Democratization and the Temple of the Gilded
Yesterday Derek Chauvin was convicted before a jury of his peers of murder, manslaughter and some other crimes I'm sure against George Floyd. This is a bit of a, let's say...heated topic, so before you read any further just know that this essay is not about the trial or the events. I am merely going to use the trial to illustrate a point. The point, noted by many, is that it is becoming quite difficult— if not impossible— to find an impartial jury on certain subjects that exist currently in the cultural zeitgeist.
Most people can agree, regardless of whatever opinion they have about the results of the trial, that Chauvin's conviction was more or less predestined to occur. He was, in a sense, doomed from the moment his knee touched the back of George Floyd's neck. This is due to underlying mechanisms that most people are only able to comprehend on a surface level, but that I would like to talk about today.
Someone who has written a lot about these underlying mechanisms is Paul Town. He is an author and I would encourage any readers unfamiliar with his work to read it (though I'm sure anyone who is reading my work is somewhat familiar with his already). One of his main ideas that he pushes is something he calls the "psychic-physical dimorphism". Essentially what this means is that there is duality to the realm of reality, a sharp distinction between the physical world that we inhabit and interact with, and the psychic which we boundlessly engage in and interact with. Another way to think of the 'psychic' realm is as the digital realm of the internet. He purports that the psychic has, since the widespread adoption of the internet, taken dominance over the physical realm. He writes:
"the psychic has been severed from its umbilical cord which previously connected from the physical and now the psychic economy has become dominant over the physical economy in a manner which has shifted dominance from masculine/strength to feminine/agility traits." Source
This is all very accurate and well explained by him, though there is often a fixation in the way he words this dichotomy, usually as the "psychic-physical economy". Because of this I believe the idea is often misconstrued as being solely a factor of wealth or resource distribution, rather than what it truly is which is an entire axial shift from one plane to another. A shift on the scale of which has perhaps never happened before. Resources are now abstracted, yes, and mass economic shifts have and will continue to take place until their natural end point of complete supremacy over the physical. However, the same can be said for every other facet of life as well, which is now where I will get to the main point of this essay.
We can observe the beginnings of a transitionary period of values and principles from the physical to the psychic. The psychic, I believe, in inherently democratic. It is decentralized in nature in a way that allows for bottom-up thinking to be naturalized. Of course, this doesn't mean that it's all sunshine and flowers and happy puppies and kitty cats and smiles. The way of the thinking, the common zeitgeist amongst the masses, will be taken advantage of by those who are able to do so based on their inherent ability and the reward mechanisms in place. This was the same at the inception of the physical, which itself is inherently top-down in thinking.
To better illustrate; imagine an ancient Greek city-state. Perfectly stuck into the physical realm, with the psychic realm being completely subordinate. What were the underlying values? Ability, skill and power. Even someone lowest on the totem pole, a slave, would have being subservient to the overall zeitgeist which valued strong leaders and explicit exertion of power. This was the rock on which all smaller systems of value (family, relationships, business interactions, politics, etc.) were built on.
This system allowed for the explicit to be more dominant over the implicit over all. If you were a slave/serf you would know that you were a slave/serf. There would be little to no confusion of power structures and those who were above others rarely looked down at those below them with anything but contempt or a nonchalant indifference.
Conversely, think of systems now. Think of those who are able to obtain power and influence. Think of how they present themselves. More often than not; with the ascendency of the psychic over the physical— the implicit over the explicit— those who are able to advance themselves do so through presenting themselves as victims. The downtrodden, the oppressed, those who have languished and suffered under top-down systems are now those who are able to place themselves at or near the top of the social hierarchy. The implicit is now ascendant. There are no more physical constraints on what the masses of people can take in and place value on. In the past, the masses of humanity would be shielded from the horrors of war, from the exploitation of the 'other' (enemy states/cultures) and any opinion they formed would not be based on the emotional empathy that one would experience if they saw the truth; but instead would be based on the values of strength placed on the concept instead of the actual action.
For example, seeing a 1080p recording of a black man get his neck crushed by a cop as he screams for almost ten minutes is going to inspire a negative reaction in most people, regardless of context. Reading about a criminal being choked, written in plain and dry text, is likely not going to inspire the same level of reaction. How something appears now determines its outcome moreso than what it is. Form is valued over function.
The surface level understanding, that the mass media is pulling the strings and making everyone hate each other or hate specific groups of people, is not quite right. While journalists often twist the truth and manipulate events for monetary gain or social points, it is not fully responsible for all the upheaval we see today. The main underlying mechanism— that is, the removal of physical restraints of information flow— is to blame. These things have always been going on. The weak have always been exploited, cruelty has always won out over mercy, pain and suffering are what build feats of wonder and power innovation. It is only now that the average person is able to plainly see that this is the case and have a natural reaction to it. And those who are able to put on the sheep's clothes and be both the downtrodden and the ravenous wolf, are those who are able to now advance themselves. This is why Derek Chauvin was doomed from the start: because everyone saw what happened. And what happened did not look like a very nice or good thing. Even if a police officer shoots a mass murdering psychopath who is about to kill a woman, the officer still shot someone. And shooting a person to death is not something that most people are equipped to see happen without have some form of empathetic reaction.
This is the Temple of the Gilded. The 'New Order' that is being founded and valued, not on being solid gold, but on having the appearance of gold. On shining, bedazzled, irregardless of what cheap metal is below the thin veneer of gold. And it is not being founded by "the elite"; but is instead being founded by a minority of cognizant exploiters who themselves are being enabled by the majority of people who simply want what is "right" by their emotional empathetic standards.