<nettime> The Plan how to move on past tragic failure left, right, and center

[Max Herman via nettime-l <nettime-l@lists.nettime.org>]

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Today, on 15 May of 2025, we can all smell deep in our nostrils the heavy, cloying scent of failure on every level.

The right, so-called conservatives, are torching everything they used to bleat so loudly could only be defended if they were in charge.  All the western tradition, rooted in reason and the rule of law, be it Roman, Hellenic, Judeo-Christian, or secular transcriptions thereof, they have sent straight to the garbage heap.  Now all they want is to grift money, with dungeons for all who disagree, and this ethnopolitical absolute squalor they call holiness.  (This new creed is also the exact opposite of what they used to claim to defend.)  US conservatism could hardly be more loudly announcing, to every ear everywhere, "we failed, the ship is lost, it's every man for himself."

The left has failed at least as badly.  With every demographic advantage in the extreme, they could not let go of their worst prejudices, vanities, and ignorance -- like the abolition of private property, religion, and government -- and sustain a working constitutional democratic majority.  They never outgrew the diapers of Marx, the binky of Freud, or the envy of Nietzsche; the world was theirs to lose, if only they could manage a reality-based path to a sustainable future, but they couldn't, and they lost it.

Yet of everyone the center has failed worst of all.  They won the 20th century hands-down walking away.  And what did they offer as a plan for the 21st?  Nothing.  No plan at all.  Just leave us alone in our comfortable compartments, said the center.  Don't bother our heads with anything at all.  We don't want to be bobbered.

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The failure of the right smells worst where its devolution to demagoguery works best.  Conservatism in the US gave up on winning the Western way, that is, by words, ideas, votes, and results, science and art in harmony with spirituality and the state, in caritas triangulatum ne plus ultra, for the good of all and sustainable justice.  When they gave up, where they lost their soul, is not known at this time.  But they sold everything to the demagogue who is now attempting to field a tyranny exactly as Hamilton foretold would happen in the Federalist 85 if "TIME and EXPERIENCE" (all caps Hamilton's) were rejected.  What failure by these conservatives!  What a dogmire shoeshine!

The failure of the left too lingers acridly in every nose.  Even now they can barely tell you what they would recommend.  They wanted to tear down every belief, every value judgment, even truth and definitely science itself, to say so self-contentedly that "everything is constructed only."  They won, and now cannot believe how defeated they are by such a win.  They have gotten rid of the Enlightenment, with its evil master narratives like voting, laws, facts, ethics, rights, checks, balances, and norms.  They won, and to the demagogue belong the spoils.  The left got rid of truth and beauty, science and art, right and wrong, borders and boundaries, and who took over?  The regressives, in toto, seized everything.

The center smells to high heaven, stinks actually, like rancid popcorn oil in a gas station microwave laced with beef broth and processed cheese food spatter.  Their brains seem to have disappeared completely while leaving all their behaviorisms intact.  Rather than doing the honorable, practical work to build a coalition that moves together for cooperative sustainability, leaving the failure-fringes of both left and right to their rank MFN delusions, the US middle transformed into a blob of inertia unable to make a single peep against either the failure-right or the failure-left.  Far from vital, rather moribund, today's failure-center has lost the noble art of saying "hello right, from you we take A and B worth conserving, and from you left, we take viable reforms C and D; we'll pass on right extremism E and left fabulism F."  If the center is the heart of every living polity, the US heart today has a whistling, gaping hole in it.  The blood, as it were, of breath and body, word an
 d deed, thought and action, nutrient and transport, through which every society ultimately lives or dies, sits mildewing in the veins and constipating in the arteries.  "A republic, if you can keep it"?  More like potato-chip grease caked on a smart phone to fill in the screen-cracks while swiping left on citizen intellection and right on last year's beach read for overeducated insomniacs.

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With such failures by US society in every quarter, it is all but guaranteed the entire natural world will die next.  Birds, fish, plants, fauna, lichens, everything gone, all decimated and ruined, irreplaceable; as Leonardo wrote, "things of the very highest price, without leave from the Master of it; while it never was theirs nor in their power," will be sold and ruined for greed and mindless plunder in monstrous fashion, and "their bodies will become the sepulchre and means of transit of all they have killed."  All for superfluous food and raiment, excessively disposable and utterly without the absolution of need, the divine web of life on earth some four billion years in the making shall be flushed like excrement from the book of all things, never to return, no, not ever.

Little wonder then should we have, when the demagogue riles its slavish crowds, extolling the worst of all worlds, and former conservatives of conscience cringe, die a little on the inside, buy bunkers, and wish it all would end as soon as possible.  No less unsurprisingly the left cannot believe how completely degraded by its glorious success the world it claimed to be saving has been.  They invoked as inevitable the demagogue in obsequious prayer for generations, two if not three, and now it having arrived they weep inconsolably.  The center, which always promised not to be able to think for itself, has kept its noble pledge and tut-tuts how the brain trusts port and starboard have so cruelly disappointed their expertise at measuring six of one and half a dozen of the other.  The towering colossus of progress and principle -- these United States of America, at least for now -- buckling at the philosophical and ethical knees, the whole rest of the wide world scatters, chittering, li
 ke palmetto beetles during an earthquake, hiding from truth, memory, and conscience like nocturnal insects from sunlight.

Science and art are of course being destroyed as first priority.  How can machines govern the failure phase, the rot and abandonment of everything, if science and art are still happening and asking questions and proposing alternatives?  No failure-machine could tolerate art and science, experience and experiment, to obstruct the algorithm.  And what is the algorithm?  To allocate the owner of the instrument a seat on a lifeboat.  How noble a calling, how elevated, and majestic!  To be first in line to abandon ship and to kick every drowning child and elder face down into a wave of suffocating aquamarine.  Hurrah, hip hip, hail, hallelujah!  "Heroes Trample Hungry Infants in Pell-Mell Retreat," reads the century's headline and very likely the millennium's.

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Unless -- unless what?  Well, not to mince words, unless success can seize the remains of the day from the jaws of failure.  The best of the right, the left, and the center, that is, must find their sustainable honor, unite, and follow it, and jettison the demagogue, and the cruelty, the fabulism, the vanity, the dishonor, and make a sustainable world.

Of course this "success" being spoken of, you say, is impossible.  Marx, or Freud, or Nietzsche, or somebody, said so; Machiavelli, or Smith, or Hobbes, or whoever.  And who are you, you who pay your mortgage and your grocery bill with money earned from praising Nietzsche, and Freud, and Marx, Machiavelli or Smith, or Harrington, to say otherwise?  Your job and very raison d'etre, the reason your spouse and children tolerate you (love's perhaps too far a bridge alas), is to prove every day the impossibility of anything succeeding ever, at all, selah, shantih shantih shantih.  Your words have become like air bubbles, but you will not have it said that way out loud.

Luckily some words, ideas, images, and meanings are still among us.  These, if used well, can salvage first politics, then economics, then society, then culture; and once those great victories are won the healing of nature, the non-human world, the climate, and microplastic sweep-up can commence at blockbuster scale.  But how?  How now?  Right left and center, in the US and Europe, Asia and America, from north to south and east to west, all have failed, failed abjectly, and their promise sits rotting at the wharf, their sailors picking their scabs and nits and blistering in the sun.

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Well, let us give thanks.  There was one among us, maybe just one, but one is all we need, thank blue blistering barnacles.  His name was Leonardo, and he knew one thing united all the warring ignorant armies clashing by night, regardless of creed color or catechism: Experience, experiment, esperienza.  You can call it consciousness, or you can call it history -- it has a past, a present, and a future yes indeed -- but both sides of every hatred, injustice, war, and oppression have it.  All of us are, truly, its children, and collectively we are, literally, its child.  It created us as surely as the chicken pot pie we ate Halloween night at age seven built our brain cells and neural network, and our mother's milk cemented in our fontanelle.

Since every army's soldiers, generals, colonels, and commissars have Experience, and were created by it, and remain open inextricably to it every passing instant, as completely as they need their next breath, it can govern them, Experience can.  It is greater than they are, than each of us is.  And it's not just armies experience can conquer.  Specializations, like science and religion, competitive guilds or fleets of cobbler's privilege that they amount to, also fall to its mighty presence.  Spirituality, of both the highly doctrinal kind and sorts less so, must bow to its majestic continuity.  Science, technology, engineering, and information are unfit to kiss its hem without first earning its blessing.  Yes, experience rules over both church and state (just ask the Sufi, and David Hume, Tibetan medicine, and the Navajo).  Old and young?  Both equally revere experience as their one true maestra.  Rich and poor?  Experience and experiment are the true leveler, the supreme voice of w
 orth and status.  East and west, new and old, city and country, oppressed and oppressor alike, Esperienza is their true maestra.  Aesthetic, scientific, and politic, and of all else in life it is the way, path, door, and domicile.  Leonardo knew this and designed accordingly.

For after all, Esperienza is nothing more than the fabric of conscience, of knowledge itself, and agency in every form made flesh by the action of memory through time upon cell structure, process, interaction, and repetition.  It is nothing more and nothing less than the soul, mind, and volition of the planet, the network set of all such.  We did not create it, nor can we destroy it without eliminating the planet itself and thereby damning ourselves to eternal ignominy.  Can we be human enough to look experience, our own at the very least, in the mirror, make our peace and confess our wrongs, pledge to do better, speak nobly with integrity, and work daily to save the tissue of this blue-green haunted orb?

Of course we can.  And since we can, we must; there is no other vector.

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To read the words of the messenger, the one who got it right, on this theme of Esperienza just go read wikiquote for Leonardo of Vinci.  Use control-F to read what he said about Experience and experiment, and the "cruelty of man," and "of selling paradise."  Realize then, or at least discuss with friends, the hypothesis never before proposed till 2019 of how Esperienza is to Leonardo as Calumny is to Apelles, how the portrait of the smiling lady on a balcony is your own mirror, parent, maestra, conscience, guide, and benefactor, its bridge the flow of built history and its garment the inhabited present of same.  Observe how every culture has this image available to it today as well as the word to go with it.  Meditate on this, absorb it, be present.  This is how we can succeed, all of us, literally every human alive today, and therefore how we must.

As I happen to be reading Sun Ra these days, a person not without flaws perhaps, but who lived the life of the imagination as best he could on many occasions, consider his poem from 1980 about choice itself.

And read it, as you must, while viewing the portrait of Esperienza side by side.


"You Must Choose" (1980)


A widening of concepts is necessary
Another look at the future is required.
Look and see the twin road vision light
It is darker than the night.......
It is the twin-road heraldry
..................... Vibrations of a different kind......
These kind vibrations are just the kind we need......

The distance narrows
We are approaching the twin roads of the future........
One day the planet earth must choose to change
..............Yes.................
There is no other way.
Don't forget the alter hints I give to you.......
The day is soon that you must choose to change.....
Be sure your intuitions voice is not denied
Or perhaps unintentionally defied.......
No other voice will speak to you
There is nothing left for any other voice to say.


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