John Gray’s essay on post-liberalism in the New Statesman plums new depths of meaninglessness. It reaches the apogee of terminal thought, caught in the multicultural, post-political milieu that defines politics and culture as an array of choices circumscribed by a variety of faceless authorities. Extending beyond the state into an institutional oligarchy of overlapping bureaucracies and NGOs. Product standards, non-tariff trade barriers, certifications, licensure, etc. All conditioned and defined by multinational authorities that sit between compulsory and voluntary (quasi-compulsory to fit the governing modality of quasi-governmentality).

Christopher Rufo’s invocation of hyperreality in his criticism of Nick Fuentes and the wider anti-Israel right wing is an interesting segue into postmodernism, particularly for a conservative activist. His primary criticism of Fuentes, that he is a media influencer draped in layers of irony that make his pronouncements largely redundant, is correct in its analysis. There is no reality behind his ideology, just further levels of obfuscation and comedy. Praising Stalin or engaging in Holocaust revisionism are just ways of reaching toward a barely-coherent ideology of authoritarianism. There’s nothing serious behind it. Fuentes is a gay Mexican Catholic calling for the establishment of a theocratic WASP ethnostate.

Concepts of vital materialism and objectness place the ontological claim of the other at its most extreme point. The collapse of the distinction between life and matter, and further the subject/object opposition, presents an elevation of the multiplicity of being to a level of equality with the traditional conceptions of life. With this elevation comes new obligations and relations to instantiate the place of the claim as not just an ontological exploration but a political mechanism that displaces sapient reasoning as the dominant mode of existence.

Thoughts are the totality of the world. The capacity to think, beneath rationalisation or abstraction, is both creative and deductive. We create things with thoughts deduced from the prior apparatuses of logic and reality in which we find ourselves. Thinking is exploratory but bounded, our being always limited by the obstacles that explorers meet – vast oceans, jagged peaks, hostile environments. This is the irony of the will – to be creatively enmeshed in its limits. “The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world”[1].

Modernity, equality and democracy are viruses, parasitical assemblages atop a decaying civilisational corpse. Their corollaries of identity and universality are appendages that give a veneer of control, an idea of integrable destiny commonly referred to as humanity. This moves beyond the realms of politics or conspiracy, down to ontological potentiality and the constituted facts of being. Projects of posthumanism or the decentring of agency still grasp at the universality of a milieu.

“I found that this result nicely illustrated the strength of our approach as compared to a typical paleontological analysis. We used clearly defined assumptions and drew conclusions that were bounded by probabilities. Nothing approaching this in rigor could be done using morphological features of bones. Many paleontologists liked to portray what they did as rigorous science, but the very fact that they had been unable to agree on the occurrence of a genetic contribution from Neanderthals to present-day humans despite at least two decades of debate illustrated that their approach had big limitations”[1].

Financial liquidity and debt loading are the means of modern sovereign power. A logistical sovereignty of flows superseding borders and national communities[1]. Less a global village, more a mass containerisation where the elements of economic sovereignty (a national currency, bond markets, capital investment, the regulatory environment) are commoditised and exchangeable. The banality of globalisation as a homogenising force is a well-worn tale, whether as global inevitability or a horizon that empire-states are beginning to overcome.

Liberation day is upon us as we see the stock market crash with overinflated stock and asset values beginning a much needed correction. A zombie economy with minimal productivity, real wage stagnation but a “healthy” stock market is hardly the sign of a strong economy. A middle class increasingly stripped of wealth[1] but at least those GDP numbers go up. Economy as farce, globalisation as pantomime.

With Trump’s negotiation strategies around Israel-Palestine and the Ukraine conflict, so-called transactional means, we see the return of politics to the international stage. The assertion of a national interest in distinction to international moral obligations shows that politics, as strategic negotiation defined by favourable terms to the hegemonic power (e.g. the largest funder of Ukraine), has become central to the distributional dividend of military spending and a NATO umbrella.

“In looking at a waterfall we imagine that there is freedom of will and fancy in the countless turnings, twistings, and breakings of the waves; but everything is compulsory, every movement can be mathematically calculated. So it is also with human actions; one would have to be able to calculate every single action beforehand if one were all-knowing; equally so all progress of knowledge, every error, all malice”[1].