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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/30/16

American Dream, Revisited

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Thus this quintessential Baudrillard insight; if we consider History as a movie -- and that's what it is now -- then the truth of information is no more than post-production synch, dubbing and subtitles.

Still, as we all keep an intense desire for devouring events, there is immense disappointment as well, because the content of information is desperately inferior to the means of broadcasting them. Call it a pathetic, universal contagion; people don't know what to do about their sadness or enthusiasm -- in parallel to our societies becoming theaters of the absurd where nothing has consequences.

No acts, deeds, crimes (the 2008 financial crisis), political events (the WikiLeaks emails showing virtually no distinction between the nonprofit Clinton cash machine, what's private and what's public, the obsessive pursuit of personal wealth, and the affairs of the state) seem to have real consequences.

Immunity, impunity, corruption, speculation -- we veer towards a state of zero responsibility (think Goldman Sachs). So, automatically, we yearn for an event of maximum consequence, a fatal event to repair that scandalous non-equivalence. Like a symbolic re-equilibrium of the scales of destiny.

So we dream of an amazing event -- Trump winning the election? Hillary declaring WWIII? -- that would free us from the tyranny of meaning and the constraint of always searching for the equivalence between effects and causes.

Shadowing the world

Just like Baudrillard, I got to see deep America in the 1980s and 1990s by driving across America.

So sooner or later one develops a metaphysical relationship with that ubiquitous warning, Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear.

But what if they may also be further than they appear?

The contemporary instant event/celebrity culture deluge of images upon us; does it get us closer to a so-called real world that is in fact very far away from us? Or does it in fact keep the world at a distance -- creating an artificial depth of field that protects us from the imminence of objects and the virtual danger they represent?

In parallel, we keep slouching towards a single future language -- the language of algorithms, as designed across the Wall Street/Silicon Valley axis -- that would represent a real anthropological catastrophe, just like the globalist/New World Order dream of One Thought and One Culture.

Languages are multiple and singular -- by definition. If there were a single language, words would become univocal, regulating themselves in an autopilot of meaning. There would be no interplay -- as in artificial languages there's no interplay. Language would be just the meek appendix of a unified reality -- the negative destiny of a languidly unified human species.

That's where the American dream seems to be heading. It's time to take the next exit ramp.

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Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst. He writes for RT, Sputnik and TomDispatch, and is a frequent contributor to websites and radio and TV shows ranging from the US to East Asia. He is the former roving correspondent for Asia (more...)
 

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