"It is from the death of the social that socialism will emerge."
-Jean Baudrillard
Socialism humiliates us. Strips bare and bares witness to our own inhumanity. The fact that a social institution must exist in order to protect the elderly and infirm from having their health care cut off by an insurance company? What could be more inhumane than this kind of bureaucratic death sentence? They dont even have the common courtesy to hate you or dislike you, it is just a mathematical function, nothing personal, what a horror. And yet it follows all natural laws and exists as part of our social "system" and culture. We are humiliated by these facts. By the inhumanity of our culture, by the inhumanity of nature, the inhumanity of the collective to the individual, of the social to the individual. Recoiling with horror from our own true form we seek to rectify our own humiliation and inhumanity with social-ism. Surely if ford can mass produce inexpensive automobiles, if science and technology can put a man on the moon, we can use similar systems to solve our social ills, shield ourselves, "use protection", against the "system", against nature, against inequity and selfishness. So then you have public schools and everyone is literate. So then you have social security and the elderly have (some) health care, they live a few years longer, nature is put on hold.
The same systems of organization that are mobilized in times of war are waged in times of peace. LBJs "war" on poverty as an example. And yet it is these very systems of organization, by their core character, that destroy the social and render us inhumane. Antisemitism had existed for centuries and surely xenophobia is within our genes, but it was modernity that made the "final solution" possible. These same systems, bureaucracies of automation and order, rigid institutional efficiencies (inefficiencies?), completely outside of human scale, are harnessed to provide what families and villages once did. Yet it is these same institutions that destroy the family and explode the village. We ask, or imagine, that the thing can invert itself, somehow blindly going about fooling ourselves, as if a foster family is a family and not some sort of horror perpetrated on children by society (though it may be the lesser of evils at times, it is still unfortunate). The old social order is replaced with the order of social-ism, which further subverts and obliterates whatever was left of the social by cruel parody. And yet this accelerated change, these cruel twists, are not events in isolation, as they are all a product of the accumulation of knowledge and technological innovation. As innovation multiplies so does the social landscape. Moores law applies to society as well. Cultural homogeneity exploded courtesy of your television. An uncomfortable image. The natives are unclothed and primitive. An erotic image. The pornography is unclothed and primitive. If society changes it is a product, an end result, not an event in isolation. We are humiliated by this social shift, caught unaware, like a fashion victim in a paparazzi photograph, unable to change with "the times."
