I use the word ‘soylent’ in the sense that the superstructure
of the modern world has become stuck in a labyrinth of its own making. Part of
the reason for being stuck in a labyrinth is the computer, which can be
programmed to repeat a senseless ideology ad infinitum, i.e., the mind of an
idiot as well.
This point--the
dead center of the mind of an idiot--was reached when Deadalus, the ‘scientist’,
started believing that he could make the computer think in an organic manner.
Therefore, when Deadalus arrives at the exit of the labyrinth of his making,
the computer has a program that will turn him back into the labyrinth.
When such
‘turnings back’ into one’s self reaches a certain critical number, organic
flesh turns into virtual or soylent
flesh of the ideal man, which man is best described by the philosopher and
psychologist Žižek as a democrat with “a certain ‘pathological stain’”.*
While I believe
that Žižek has contributed ideas that move us closer to better perceiving
certain riddles of our times, he--through being or pretending to be so much of our
times—has made his own It (the ‘who’ of earlier times) into a ‘stain’ of soylent flesh within his own formulation
of a ‘democratic’ nation, Such soylent
flesh though alive finds itself to be in a state of rigor mortis.
Lacking grounding
in organic nature, man becomes a soylent,
a creature which attempts to establish for Itself a beachhead by hooking a
steel ring into the nose of an organic democratic community. The not yet repressed
community of individuals is then told in suitably academic terms: “This
leftover [democracy in the wild] to which formal democracy clings, that which
renders possible the subtraction of all positive contents [i.e., the tongue
does it after kissing the ring—auth.], is of course the ethnic moment conceived
as ‘nation’ [the nation as an identifiable leftover of the organic
community—auth.]”*
I concur with
Žižek in how our time perceives the condition of government. Bought off by
capitalism turned into religion, governments of the West have had great success
in murdering and destroying organic life and environment on our planet, and
replacing it with two cars in a garage and the like. Such a replacements have
satiated all need for the human mind to think creatively, as ‘art’ today illustrates.
In other words, ‘art’, too, is an instant soylent,
an It, a product of an inhuman human and can bypass the human dwelling and go
directly into a museum or morgue. What is the difference?.
One of the insruments
that facilitates and turns the organic community into a community of soylents is the law. We can observe this
every time a Parliament (composed of pseudo immortals) meets and passes laws
for the mortals; that is to say, law-makers die of the law only during a
Revolution, but the public suffers and dies of it all the time. The ‘dying’ are
all ‘ordinary’ men and women, soldiers, and prisoners sentenced to death, and
include self-immolating Tibetans in the role of Indians trying to resist the
invasion of their country by a soylent
cavalry of the Chinese.
It is interesting
that upon entering the ritual of becoming soylent
leads to becoming an ‘ethnic’ at the half-way house called ‘a nation’.
This prompts the
question: What is the difference (if any) between an ‘ethnic’ and an ‘organic’?
The obvious
answer is that the ‘ethnic’ is of a ‘nation’ (preferably an urban one), while
an ‘organic’ is of a community
in the wild. Such a link leads us to a ‘community’ that several blogs ago Žižek
defined by the German word Gesellshaft,
basically an organization of strangers, card carying members of a political
party or labor union. Be these as ‘ethnic’ as they wish, the Geselshaften of
capitalist democracies remain for ever a conglomerate of strangers with love in
a state of rigor mortis between them.
Another
definition of a community speaks of it as people living in the same locale and
sharing the same social and historical experience.
Yet, a third definition
of ‘community’ is the Latvian definition: it locates the home (the place) of
Latvians in Latvia
Such a definition
of a community, nullifies the community of place—especially if the place is a
small one, and those living at the place are a small number. When ‘the place’
has many tens of millions of inhabitants, then the physical impossibility of a
quick and total replacement of the remnant of the organic community preserves
the ‘ethnic’ inhabitants of a nation until the language changes beyond easy
recognition. However, this does not hold true in all cases. In the instance of
the Latvians, their (and not only) organic community became soylent with the
replacement of the oral and idiomatic culture by that of the written word and
legal terminology.
Thus, even within
one nation there may come to be two communities: one being of the soylents, the other of the organics. The
soylents, generally practice
capitalism, while the soylents practice subsistence economy. --With the arrival
of the Industrial Age, the soylents
generally repress the organics—until the soylents
become an overwhelming majority and their ‘nation’ experiences exponential
growth ‘in place’, which, because the growth cannot be sustained, quickly
implodes (crashes) ‘in place’ and reverts to the ‘wild’ state. Needless to say,
the implosion is denied, as is the case today, because soylents cannot imagine that ‘democracy’ must return to its organic,
i.e., autarchic and subsistence economic stage.
*Slavoy Žižek, “Looking Away”, An October Book, MIT Press, p 104-105. All
text placed withing brackets [ ] are by the author.
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