Monday, April 8, 2019

Inhuman Scale

It must be remembered that power is not a means to an end, however noble those ends may sound, but that power is an end in and of itself. As government grows in size and scope of managerial power, it increasingly sees any power still in the hands of the citizenry as an intolerable rival and potential threat. Power is a jealous god after all. Private property is a realm over which the citizen has power and therefore it must be gradually taken away. After all, the individual citizen is viewed by the State as largely ignorant, woefully uninformed and utterly incapable of understanding the complex political and social issues of today and is therefore incompetent to make his own decisions. Eventually, the citizen must on no account have any power whatsoever even to associate or not with whomever he wishes or even to have his own thoughts or opinions. However great the imbalance of power between the State and the individual citizens, the apparatchiks can never rest easy until they have complete control over the citizenry. Even then, one has to wonder if the politicians' and bureaucrats' control would ever be enough for them.

This is one of the ways in which the State will move to gain greater control over their citizens.
That there is a push to move people into cities and to compact them into ever more densely populated neighborhoods comprised of massive blocks of glass and steel towers can not be denied. In the ostensible pursuit of "sustainability", the citizen will in time be denied permission to own his own land or automobile. Even energy will be grudgingly doled out by the managerial powers as another facet of life over which the custodial state will have uncontested control.

Hence the densely populated, gargantuan towers that the pleb masses will live in will ensure the citizen will walk to work or for any other errands and will be allotted only as much energy and resources as will barely sustain life. Or else some climatic apocalypse which not need be factual but morally true (in the opinion of our betters), will happen.

Such imagery as this was once considered a disturbingly dystopian nightmare as depicted in Fritz Lang's 1927 movie Metropolis, is now considered by the political and bureaucratic continuum (h/t Admiral Logic) and their rank and file social justice warrior lickspittals as a veritable paradise. At least a paradise for the ruling class and favored elite vassals.

It is in fact a form of neo-serfdom where the peasant will be forever tied to his land, his life fully regulated, eating and drinking only what the State approves, his speech monitored and corrected, and exist always under the watchful eyes of omnipresent cameras. It will be a mean, drab existence established for the amorphous and undefined excuses of the "greater good", "social justice" and "fairness".  Such will be the noble cause corruption used to justify tyranny- all for our own good, of course.

But there is another aspect of this proposed metropolis which is that in comparison to the megalithic towers and the mean, sterile existence of its denizens, the individual human being is reduced to an optical zero in comparison to the cyclopean scale of the buildings. The soul of the individual is not merely humbled against the vast scale of the numbingly bland or brutishly ugly architecture as a vulgar display of the power of the State, but the soul is utterly crushed beneath it.

If Orwell's novel 1984 and the film Metropolis had a love child, this would be it.


Donald Cavaioli


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