The Economistic Conception of (Postmodern) Freedom
In the modern world, our understanding of freedom has been shaped at large by the deluge of Anglification, capitalism, and the philosophy ultimately characterizing the British Isles.
It’s the instrumental and ‘affaired’ mindset of the British that has been the ‘interested’ foundation of modern everyday thinking, which is why we go around consuming material objects that we don’t need and indeed don’t want yet continue to cling to in the vain hope that they will bring us lasting, complete fulfillment after our distress has receded. But it never comes.
Alain de Benoist, the doyen of the Nouvelle Droite, has challenged this essential ontological predicament by linking it to the commercialization of the fundamentally human aspects of our existence, such as love and seduction, that’s been ripped apart from its profoundly human dimension by the simulacrum of Tinder and the pick-up community.
What Benoist is arguing against, is the economistic heart of postmodern ontological phenomenology that makes us into self-interested and egoistic individuals, stripped from all meaningful cultural essentialism.
I think this is why we see the essentializing trends in contemporary black art, whereby the ‘blackness’ of a piece of art and its artist come together in a unified horizon to embody the essence of being black. The contradiction lies in its racialized double standard: what if a white person tried to do this?
Baudrillard also pointed this out with reference to hyperreality. What modern technological accessories such as a romantic films, pornography, and VR have in common are their ‘phenomenal’ function as simulacra, whereby artificial simulations of reality increasingly come to replace an often mundane everyday life.
In some sense, these fake depictions possess the alluring quality of having a more real dimension than reality. In Zizek’s words, it’s fiction that is more real than reality. They’re instantly more gratifying than the romantically effortful yet inescapably anguishing struggle of life: you will never have better sex than in porn, or kiss better than Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic.
The situation we find ourselves in is the haunting spectacle of postmodernity that sensationalizes politicization whilst seeking to establish total liberal hegemony and to satisfy consumers who go on pursuing their selfish lifestyles, i.e. empty signifiers of purported purpose, despite their being “aware” of the global problems facing us.
Middle-class dinner table discussions of “caring about the world” constantly spout drivel and opinion that may well be genuine, but they function like superficial, egocentric smugtalk which inspires nobody and does nothing.
Conversely, it actively perpetuates falsehoods, views and illusions that cloud their thinking from seeing what must be done systematically. This underlying cultural substratum of discourse does nada to save us. The credo of today is to pretend that you really care.
The problem lies with the ongoing economistic and hyperpoliticized ultra-discourse which relegates differentiated culture to the backseat where consumerism and politicized culturalism can have their game in consolidating elitist cultural hegemony whilst no real changes are being made.
Liberal hegemony is only the cultural overlay — the point is always to accrue the ultimate motivating factors of higher individuals: money, power, and prestige.
In Schmittian terms, this amounts to saying that bipartisan liberal depoliticization only functions at the politico-cultural level, whereas the statist political economy remains solidly in their grasp.
So, what’s the postmodern economistic condition at its core?
It’s the map that replaces the territory — the code that sustains itself with no inner content, purpose, or reference; a spiritual dearth stripped from its humanity; the painstaking non-fulfillment of Lacanian objét petit a, and the truth that we all crave.
