'Southernized Whites' is just a way of making New Yorkified Whites feel smug in their jewishness.
Both parties are functionally the same thing. Just painted different colors. A steaming, tightly coiled pile of poo with a blue flag, vs a steaming, tightly coiled pile of poo with a red flag.
Our only hope moving forward is eliminating the two party system…and frankly political parties in general. Parties are nothing more than separatist factions operating towards their own ends, within our broken system, and neither have any interests other than continuity of the status quo.
Here’s one avenue I feel strongly is worth exploring. (Yet I always reserve the right to get smarter)
https://treemason.substack.com/p/adaptive-libertocracy
Brilliantly stated. I read Society of the Spectacle last year and had a very similar realization. When you realize that they're letting you protest because it adds to the spectacle, it breaks things down to an absolutely heartwrenching conclusion: there is no end, all that we are is the means. The means to profit, to performative faculties that don't function in any sort of capacity other than to uphold the spectacle of all that is and isn't real. If everything is essentially the equivalent of performance art than how can we really know any sort of identity outside of that?
I loved this piece.
This is, hands down, the most to-the-core diagnosis of the whys and hows of our era I've read or heard. So damn well said too. I had to move from my chair to the couch so I could read it better... for some reason. All that to say, I'm joyfully envious because this is the article I wished I could have written.
You don't read very widely, I guess.
Not as widely as I'd like!
Libs: but…I like amoral self-indulgent hyperreality—just not when they do it.
Wonder if this is a networked version of hypernormalisation. System broken but all we can do is keep pretending. Locked in.
Adam Curtis does this very well in his BBC film “Hypernormalization.” All of his work is available on YouTube. After reading this piece, I’m super aware that I’m sitting in front of my screen alone being performative right now for all of you. Thanks for the astute analysis of what we’ve become in the US.
Yes, ‘watched over by machines of love and grace’ is also very relevant to now.
Capitalism, it's called capitalism.
Capitalism is the problem. What was the question?
The only difference between capitalism and cannibalism is the spelling. Both are Wetiko.
And neoliberalism is basically capitalism on steroids.
Yes and, as debord describes, even our critique of capitalism and the totality the commodity form imposes on life (or "non-life"), has been captured by images of itself. We can only center the interests of the working-class if they are made up of hard-hat-wearing, truth-talking, rough-around-the-edges community bolsheviks. We can only continue the Permanent Revolution if we wear red, cry out Rosa Luxembourg catchphrases, and elicit applause from those who have read the same books as us. Our understanding of capital itself is wrapped up in the realities of the production process of the late 19th and early 20th century, and critiques are only valid if they are draped in the language of that time's witnesses. We do not allow ourselves to deepen the criticism, to tackle totality, because the path has not already been carved for us. There is no dictatorship of the proletariat, because there is only a dictatorship over the present by the past, and nothing more. Need we doom ourselves to repeating the same losing tactics that have lost, and keep losing? Or must we, as this article suggests, re-shape our strategy, reframe our opposition, and refocus our efforts to materially manifest a future?
The part about pre-digested experiences really hit me hard. I really think you are unique and correct with your take on Trump being an amoral figure and why that put him where he is.
Great read can't wait for the next one.
But part of not believing in things means he’s not really against things as long as they don’t restrict his power. So he sides with the Handmaids people, the TechBro Crypto nihilists, the Military Industrial fascists, the Armageddon crowd, the conspiracy nut jobs, every brand of crazy. He pits them all against each other like Kaiju in a monster movie and let them fight for his attention.
This leaves us in Extremist Whack-a-Mole.
The most cathartic and articulate characterization of the time I’ve yet to read- thank you. I can understand Debord’s change of course. It can be overwhelming and make it easy to give way to nihilism, but it’s then that we must remember the words of Bucky Fuller when he said: do not fight the existing system. Instead, build a new one that makes the old one obsolete.
There are needs the system does not provide. Give the people what they need. They will go to what’s life giving and this monstrosity can wither and die.
The only thing patriarchy values is the fascist consolidation of power and control. Everything else is instrumental to the purpose of self-perpetuating (and therefore intensifying) systemic stratification. That's why, eg, the powerful use faith, religion and spirituality to set up cults, and why they promote horizontal conflict through the "culture wars" of identity politics, and why they can't tolerate diversity of perspective and thought or feedback, which threatens to expose their dysfunctional stupidity and hold them accountable.
Very true
"He dissolved his own movement, moved to the south of France, drank heavily, and eventually shot himself..." Yes, that's one way out but there are others. Paul Kingsnorth's "Against The Machine" has some more positive suggestions (https://egghutt.substack.com/p/blessed-are-the-barbarians) as do many other writers. I once paid $8 for the blue checkmark and felt nothing. I felt much better after deleting my account entirely.
With all due respect, Paul Kingsnorth's neo-luddism bordering on primitivism still leaves a lot to be desired IMHO. Occasionally he makes some good points here and there, like a stopped clock being right twice a day, but at the end of the day it's essentially a cop-out.
There it is again, that funny feeling