Skewering Me-Pods

by Friedrich Hansen

Miscarriage of Superman: Franz Kafka’s metamorphosis of Gregor Samsa

Arthropods of the sort of spiderman are the virtual constituency of Hollywood just as the Me-Pods are the constituency of the liberal mainstream media. Both keep creating the West’s false expectations rooted in fictional reality which is why they hate down-to-earth President Donald Trump even more than they hate themselves. Mired in self-sustaining loops of Greek and Freudian mirror thinking the Baby Boomers and their offspring the Millennials became facile victims of transference and countertransference, Freud’s magic ping pong. Add to this liberal atheism or agnosticism and you are left with unforgiving resentment of the typical Me-pods, rigid types, lacking self-reflection because they have dispensed of their inner, moral self. Equally lost seems the benevolent market routine of “give and take” or the religious “live and let live” which used to sustain the Western political equilibrium originating in Jerusalem, not Athens.

We will return in a moment to these miscarriages of megalomania, brilliantly expressed by Franz Kafka. Conversely Me-Pods are champions of the old Hellenist honor-shame-and-revenge culture depending on superheros with the dire consequence that they are notoriously bad loosers. They can rarely overcome grave errors such as the US democrats having once fought on the wrong side in the American Civil War, hence their obssession with racism. Interestingly the Wilsonian progressives, emerged at exactly the time when the streams of pessimist-megalomaniac philosophies, namely Darwinian, Nietzschean and Freudian reached the critical mass for substituting the social-utopian paradigm into the bio-utopia of superman and gender.

President Trump‘s personality is of an entirely different kind rather akin to Zeno, the Fin-de-Siecle anti-hero of Italo Svevo‘s towering novel of modern man: “Zeno’s Conscience”. Its ironic and  funny anti-Freudian tinge has worked out the exact opposite of a bio-utopia of supermen: Zeno is a man endearing us despite of his ineptitude and weaknesses, just like President Trump. But against the rules of human empathy rigid Me-Pods still won‘t give President Trump his due, let alone the benefit of the doubt as with Russiagate. Liberal „cool“ elites, also known as the Davoisies and Greens, can be best characterized by their habit of navigating reality under a protective carapace wrought from „fun & fiction“, furnishing them with a hard shell of mind control called Political Correctness that is rarely pierced by the worries of those they pretend to represent. Ever since the decadent Fin-de-Siecle this impenetrable mind would be symbolized by the biological exoskeleton of the Hollywood arthropod.

It took a no-nonsense guy from the real estate battle grounds in New York City to crush the liberal exoskeleton and awake the Me-Pods from their conceited slumber, ensconced in the virtual fantasy world of Hollywood or academic „safe spaces“. For an example just think of the ridiculous performance of Hollywood bellman Robert de Niro – outstanding in its primitivism. This pubescent brandishing of the clenched fist alone followed by the spread of the Trump-derangement Syndrom has been the most embarrassing revelation about hip Americans for decades. It exposes these rigid fans of silicon, fiction and paleolithic reality as noting but bad loosers, so typical for shame  cultures. The social-Darwinist adjunct „super“ has entered every day jargon in even the most remote provinces of the West. Gone the notion of fair play, once the mark of Americans, born from great sports like baseball or rugby. This is the sad tragedy of divided America today: liberals of the pathetic and selfrighteous „soft-core-hard-shell“ variety are hiding under their carapaces, shockfrozen in their no-nothing defense like bugs.

The contrast to the brave roly poly Donald Trump with his metaphysical hairstyle – the undoing of the carapace could not be greater. Trump keeps absorbing endless salves of punches and humiliations fending of any withdrawel. His strong support among the Evangelicals shows, however, where moral resilience and endurance are still to be found: in rural middle-America. Moreover it speaks to Trump‘s monotheist sensibilities, buttressed by his Jewish-Orthodox family ties and adamant siding with the state of Israel, that his ability to suffer and take endless blows – just like the Jewish state has done since its existance – by far towers his sometimes conceited self-love.

It is for this very reason that Donald Trump‘s initial mission was marked by empathy with the loosers of globalization – empathy that his adversaries are lacking so much.

Liberal elites have not done their homework as usual, missing that industrious arthropods were once believed to represent the perfect incarnation of Western animal spirits. If today those spirits have gone awry it is because they have waxed into global monsters with billions of customers. They are the last incarnation of Spinozist pantheism: the divine being crushed into smithereens by the digital titans of Silicon Valley. Metaphorically speaking the rise of the West used to be symbolized by the teeming bee hive driving humming market economies, or so Friedrich Hayek once mused in a lecture given in the 1980s at the Royal Society of London. It is only since the years of the Great Depression that market spirits had to wax mightily upon facing the challenge by fascist and communist totalitarianism. Since then the fantasy progeny of bees, ants and termites pouring out of Hollywood knew no bounds, most prominent among them King Kong and his monster brothers, the long extinct Cambrian dinosaurs.

They are the avaters of the uncontrollable denizens of Silicon Valley and they give everybody a clue to how far liberal self esteem has lost sight of reality and to what degree it has been virtually inflated. The globalist elites are champions of reckless individualism, most of them centrifugal and increasingly gendered anti-family types. Their obsession with sexual transgression, a revenant of Nietzschean „triumph of the will“, driven by brutal self-realization is only surpassed by their resolve for tearing down any borders, moral and physical alike, in order to satisfy their voracious appetites. Don‘t allow yourself to be fooled by the vegan or green credentials of the globalists.

It is the authentic drive of the family man Donald Trump who arrived at exactly the right time to pierce the „centrifugal“ bubble of globalism and return us to Western „centripetal“ values – proto- liberal Immanuel Kant‘s own analytical terminology – centered in religion, nation and family. Trumps family hails from the middle of Franconia by the way, not very far from where I happen to live at the moment. We all know that ever since the beginning of the modern era rural areas have caughed up the best men and women. Just remind yourself of the great aviators like John Glenn, true American heroes and all without exemption emerging from rural middle America.

Despite the flowering of fiction and superwomen the concept of humanized Darwinism is stone dead and lives on only in Hollywood. This fact alone shows how dated the liberal mindset actually is. Liberals are dead men walking due to their decadent taste for virtual reality and repetitious stimuli, ever so keen to escape anything remotely smacking of duty, morals and analogue values. Ask yourself why arthropods after representing the most successful species of biological evolution on our planet went on to become arguably the largest group of virtual actors to be found in movies churning out of Hollywood.

Worse, though is not apparent: The monotheist concept of transcendent heteronomy otherwise known as divine providence or if you wish „guidance by a personal God“, is thrown into secular or immanent heteronomy, spreading all sorts of „centrifugal“ addictions, typically sex. The replacement of inner coherence with external heteronomy is my definition of the liberal tyranny built on the model of the arthropod communities. From there inevitably follows the need for big goverment with comprehensive control of human animal instincts. Spiritual freedom of judgment and moral education is zapped away and weakened permanently thanks not least to silicon-digital gadgets which follow algorythms of merciless causality leaving very limited room for mistakes, compromises and human forgiveness. Experts estimate that biological science fiction make up more than half of the yearly Hollywood output. Tinsel town is meanwhile so biased that movies alone are sustaining the false claims of Darwinism, if only in digitalized fiction. This delicate absurdity could not remain unnoticed by the genius of Tom Wolfe, who pointed out that pure biological evolution has been long succeeded by language evolution. To be more precise: it has been succeeded already ten thousand years ago.

Now against the elitist-liberal version called Darwinism, as Wolfe has worked out in his Kingdom of Speech, published last year, the genuine concept of natural selection was doubtlessly first discovered by a guy of very limited means. His name is Alfred Russel Wallace, yet he was too benign and modest for penetrating the PC shell of Hellenized academe, equally cunning and patronizing shame-and-honor guys who until today make up the party of liberal buddies of Charles Darwin. Notably it was only after he chanced to have a look on Wallace‘s paper that Darwin could bring himself to jot down his own ideas. Yet no doubt even Wallace‘s evolution of the plant and animal kingdom for all it is worth, is pertified stuff never to be extended to infinitely complex humanity.

It is only for sheer power lust that liberals keep utilizing Darwinism as the creed for submission of the masses to sustain human serfdom by nurturing the arthropod mentality. Last not least: spineless, intellectually depleted and chronically under-educated liberals need to hold on to something, don‘t they? This is why the arthropod hype, also known as Darwinism, remains not only the liberal pet project an it was precisely at this junction that an affinity emerged between biological-sociological utopias and Wilsonian progressism. If anything this affinity was epitomized in the biography of the eminent Belle Epoch liberal and Flemish Nobel Laureate, Maurice Maeterlinck. After finishing law studies in his native Ghent, he became a fairly successful playwright in Paris during the early 1890s. In his „evolutionary“ plays nothing dramatic happens except fate is taking its inevitable course very gradually. Their overarching motive, besides inertia was a vain hope to be saved by an underlying biological determinism. This was just the secular continuation of a deeply reductionist Protestant notion of Christ as the pars-pro-toto rendition of divine law – a mentality that lives on in genderism. Across the English Chanel at the time fellow playwrite Oscar Wilde made his name as gendered artist and gay globetrotter. Yet Maeterlinck would quit the world of theatre before the turn of the 19th century and submerge himself into serious naturalist enquiries, namely exploring the world of arthropods – a very similar career as his German fellow entomologist Ernst Jünger. Both experimented on the combination of belle lettres and science in an attempt to achor human civilization in biologic determinism as for instance in the world of arthropods.

Etymology here helps us to understand how the juxtaposition of „arthros“, Greek for joint, and „pod“, Greek for foot. But „pod“ also plays with twin English meanings: herd and carapace or capsule, which refers to the exoskeleton of insects and bugs. From the latter we can sense the concept of natural camouflage provided by multitudes of individuals all looking the same – an idea Edgar Allen Poe employed for his narrative topos of the „thief finding sanctuary in the crowd“. This looks like a shared motive between liberal „sanctuary cities“ and genderer multitudes of sameness. It represents just the latest transition away from individual persons to mere typologies.

Sigmund Freud, hyped mostly as last enlightenment prophet, was nevertheless mislead when he translated the decadent, reductionist biologism of his day into his notion that sex alone defines humanity. I call this Freud‘s pars-pro-toto or arthropod fallacy which replaced meeting in language with metting in the flesh. It brings us back to his congenial contemporary Maurice Maeterlinck,  who really followed through this pars-pro-toto symbolism into biology. It was his Protestant infatuation with static gestures which was to lead him from the theatre stage with living actors to wooden puppets and finally to the rigid exoskeleton of arthropods, mostly ants, bees and termites. Worth of note about Materlinck‘s symbolistic plays is this: women featured prominently for being  in better control of their destiny than men, who were prone to early death.

So it was no surprise at all to find Maeterlinck in the thrall of Queen ant, which can reproduce asexually through cloning and in effect can release thousands of female workers without any male interference. It was this kind of boring biological stuff that impressed liberal elites most and would earn Maeterlinck the Noble Price for Literature (sic!) in 1911 – confirming the decadent taste for marching arthropods in the run up of the Great War which would see human columns perish by the thousands like termites.

Now if we look carefully how certain gadgets emerging from Silicon Valley succeed in wheaning users off from any human empathy the times seem not too far away, when liberal fans of augmented reality glasses start emulating arthropods. Are they are equally keen on viewing only fractured or fragmented pictures of reality simply in order to experience more intense or shocking sights of virtual reality? Are they not like these bugs, shaped in aeons of evolutionary selection which came to represent a design, informed by „shock-frozen images of anxiety“ rendering them extremely well armoured. Metaphorically speaking, cannibalists bugs share with committed liberals the fondness of sacrificing their adversaries lock, stock and barrel. This is how we need to make sense of the incessant and unforgiving attacks launched by the liberal media on President Trump. Addicted to virtual reality liberals just like arthopods seem to have lost any human empathy and sense of proportion.

The analogy does not end here: liberal gender activists, loath of the inner moral self, want to completely externalise instinct control for everyone simply because they won‘t control themselves any longer. They are keen to emulate the way the social life of bee hives or termite mounds works. That is one of the utopias of liberal tyranny based on the fact that gay insistance on „being born like that“ (just as with race) justifies more government control and eats up humans freedom of mind and body. The danger here is that digital gadgets familiarize everyone with relinquishing personal responsibility and judgment. All the same, gender-biological or virtual-digital determinism both militate against spiritual freedom. This plays into the alliance between the San Francisco gender aristocracy and the big players at Silicon Valley. For instance Apple I-phones facilitate the use of apps for immediate encounter „in the flesh“ without any interference of the human conscience. It‘s called digitally assisted hook up sex. Not for nothing are silicon-based gadgets named with mortifying appendixes such as „pod“ or „pad“ as if we could be set up on a completely new footing externally like arthropods.

Apple users have a cult mindset and like supermen and arthropods

Certainly the inevitable and totally inadaequate media coverage that Apple receives for free marketing, euphemized as „news“, for any of its silly „pods“ is revealing indeed. To be sure what comes out of Silicon Valley has little semblance with cutting edge science as we knew it. This much can be known from the disgraceful tone alone with which the elected President of the United States was received by the mandarins of Apple, Google & Co.

Funny enough president Trump seizing on the VW combustion scandal teaches us something about his realism and „arthropod“ sensibilities. Actually the scandal has been somehow pre-mediated long ago by the Austrian parvenu Adolf Hitler. No sooner than envisioning his power grip in Germany this gifted impostor and failed artist from Vienna came to promise every German citizen his own rolling carapace, a mass produced steel-arthropod. Named the Beetle it was promised in exchange for granting the usurpator German citizenship in 1932, actually a mutual exchange of carapaces. The first proto-Type of the Beetle arrived in 1935 yet its civil mass production had to be postponed until after the war. It cost only three times as much as the I-Phone, if I got the maths right.

Hitler needed the beetle deerly in order to boost his reputation when he was still mocked in some quarters of Germany as the Bohemian Private. So he greately desired a German Passport and after seven unsuccessful attempts elsewhere he succeeded almost in the last moment before the German election. No, I am not making this up, it is Wikipedia telling us unblinkingly: for the sole purpose of citizenship alone, Hitler would be made into a Professor for arthropods – my term (FH) for the official title of „organic sociology“ – at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Six years later in 1938 the city of Wolfsburg (Wolves Castle) was founded for hosting the beetle headquarters.

Predecessor of the I-Phone: VW Beetle used by the German „Afrika Corps“ in WW II.

The consonance of „Wolves Castle“ with „Wolves Lair“, the „Führerhauptquartier“ during WW II, is striking. Therefore we may account for todays digital highways, navigated by Apple, Google & Co., as congenial with strategic beetle mobility on the analogue „autobahn“. As a matter of fact Silicon Valley has been calling the shots in Washington D.C. for quite a while and just as the Nazis abused biological evolution based on race we could awake to the fact that the tycoons of Beverly Hills and the Californian Bay Area might abuse language evolution on the basis of gender. As it happens language hygiene has come to fall into the lap of President Trump and he is moving well within the moral bounds of Western civilization with his language appealing to the human conscience. A good example being his recent claim that „Germans are cheating“ economically, thereby brilliantly piercing their postwar carapace – called „persil schein“ – of political innocence and exposing them as stiffs. Since the VW beetle was a brain child of Hitler I just point out that the name plays with the absence of conscience: the beetle born to cheat.

Nor was the celebration of arthropods in decadent Europe new or a Nazi invention for it accounts for nothing less than the foundation myth of the free market economy, taken up by Adam Smith himself from a Dutch emigree. His concept for the division of labor in particular has been inspired by a poem called „The Fable of the Bees“, brought from Amsterdam to London by the psychiatrist Bernhard Mandeville in 1705. Ever since has attracted praise by advocats of free market economics like Friedrich Hayek. Keep this in mind when you hear President Trump berating free trade and free market dogmas.

President Trump is more than justified questioning the moral claims of radical market advocats. Its core credentials hinge on the famous bee-formula: private vice is being turned into public virtue by way of the division of labour. Yet meanwhile exactly the opposite has come to be true after market dynamism keeps unraveling the family among many other detrimental effects. The free market is now catering to, if it has not actually helped creating, new vices by the millions such as pornography, nudism, sodomy, fisting, blow jobs and sexual promiscuity. The fundamental mistake of Mandeville and Smith lays in replacing Jerusalem with Athens. For as antiquity has taught us the multitude of the Greek polis could never attain political unity and permanence in contrast to the Jewish civilization which has been alive and kicking for five millennia. Instead the profane Fable of the Bees became the economic gospel of classical liberals and libertarians. So let‘s share some lines from the original poem:

A Spacious Hive well stock’d with Bees,

That lived in Luxury and Ease;

And yet as fam’d for Laws and Arms,

As yielding large and early Swarms;

Was counted the great Nursery

Of Sciences and Industry.

No Bees had better Government,

More Fickleness, or less Content.

They were not Slaves to Tyranny,

Nor ruled by wild Democracy;

But Kings, that could not wrong, because

Their Power was circumscrib’d by Laws.

The ‘hive’ is corrupt but prosperous,

yet it grumbles about lack of virtue.

A higher power decides to give them what they ask for:

But Jove, with Indignation moved,

At last in Anger swore, he’d rid

The bawling Hive of Fraud, and did.

The very Moment it departs,

And Honesty fills all their Hearts;

This results in a rapid loss of prosperity,

though the newly virtuous hive does not mind:

For many Thousand Bees were lost.

Hard’ned with Toils, and Exercise

They counted Ease it self a Vice;

Which so improved their Temperance;

That, to avoid Extravagance,

They flew into a hollow Tree, 

Blest with Content and Honesty.

The poem ends in a famous phrase:

Bare Virtue can’t make Nations live In Splendor;

they, that would revive A Golden Age, must be as free,

For Acorns, as for Honesty.

 

We can see why Trump is right again presenting himself as a free market sceptic nailing down liberal-Protestant cheating most efficiently with his slogan America First. It blithely tears down globalism as the foil on which liberals depend like manna for their „Tikkun Olam“ or „Save the Planet“ suadas. No one encapsulates this liberal racket of ethical posturing, with no other purpose as shaming the rest, than rock star Bono. Pontificating unelected liberal campaigners like him kept breast feeding, symbolized by their latte sipping habits, on Western bad conscience – that is to say, until Donald Trump pulled away completely the carpet from under their self-righteous PC gymnastics. It cost liberals very little, but for decades has granted them the moral highground in the media.

If anything, Trump is fighting for the original institution of trust and keeping ones word against liberal hypocrisy and relativising our core values. More than is presently realized, liberal PC endangers and alienates human trust and fellow-feeling. It suppresses the good neighbourly and family relations by intoxicating language and public discourse. Self-rule and free interpersonal exchange are being hampered in the way George Orwell warned us about. The manipulation of language gets much worse once we are forced to use gender new speak for sexual idenities derived from the LGBTIQ letter soup. Personal conscience as a human institution is in great danger today of being eroded by identity politics and through the dissolution of the family. Sexual identity to be sure is the externalization of personal conscience, actually turning it into a farce. Arbitrary sexual identities are mere constructs of human fiction corresponding to virtual realities that emerge from such places as Facebook and Instagramm.

Anyone who wonders about President Trump‘s sentiments about gender reasignment experiments need look no further than Kafka’s overnight metamorphosis which turned him into a giant bug. The great writer is just one of many Jews who cared about the ontological difference in the human perspective, the difference between the outer professional self, mostly determined by what we see, and the inner moral self, mostly determined by what we hear from our parents and learn by heart. He is telling us: “The Jews are not painters. We cannot depict things statically. We see them always in transition, in movement, as change. We are story-tellers “ (Ira B. Nadel: “Joyce and the Jews – Culture and Texts”, MacMillan Press 1989.)

First published in Geopolitica.