Here, fellow thinkers, is an example of a fucking good article.

It deals—very broadly speaking—with “cultural ignorance [as the precursor for cultural stupidity] generated by American hyper-capitalism in the form of junk affluence.”

Below are some disjointed excerpts that struck me as both highly relevant and astute. (My intent is not to reduce them to pastiche; just to shorten the lengthy read into chunks that might actually get read amidst tumblr’s unflinching shallowness).

The full article can and should be read here. The emphases are in the original (and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this writing is occasionally fairly Maddox-y, for those of you who are fortunate enough to have previously experienced his fuck-tastic musings).

Anyway, on with the show:

Our hyper capitalist system, through command of our research, media and political institutions, expands upon and disseminates only that information which generates money and transactions. It avoids, neglects or spins the hell out of information that does not.

Cyberspace by nature feels very big from the inside, and its affinity groups, seeing themselves in aggregate and in mutual self reference, imagine their role bigger and more effective than it is.

(The Stewart rally was nonetheless culturally historic; we will never see a larger public display of post modern irony congratulating itself.)

But in the big picture [Wikileaks] will not change the way the top lizards in global politics, money and war have done business since the feudal age — which is to say with arrogant disregard for the rest of us. Theirs is an ancient system of human dominance that only shifts names and methodologies over the centuries.

Still, I for one am in favor of giving Assange the Médaille militaire, the Nobel Prize, 15 virgins in paradise and a billion in cash as a reward for his courage in doing damned well the only significant thing that can be done at this time — momentarily fucking up government control of information. But “potentially stimulating a new age of U.S. government transparency,” (BBC) it ain’t.

Since the industrial revolution, the struggle has been between capital and workers. Capital won in America and spread its successful tactics worldwide. Now we watch global capitalism wreck the world and attempt to stay ahead of that wreckage clutching its profits. A subservient world kneels before it, praying that planet destroying jobs will fall their way. Will unrestrained global capitalism, with all the power and momentum on its side and motivated purely by machine-like harvesting of profits, reduce the faceless masses in its path to slavery? Does a duck shit in a pond?

The required spiritual and philosophical language has been successfully purged by newspeak, popular culture, a human regimentation process masquerading as a national educational system, and the ruthlessness of everyday competition, which leaves no time to contemplate anything.

Deconditioning from cultural ignorance is at the heart of any insurrectionary politics.

Deconditioning also involves risk and suffering. But it is transformative, freeing the self from helplessness and fear. It unleashes the fifth freedom, the right to an autonomous consciousness. That makes deconditioning about as individual and personal act as is possible. Maybe the only genuine individual act.