The erasure of national sovereignty leads, not to Shangri-La as some would have us believe, but to a supranational consolidated ‘sovereignty’ presided over by banking interests, which is no sovereignty at all. On the contrary, it’s the Town Hall of the Panopticon. Greece is not some idiot uncle who simply needs a loan to get back in the fold. That’s a tragic misread. Greece is the canary in our mine-shaft, loss-leader on the road to global debt servitude. As goes Greece so too will go the world in due course. Others wait in the wings: Puerto Rico, Italy, Portugal, the US. From the back of the cave, distant miners are easily mistaken for canaries.
It’s the math, stupid. The irrevocable tipping point of mounting debt proceeds from the law of large numbers. Debt-money has unsustainability built into its Ponzi structure –unless we get the Martian mineral mines cranking in short order (exogenous resources expand the denominator; but then what, diamond mining on Saturn?) The Earth wearies of being picked at for mindless, usurious advance. Those who run the Ponzi are not wringing their hands in distress. You don’t wring your hands when things are playing into your hands. Debt is a weapon designed to bring the world to its knees. This ‘abyss’ is a carefully planned rendezvous. So, all the media histrionics about spendthrift nations tempting perfectly avoidable black holes, the character defects of the lazy Greeks, are just that: histrionics meant to disguise a premeditated arrival point.
The trumped-up contempt for national sovereignty rests upon a circuitous myth: That war in Europe has traditionally been precipitated by jingoism and toxic forms of nationalism, when, in fact, these are second-order manifestations brought on by the boom-bust manipulations and economic crises caused by the very financial interests that set out to ‘rescue Europe’ from the fascist recoil the former sets in motion. We’ve been schooled since birth in ass-backwardness. Debt is not some agnostic handmaiden to growth. Debt necessitates growth, for without it, the former perishes. Nor is debt ‘agnostic’. On the contrary, it is laden with agenda as all weapons are.
So when we hear the idealistic refrains of committed Eurocentrists (i.e. idealists presumably, as they lack a stake in the centralized outcome), we witness stupendous naivete greeting circular logic with open arms. Paraphrasing the circle:
Anoint us your ruling elite and we promise to cease playing the gaps that have historically visited ruin upon you and have delivered you to such desperate straits that you would even consider anointing us your ruling elite.
These various ‘sovereignties’ (vigorously equated today as being something on par with body odor) happen to comprise the variegated splendor of the human race. Perhaps humanity’s a little too splendid for your tastes? God made nations. Petition Him. Core identity springs from sovereignty (the latter really a geo-politicized term for community, coherence and social comity). Sovereignty is the only potent ‘reservoir of recoil’ against a powerful centralizing force. National sovereignty, sharp elbows and all, is the only real bulwark against supranational hegemony. Pick the borders of your poison.
Power didn’t raise no fools. Fully recognizing its enemy (and faced with a prey that’s been trained to sees its enemy as its fwend), absolute power seeks to neuter the differences. Certainly an indeterminate flatland will aid administrative management, Max Weber’s foretold nightmare. One tactic, again, is to denigrate sovereignty ceaselessly, banishing it forever to a pejorative never-land. Another tactic is to flood all pockets of distinction (and social coherence) with waves of outsiders, in effect burying the former alive in their own backyards. Note how the inoffensive euphemism ‘open borders’ is promulgated by the media to gloss what clearer heads would call a mass invasion.
The powers-that-be seek gray, flattened automatons alienated from everything that makes them human and distinct –veritable warm bodies whose raisson d’etre consists in holding up the consumer end of card swipes. Sheldon Wolin suggests we’re in the grips of what he calls ‘inverted totalitarianism’, a follow-on from ‘classical totalitarianism’. What if we’re in the grips instead of an determined eschatology, from proto-totalitarianism to perfected totalitarianism? The ‘perfections’, you ask? Rallying cries become nonstarters when there is nothing to rally against. Mussolini, so easily detestable, has been inverted into a System. You can’t hang oxygen from a lamppost.
Centralization is a thus devil’s bargain of swapping lesser ruins for an eclipsing ruin from which there will be no escape. The surveillance super-state will detect intimations of dissent before they congeal into barely-formed intentions. You can’t take every hill at once. One hill must serve as lever. Inverted totalitarianism is the ultimate invisibility cloak.
Today’s Stasi is a trillion eyeballs peering from all sides, an army of clever toasters and sensate devices measuring our biorhythms, sizing us up for our propensity for future crime, all the while baiting us with convenience and the solicitous wink of emoticons –pixels mocked up to be our flatland fwends!
So you’ve been warned. Never touch a sentient doorknob while nursing a fever. You could be mistaken for a hothead. The colorless, odorless Internet of Things will work tirelessly for the State. Without pay. Without compunction. Kitchen appliance will reveal the dark side of inanimateness. The heat of the kitchen hides a multitude of sins! Never curse your skillet. Beneath the scrambled eggs the smarter ones are taking notes.
The enemy is ubiquitous and soon to be eternally ensconced. Fortunately manufactured consent has taught us to love and embrace our self-harm. So there need not be a fight. Even a whimper detracts from TV time.
As Wolin points out brilliantly, the instigators and seeming foremen of the Panopticon are themselves unconscious cogs in a system of vague and indeterminate tyranny. With everyone comporting a touch of gray, no one warrants hanging as no one absence is enough to bring an end to things. The Internet of Things is the distributive architecture of complicity. We cannot thwart an enemy we inhabit. Nor can we forestall a future that, by virtue of ubiquitous arrival, rescinds the discrete coordinates of entrance.”