The Triumph of Mankind Over the Great Reset: Guns, Books, and the Social Contract

• The Triumph of Mankind Over the Great Reset: Guns, Books, and the Social Contract
  by Joaquin Flores, https://www.strategic-culture.org/
  In The Dystopic Great Reset and the Fight Back: Population Reduction and Hope for the Children of Men , our Part I, we developed on our previous essays on planned obsolescence and the problems of the old paradigm as we enter the 4th Industrial Revolution. We looked at how several science fiction works like ‘The Virus’ and ‘Children of Men’ in culture actually predicted and lent to us an understanding the new reified nightmare being built around us. Finally, we looked at Althusser’s ‘ISA’, Ideological State Apparatus and how this was developed towards a politically correct elite culture which opened the door to the so-called ‘new normal’, where slavery and self-harm are virtue signals.
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  At the end of ‘The Dystopic Great Reset and the Fight Back […]’ that it would be necessary to trace aspects of the history of the social contract in order to lay the foundation of understanding In our previous essay ‘Capitalism After Corona Lockdown: Having the Power to Walk Away’, we also then posed the question of the social contract itself.
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  Because the vast majority of us today are born into civilization, we don’t always think about its origins in terms of the agency of individuals who joined or formed the first civilizations. We tend to be taught through our institutions that it was something in between voluntary and natural, and the great 19^th century nationalist romanticism promoted a view of self-determination of peoples, a view that would later be taken up by nationalist and leftist movements around the world in the 20^th century – later enshrined in the UN.
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  But much of the story of the first state-building civilizations, understanding that people are a resource when organized and put to work, is that some balance between slavery and half-freedom rests at its foundation.
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  The mass production of books and guns, which came about within the same historical period, entirely upended the old foundation of class society. The mass production of guns and books may have, at a certain point, been seen as powerful reinforcements for the status quo. Larger armies could be effectively armed at lower cost. The Ideological State Apparatus, as we can infer from Althusser, could be disseminated and internalized more effectively. But as with technology, came its dual-use features. The very technologies developed with an eye at perfecting the control mechanisms within the status quo of oligarchic orders, in keeping up with the technologies that other competing power networks (countries, kingdoms, nations, etc.), can be turned on its head if these technologies were democratized and fell into the hands of the broadest possible numbers of people. Such was the process both in the American Revolution, and also for instance in the Vietnamese resistance to Japanese, French, and American colonialism in the last century.
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