Increasingly it seems much of both what remains of the self-styled left, and what remains of the self-styled right, have become useless to those on behalves of whom they claim to speak. Both appear largely to have degenerated into little more than performers of self-indulgent, sentimentalist morality-plays unanchored in any historic or species reality.

These ‘plays’ or cosplays that both groups put on are neither authentically progressive nor authentically conservative in any recognizable sense – there is no affirmative vision of progress or conservation that might be brought to the world in evidence. The cosplay is thus not actually about the world at all. It is about the performers – how they apparently wish to appear, both to themselves and to others. 

Often, indeed, the cosplay morality-plays seem to be no more than therapy – a form first developed during the 1950s and confined to the clinic, now extended to public and virtual spaces. Characteristic of the form is both fantasy and playacting – what we might call ‘fantasy-enactment.’ Like this earlier therapeutic form, moreover, the left and right role-play morality-plays have both individual- and group-therapy versions.

The individual morality play fantasy of the counterfeit right is that of the lone and heroic entrepreneur, the visionary ‘maverick’ who ‘sees beyond’ and ‘bears divine gifts’ if we but ‘leave him alone.’ At present, ‘Elon’ is probably the most prominent exemplar. The rightwing role-player then fuses with Elon by acting as his ‘official spokesperson’ or apologist via ‘podcast’ or ‘post.’

This self-medicating fantasist’s particular pretensions are not without basis. But the image is caricatured, sentimentalized and, most importantly, far too rarely instantiated to correlate to anything more than a small part of our species’ actual worldly progress. If you doubt this, ask Elon himself what would happen to, say, Tesla, were China’s BYD, which has no Elon figure, not prohibited from selling its now world-dominating EVs in the US.

The group morality play fantasy of the counterfeit right is that of pioneering and freedom-seeking, city-on-a-hill -building idealists epically voyaging to a new, ‘uninhabited’ place to make Utopia after long-suffering and at last losing patience first with sclerotic, oppressive, intolerant old Europe, then with other places on the globe – post-liberated South Africa, for example. All of them Elons, as it were, adventuring en masse first to putatively empty continents, then to empty planets.

Here too there is a ground for the image, but as with Elon, so here the exception is grotesquely magnified into the rule. For the great bulk of those who came to the Western Hemisphere from the early 16th century onward, when they came voluntarily, came in pursuit of simple material opportunity, not Utopia.

And of course the place wasn’t empty and awaiting them even at the outset, let alone farther along in American history. Almost everyone now here was either conquered or conquerer, directly or indirectly; and probably millions were killed or maimed, physically and/or culturally-spiritually, along the way. To call these wounds noble ‘sacrifices’ is in most cases, even if not in all, again just to sentimentalize the sordid, or the bungling, or the mixed into the pure and the valorous.

Both individual- and group-rightwing fantasists (and let’s bear in mind that the two overlap) of course also project fantasy enemies of their fantasy ‘projects.’ Favorite such targets in their case are ‘leftists’ and ‘liberals,’ ‘Marxists’ and ‘communists.’ Even though there are few if any such people in American or wider ‘Western’ public life any longer. And even though, more importantly, today’s self-salving reactionaries wouldn’t know them if they saw them.

Turning now to the cosplay morality-play fantasies of the ersatz left, these are surprisingly similar to those of the ersatz right. Structurally, in fact, the fantasies, fantasizings, and therapeutic play-acting modalities are identical. All that differ between them are some of the specific story-contents, not the eschatological story-trajectories or –structures, of their stories – their myths. (Or to use the new ‘cringey’ buzzword, their ‘narratives.’ (Sorry, I recognize ‘cringey’ is cringey as well.)

The individual morality-play fantasy of the new counterfeit left – I say this with sorrow as an actual Marxian – is that of the wrong-righter and ‘social justice warrior,’ as a current idiom has it. Our hero supposes that in making a ‘fashion statement’ by wearing the latest hip piece of exotic fabric, or in ‘demonstrating’ in the right outcast-’foregrounding’ ‘resistance’ demonstration, or in hashtagging ‘#resist’ or in ritually repeating ‘no kings’ or in posting dank memes, he is furthering true liberatory struggle, not merely playing ‘heteronormative’ white savior, or Rousseauvianly ennobling some apparently agency-lacking ‘POC.’

This parents’-basement Mao, Che, or cloth-faced campus crusader can’t be bothered to learn actual history or visit actual sites of literally murderous oppression or life-and-death struggle against backward clan, feudal, or ‘religious’ savagery – e.g., in the Levant, South Sudan, or in West Asia or East Africa. For our new crusader’s purpose is, again, not to achieve anything in the world. It is simply, at best, to ‘feel a part of something’; and, at worst, to elicit expressions of approval – presently, ‘likes,’ raised snapping fingers or ‘jazz hands’ – from clapping-seal audiences of fellow idiots for successfully emitting the right phonemes and hieroglyphs. (The present degeneration of phonetic and ideogrammatic language into more primitive memespeak is of course also part of this story – a part I will treat of separately.)

It is all approved memes and emojis in a carnival of illiterate attention-incapable attention-seekers – or in the current idiom, digital ‘influencers,’ ‘cuators,’ and ‘content-creators.’

The group morality-play fantasy of the new counterfeit left is that of the oppressed ‘discrete and insular minority’ now fictitiously claimed to have possessed a putatively discrete and determinate ‘identity‘since the beginning of time – think ‘palestinians’ or ‘furries’ here – now alleged finally to be embarked upon a long-germinating struggle to ‘liberate itself’ from fictitious ‘colonizers’ or ‘the normies.’ 

Every newly fabricated such ‘identity’ is quickly ‘ontoglogized,’ to modify a term that the new pseudo-left now increasingly (and apparently unknowingly) borrows from dead reactionary philosophers to indict … yep, accused livingreactionaries, … and made the fulcrum on which all species history is comically claimed to have turned…

Even if the ‘identity’ in question is that of a class of people who ‘identify’ as bunnies or bivalves, as catnip or cats. These people seem to feel cheated, like younger siblings of older war heroes, for not having been born in time to play savior during the real abolitionist and civil rights struggles of the 1850s through the 1960s, hence are determined simply to repeat the original performances save now with new pseudo-identities ‘foregrounded.’ 

MLK now ‘has a dream’ that people in animal costumes will figure, not just in psychedelic music videos, but in classrooms and solemn processions as well. Malcolm X now for his part aims to free those who ‘identify’ as clams ‘by any means necessary,’ while John Brown doesn’t raid Harper’s Ferry to arm slaves, but sails to ‘gatha’ in a ‘flotilla’ boat full of condoms and selfie-sticks.

Meanwhile real liberation – productiveliberation, class liberation – continues ignored and unsought – indeed, unconcealed, unimagined. In part, precisely because all the illiterate cosplayers are simply ignorant – entirely ignorant – of the great class struggles of the 19th and early 20th centuries – including those of the Knights of Labor and IWW here in the US, before the US Treasury suppressed them to favor more tame operations like this of the AFL and CIO, who didn’t challenge our still-operative system of wage-slavery (rented workers instead of owned workers). 

And of course they are ignorant of these actual liberatory movements – they themselves belongto the dominant classes, and are speechless before actual working people. Hence, of course, the successes of worker-conning faux ‘populists’ and Orange Juliuses – as Central Casting a case of what Marx once called ‘Caesarism,’ ‘Blanqism,’ or ‘Bonapartism’ as a movie director could seek.

Indeed, all of this as the owning class likes it…

Why do I say that these dupes, the ersatz ‘right’ and the counterfeit ‘left,’ are all sentimentalists? Why do I say ‘self-indulgent’ and indeed ‘clinically narcissistic’?

Well for one thing, as noted before, there seems to be no positive vision of an actual world to be ‘progressed’ toward, ‘conserved,’ or both. That suggests mere ‘acting-out,’ and hence acting. ‘Play-acting,’ ‘posing,’ ‘performing.’ It’s all just purgation of (new buzz-word alert …) ‘dysphoria’ of one self-indulgently self-ascribed sort or another. All is now ‘trauma’ and, to repurpose an earlier idiom, the ‘triumph of the [bourgeois] therapeutic.’

But there is more. There is the also utter indifference not only to describing what we are to make or conserve, but also, and intimately relatedly, to understanding what we have been, what we are, and hence what we can and should be with the benefit of actual knowledge, understanding, and vision of the kind serioushumans work for.

Spend a few minutes watching a troop of baboons or a shrewdness of chimps (yes that’s the term) at a wildlife preserve or in a documentary film, then Google the history of literally any country or ethnicity in the world right now or any empire of the past. While there is much beauty and nobility – much love, care, and creation – in all cases, there is also astonishing, thus far unremitting, and pervasive cruelty and aggression.

Joyce once said ‘history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken.’ The same might be said about ‘civilization,’ even though we can justly call history and civilizations beautifuldreams too …

Think about it. Watch nonhuman animals ‘mark’ and take ‘territory,’ then consider all human history …

Literally no people in the world today are ‘indigenous’ to where they live in any absolutesense. Every ‘indigenous people’ is indigenous only relative to their most recent conquerers, and every such people has itself conquered some other people who either are, or were (before being ‘ethnically cleansed’ or exterminated), indigenous relative to them.

Every people. Every ‘civilization.’

Nearly two centuries after Columbus inaugurated the ‘western’ Ibero-Catholic conquest of the Western Hemisphere (1492), for example, the ‘eastern’ Ottoman Empire was still trying to islamize Western Europe through the gates of Vienna (1682). And of course even last century (if not also this one), Ottoman, then ‘republican’ Turkey was ethnically cleansing and genociding its own Christian Armenian and Muslim Kurdish ‘communities.’

Meanwhile the Qing were still expanding the multiethnic Chinese empire, which didn’t reach its full extent until after ‘America’ declared ‘independence’ the 18th century (1776), when it became the fourth largest empire in territorial terms and the largest ever in populational terms in all of human history.

Europe’s ‘age of empire’ wasn’t only historicallynon-unique, it was contemporaneously non-unique, temporally overlapping as it did with multiple then-still-expanding empires in Asia (e.g. Persia, Turkey, and China), Africa (e.g. the Bantu), and even the Americas (not just the U.S., but also multiple tribes here before us that kept expanding even after we’d arrived (cf. the Iroquois and the Comanche, to name but two), more on which below.)

Even apart from its later colonialism and imperialism, Western Europe was already and still is the product of sundry Germanic conquests over Celts in late antiquity, who had themselves conquered yet earlier peoples of whom southern France’s and northern Spain’s mountain Basques are a remnant.

India is the product of Indo-Aryan conquests over previously settled Dravidians, itself later occupied for some centuries by islamizing Mongols whose ‘Mughal’ descendants later collaborated with the British Empire in lording over and parasitically extracting from the Hindu population, and whose own descendants now populate Pakistan, Bangladesh, and certain minority precincts of India (hence current ‘Hindu Nationalist’ ressentiment and resurgence).

Modern China is the product of Han and Manchu conquests of earlier Turko-Mongolic peoples, who conquered Irano-Sycthian peoples before them. (To this day the mummified remains of red-haired blue-eyed ancients are found in Chinese deserts.)

Hungarians descend from Hunno-Magyar ‘Xian Nu’ peoples chased west by the Han, who in turn pushed eastern Slav and Caspian Gothic German peoples westward to what is now western Europe.

Japan is the upshot of successful proto-Turanic/Mongolic conquests via the Korean Peninsula over earlier Sibero-Pacific Ainu peoples who now cling to remote mountainous precincts of a few Japanese isles much as the Basque do in Spain’s Pyrenees and the ‘Dark Celts’ do in Britain’s (that is a Celtic name) ‘Scottish Highlands.’

‘Western imperialism’ and ‘western colonialism’ of course were ‘a thing,’ with the consequences of which we still live. (Most modern African and ‘Middle East’ boundariesare among them.) But the same holds of the imperial and colonial conquests of the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Ethiopians, Kushites, Etruscans, Greeks, Persians, Hellenists, Romans, Byzantines, Varangians, Vikings, Arabs, Seljuks, Han, Polynesians, Kieven Rus, Muscovite Rus, Toltecs, Aztecs, Inca, Mayans, Iroquois, Ottomans, Comanche, Khoisan, Bantu, and on and on and on …

Indeed, all of us being modern Homo Sapienswith a common point of geographical origin now thought to have been either in Eastern Africa or the adjacent Fertile Crescent, and all of us carrying small traces of genetic material from earlier hominid groups (OK, I’m probably half Cro Magnon or Neanderthal, if not ‘Peking’ or even ‘Piltdown Man’), it is clear we are all of us – literally all of us – descended from ‘settler colonial’ conquerers, ‘imperialists,’ and ‘ethnic cleansers,’ with bits of the peoples whom we replaced still inside us.

Why don’t we face this? Why not be honest about it, ‘own up’ to it, and do something useful, something self-bettering if not indeed self-overcoming and world-transforming with it?

To start with the honesty, it seems to me that an earnestly truthful, rather than merely ‘feel-good’ self-indulgent and moral-peacocking ‘land acknowledgment’ ritual at an event in the American Southwest would proceed more like this than like what we are used to: ‘I would like to acknowledge that we are on land taken from the Comanche, who took it from Mexico and the Apache, who took it from the Arapaho, who took it from certain tribes linguistically akin to the Navaho, who …’

But of course we will never hear this because the truth of our species has never been what the current rash of group-narcissist public self-flagellation exercises are about.

They are about us here and now, not our species always and everywhere. They are about teary-eyed piety-performing, not literal progress.

Progress … That takes us to what to do now, how to make something actually useful of our species history – something ‘conserving’ of what’s truly worth keeping and building upon, and ‘progressing’ to what is worth actually producing …

Meditating on that word ‘progress,’ in connection with which our current crop of self-styled ‘progressives’ seem no more to have any destination idea in mind than have self-styled ‘conservatives’ any idea of what they’re ‘conserving,’ seems to me to offer the fitting way out of our current self-absorbed, self-indulgent, narcissist’s impasse …

What are we, what have we been, and what can we become?

It seems to me we are one great thing made of two great things. We are self-creators made of creators and self-overcomers. We ‘get over ourselves’ to create ourselves – we’re creative self-overcomers, creative self-makers. 

And in this capacity we can self-create positively and affirmatively, self-magnifyingly, looking energetically forward, … or we can self-destruct negatively and narcissistically, looking lazily self-indulgently and self-flatteringly backward.

The latter is what we are doing right now, pseudo-left and pseudo-right both. And I’m not exempt, having long been a hopeful member of Team Bernie, Team AOC, Team Warren and Team Khanna – ‘movements’ I’d hoped could be all about progress and production, but ‘movements’ that now have degenerated into grotesque forms of Revanchisme-cum-Identitarianism 2.0.

Failing to own up to what we have been and can be and become – all of us, as a beastly yet beautiful species – we console ourselves now with the thought that at least we’re ‘good people’ by properly celebrating (as ‘conservatives’) or denouncing (as ‘progressives’) our pasts. And in so doing it’s natural, I suppose, to concentrate navel-gazingly upon our own now-identitarian-understood pasts.

But if we look forward, it seems to me, we can better see all of us, together, as a species now poised to beat scarcity, suffering, and even aging and death.

Look these things up. A Promethean future is now literally imminent, if we but look to it and get to work consummating it.

There were prophets who told us this long ago. They are prophets we ought now recover. And in their own words and works, not in memes or in tweets, not in secondary or tertiary literatures.

The three I think most important are those I write most about: Marx, the prophet of Social Surplus now exploitatively extracted that can be socially reclaimed and reinvested ad libitum; Nietzsche, the prophet of the Self-Overcoming Will (’will to power’ is perniciously misleading in modern English, and should be replaced by ‘will to self-overcoming), which Marx’s Social Surplus is already plentiful enough to underwrite and finance, to put into actual operation both individually and collectively; and Federov, the prophet of shared, Commonself-overcoming that literally, physically, conquers both death and disease and colonizes the universe itself (what he called ‘the Common Task’), making of all of us an eternal and celebratory human symphony.

There also are complementary thinkers of great import whose writings buttressed those of my ‘Big Three,’ whom we also should be reading seriously now. Luxemburg, for one, showed why the Marxian Surplus (‘accumulation’) at present cannot be smoothly and fully productively absorbed – because produced by workers who don’t own it – and how it accordingly has issued in modern mischiefs including the contemporary, ‘market-seeking’renditions of earlier forms of imperialism. Bataille, for another, at least in his more sober moments, traced how the pre-capitalist andcapitalist Surplus, as an ‘Accursed Share,’ generated all human expansions of the past, the sordid and the splendid alike. Our task, I submit, is at long last to make of that ‘accursed’ share a Bless-ed Share, to make of the Surplus our self-overcomingly used Surplus.

In any event all of these thinkers and a few more, it seems to me, grasped our predicament honestly rather than self-flatteringly, and hence were enabled to start to map worthwhile progress and worthwhile conservation. It is these transhistorical, species-attentive, truly synoptic visionaries with whom we must ‘dialogue’ going forward, not attention-deprived and attention-incapable ‘edge-lords’ who, as obscure to themselves as to us and all working people, grope darkly for therapy – not progress, salvation, or worthwhile salvage.

It would be natural to close here with a futurist science fictional flourish – a quote from a novel by Platonov, for example, or an image from a stage-set for Victory Over the Sun. But instead I’ll stay true to the American South of my youth and quote an old fellow who briefly resided in my New Orleans …

Faulkner is said to have said that ‘the past isn’t distant; it is not even past.’

The same can be said of our future.