Guy Debord And The Demiurge

 

Famed Marxist and charlatan Guy Debord is famous for expounding his theory that any, and all political action is essentially useless, and that most, if not all of society is just mainly a projection of what he terms "the spectacle" in which all performative actions are primarily a distraction from any real solution to workers' rights, and that everyone essentially performed on stage, with actors, sets, lighting, and cameras. This type of illusory thinking predicated that society was indeed, one giant movie which everyone unwittingly participates in, and whether they like it or not, cannot escape. That wars were fought in "theatres" and people such as stockbrokers, CEOs, middle management, the police force, the military, even your local mayor, were inasmuch as phony as any Hollywood production. Hence, it follows, that any attempts to change the system within were futile and the solution must exist "outside the system" which I tell you, is much more difficult than one can assume. Looking backwards at history we can see that almost every society could very well have been a spectacle, from the kings and ceremonies of old medieval times to the early scientific leaders of the early modern period, to the television and radio of the early 20th century all the way to our increasingly digitized world of computers and social media. There is no escape, is what Debord says. However this kind of just "go outside and touch grass" mentality reveals a great conception beyond what he imagined back in the '68 riots. Much like any self-respecting Marxist would assume, the history of all mankind is the history of material struggles, and henceforth, there is no "prime mover" and yes, "something did come from nothing" and that all there is to be in this very universe is nothing more than material actions, But what does this mean for your average religious-inclined thinker such as myself and many others. Well, for starters, it betrays a certain mentality that you should only care about the "here and now", and whatever you do after the "here and now" ultimately doesn't matter since people like Ernest Becker presumed that all actions performed in life were just "ways of avoiding death", hence it follows that ultimately, your footprint you lain down upon the earth after your soul has departed (forget them even considering anyone has one, for all intents and purposes, there are just bodies, not minds and we are just robots without a conscience and hence, lack rationality), you just rot in the ground, to be fertilizer for other material objects. The point I'm trying to get across, whether or not you see nature as being inherently bad (like Lyndon LaRouche did) or good (like Henry David Thoreau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) nevertheless, most of it, a worship of the present time, the present landscape you occupy, and not what happens to your legacy. Ultimately, Guy Debord was concerned with what he felt in the present moment, and while he is long dead (he was suicidal and it shows, he attempted this many a times) so I'm unsure if his soul/mind survived enough (in his own perception) to care about teenage leftists felliating him post-mortem, much like Mark Fisher (another genetic dead end). This type of existential revolutionary defeatism accomplishes nothing, as people like Jean-Paul Sartre believed you alone are responsible for acts in which you impose your will upon, and like many Marxists, he too did not believe in a higher power. The only alternative to religious belief is suicide, and if you condemn yourself to the earth, you are an unwitting agent of the demiurge. Now I no longer hold Gnostic beliefs but there is some truth to being so tied to material means you commit yourself to the worms. Its all well and good to try and protect God's creation, to align yourself with the ground and all that lies beneath it, but if you make it your lifeblood, your "raison d'etre" to be a strict materialist, as Thomas Hobbes wrote, "life will be brutish, nasty and short".

                                                                                                                        J./Adolf Stalin