Capitalism and Psychosis

I don’t endorse terrorism in any way. The way to change the world is through peaceful self-transformation and peaceful collective political organisation/organising.

September 11 was a tragic event, where innocent civilians were indiscriminately targeted.

What was the political and politico-spatial intent and effect(s) of the attack, particularly concerning the twin towers World Trade Center?

What were the effects of not only the attack, but the dissemination of images and footage of the attack across the world by media and news organisations, on the subconscious political minds of people all across the globe, where images and footage of the attacks were liberally and extensively circulated?

What, I argue, was implanted in the collective unconscious of the world’s people, was the symbolic castration of the (epi)centre of transnational capitalism – its twin phallic symbolic power centre (one phallus symbolizing hegemonic transnational capitalism and the other overtly patriarchal (read as ‘male dominant’) transnational capitalist class (‘TCC’ (Sklair)) power) (a sideways note: matriarchal power is inherently more covert and emotional) – the twin towers located in (transnational) capitalism’s centre and main capitalist mega-city: New York. New York is where the highest concentration of headquarters of the world’s largest transnational/multinational corporations are based and actions, agitations and manipulations in global markets, coordinated: the site of the most concentrated machinations of capitalist empire. The World Trade Centre towers were symbolic of capitalism’s patriarchal transnational capitalist class globalizing power, across the world, subordinating social and political space to its hegemonic centre in this symbolic power. The subconscious symbolic political meaning, as a twin-phallic symbol, was that of cooperation and narrowly-overtly patriarchal hegemony of the male dominant TCC and its transnational capitalism globalizing order: one (phallic tower) for male dominance and the other (phallic tower) for the transnational capitalist form of dominance.

Due to this post-modern hyper-reality simulacra (Baudrillard) of media dissemination of the destruction of the twin-towers, (transnational) capitalism, and its political, economic and social reproduction, entered into a new phase: capitalist psychosis. I argue that the monophasic and disenchanting (Weber) regimentation of capitalism has lost its stranglehold of political legitimization at the level of the unconscious. This concurs with Saniotis’ theory in ‘re-enchanting terrorism: jihadists as “liminal beings”’ that jihadists attempt to re-enchant the world in a religious imaginary (against the disenchanting practices of global capitalism, whose religion is increasingly that of conspicuous consumerism and acute global wealth disparities and exploitation).

I define monophasic capitalism as a social phenomenon which stifles socially-minded intrinsically motivated creative labour resulting from excessively obedient work in the capitalist hierarchy in the workplace, as well as from chronic over-work of the populace.

Capitalism as psychosis is the disconnect with and contradiction of key capitalistic values: amassing wealth does not buy happiness or satisfaction, and there is the shattering of people’s expectations and dreams promised by capitalism’s hollow ideological propaganda as compared with the harsh social and political realities which everyday people face instead, in a struggle to maintain a semblance of existential control. Social manipulation has become far more flagrant, obvious, abstracted and ubiquitous in marketing and advertising campaigns and in market-share maximization. People have lost faith in the major party duopolies, suspicious of corporate corruption and lobbying in the representative democratic political process. The majority of people in the world now understand, that something is terribly wrong with national and global political landscape(s). Corporatism (the logical corollary of capitalism) has been exposed for what it is – a delegitimization of transnational corporate capitalism catapulting the psyche of the populace into a psychosis, where their values are being torn apart in social squabbling and conflict which capitalism creates: ironically contradiction, and the fragmentation of social space due to collective psychosis, is the main unifying factor we witness in the realm of social values and praxis. Our waking and sober dreams are becoming more and more not based in reality: now more than ever, it is the illusion of control which fuels capitalist reproduction.

I am in no way saying that the this makes the end of capitalism inevitable, just that its promises are and have become increasingly largely socially and politically illusory.