In the ongoing monologues of pseudonymous-Wagner, over on Land’s blog, it’s possible to observe the Puritan, capitalist, racial, and narcissist, hysterias of US history, attempting to plot simplistic paths of combinatorial justification consistent with each extremity of prejudice.
It’s always a terminal culture, one predicated on another hysteria, that of apocalyptic productivity. Apocalyptic productivity is the corollary of extreme profit, hysterical profitability. That extreme profitability is the root of the so-called, ‘military-industrial complex’, a complex composed of both infrastructure and cultural psychology, aptly described by Allan Ramsay, back in 1777:
“the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans. The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits,” *1
The psychology of extreme profitability can never be satisfied or sated. Such dissatisfaction is exacerbated by the hallucinatory projections of a carefully maintained culture of deprivation anxiety – “you can take so-and-so out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of so-and-so”.
It’s a cultural machine of apocalyptic profitability, a cybernetic control system of psychological and cultural investitures whose only model of sanity is apocalyptic hysteria. The USA as the kingdom of sadomasochistic, ‘full-spectrum domination’, always chasing its own delusions of infinite profitability and infinite dominion, its dream of infinite exploitation.
That dream is always a business in the USA, an oneiric commerce whose depredations its promoters likewise always seek to justify using heavily customised epistemology. One in which the most depraved iniquity is presented as objective, neutral, and customary.
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*1. “It is interesting to note that Allan Ramsay likewise deplored “a friendly alliance between the camp and the counting-house” for exactly the same reasons (Letters on the Present Disturbances, p.34). Ramsay maintained that of the evil consequences of such alliance “the two last wars carried on by England against France and Spain, furnish a most melancholy illustration. To obtain the sole and exclusive commerce of the western world, in which the French and Spaniards were their rivals, was the modest wish of our merchants, in conjunction with our Americans. The fair, and truly commercial, method of effecting this would have been, by superior skill, industry and frugality, to have undersold their rivals at market: but that method appearing slow and troublesome to a luxurious people, whose extraordinary expences* required extraordinary profits, a more expeditous one was devised; which was that of driving their rivals entirely out of the seas, and preventing them from bringing their goods at all to market. For this purpose, not having any fleets or armies of their own, the powers of the State were found necessary, and they applied them accordingly” (ibid., pp.32 f.).
Knorr, K. E. ‘Ch02-Part2 British Colonial Theories 1570-1850’. In British Colonial Theories, 1570-1850. The University of Toronto Press, 1944.”