Parasitic Ideology

It'd be easier to spot if it covered people in fungus.

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And now, on with the show.

I read a piece by Sam Butler a few days ago on the Drop Site News Substack that discusses the kind of government that tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would like to see in this country (and elsewhere), and how they are using the Trump/Vance campaign to try to bring it about. These moguls have latched onto an antidemocratic ideology sometimes called the Dark Enlightenment, which posits not that government should be run like a business, but rather that government should be a business—providing a service to customers (not citizens) who have no say in how the business is run other than via the customer support line. Dissatisfied customers can take their business elsewhere (to other technocratic “realms”) or be mowed down by the company’s privately-owned killing machines.

Given that this rightly sounds horrible to most people, why would some of the world’s richest people (and some of the world’s smuggest political “thinkers”) want such a government, and how do they think they’re going to sell this to regular people in a country that ostensibly prides itself on freedom and self-government? The answer to the first question is, of course, that all these people believe that they’ll be in the C-suite class in this new arrangement, just as they are in the current one, only with even more money and power and even less interference from the little people. The answer to the second question has to do with the supposed advantages such a new form of government would have over our current democracy, chiefly: that it would be more productive. They use other words, too—cleaner, more attractive, more “rational”—but these are all simply either means to or byproducts of greater productivity. Productivity of what? Again, there are concrete answers like money or technological innovation, but even these will amount to the means of achieving ever more productivity.

Why would ever greater productivity be good or desirable? The Elon Musks of the world wouldn’t have an answer because they wouldn’t even recognize it as a valid question. The best the “thinkers” in this group can offer is a vision of a future utilitarian utopia in which the maximum possible pleasure or “value” is achieved by filling the universe with planet-sized computers simulating uncountably many happy virtual consciousnesses. I’m not making this up.

But where is the actual good in any of this? For these people, and many others who consciously or unconsciously believe in the merit of a capitalist system, “good” simply means “more,” and the more productivity you can achieve in whatever you’re doing, the more you can make even more. Impediments are to be removed, frictions smoothed out. New products will be made to allow this, giving rise to new markets and more productivity. The world these people want to live in is just the one we already have, only moreso. It then becomes easier to see both why ordinary people might go along with this dystopian vision: it’s a confirmation and a continuation of a myth they already believe.

Our country (and increasingly, our world) is one that has succumbed to the myth of individualism, which teaches us the importance of fortifying ourselves against others and competing with them in a zero-sum game to accomplish our individual ends. This is a worldview that fears “the other,” and defines the individual self in opposition to it. Because that conflict with the other is the foundation of the self, and the self would cease to exist without it, it must rage on forever in an ever-escalating (sometimes literal) arms race. Think of how deeply interwoven gun ownership and private insurance are in this country, and realize that this is a culture that sees the world and other people as inherently dangerous. But without the possibility of ever achieving definitive safety (since a definitive reconciliation with the other would be the death of the self), the only strategy is to accumulate ever more money and power and try to control the world as much as possible for one’s own ends.

Except that all of these would-be rugged individualists do not realize that they are elements of a global system. We all are, all the time. And part of what any self-regulating system does is promote elements that are conducive to its functioning and exclude elements that would interfere with its functioning. In this case, the system is not the global body of the earth and all its lifeforms, but rather the ideological virus of domination (in its latest variant, capitalism), which has hijacked the functioning of that body for its own ends. It is a parasitic life form that, as part of its own life cycle and reproduction, must destroy or neutralize the host’s defenses and compel the host to act as its instrument. In the global body, therefore, anyone who challenges the parasitic ideology is excluded from institutions of power and, if necessary, killed, while those most willing to advance that ideology find themselves with every resource and opportunity to do so. Fools like Elon Musk believe that they are rich because getting rich is what everyone is supposed to do and that they are simply very capable of doing so. They think they got where they are all by themselves, that they’re the ones driving the bus. But they, like us, are hosts to the parasite, which ensures that the degree to which a person is likely to support the status quo is the degree to which they will have the power to do so.

One of the best things we can do to expel this parasitic ideology and heal our global body is to ask ourselves what is actually important. As I said, the proponents of capitalism and domination and productivity do not actually have an answer. “More” is a bad infinity, all means and no end, an unattainable future for which everything real is sacrificed. It is to their advantage, then, that the question of value and purpose is never asked or even recognized as a valid question, and that the people who ask it are chided as people who don’t live in the “real world.” Because when we ask the question of what is actually good, and when we find the answer, we see that it is the opposite of what the parasite wants. The parasite—which is just the belief in pure separateness, pure difference between self and other and all the various organs of the universal body—thrives on conflict and domination. What is good doesn’t contradict difference, but situates it within wholeness. What is good, therefore, is love, kindness, generosity—all these things that let us see ourselves in other people and the world. When we realize this, we all become mirrors within which the world is reflected, and the world becomes a mirror for us. In place of a bad infinity, which never arrives, we witness the infinite good which is always present.