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http://edwardcurtin.com/you-know-well-never-know-dont-you/

You Know “We’ll Never Know,” Don’t You?

In his new, six-part, seven hours plus documentary – “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World” – the celebrated English documentary filmmaker, Adam Curtis, who has worked for the BBC for decades, tells us that nothing makes sense anymore and it is “pointless to try to understand the meaning of why things happen.” A profound shift in our understanding has occurred, he tells us early on, and he then proceeds to replicate this fragmented, unknowing modern mind by showing us an endless stream of video images from the BBC archives that jump from one seemingly disconnected subject to another to reinforce his point.

As the reviewer Lucy Mangan of The Guardian approvingly writes, the film is “a dazzling, overwhelming experience.”  This is true, but not in the way she thinks with her five-star rating. The film does dazzle, and fascinate, but in the sense of bewildering or casting a spell.  But to what end?

For Curtis maintains that there is no meaning anywhere (not even in a review); we are all living as if we are on “an acid trip”;  and we will never know what the hell is going on in the world because…well, because there is no logic to anything and our brains are scrambled with fragmented memories, fleeting images, and paranoid thoughts just like the movie Curtis narrates in his unemotional, matter-of-fact voice. He doesn’t have to say that he’s cool and everyone else is nuts. The style is the man when the authoritative voice calmly speaks above the din. Quite BBCish.

“Everything is relative,” is the underlying message, except that Curtis fails to spell out the contradiction in this post-modern meme: Everything is relative but the statement that everything is relative.  It is absolute. Some people know and others don’t.  Next video clip please.

After watching his pastiche film that is filled with his compulsively fragmented skepticism about “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere,” I was reminded of what a famous philosopher once wrote in his “Critique of Pure Dread”:

In formulating any philosophy, the first consideration must always be: What can we know?  That is, what can we be sure we know, or sure that we know we knew it, if indeed it is at all knowable.  Or have we simply forgotten it and are too embarrassed to say anything?  Descartes hinted at the problem when he wrote, ‘My mind can never know my body, although it has become quite friendly with my legs.’  By ‘knowable,’ incidentally, I do not mean that which can be known by perception of the senses, or that which can be grasped by the mind, but more that which can be said to be Known or to possess a Knownness or Knowability, or at least something you can mention to a friend.

Like Curtis’s title, I have never been able to get those profound words out of my head because they have always seemed in their own way to have captured the underlying zeitgeist of the past half-century and more – the unspoken message that has come to inform the neurotic skepticism of our times. And unlike Curtis’s  solemnity, at least Woody Allen makes me laugh.

Curtis is a serious man, and when he very seriously tells us in Part 1 that Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, who was the only person to ever bring a trial in the assassination of President John Kennedy, was a man devoid of logic who once wrote a memo to his staff urging them to think illogically and just look for patterns based on “time and propinquity,” he wishes us to consider Garrison a crazy conspiratorial thinker who saw strange patterns when there were none.  To see Garrison as a deranged man who used a pastiche method of cutting and pasting disparate unconnected facts to form a conspiracy theory to convince you that there were hidden forces operating behind the façade of American society.

Echoing the CIA’s famous memo to its agents and accomplices in the media to use the phrase conspiracy theory/theorist to ridicule its critics, Curtis so solemnly tells the viewer that such crazy conspiracy theories and the method for arriving at them and their claims that there were hidden forces operating behind the scenes are paranoid nonsense and that they would come to infect the modern mind.  Most of Garrison’s thinking, he says, was pure fantasy and he could produce no evidence for his claims.  In other words, Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy, not the CIA.

This claim is factually false, but it becomes the basis for the next five parts of the documentary.  And perversely, the entire documentary is constructed using the same method of cutting-and-pasting, “time and propinquity,” pastiche/collage so beloved of postmodernists, that Curtis accuses Garrison of using, a method devoid of logic or meaning.

This is not a Woody Allen joke.

There is no doubt that Curtis has found and presents very interesting historical film footage that ranges back and forth across the world and time.  He knows how to engage an audience and to draw them into emotive and dreamy experiences of fear and paranoia. As one watches, one feels the walls closing in and terrible disasters lurking in the shadows because no one is in control, for control is an illusion. You’ll never know.  You’ll never know. Everything is relative.

Yet there is much to learn and consider from his footage.  But context is all, and the hours one spends watching lead to part six when Curtis circles back to part one to tie the knot on his “emotional history” within what the writer George Trow once called “the context of no context.”  We learn about chaos and complexity theories, artificial intelligence, multiple selves, drugs, how neuroscientists and psychiatrists have claimed that consciousness does not exist, and that even though people think they are individuals in the age of individualism, they are deluded.  In the digital age people are now doing exactly what Garrison did fifty years ago; now they are creating conspiracy theories from patterns of data on the internet and it’s all a form of madness.

Thrown in as an aside, Curtis says of the attacks of September 11, 2001, that “no one had seen them coming.”  This, of course, is blatantly false, since the U.S. government was not surprised, as is very well known and confirmed, but Curtis’s claim reinforces the idea no one knew or knows what’s going to happen, that incompetence is the norm, that “nothing makes sense anymore,” and that the official narrative on 9/11 is correct, just as it is regarding the assassination of JFK, for Jim Garrison, the man who bravely and brilliantly explored the case early on, was just a nut case who believed in strange coincidences. And his crazy way of connecting the dots has infected our world today.  We can’t get him out of our heads.

When he finally brings us into the present, Curtis tells us that COVID-19 “was a force that came from completely outside the systems of power.”  Of course!  Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, we are living in a world where the ruling elites are at the mercy of chance and we think they are in control.  No, that is our illusion.  Shit happens. After spending hours showing us how the world’s elites are corrupt and do all kinds of devious things to maintain their power – conspire to do so – we are also told there are no conspiracies.  There are and there aren’t.  We are trapped in an insane world of double-binds, “a world where anything could be anything because there was no meaning anywhere.”

I suppose this might apply to this film.  But no, it is very meaningful – in the way exquisite propaganda is.

Woody Allen can be hilarious, but Curtis is quite funny himself.  After seven plus hours of telling us we live in the world of nightmares where we are trapped and this sense of imprisonment is something we can’t get out of our heads and we’re all going bonkers, he ends by repeating his opening caption, which are the words of the anthropologist David Graeber:

The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make.  And could just as easily make differently.

Really?  I never knew that.  Did you?

....

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar21/debt-earnings-pyramid3-21.html

Stimulus Addiction Disorder: The Debt-Disposable Earnings Pyramid

For those who suspect the status quo is unsustainable but aren't quite sure why, I've prepared a simple chart that explains the financial precariousness many sense. The chart depicts the two core elements of a debt-based, consumerist economy: disposable earnings, defined as the earnings left after paying for essentials which can then be used to service debt and debt.

In other words, if all the household earnings are spent on non-discretionary expenses (rent or mortgage, taxes, food, utilities, healthcare, etc.) then there is no money left to pay the interest and principal on a loan. Lenders consider this household uncreditworthy for the simple reason that their earnings cannot support the monthly nut of debt service (interest and principal).

Note the word earnings as opposed to income. Social entitlements such as Social Security are income but they are funded by taxes paid by those with earnings. (All of America's social entitlements are pay as you go--the trust funds are PR fiction.) The investment income (interest) paid to owners of Treasury bonds is also paid by taxes on earnings.

All the interest and principal of debt is ultimately paid out of earnings, either private-sector debt paid directly out of wages or public-sector debt paid out of taxes which are paid out of earnings.

The problem with servicing debt out of income is two-fold: one, earnings of the bottom 95% have been stagnant for decades, which means earnings aren't actually rising in terms of the goods and services they can buy, and two, the cost of non-discretionary expenses (essentials) has been rising, especially the big-ticket costs such as housing, healthcare and higher education.

You see the problem: since earnings are flat and the cost of essentials are steadily rising, there is less disposable earnings left every month to service debt. This is a problem in an economy like America's that depends on debt-funded consumption to fuel "growth." No increase in debt means no increase in consumption which means no "growth."

In response, the status quo--the Federal Reserve and the federal government--have played two financial tricks to maintain the illusion that earnings can support more debt: one, the Fed has lowered interest rates to near-zero, reducing the costs of mortgages (but not the sky-high interest rates charged on student loans or credit cards, of course) so the same stagnant earnings can support a much larger mortgage, and two, the federal government has increased its own borrowing to fund various stimulus programs, most of which are corporate welfare to monopolies and cartels in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, government contracts, etc. But as the consumerist economy weakens, the government is increasing its stimulus to households as well--all with borrowed money that is theoretically serviced by taxes on earnings.

Alas, these tricks are not sustainable. Interest rates can't go lower than zero without bankrupting the banking sector, and federal spending is completely untethered from tax revenues.

The "solution" is obvious: borrow the money needed to service new and existing debt. This is the definition of a zombie economy comprised of zombie companies and zombie consumers that need to borrow more to sustain the illusion of solvency, i.e. that their disposable earnings are sufficient to service all their debts.

Notice that the debt-disposable pyramid is inverted: an ever-larger amount of debt is being piled on an ever-shrinking amount of disposable earnings. The trick of borrowing more to make the payments on the existing debt and fund new consumption results in a compounding of debt, not an arithmatic (linear) increase in debt: debt grows geometrically while the disposable earnings needed to service the debt remain stagnant.

The only "solution" left is Stimulus Addiction Disorder (SAD): the Fed must create trillions of dollars out of thin air to buy the Treasury bonds that are sold to fund trillions of dollars in stimulus--not once or twice, but from now on until the entire travesty of a mockery of a sham collapses under its own weight of flim-flammery and fraud.

Artifice, illusion and simulacra are not real, and what's not real vanishes back into the air whence it came. One glance at this chart explains why the status quo is locked on run to fail and will implode in a spectacular collapse of the unsustainable debt super-nova. SAD, to be sure.