CJ Hopkins: The Insanity of The New Normal
Daniel Miller, IM-1776, May 2021
Daniel Miller interviewed me in May of 2021 for IM—1776, an online magazine of cultural and sociopolitical analysis, and it got a little philosophical. For example …
DM: … although global capitalism is perhaps hegemonic, it is still composed of different power centers who don’t share exactly the same interests, above all China, Russia, and the West. Each of these zones, which are also themselves subdivided, has handled the ‘New Normal’ in different ways with Russia the most sceptical, China the most cynical, and the West the most fanatically deranged. Sometimes I wonder whether what we are living through is the death rattle of a delusional and dying Western system, rather than the imposition of a new paradigm of global government.
CJ: Of course there are individual agents carrying out the restructuring of global capitalism. Systems are comprised of and maintained by individual agents. My point is that these individuals are essentially interchangeable components of the system, the fundamental structure and evolution of which frames their decisions and actions. An ideological system is like a tennis court, a chessboard, or an artistic medium. It establishes the territory and the rules according to which individuals think and act. In a tennis tournament, the individual players on the court change, but they are all playing tennis. Same goes for any artistic medium. You can’t play music with paint, or paint with a piano. Language is another useful analogy. Anyone who speaks more than one knows that the structure of the language determines how you think, how you perceive, what you are able to express.
It would be convenient if there were a clutch of conspirators at the top of the pyramid orchestrating everything according to an arbitrary master plan. Then we could ‘storm the Bastille’, chop off a few heads, and radically change things. It’s tempting to see things that way, because there are identifiable people at the top. But global capitalism is a Hydra. Chopping individual heads off achieves nothing, other than replacing the heads with other heads. And the Hydra remains the Hydra.