There was a joke on the Soviets: as the West invented the personal computer, the USSR reached its greatest cement production in history.
China now produces more cement than the rest of the world combined.
We are left with the sense that our modern brand of progressivism is instead materialist regressivism.
Whereas at one time, the good life was punctuated by creations which were more beautiful than the next, now the good life is punctuated by concrete pads fashioned to be Instagram friendly. Buildings which were once hand-hewn with earnest attention to an unfolding of beautiful, rhyming proportionality, made to exclaim the possibility of the transcendent, now it is as though the possibility of the transcendent merely reminds us of our own meat puppet mortality and finitude. So instead we erect cement and glass with no sense of the human scale, sense of locality, of our organic but noble agency. What we are supposed to think of as nice are merely science fiction which erase one’s awareness of one’s own messy, changing nature. It is the man who has not seen wonder, the transcendent and the beautiful, who cannot bear the reminders of his mortal limit.
The materialism which claims the magic of so-called “science” as its organizing principle seems more motivated by the pathology to conceal from us our true selves as living beings in favor of inorganic, contrived, two dimensional geometry in cement.
In this dystopian plane of glass and concrete, there are no archetypes, there are no representations of man as possessing of the timeless properties of his nature, nor references to nature which may represent to him complexities within his own being, the indestructible gods with whom he must wrestle.
It is the mark of the age where, despite untold volumes of cement and computational power, we are no less desperately transactional than we ever were and that versions of the good life in cement or in bytes are just non-pharmaceutical anesthetics.
Another feature of this anesthetizing narcotic is false central bank paper. Locked into a monetary regime which steals labor before it was even enacted entombs us in perpetual transactionality where expectations of beauty or transcendence evaporate like virga before they ever rise to the level of consciousness. A dialectic that beauty was bourgeois anyway is shoveled at any would-be subversives. The awareness of one losing one’s life to expropriating inflationism must be prevented. He must not attend to the contours of his natural existence lest he revolt in the anger and injustice of his precious years stolen.
Pointing out shallow Marxist ironies isn’t much for bringing virtue into the world. The deeper path is simple: build the beautiful and produce private, censorship free money. A home, a garden, a hotel, a manufactury, a piece of music. Start somewhere, but let it be the thing that can live on after you to durably reaffirm the sovereignty and nobility of the beings who follow.
-RC