Schopenhauer said: “To feel envy is human, to savor Schadenfreude is diabolic.”
The ship of government of the United States of America is being loaded with devils, so I guess being diabolic and roaring with laughter at the fools who will quickly and efficiently guide the ship onto the rocks is Schadenfreude at its most satisfactory.
We have crossed over into a new era. Oligarchs and authoritarians are now driving the world. Of course, as we all know, they will steal as much as they can, as quickly as possible, and then the whole system will collapse, like the stock markets do all the time.
“Boom, Bust, Quit is what capitalism does. The ecological crises it causes, the social crises it causes, the productivity crises it causes are not perverse outcomes of the system. They are the system.”
I suggest you read Invisible doctrine: the secret history of neoliberalism / George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison. It explains the difference between the fairy tale of capitalism and the reality of capitalism. “The standard definition says something like: The essential feature of capitalism is the motive to make a profit.” The reality: “Capitalism is an economic system founded on colonial looting backed by the threat of violence, to turn shared resources into exclusive property, and to transform natural wealth, labor, and money into commodities that can be accumulated.”
Like most rational people have observed, Kamala Harris never had a chance to win. She was hemmed in by old policies and the Wall Street crew who held her hostage. Biden resented the intrusion and did nothing to help her. The Boy’s Club in Washington is never going to let a woman into the driver’s seat. And the newspapers, TV stations — the media (aka The Mainstream Media) — did what they have done for the last 10 or 12 years, plaster the name and picture of the Orange Monster on every front and inside page of their publications and on their screens. Instead of banishing the face and words of the serial liar, they went along with the Hollywood dictum “Say something good about me, or say something bad about me, but say something!”
“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Edward Bernays said that in his book Propaganda (1928), and that’s what happened. Expert advertisement techniques (PR) and the incessant bludgeoning of the American mind with “the product,” drove the obedient consumer to the MAGA trough to slurp up the swill that they had been told was not only tasty but good for you too. It’s not tasty. It’s not good for you. It’s swill made of over-the-sell-by-date rotten crap that will make you ill and will eventually kill you. But the common American consumer, trained to buy, buy whatever, buy something, bought what was put in front of them the most: MAGA Swill!
Yes, I did my best to convince people that there could be an alternative, but I was screaming into the abyss. Down there in the darkness where the lost and lonely live, they could probably hear my screams, but they no longer have the ability to understand the words. The lost and lonely suffer from something very similar to battered woman syndrome. Each time the bad bully bashes them, they think it’s their own fault and say “Sorry!” and then go back to slaving in the darkness. The victims learn to love the beating because it shows that at least they are being noticed.
That’s the MAGA herd mentality. Now that they have enabled a whole ship full of bullies to get into a position to beat them black and blue for at least the next 4 years if not longer, they are rejoicing because their suffering and their continued suffering will make them feel noticed. And the bully will punch and say: “It’s not my fault. It’s them other people over there. They just punched you again. You know it wasn’t my fist, don’t you?”
The question that is in every economist’s mind at the moment is whether or not the elongated muskrat can become the world’s first trillionaire. There is a prediction currently doing the rounds that says he can reach that point by 2027. And of course now that he has been able to buy the government of the United States, he might even get there sooner.
But whether or not he gets there doesn’t matter all that much, because what he and all the other rats on the ship of fools will be doing is gutting the country of its wealth and privatizing everything. George Harrison’s original Tax Man won’t have anything to say because there will be no taxes for the rich, only a user tax for you, the consumer, because everything will be owned by someone (and not by you):
(If you drive a car, car) I’ll tax the street
(If you try to sit, sit) I’ll tax your seat
(If you get too cold, cold) I’ll tax the heat
(If you take a walk, walk) I’ll tax your feet
Isn’t it wonderful? I can sit over here in a country that still has universal health care, proportional representation after an election, a pension system that will never be privatized, a police force that doesn’t kill at least 600 people each year and an education system that allows anyone with the relevant qualifications to go to university for practically nothing and will even give them state funds to help them along.
Of course I can laugh and diabolically experience Schadenfreude. Should I? Is it morally wrong to be so happy about the demise and destruction of a nation that once was the Great Protector and beacon of democracy? Morally, it’s probably a gray area. Why? Because that beacon of democracy is a bit of a misnomer. The PR for democracy has always been excellent, but the actual democracy part is flawed. It has been flawed from the beginning. The one thing the framers of the constitution wanted to avoid like the plague was proportional representation through direct democracy. They were paranoid about that possibility because they thought their wealth would be stripped from them and that the common people would then enjoy the Schadenfreude of seeing the mighty fall from grace.
So they built a system that ensured the rich and powerful would always have the last say and dominate the government. Oligarchs United. And so this flawed system of electors and corporations that are people and can spend endless amounts of money on elections (but unlike people can never go to jail for crimes), has finally reached the terminal. Neoliberalism brought the train to the end station and now all the thieves and perverts and fundamentalist crackpots are getting off the train and boarding the ship of state.
What’s NOT to be happy about?
People went to see The Titanic (not me) even though they knew the ship was going to sink. Now here I am on the other side of the pond, between a rock (the USA) and a hard place (Russia) and I’m diabolically laughing with Schadenfreude, despite the fact that I know for sure that not only will the US go down when it hits the rocks, but that we over here will be squeezed and threatened from both East and West and may not survive in the crush.
Guess I’m just another Laughing Fool
