The Etiolating Throne of Neo-Pragmatism

So, there I was, walking to work again in the bottom half of Manhattan, grumbling to myself as I do in the hours before coffee gives me the alacrity to enunciate words...when I came upon a corner filled with people looking in the direction behind me. Goddamn tourists... But something, some sort of quiddity, disturbed me about this group, forcing me to scrutinize what I had seen once more. Wait a minute... businessmen...bike messenger...the deli guy...these aren't tourists... What the fuck? I turned around to look behind me and observe the north tower of the WTC with that enormous hole in it...and with the time to only guess the events leading to this denouement, I watched as that second plane buried itself into the south tower. Good fucking morning, indeed. Of course, the aftermath which ensued the destruction of those towers constituted nothing but panic from nearly everyone. People with loved ones in those buildings frantically called their cell phones with rubicund eyes, belligerent men shouted for blood in the bars, and those who sought to quell their thirst for blood by hopefully giving blood to those who might need it (including myself) all performed the drama before me. I will remember most of that day with a certain amount of pride, as I watched my beloved city scream in agony but refuse to buckle its knees. Most of those memories are powerful yet painful...but there are other things in my memory which violate the mores I had thought applied to all around me on those streets. Despite the air being permeated with noise and cries, I passed by an alfresco cafe table with a woman calmly reading her issue of Cosmopolitan, refusing to pay one ounce of attention to the chaos around her. At one point, the worst amid the pandemonium, a small group of nonchalant girls with shopping bags strolled past me, chatting about a slew of meaningless topics which probably filled their opulent, vapid lives. And they pondered :

Of course, one could make the case that the United States has reached its apogee of power, and its decline has finally arrived on its appointment scheduled by fate. In fact, you're probably expecting me to launch into some cliché piece of diatribe using an allusion to Rome...some ab actu ad posse valet illatio (which means "it is possible to infer the future from the past"). Come on, admit it, you were thinking it. Well, Dennis Miller has that covered, so I won't be going that route. Instead, I'd like to contrast the current mindset of this country's elite with the decadence of those epicurean assholes from the Iron Age. To be honest, I think that it's too rash and too much of the conventional idea of pragmatism to simply look at a country like the United States and use its position of power and wealth in order to pluck a historical reference and predict its demise. No, internally, there are too many factors which are different from historical examples... and, on an interesting note, there is too much taking place outside of its borders which indicates that domestic trends are part of a larger migration of the world towards some other form of social order. In fact, it seems that the various institutions of the world, be they economic or political, seem not to be changing in parallel to each other; instead, they seem to be converging.

Man, this guy usually writes some funny stuff...where's the funny shit? Don't worry, the tone will lighten up a bit here...I'll try to work in some ass jokes while I talk about ideology here...Ideology has been used both as the passion which drives honest leaders and as the tool used by less honest ones to manipulate others, but it has always had its place. However, as time goes by, those with the lead roles on the global stage have started to ignore the potential of a particular ideology, especially one that starts with an 'O' that fucks the other philosophies in the ass...you know, one day I'm going to create a bumper sticker that says "My Philosophy Bitch-Slaps Your Philosophy In The Mouth"... but I digress...In addition to not crafting an abstraction to live by, they have also decided to do something different from most pragmatist historians, in which history has merely provided study cases for political advisors. Instead, the seminal guide to contemporary leadership involves a new blueprint to execution, touting the paragon as a contradictory combination of institutions that seem to work in harmony and attain the highest number of goals. In other words, like a drunken sailor with groping-ass hands (there's your ass reference, folks) who has been attacked with mace spray, they have decided to "feel" their way through a plan of action and handle their business (being either political or economic in nature) through adopting a model which is more horizontal than vertical; the goal is to reach a position with the flexibility of an Eastern European prostitute. And as the neologist that I love to be, I get to name this "newfound discovery" : Neo-Pragmatism.

So, what am I talking about? Well, let's take China for instance. For decades, Communist China proudly adhered to its policies of detesting every aspect of capitalism...but, during the last quarter of the twentieth century, the condescension of wealth began to lift as American and European business began to whet the appetite of Mao's apostates. In fact, in recent years, a new "crass" of entrepeneurs has begun to emerge, creating an amount of wealth for private citizens unseen in recent Chinese history; oddly, they still function as members of the official Communist party. So, what derivatives led to this duality? We need iron-fist power over our citizens, but unlike Russia, we're not stupid...we need to create wealth and to attain wealth from Western countries. Hence, the Communist party now has a subset of capitalists. In other words, this approach seems to satisfy all requirements as we learn from history...it seems to work. Conversely, we have the United States...but instead of the U.S. government (which obviously deviates more from the Enlightenment period with each passing day), take a company which carried the freedom banner since its inception : Google. Google, along with many other companies, decided to capitulate to China's demands of search engine censorship for a number of alleged reasons, with lucre being the obvious choice for a company with public ownership. However, Google (and others) justify their actions by claiming their presence, in any amount, will have a positive effect by disseminating at least some information to the population of China. Again, though, like China's new economic caste, there is a precision to the method, aiming to find the course of action which will be at the union of all its contradictory goals and to make itself more like others without too much self-betrayal... which is precisely why Google fights for privacy in the United States but not elsewhere. And, of course, we have the European Union, a cluster-fuck of countries that seek to prove Einstein's theory of relativity by moving more towards and away from various moral positions at the same time, creating a case of vertigo so violent that it causes retardation...but who would have guessed that from Europe? However, the scariest component to these examples is that I think most of them involve people who actually believe that their actions are benevolent, without even regarding a context to which they should adhere. Unlike the pragmatism of old in which 'being practical' was used to support (and simultaneously contradict) an ideology or none at all, this new one has the opinion of itself as arbitrariliy crawling towards an ideological plateau. In other words, they are simply 'hoping for the best'. And the worst part? It almost seems as if they're spending more time watching each other than paying attention to themselves.

So, who gives a shit about any of this? The powerful do lots of things to keep their power...what the fuck else is new? And who uses words like 'etoliating', you pretentious fuck? Yeah, I'm clairvoyant like that...somehow I knew exactly what you were thinking. Well, asshole, maybe you're right...maybe we shouldn't worry about it. Maybe Hoobasuck is right in their lyrics when they yoodle "So why does there only have to be one correct philosophy?... I'd like to think that i can go my own way and meet you in the end." Then again, maybe their arguments are about as strong as their chord progressions, and maybe you're a fucking idiot for thinking that a moral blueprint can be composed with something analagous to a thousand typing monkeys. Unfortunately, you derive your actions from an ideology, and you cannot put the cart before the horse... unless the cart is a robot pulling a wooden horse...but that's the plot of Cyber-Trojans, which I cannot talk about due to a NDA that I signed over a line of coke...But that's neither hare nor snare. The point (and, believe it or not, I have one) is that an arbitrary set of positions will not deliver you unto any blessed land; instead, you are only laying the foundation for your own demise by not ensuring the architecture has a harmony which creates a mighty gestalt, not an easily recognized result of shitty patchwork. If you did, you'd see where showing oblation to foreign authoritarians will encourage them here, making your business a bonesaw in the amputation of freedom. If you did, you would see how more regulations would only make your people less productive and less prone to create wealth. If you did, you would understand how playing as a best friend to both China and Taiwan will only end in one swallowing the other. If you did, you would see how handing a gun to the enemy of your enemy would come back to haunt you since you didn't load the last chamber with an explosive...all because you didn't want to offend any of your supposed 'friends'. And if you did, my towers might still be here.