Vanguards Of Misguidance

“The world delivered into your home and your mind… returning us to slavery” (The Obsolescence of Man by Günther Anders)

The story here is an attempt to trace four seemingly separate histories into a single narrative and timeline. Figures, messianic prophecies, psychological conditioning and “Transnational Capital” have literally manufactured ‘warped human beings’ — the figure of “the mass-man” (Günther Anders). Emerging from, but not specific to the West, yet speaking globally about the dissolution of the individual into a “vapid mass” subject to doctrines and roles, right down our current age, that we can rightfully understand as the “Capitalocene”. I am trying to anticipate the process of collapsing societies — of the past and present, fraught with commitment and illusion, worse evangelic guidance or the promise of liberation, eventually returning us to slavery.

Pretext - “The end justifies the means”. There is a high probability that the distinction between “ends” and “means” has been rendered absurd. Is lost, especially within our “Technological Society”. Why? Because both (means and ends) are two parts, one philosophical and the other practical, in relationship. The two are infused, stuck together, within layers, of culture, ethics, education, indoctrination and eventually rendered useless by one or another form of mass technology viz-a-viz the “demands of capital”. Günther Anders unboxes the absurdity of “justify” as a “fake formula” that “ensures the simultaneous legitimacy of the two categories at the same time”.

“Real humanity” according to Günther however, only begins to when faced with “concrete fragments of life or its disintegration in a technological world, where one can no longer understand or even question whether they are means or ends.” (The Obsolescence of Man by Günther Anders). From this milieu over time emerge many “Vanguards Of Misguidance”. As cult-figures, messianic voices and master minds — of world-making / world-destruction. Because the entire planet, people, animals, ecosystems, all that can be understood and exploited as “means” then “noble goals” are most often based on pure illusion. Objectively speaking nothing good is achieved in reality for the proletariat, while heading for overall “obsolescence”.

“The journey towards the spring, is just as good as drinking from it…”

The evangelic business of purification. Sabbatai (Levi) Zevi lead thousands of Jews into the Ottoman empire, via his visions, indoctrination and call to unite under God, instead of the Synagogues and the ruling clergy. Nathan of Gaza, proclaimed Zevi a messiah around 1666 CE. A little later, to everyone’s surprise Zevi converted to Islam, that shocked and dismayed many of his followers. Zevi and his devout loyalists, won big favors and land in return, from the Ottoman elite and Sultan Mehmed IV.

Centuries later, Jacob Frank, a self-proclaimed messiah would set the first chapter of “Dark Enlightenment” in motion. Following the pending matter of “reincarnation” via Sabbatai Zevi, this new Jewish religious mysticism followed socioeconomic webs to collectivize — zones of war, zones of poverty, zones of relative prosperity and zones of mercantile exuberance. Jacob Frank was expelled from various places and imprisoned for 13 years for his total disregard of the “rules of modesty” (Tznuit, Judaism). Albeit, his devout followers set out in all directions possible, with practices based on “purification through transgression”.

Jacob Frank’s “teachings” were the guiding principles for future “Frankists”. Various sects and their horrendous practices, including ritualized orgies, blood letting, incestuous acts— most notably between fathers and daughters. Clearly deliberate acts, set according to a calendar, against pre-existing Jewish laws. Adopted as the “V”, also represents Jacob’s Ladder. Messianic or plain horrific, Jacob Frank believed such rituals were necessary to “hasten a messianic redemption through embracing the “abyss” of sin”. Whatever haste and redemption that never came, a bizarre simile appears through history, in terms of evangelic hysteria, the unfulfilled messiah and violence, between Israelis of today (Zionists) and their Jewish ancestors, like Sabbati Zevi, Jacob Frank, Moses Dobruška, Paul I of Russia, even later with founder of modern Zionism like Theodore Herzl, Je’ev Jabotinsky and David Ben-Gurion. The current genocide in Gaza, is not about some Zionist vision, that is impossible to achieve, but the collapse of human rights, international law, accountability, resolution and diplomacy.

Frankist mobilization, however short lived, would predate the Jewish class of bankers, money lenders, financiers, scientists and psychoanalysts, by centuries. “Frankism” initially aimed Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania. Over time to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, Vienna, Slav territories (Hungary and Romania) and later into Ottoman Turkey. The city of Vienna became a thriving base, for many future Jewish influential figures (18th and 19th century). After the collapse of the French Revolution, many of the remaining Frankists in France believed Napoleon Bonaparte as a “potential Messiah”. Hundreds of thousands of civilians and soldiers killed in France, Germany, Prussia, Austria and Russia as part of Napoleon’s disastrous imperial plans — the prophecy fulfilled?

“Money Is God”. The “Dutch Golden Age” (1580 to 1670) created the Dutch Republic during the “Rampjaar”. Popular history recounts the period as “Dutch trade, scientific developments, art and overseas colonization was among the most prominent in Europe.” (Wikipedia). What goes unaccounted for, is the process and collusion of movements that lead to such a “golden age”. A century of reformation, of the sacred and the material — as “means and ends”. Effectively guiding huge number of Europeans to migrate as well as reorient Christianity. One example of the above historic process is about “Crypto-Jews” of Aragon, Catalunya, Valencia, Lisboa, Bilbao and Toulouse. Folks who migrated to Holland over decades, causing a huge transition of wealth and business routes. Famous philosopher Baruch Spinoza being one prominent figure, of the above exodus.

The transition (1610-1660) from the Iberian peninsula to Holland and England, would effectively bust the future prospects of the Spanish and Portuguese empires, as well as energize the “Rampjaar”. The Protestant success of “Rampjaar” is rooted in the worship of capital viz-a-viz God, specific to the emerging super-rich bourgeois. Also specific to early Calvinism, eclipsing the Hispano-Hapsburg dominion (Spanish, Austrian, Portuguese, Italian and French royalty) within Europe as well as newly colonized territories.

“Grandeur that rested upon the economic expansion” was not an outcome of Dutch ingenuity and maritime power alone, but the coming together of various forces, into “one almighty world-logic”. Of transforming Nature, faith, people as well as the invention of “natural wealth” — “means justify ends” as industry, commerce, profit and material abundance. Yet abundance for who? In the words of Calvinist, Jacobus Arminius, “the poorest and hungriest masses of our faith have been driven to destitution by the merchants and the Church of England.. the reformed have retained elements of Catholicism… bishops and their bullion investments… people facing loss of faith and absolute poverty… we have no choice but to abandon this godless land”. Is why the English let William of Orange, ‘Stadtholder of Holland’ to become the King of England, effectively combining two rivals, two maritime routes and empires into “one mercantile world-eating system” (Against Leviathan, Fredy Perlman).

Protestant logic and religious discourse would go through tremendous evolution in England (1660-1700). Concurrent inflation in England, France and Flanders (Belgium) led to widespread starvation during the 1690s. While the period is often framed as part of European Enlightenment, it also marks cycles of exodus and abandonment. The formation of the Bank of England (1698) viz-a-viz shareholder’s ability to divert colonial wealth to all possible frontiers — to fund future wars, speed up acquisition, ramp up slavery, maritime traffic and send out hundreds of missionaries to all possible corners of the planet.

Akin to a parasite that could cross oceans, or as one sequence inside a “world colonizing project” — the Puritans landed in the “New World” and immediately set out for the pending messianic predicament, aimed at the land and plenitude of the Indigenous or so called “Red Indians”. What many historians based in the West prefer to call “Pilgrims” were a class of people, as god-fearing and as hungry for material wealth — at the primitive foundations of “Money Is God”. The old “ends justify means” as the new “manifest destiny”. Benjamin Franklin’s correlation of natural plenitude and virtual wealth when he compared “number of pigs in a farm… multiply into more and more dollars over time…“ (Max Weber’s criticism of Capitalism). Franklin was not alone, as in devoted to capital’s devious rules — that time is linear, Nature is free and resources are infinite.

Shortly later, the United States and the “Money Is God” rule, would manifest as the highest bastion of individualism and private wealth. From Plymouth (1606) to Washington (1696) to Los Angeles (1886) expansion of capital and colonies, as a world-praxis — the Puritan victory of “Money is privilege is noble is God”. Participating in a religious service or the economy, higher education, charity, sports, travel even leisure or comfort can all be bound up within the cycles of capital / money. “People employed not just in factories, farms, ports, frontiers and nation building but the very pre-production of the mass man, directed at the service of capital.” Indeed, that justification is still firmly rooted within every capitalist society and whatever political economy.

One who attacked the corruption of Christianity in relationship to the domination of science at the service of capitalism, was Ivan Illich. His body of work, as books, essays, theological lectures, creation of anarchist institutions in Mexico, confronting aspects of medical science, mainstream education and industrialization — makes him an enigma of sorts. His famous lecture “To Hell With Life” is a punch-in-the-face, aimed at many earlier vanguards, who defined the myths of modernity, work, learning and technological superiority. Illich rejected both capitalism and communism, as two hands or the mirror opposites of the same “accelerating evil of efficiency coupled with ecological insanity”.

From the above timeline (1800-2000) emerged “Transnational Capitalism”. What are generally labelled as “secret societies” such as the Freemasons, Frankists, Vatican Orders, Rothschild, Jahudan Cavalleria, Jesuit Missions, Mendes of Antwerp, etc were the early arteries within the growing body of capitalism (1500 - 1800). What underpins seemingly opposing sects, faiths, nationalities and cartels was the “potential for spiritually compromising one’s unequivocal commitment to God.” (The Obsolescence of Man, Günther Anders). Whatever differences of compromise or commitment aside for the moment, underpinned by the logic of “the end justifies the means” was, and still is at the heart of all such promises, reformation and constant rearrangement of power.

Capital as a floating dominion. The Dutch East-India Company at its apex (1750-1800) was a “floating maritime nation” with its own juridical powers, military and naval garrisons and regulated currency. Hundreds of routes or colonial arteries moving transcontinental slave-labor, wealth, products and prospects, even germs and bugs, while funding endless wars and conflicts erupting in every corner of the empire, and back home, between the most ravenous masterminds of Europe. A legacy that includes key figures like Napoleon Bonaparte, Wilhelm II, Queen Elizabeth II, right down to imperial figures like Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, to Nazis and Fascists like Adolf Hitler, Fransisco Franco, Benito Mussolini, followed by revolutionary or messianic figures like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, etc.

Marxism, revolution and “Transnational Capitalism”. Whoever wins and whoever recedes as the figure of the defeated and deposed, the power of capital must expand. Go and “seek out every possible means to agglomerate its power” (Richard Spencer). Is exactly why the Wall Street invested in the Bolshevik Revolution. Shocking or counter-productive as it may sound, the matter can be understood as a huge leap for “Transnational Capital”. Amazing how the economic, ideological and personal, as a set of motivations, envisioned by key figures involved also reveal here-to-fore unknown arteries of capital. Backing power, politics, mobilization and the consequent ruination. Secret history or conspiracy? Not at all.

Yet why would a bunch of capitalists invest into a communist revolution? Instead of dealing with the question as conspiracy, the invisible hand of “Transnational Capital” which directs motivation as well as the power dynamics between so called “friends and enemies”.

Figures within Wall Street, bankers, money lenders such as Jacob Schiff, Kuhn, Loeb & Co actually distributed Left-wing propaganda among thousands of Russian prisoners of war being held by the Japanese (1902 - 1904). The following year, was the first revolt against the Czar. Pre-revolution, as traced back by author Richard Spence “…shipment of Russian gold bullion out of Russia eventually into American vaults… undertaken via Olof Aschberg’s Nya Banken following the Guaranty Trust at Wall Street… Melted down in Sweden the gold proceeded to Paris, then to London and eventually to New York… to Morgan Stanley Chase interests and partly for Jacob, Kuhn and Loebs”. (Wall Street And The Russian Revolution). Millionaire Menshevik, Marxist Alexander Parvus and German banker Max Warburg invested “in anticipation of the coming revolution”. Simply put, capital as an energizer for future market domination. Is more like a “conspiracy fact” — the massive windfall for Wall Street, that would return to create new “trans-capital projects” between capitalists, socialists, fascists and communists. William Wiseman, the head of British intelligence, who had made a fortune in Mexico (meat packing) and in Canada (frontier real-estate) became a key figure in Wall Street, making the right connections with Bolsheviks, ending 1925. The year, as a fundamental change in direction for Soviet Russia. According to Richard Spencer, “the transfer of technology and credits to the USSR as a continuous relationship between the Soviet state and Western capital, way before the Cold War period”.

Wall Street’s role in the Bolshevik revolution began as “successfully lobbying against U.S. trade and loans, and funding Japan’s war against Russia”. Yet such a vanguard economic strategy overshot in ways, no one could foresee nor manage future blowback — political ruptures and the “escalation of bank-rolled wars not just inside revolutionary Russia, but allover Europe and gradually around the world, through the 20th century”. (Wall Street And The Russian Revolution). What did Wall Street achieve?

Spence has a more plausible explanation, and rejects the notion of a “Grand Unified Wall Street Conspiracy’ to dominate communist Russia — it simply points to the “lowest hanging fruit” viz-a- viz continuous warmongering for profit. Wall Street concerns that sought Russia as a market and the entire Far East — vast territories waiting for capital to plunder, backed by a set of investors following the logic of infinite growth and extraction. Warring among themselves as any other business venture of the past or present enemy. Much like the coeval “conflicts of interests” in India, Africa, parts of South America and the Middle East — rival consortia battled around the planet, via hundreds of bank-rolled projects, via agreements and imperial mandates using ever more destructive technologies. The same goes on today, albeit inside new regions, creating ever new “detonator landscapes” transforming the planet in irreversible ways.

The entirely non-living entity, of capital undermined frontiers as well as emperors, religions, savants, revolutionaries and capitalist consortia alike. Fredy Perlman’s “World-Eater” (Against Leviathan).

What makes revolutionary figures like Leon Trotsky become a “traitor” or some “Wall Street agent” versus Vladimir Lenin a “wonderfully complete incarnation” (Maxim Gorky) is secondary to capitalism and its outreach. Long live the revolution and Vladimir Lenin is long dead. “The heirs of his mind and of his will… despite everything, whatever a man creates that is true and honorable lives; that conquers without which there would be no men”. As hilarious or ironic it sounds in hindsight, that a messiah would return with the message of Marxism to lead the seething roaring masses, or better even “light up for mankind the path which shall lead it out of the shameful chaos of the present,” (1928, Maxim Gorki). Whatever “shameful chaos” of the past, present and coming future, as blips and flashpoints within the timeline of the Capitalocene, and its cycles of world-making and world-destruction (boom and bust).

Yet kudos to the actual “mass” — woman, man and child. Mass of illiterate peasants, industrial workers and Marx’s “lumpen proletariat” to actually give up everything in the name of revolution or some new nation. Take up guns or share the loaf of bread for the “common good” or some new messiah. Kudos to the working class spirit that spilled over into many parts of the world, as rupture, revolution or as emancipation.

The question of “end justifies the means” is a continuous struggle and not a revolutionary “end”. A return to “the structure of a Greek tragedy and its modern counterpart… the death of spirituality in a world where almost everything is ordained by capital“ (Arnold Toynbee). The same insightful person, who said “Madison Avenue is a real danger to the West than Communism.” Long gone Communism, the imaginary demons morphed into new cult-figures and new enemies. “We are at war, and we cant see it…Putin is coming…” (Donald Tusk, President of Poland). “Little pigs of Europe cannot agree…” (Vladimir Putin).

The Munroe Doctrine may never accomplish its objective, even with a thousand years of warmongering and indoctrination. Called “foreign policy” is just another extension of “end justifies the means” of a collapsing Empire. One that can continue to massacre people, capture land, search out resources and place forms of extraction. The other empires, such as Russia, China and Fossil-Capital based nations, also devoted to the same “end justifies the means” and warfare, of one kind or another. The new “China Fanboys Club” is after all a new group of devotees, of socialism, yet following the same “justification” in favor of capital (means) and technological society (ends).

For capital, things like political ideologies, race, language, ethnicity, gender, class, were barriers but not specific to an empire or continent — well on its way to create the final planetary prison — or the current world-order webbed inside Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s “one and only Empire”. Essential components by which the capitalist class redistributes (sucks) wealth “upward” as a norm or as process, is justified as “ends and means” by the Left-Intelligentsia including prominent Marxists of our age, waging explicit “psychological warfare using the pen and not guns” (Gabriel Rockhill). Because Noam Chomsky is “friends” with Jeffery Epstein and Steve Bannon, nothing more need be said about the above Intelligentsia and a “Vanguard Of Misguidance”. Monsters are imaginary right?

The seduction of the modern human mind (and body), was perhaps Capitalism’s final frontier. Only then could things like propaganda, mass media, mass entertainment, “machine morality” and “artificial intelligence” evolve from the same technical (the unnatural) milieu. To shape the “mass man” psychoanalytical training was placed right in the middle of the global class-struggle. “The techniques for shaping attitudes, are psychological as well as technological. The technical milieu of control, attacks the conscious and the unconscious at the same time.” (Propaganda by Jacques Ellul)

Sigmund Freud’s concomitant hell! The binary logic of Oedipus complex was the cornerstone of psycho-sexual development or disorder for a while. Sexually obsessed teenagers or children, according to Freud, turn to anger, guilt and rejection — emotions which can “fabricate all sorts of situations”. As per the “Oedipus Complex” a son’s sexual attitude towards his mother and concomitant hostility toward his father, is first formed during the “phallic stage of psycho-sexual development” (Wikipedia). Freud was convinced that so was the daughter’s case — the attitude of desire for her father and hostility toward her mother is referred to as the feminine (or female) Oedipus complex. The broad consensus thousands of experts derived from the famous “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1899). The terms acquired further popularity in “A Special Type of Choice of Object, Made by Men” (1910).

Digging deeper in “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Freud betrayed his patients by recasting their memories as a psychosis of “sexual fantasies”. The turnaround is casting doubt on experiences that were most probably real. Something psychologists often do. Whatever deep insights Freud may have framed, his brand of psychology is not just binary (reductionist) but also “complicit in covering up sexual assault” (Jeffery M. Masson, The Assault On Truth).

Masson unpublished dozens of letters written by Freud to his close friend Wilhelm Fliess, which reveal his grave doubts about “abandoning the seduction theory.” Masson discovered that not only was Freud documenting the “high incidence of sexual abuse of children, he had in all likelihood witnessed autopsies of children who had been raped and murdered”. Point being, Freud abandoned his Seduction Theory, as a failure of courage rather than a lack clinical success or theoretical insight. As a result, for decades most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts have in effect been reluctant to trust the memories of their patients. This becomes obvious with women in particular, about the traumas they experienced especially during childhood. How does Freud turn repression into the logical? Check out a recent critical analysis about Freud’s “Dangers of Tenderness” by Julie Reshe and Stephanie Koziej.

In Oedipus Rex, the child’s wishful fantasy that underlies it, is brought into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. Destroying that very capacity to dream and imagination of the so called “psycho-sexual development”. Awarded for such a theory, his framework has simply given us many “navel gazing binaries”. Is all about the self, about only you, that eclipses the capacity for objective “shared truth and common healing”. This type of nonsense (Oedipus Rex) is broad consensus, across the West in terms mainstream psychology. Subdue trauma and traumatized people via pure “analytical gaslighting”. (Professor Jiang, Empire Of Evil / Evolving Role Of Capital )

Freud’s sweeping observations that captured the so called “human psyche” were popularized by the broader outreach of institutional psychology. However deep, the view is one side of a multidimensional phenomena. Schizophrenia within capitalist societies (Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Gauttari, 1983) invalidated many Freudian mental maps and theories. Michael Foucault had opened up the debate earlier, in his “Discipline and Punish” (1977). In 1981, J.M. Masson was fired from his position as Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives, shortly after publishing a paper in New Haven. Effectively unraveling the theory Freud had developed in 1895 - the so-called “Seduction Theory” as it “may have been valid after all”. Masson’s discovery deeply scandalized not just Freudian fan clubs, but also academia, doctors and leading psychoanalysts.

Little changed, in terms of the rot and decay, of mental health within neoliberal socities of late 20th century. This “Achievement Society” (Byung-Chul Han) is full of pill-popping, self-affirming winners. Full of high-speed achievers who want to have sex at the same velocity (push-button) as their short-firing nervous systems. Yet Capitalism and neoliberalism, with the lifestyle of “Achievement Society” also gives us thousands of options — call it the “art of self-exploitation”. Cybernetic gratification. Hundreds of millions of people on Instagram or TikTok, practicing techniques of “happiness” and “fame” — or self-serving “influencers” of nothing important, hawking for a global psycho-culture and psycho-politics. We seldom comprehend, especially in our day to day reality and behavior, that what we practice as freedom, most often gives way to “renewed subjugation”.

Finding no clear binary or objective guidance, when we grapple with core questions — if ethical means are required for good ends? or if some “great outcome” justifies questionable actions? Is it OK to find ever new means to control and to dominate? Is it OK to slaughter the innocent at the foundations of almost every nation or settler colonial project? Is it OK to unleash utterly destructive processes for some “Higher State”. A state that is based on capital, made of enclosures, of private wealth and property and not “something” actually sacred?

Regardless, utterly misleading binaries and vanguards appear again and again with similar promises — sometimes worse than the previous. What is famously linked to a Machiavelli or Marx or Lenin’s “Highest Imperialism” or Aldous Huxley’s book “Ends and Means” — as the most influential, albeit part of a massive milieu, of messiahs, visionaries, philosophers, scientists and revolutionary icons. A thousand figures and thousands of historic events.“Events that come to us, not we to them.” (Günther Anders). Maybe the most relevant and spiritual experiences, events and ideas are waiting for us within? And not outside.

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