Twentieth Century propaganda, sustained through the decades by countless Hollywood productions, has conditioned us to believe that new regimes arise through elaborate scams. Some sort of fake crisis, internal threat, war-mongering enemy, or faux economic hardship provides the excuse for an enterprising political genius to grab power. This political entrepreneur then wields the force of the state over and against the population that he successfully duped. This is not how it really happens. The power of particular men is limited by and operates within the will of the people who conform to its force. A new regime may attempt to shape this power, use it, or bend it in particular directions, but any sovereignty claimed by individual men is ultimately derivative. The tyrant is as much the puppet as the puppeteer. The basis of sustained power is in the souls of the dominated, their habits, their fear, their acquiescence. Real regime changes happen here.
We are witnessing regime change. It is not a conspiracy. The coronavirus is not a scam and the efforts to contain it are not a veil hiding the real power grab that is happening underneath. The problem is real and the old regime isn’t working. The imperative to isolate, the imperative to social distance, is necessary exactly because we are already more isolated than ever before, because we are already more dissolved into a mass than any humans in history. Our very interchangeability is the condition of the virus’s devastation. The only solution that will “work” is to push forward to complete anonymity rather than back to social embeddedness; to families and communities. It is exactly our debt/consumption economic system that has made us so economically vulnerable, and the only solution that will “work” is to push forward to the near total extinction of small-scale capital ownership. The only thing that will “work” is the reduction of the economy to businesses too big to fail and the extension of the State beyond the lingering pretext of the public/private binary.
The final move to reduce society to the consuming individual and the capital-controlling State-Corporate conglomerate is what will “work.” It will work, however, only because of the conformity that constitutes its power. The new regime will not be imposed upon us by some scheming elite — that’s a libertarian fantasy. We will be the regime. Its sovereignty will come as much through the new social mores, manners, and moral judgments that will reward anonymity and scale while punishing community and intimacy as it will through any legal or economic apparatus. Our fear is…
