Post-greed in the post-human world

Can we safely assume that postmodernity is the only paradigm destined to be our future? This is not an idle problem since socio-centric formations are remaining a good promise for many people. Moreover, the present consumer society is the form of social coexistence in which the majority of the Western World would prefer to stay forever. Is there a chance for humanity to fix the current stage of neoliberal capitalism if we take into account the major personality trait developed by that type of society? The questions imply understanding the goal-settings of the society-centric systems no matter which particular regime is considered. At the same time, to realize why we have to approach a post-social state of affairs it is necessary to comprehend specific features and patterns inherent in such regimes as, for example, communism.

Some may argue that nothing valuable is in such a regressive observation since communism lost the battle. Yes, communism is a loser, but it is still present in public discourse, however. And it means that communism seems to be able to get reincarnated in principle. The reasons for its failure could reveille what was wrong with the communist goal-settings. Do we really understand the reasons clearly? And what about fascism? No chance to be reborn? The recent rise of the right-wing movements over Europe hints at something barely expected in the era of global democracy. Besides, one of the easily executable versions of fascism nowadays is the “national medical terror” that is under construction in many countries amidst the so-called global pandemic. And even if we are sure that both pre-consumer forms of society can never come back, we must realize why it is so. And the postmodernity perspective can assist in dealing with such a murky issue.

There is no doubt that the historically accurate reincarnation of the heroic “Deutschland über alles” is utterly impossible today even if old man Adolf comes back from hell in flesh. The same relates to his vis-a-vis old man Josef. They both would unlikely find a more or less significant number of followers today. And the reason for it is quite simple: there are no people in that colorless clot in which contemporary humanity is turned into. Only consumers are available.

“Consumer” is a special mental virus whose pandemic covered the entire Earth at the beginning of the XXI century. Consumerism is unique in its totality — no effective mass therapy against this disease is known. Its explicit symptom is greed as unstoppable thirst for consuming things. And human greed is just the topic we are going to consider hereinafter.

Numerous political analysts never get tired to debate why communism collapsed so unexpectedly quickly at the end of the XX century. Some of them explain the victory of capitalism over communism with a better goal-setting system inherent in capitalism. It more profoundly appeals to the propensity to trading inherent in all people. The others see the reason for it in the thirst for freedom: Soviet people did not want to live behind the Iron Curtain any longer.

Thus, all those experts seemed to find a true subject — the people who had particular wishes and who applied their goodwill to change the regime.

Such arguments are too naive not to be nonsense. Subject? Goodwill? This is not about the silent majority, not about the public. And this is not about capitalism that defeated nothing actually — capitalism itself was far from its perfect form by the late 1980s.

Time was the one that defeated communism. That was the doom that erases even Olympian deities and cultural heroes. The Marxist ideology has waned being fully inadequate to the current moment. It was stewing in its own juice without having fed by fresh ideas. The Soviet socialism lost to the entropy quite naturally: the second law of thermodynamics spreads over social formations as well.

The Fourth International, world revolution, and added value all were beyond the interests of anybody in the 1980s. Such topics were fresh and actual a century earlier. There was no TV back then. And the Chinese sweatshops were unavailable as well. Instead, there was the true bourgeoisie who owned factories and steamships — the material assets, not equities of digital giants.

The oppressed class was arranging street protests, the revolutionists were debating all night long in smoky safehouses about how to expropriate the capitalist means of production. For what? To keep working hard at those factories but to redistribute the achieved material wealth in a different way — the surplus value should remain in the hands of a working class. That was the time when masses were merely hungry, nobody thought about delicacies.

But proletarians of an utterly different quality appeared in the late twentieth century. After many twists, wars, and building communism the socialist bloc implied quite a wealthy society. A new working class started seeking something special, something symbolizing the status of a happy consumer: carpets on walls, crystal chandeliers, soviet cars “Lada”, TV sets and fridges. Later on, they were looking for imported goods such as cola, blue jeans, video players, “Playboy” magazine, used foreign cars, and on it went. Marxism? No, it was totally irrelevant.

Not capitalism was knocking the opposite side of the iron curtain back then. That was a new epoch of information. Only a few in the very Western World were able to recognize the cruel nature of the epoch which started to exhaust the classical industrial capitalists. And there were about 300 million new victims behind the iron curtain — the people who were not completely infected with consumerism. They had no idea about methods of transmission of the virus — electronic communication technologies.

Communism was doomed. What could it counter the virus of consumerism? If it happens 20–30 years earlier, than a chance might occur. The high idea of cosmism was still alive in the heads of the Soviet youth in the 1960s: blue gardens on Mars, the conquest of deep space, entering noosphere and changing the laws of thermodynamics. That was a decent immune barrier against vulgar philistinism, consumerism could not come.

But the Soviet gerontocracy sold the romantic youth just for salami in the late 1960s to start nurturing the deficient innate quasi-consumers. The Kremlin elderly did not want to realize that the state with prevailing marginalized consumers would fall down sooner or later. The microscopic property right of the Soviet people was nothing but a reason for a permanent cognitive dissonance. What reward could soviet workers get from the socialist system for their outstanding labor? The hall-of-fame boards, pennants, and certificates of appreciation were the reward. But what did the workers want to get actually? Blue gardens on Mars? They want to live a comfortable life like it was depicted in the smuggled German catalog “Quelle”.

And the natural human greed started growing in the chest of the soviet sub-consumers to strangle their residual loftiest impulses. It was necessary to cure the greed with some high spiritual or intellectual ideas, but no ideas except rusty Marxism were available.

But what is human greed from a natural perspective? “Possess and wish to own more” as it is recorded in our hypertrophied (in comparison with the other primates) neocortex by the biological evolution. Our primitive ancestors were hiding from predators having to feed on carrion over thousands and thousands of years. They were destined to die living individually. But they thought to gather in flocks and some of the most daring individuals had to sacrifice themselves to save the entire tribe. So, over time, heroic behavioral patterns have settled in human consciousness.

Some might argue that such behavior is a prerequisite of communism with its socialized property and wives in common. But a cursory look is erroneous as usual. The thing is that our brave primitive ancestor was hardly counting on a hall-of-fame when he was chasing saber-toothed tigers away from his tribe’s site. He was aware that in addition to the praise from elders and the admiring gazes from the youth he would have a legitimate right to get a personal material reward of a consumable sort such as a bustier spouse, a thicker lump of meat, a furrier animal skin, a sharper stone ax, and the like. Such a centuries-old practice has tightened the link between what we could own personally and extra efforts necessary to be the owner.

But an ideology of the socialized property was trying to break that link. Perhaps it would succeed over time, but there was no time anymore. The time that was not money yet. Another time came to reincarnate and enhance the old natural patterns. Namely, the new time hyper-enriched with information along with old good greed has implanted the virus of consumerism into soviet brains unaccustomed to deep self-reflection. The need to overstress personal motivation disappeared from soviet people who used to get certificates of appreciation. In general, there was no need to think at all — an image of abundant store shelves was reliably fixed in their consciousness. Soviet citizens have been replaced by post-soviet consumers. The starving subconsciousness of Soviet people made them pounce on Coca-Cola and blue jeans as on material symbols of the so-desired personal well-being. Only such hyper-compensation was able to generate the social monstrosity at post-soviet terrains.

Such a hyper-compensation brought the entire Socialist bloc to the grotesque and, oftentimes, ugly forms of the post-soviet quasi capitalism that is widely known as the “crazy nineties”.

But the weird thing is that human greed still bears negative connotations even in the countries with the “advanced” consumerism. Greed is still something reprehensible, something beyond the scope of virtues for which children are taught in kindergartens and schools. Greed is still beyond the curriculum of colleges and universities. Does this mean that the old-school puritanical capitalism is still viable in the Western World?

It is worth addressing this issue from a statistical angle. Have you ever noticed who were the most generous philanthropists in recent history? The greediest fat cats were. Bankers, billionaires, rich celebrities, that is to say, the ones whose wealth status allowed burning money with a light heart. Have you ever heard about anybody who spent the first substantial earnings for charity? Highly doubtful.

A logical contradiction is available here: the entire Western civilization is built upon consumers — the ones who treat their personal greed properly. So, it is dangerous to keep one of the fundamental forces of human volition out of public veneration. Those who deem greed worthy of condemnation make a rough mistake. It’s time to remove the mark of sin from such an indispensable virtue of the present days.

It is important to avoid linguistic palliatives and seemingly positive euphemisms such as “a wish to own more” or “pursuit of material wealth” that make the issue even more complicated and, therefore, less solvable. The present-day language should name things in a straightforward and utilitarian manner. Greed means nothing but greed. Period.

Greedy individuals should give up feeling ashamed when they publicly announce their major features. Why is the basic freedom of demonstration of your true nature is allowed only for LGBT activists? No simulacrum of total tolerance is valid. That’s why the condemnation of greedy people must be widely recognized as the darkest intolerance and miserable obscurantism.

The ones who disrespect greed are merely unable to comprehend what in fact pushes our today’s progress forward. Progress as a commitment to achieve more is based on a trivial principle of initial scarcity. This is nothing but a conflict between what we actually have and what we could have potentially. The conflict as progress shows a direction of social development.

Conflict in itself is fundamental for understanding how things run in this universe. It is so contextually relevant that we need to dig dipper into its nature.

It is not easy to recognize conflict as a basic system-engineering element of our civilization. Some may guess that the second signal system — language lies at the heart of all people’s interactions. The others consider an ability to think as a foundation of everything we do. Both concepts seem reasonable but they both are looped over human beings while all the other phenomena of the reality are left untouched. If we involve the whole nature into our consideration, the best reflection of what is going on around is the ancient Chinese yin-yang symbol where dialectic of unity and diversity is available. It shows how things happen in this world. But why everything happens as it happens?

The entire reality unfolding before our eyes can be perceived as either evolution (paradigms of both modernity and postmodernity) or circulation (a paradigm of pre-modernity) — choose the model you like the most. Disregarding the chosen model, only one fundamental process generates interactions between everything and anything else — a conflict. Namely opposition in contrast to unity makes any movement possible in this universe. Dark and light, plus and minus, male and female as well as all the other polar extremes are in a state of permanent conflict. Just the divine conflict creates powers and forces that allow anything to develop.

If we apply this to a biosphere, we can find universal conflict as a reflection of a cruel but fair modus operandi — “eat up or be eaten”. The endless war of all against all is what creates food chains. Our motivation to survive by all possible means would be meaningless without the necessity to struggle against opposing powers. A never-ending conflict teaches the fittest how to win the battle. We humans fairly call it “progress” once we all are learning how to collectively resist our ultimate enemy — death.

Despite all military conflicts available in human history, the global population keeps growing. The plague in medieval times killed ¾ of the European population, but in a very short period (in terms of history) the European civilization made a leap to another evolutionary stage — Renaissance. All revolutions that erupted over the last 500 years were shifting humanity into unprecedented social formations enabling technical progress to move forward.

Any warfare, pandemic, or revolution is nothing but a conflict that inevitably triggers progress. Any conflict is a broken status quo due to a lack of balance between what currently exists and what can come instead. Any social development is impossible if all opposing forces in society are well-balanced. No social progress is possible if no confronting strata are available.

The so-fancy “sustainable development” propagated today by many eggheads through media is merely an oxymoron, if not a myth. Any development as a movement needs conflict in its background to succeed. The more contradictory interests clash, the more reasons for desirable improvements appear. A stable position implies a lack of movement. If sustainability implies any movement, it would be rather a circular mobility than progress.

Think of the Cold War in the last half of the 20th century: namely the then arms race indirectly made reading these lines on your gadgets possible today. The ideological conflict between two opposing political systems was pushing technologies to make progress. But the fastest progress was observed during the WW2 when the leap-frogging development of industries emerged day after day. We bet the then creators of various “wunderwaffe” had no idea about any sustainable development.

Conflicts happen every day due to the great social and biological diversities on this planet. The struggle against what is inherent in our very nature is as meaningless as a protest against the day and night sequence. The more we try to mitigate conflicts through the artificially created “social harmony”, the more our nature rebels against our biological organisms. Cancer is nothing but a conflict between the cells repressed by idiotic social conventions and biases in our minds.

We can never win the battle against our own nature. The increasing mortality due to cardiovascular disorders and cancer is a clear message from mother nature that our attempts to shift conflicts into the outer space of our societies will inevitably get conflicts inside the inner space of our bodies. We should accept and appreciate what is the essence of existence and movement — the life-giving conflict.

Our social organisms are no exception. Even such a simulacrum of conflict as the current “Trade War” between the US and China is better for both superpowers than a morbid degradation to which many “peaceful” European countries are sliding today. The ongoing civil war in Syria motivates the local population to migrate over the world so furiously that the only option for apathetic Germany is to watch how Syrian refugees are gradually occupying German cities. This is how ethnogenesis occurs, by the way, making the human genotype shining bright in its diversity.

The thing is that prosperous but spineless Germans do not want to come into conflict with their government which is incapable of resisting the liberal public opinion that, in many cases, can be recognized as extrajudicial coercion. The latter mesmerizes German leaders to meekly accept the quiet Muslim invasion since an ethnic conflict in Western Europe wouldn’t look like a civilized European solution. This is how social conventions in our mind let cancer cells eat up the host’s native cells. Eat up or be eaten, indeed. There are no negative connotations in such a comparison. Cancer is just another form of life. Cancer cells fight for survival in the same manner as the host cells do. And only the life-greediest will survive.

What is the current migration crisis if not social racism reflected by the so-called “clash of cultures”. Both the local population and migrants divide all people into two groups: mates and foreigners. What makes them do so? Nothing but social conventions of different societies where they are brought up create numerous reasons for frictions and conflicts. People always establish an association of mates against an association of foreigners. The difference is only in the level of activity of each association. Some perceive an opposition with foreigners as a call to action. The others prefer to take the invasion as fate. None of them is right, none of them is wrong. They all are socially conditioned crowds in which only a few individuals are capable of getting above herd behavior to look at the situation from the post-social perspective.

And here we can clearly recognize the main collective identity covering all humans wherever they live — society. The late modernity in which the majority of the Western population live today consistently fights against such particular types of collective identity like race, nationality, religion, and gender. But the true equality of humans cannot be achieved without neutralization of “the mother of all collective identities” — society. It does not matter which particular type of society is applied: traditional, communist, theocratic, liberal — they all are the same in the present context. The social formations are always circumstantial, they reflect the coloration of the plumage of a particular elite. Any society is always about power and hierarchy.

And if so, only a true alternative for society — the dis-society (or post-society) is able to settle the problem of individual identity. Here, postmodernity steps on the stage again. The term “postmodernity” implies a very multifaceted phenomenon — a social paradigm that does not exist in a fully finalized form yet. Indeed, postmodernity is a wide field for speculations, rumors, and irresponsible philosophical foolishness. Today, anyone can claim that there are many different “postmodernities”, and it will be the truth. But whatever type of post-society we mean, there won’t be the next edition of socialism-capitalism-liberalism as a result. This three-headed dragon will finish its days in the present aging modernity — the time knows its game well.

To turn a present-day consumer back into a human with a vivid idea of equality, a new concept of human coexistence is needed. It should not harass the natural human greed with unnatural approaches (both communists and fascists failed doing so), but at the same time, it should temper consumerist appetites in accordance with natural physiological limits. For this, it will be necessary to create (or at least to propose) some basic principles of the post-consumer society under a common idea of rejection of the global “greedism”.

But first of all, it is necessary to comprehend for which objective modernity has been fighting over the last 400 years. Aside from circumstantial details, modernity was fighting for a society of individuals having the right of a free choice. Ideally, this is the society of independent personalities capable of choosing their personal fates with their individual free will. Has the objective been achieved? To what has modernity come finally? It has come to a collective consumer having the right to choose from predefined options. Of course, there are many different options: work is here — leisure is there, sin is here — sainthood is there, authoritarianism is here — democracy is there, and so on and so forth. But anyone has the right NOT to choose between rigorously regulated options. A huge listing of options is the very modernity (or Matrix) that severely requires us to either make a choice and be determined with one or another social convention or die in a confrontation with society. It creates a vicious circle in which civil liberties are heavily steeped in social obligations. People in modernity are hooked-up for obligations all around. They are obliged to consume to be happy. If you cannot be happy, society will teach you how to. If you do not want to be happy, society will force you to be.

But what if not to be a unit of society with its endless lists of consumable options? We do not mean a particular social formation, we mean human society as a whole. It implies an ability to visit society from time to time at will. Since you are a true individual, keep staying in your utmost ontological aspect with which only “Me” and the Universe around exist — neither mates nor foreigners with their social conventions are to be available. Moreover, even the “Me” should have several different versions to choose from: various personal identities matching the mood and relevant occasions. No obligations before hierarchical structures of Matrix, no social coercion, no forceable consumption.

Postmodernity offers to kill all birds with one stone through total dissociation of individuals when each human being is to be an absolutely independent creature whose membership in one or another group of other individuals is completely voluntary and optional. Moreover, the very membership in the human race is proposed to be questioned as well. Transhumanism is working over this issue as the relevant technologies evolve. Can you imagine a religious massacre or an ethnic conflict between post-human cyborgs? But this is not about cyborgs actually. The task is to provide each particular post-human creature with no taken-for-granted obligations to any conventional collective. Only the postmodern dissociation can liberate mankind from the violence of society.

How much protection against Matrix can the postmodern “plural” (or “liquid”) identity provide for individuals? The stake in this game is about the uncertainty that makes the personality of an individual too variable for Matrix. How can society control a creature who is John in the morning (45 y.o., married, plays “World of tanks”) being Mary in the evening (20 y.o., single, plays poker)? Conflicts between individuals can hardly disappear in such a case, of course, but both social oppression and forcible consumption can decrease significantly. We will get back to postmodernity a little bit later. Now, it is necessary to finish up with the role of human greed in the mechanics of conflict.

As we have already figured out, the absence of any social violence does not mean the elimination of conflicts. Conflicts live in our cells as necessary prerequisites of any movement and development. But society seems unnecessary for it. That’s why if people keep clinging to a conflict-less modus operandi in everything they do, they will turn into toothless and spineless creatures living in a fanciful harmony of social utopias. Even if we defeat cancer, heart attacks, and strokes with the advanced pharmacology, we will hardly avoid our inner conflict at the end of the day. The conflict will cry out from the depth of our nature requiring some movement in the name of progress. And the Universe will have to send something admonishing to shake us up like it once happened with plague in the middle ages.

Since conflicts imply progress, greed implies a conflict between the current lack (even if it is fictitious) and the desirable abundance. Greed for whatever we might have beyond our physiological capabilities is a specific state of consciousness inherent in consumers only. And greed is impossible without imagination that can show people various opportunities on how to grab something extra. Nothing but greed in various forms is the basement of our social hierarchies. Just try to deprive any business leader or a policymaker of their power and you will see how furiously those “champions in greed” can defeat every inch of their hierarchical positions.

Let’s take a look at the business sector from such a perspective. It is fashionable to speak ill of corporations today. Transnational giants are blamed for all the evils due to their greedy manner of maximizing profits by all means. In doing so they supposedly bring only harm to society. What a primitive way of looking at things! Corporations provide millions of talentless, powerless, spineless, and brainless individuals with jobs and livelihood. Corporations help a huge inert mass of the global population keep afloat. Namely hyperactive super-greedy persons establish corporations to hire plenty of those who lack enough natural greed to thrive independently.

The present capitalist order of things suggests every employee to stop throwing mud at the greedy rich if s/he works for them. Otherwise, only morbid ambivalence in actions and desires appears. You work for Amazon but you don’t want to assist the richest entrepreneur in the world Jeff Bezos to get richer. You feel discomfort with pissing in a plastic bottle since no toilets are available at Amazon’s warehouses where you work. No problem, you always have a choice. Leave your job and become an anti-globalist, anarchist, libertarian, or whatever you want. You can establish your own business to be like Bezos as well. But first, it is worth asking yourself whether your natural level of greed is high enough to struggle for your own piece of the pie.

A fair analysis of your personal greed is absolutely necessary to be an integral part of the current over-commercialized paradigm where consumerism (nothing but a socially appreciated version of greed) is fuel for progress.

Growing megalopolises with their omnipresent commercials and abundance of goods are the decent symbol of the over-merchandised present. They are not for the people who are deprived of a desire to own more. If you stay indifferent watching lucky people in new shining Teslas, if you do not lift a finger to earn an extra dollar, if you are satisfied with what you have, your place is actually in a Buddhist ashram somewhere in the Himalayas rather than in a modern city.

Any sort of practical philanthropy is meaningless without a long initial period of overarching greed. First, you must spend your time, efforts, and health to gain as much as possible. After that, when you possess much more than you can personally consume, you may bestow your charity upon whoever else. Otherwise, your wish to support the others will always remain fruitless mind games.

The social value of human greed is so significant these days that it is worth teaching greed as a separate subject at schools and universities. New generations should not be misled by obsolete moral assessments. Their bright future depends on how deeply they comprehend the role of healthy greed in their life. “Human Greed Education Manual”, “Practical Greed Framework”, “Contemporary Capitalist Greed” and the other similar textbooks should appear at student libraries as soon as possible.

Any hypocrisy must be left behind when we say “greedy” keeping in mind that the majority of us live in secular states where materialistic definitions dominate. Both a therapeutic effect and moral admonition are present in the understanding that a greedy person is a “powerful consumer”. Unsophisticated perception of greed as a normal desire to get more from life can eliminate a morbid ambivalence from the discourse of a happy consumer society.

Now, we can get back to the outdated society-centric political systems where natural human greed was heavily neglected. The deviations of both right-wing and left-wing colors are available in today’s neoliberalism. They slightly differ from what people understood under communism and fascism in the past. At the same time, all contemporary anti-liberal movements have many postmodern attributes despite being historically rooted in the pure modernity.

Today’s left-wing movements with their ideas of social justice start coinciding with a liberal agenda of globalization while the right-wingers tend towards values inherent in military communism. Russian radical traditionalists have crossed right-wing beliefs of Julius Evola, hyper Orthodoxy, and Stalinist socialism in a volatile mixture of the fury towards neoliberals. Not towards the conventional neoliberals, but to some heavily covered mythical globocrats who conspire against humanity — the very evil of nowadays as Russian traditionalists believe. In terms of manipulation, such an approach is infallible: first, you create an image of an enemy whose nature, motifs, and destination can be neither confirmed nor refuted. Then, you put your followers before that image claiming that nobody but your party is the only opponent to the absolute evil. And of course, anything goes to fight such an enemy.

The entire pathos of the right-wingers is based on obscurantism. Moreover, obscurantism and intolerance are two main pillars of any radical right-wing movement. Just look at the perpetual denial of global warming by the President of one of the most developed countries. One of his former advisers was an ardent devotee of Julius Evola. Self-deprivation from facts is an illustrative feature of many smart idiots who oftentimes find themselves in a pretentious radicalism. But the most pitiful aspect of their vain efforts is their retrograde discourse that tackles nothing from the upcoming post-social state of the totally interconnected humanity.

Everyone who sees the future through the lens of the “glorious” past does not realize that any social phenomenon which defines itself in opposition to global trends of the present moment is destined to fail. Once globalization emerges due to the rapid development of information technologies, nothing but a global disaster can stop the inevitable unification of world cultures and economies. Isolationists who mostly belong to right-wingers are too arrogant to admit that the unfortunate instances of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany can be the only outcome to which the so-called anti-liberal traditionalism can lead its followers.

They live in a semi-magic environment of their beliefs in which mighty ancient powers can rise out of Valhalla to help them conquer the “present-day liberal mess”. Placing themselves into a specific artificially created psychological niche is quite an effective approach to their incapability to follow the ever-changing era of information.

Their inclination to conspiracy and obscurantism makes them look like those post-soviet pensioners who eventually appeared powerless and redundant without the socialist wealth unification. In their attempts to hide from what is going on around, the pensioners gather every day somewhere behind garages to drink cheap alcohol, share rumors, recollect the glorious past, and scold the government. With each passing day, a gap between those poor old folks and the reality widens. Time in such a “behind-garage space” goes backward — anything from the progressive achievements of the humankind has no place there.

In an effort to protect such obsolete doctrines as nationalism, intolerance, religious and gender discrimination the traditionalist radicals of all stripes are trying to go against the forthcoming post-social order. Once the latter results from digital virtualization, their attempt is nothing but a miserable socio-cultural Neo-Luddism from which to a heavy paranoia only a step remains.

The entire history of humankind proves that the future belongs to free thinkers capable of disrupting old patterns with innovations. Innovations in a social context should be understood as various technical measures aimed at building a highly decentralized post-social system of governing. Needless to say that the motto of any former social-centric regime “public good above private interests” won’t work in the hyper individual postmodernity.

From a philosophical point of view, both communists and fascists are liberals, how odd it may sound. The liberals who consider that only the working class deserves to enjoy the benefits of life belong to the left-wing liberalism (communism). The liberals who consider that only prominent highly dedicated individuals deserve a better life belong to centrist liberalism (meritocracy). The liberals who distribute benefits of life on the ground of race (or nation) belong to the right-wing liberalism (fascism). But all three divisions of liberals build their discourse upon materialistic postulates of modernity. All liberals bet on society as on the only possible way of human coexistence. All possible social transformations and revolutions are aimed at coloring each particular deeply liberal chronotope in different shades: either in red (left-wing) or in brown (right-wing). Postmodernity has nothing to do with such well-worn standards of people management.

Humanity has already passed through the society-centric regimes honored by the left-right-wingers — they all are in the past. Thus, the only place for obscurantists of both right and left wings locates in the dustbin of history, somewhere behind the civilizational garage where conspiracy, nostalgia, and self-depriving pathos are acceptable only.

But let’s get back to greed. The liberal world order is backed by human greed heavily. Capitalist liberalism defeated both communism and fascism thanks to its polite attitude to greed. Fascists and communists were conducting cruel experiments over human greed. As a result, they both came to a bad end. But the contemporary liberalism can be safely called just a temporary winner, and its road to the bright future is not securely straight. The social inertia of the silent majority along with trivial overproduction slows liberals down. Human greed organically inherent in liberal mentality can both assist and hinder in the way. An algorithm of its help is clear: the true consumers don’t think. They consume and communicate. Brains don’t have much use for greed. This animal relies on the other organs mostly. It is a big plus for the liberal consumer society.

However, a large systemic minus is available in it at the same time. An ideology of unlimited “greedism” is good only for a limited number of consumers. It works for Gold billion, for example. But we have about eight billion on this planet, and all of them seek to consume with no regard to the consequences. There won’t be enough resources to satisfy such tremendous greed. Thus, a well-designed ideology is affected by an insufficient “food bank”. Such an agenda banishes liberal humanity from the pathway to the future. What can be done about this?

Two logical approaches seem possible.

1. To reduce the world’s population by about 80 percent. A lot of physical violence is needed for it. There should be a real mass massacre, a world war with various weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, etc). But such an approach is unviable today. Neither because of the lack of weapons nor due to humanitarian concerns of the governments — there is no problem with that. This is about the very ideology of the global “greedism”. Over the process of evolution and feeding on abundant pastures of the liberal world order, human greed turned into a staunch pacifist. It’s main and only modus operandi is trading, not war. Consumers (the adherents of “greedism”) can accept local warfare at some “sub-liberal” terrains (Syria, Libya, Ukraine, etc). But they are dead set against concentration camps, gas chambers, and nuclear attacks against megalopolises with consumers. That is to say, the idea of another world war cannot come to minds of mass consumers no matter whether they are from plebs or elites.
2. To replace the ideology of “greedism” with a less resource-demanding one at some particular places on Earth. The goal is to make the local population consume less. Such an ideology should encourage people to restrain their collective greed as much as possible. Even though it is a tough task, it is worth trying in the locations with a relevant historical background. It is worth reanimating theocratic monarchy, for example, to make the local people accept some “high above-human values” for granted. The values should occupy supreme importance in their heads making them have nothing against a minimal state-distributed ration supplemented with a mandatory everyday practice of kissing a tsar’s portrait along with holy icons amid another everlasting corona-quarantine. It will hardly be possible to implement such a program quickly whatever “conservative revolution” is arranged. But a systematic approach can be fruitful in the post-soviet neo-oligarchies over a decade or so. In the same manner, the post-communism can be tried. There is a country to learn from: the locally modified North Korean Juche might organically fit many African locations. However, the approach has one key shortcoming — the lack of immunity against the contemporary means of communication. Only North Koreans are lucky with their total deafness and blindness to the global infosphere. All the other peoples are vulnerable. Even Chinese people with their Great Digital Wall against the Western internet are lost to an ideology of “anti-greedism”. They consume like locusts having no plans to stop. The internet coverage is growing to bring an ideology of consumer society to all corners of the planet. So, any local implementation of the artificially created “anti-greedism” won’t work unless a reliable method of censorship of the global information flows is invented.

That was about simple approaches only. As we can see, consumer humanity has no straight pathways to the postmodern future. Thus, some synergetic multiway methods are needed. It implies a paradigm shift to a new techno-economic integrity. And again we meet postmodernity. What is the main difference between postmodernity and the former paradigms?

Both premodernity and modernity (including the present consumer society) were developing on the basis of large collectives having vertical hierarchies of power and a clear formula of relationships “a slave and a lord”. No matter whether it was a national state, a multinational empire, or a local tribal structure, there always were well-arranged societies. Over the process of the historical development of social formations, society absorbed literally everything — the heavens and the earth. Today, the Pope is a social institution, the Church is psychotherapeutic care, nature is the Ministry of ecology and natural resources, and so on. Nothing is left beyond society these days. The smallest piece of the most distant island beach is thoroughly mapped and attached to one or another social entity under a relevant property right. The quintessence of the entire socio-historical development is the present consumer society. Having quite blurred borders and incoherent agendas of its degrading elites the present consumer liberalism, nonetheless, is a particular society that implies an unequivocal collective identity. We see a well-stratified society that praises, protects, and feeds the collective human greed.

Postmodernity, in theory, should negate the present social order. Maybe not totally everything, but the major characteristics of modernity should be rejected in quite a nihilistic manner. Fascism and communism were unable to do that since they both belonged to modernity. Together with liberals, they had a common basic order of social relations — “public is above personal”. However, this formula should not be perceived allegorically as the primacy of public justice supposedly provided by the state that limits predatory impulses of some mighty individuals. In our context, it should be understood literally: society is always more important than any individual.

Postmodernity must reverse that formula to exempt individuals from collective obligations reflected in traditional social conventions. Hence, postmodernity should go against society. But only a radical version of postmodernity can be and should be antisocial from the perspective of today’s order of things. And the weirdest thing is that no revolution is implied in it. This is about the next logical stage of the development of modernity.

With what did modernity fail to perfect? Which idea did it make vulgar with consumerism? That was an idea of a free individual untainted by society’s frameworks. The true postmodernity should correct such an error somehow. No liberal and democratic reforms such as militant feminism or indiscriminate LGBT appreciation can help since they all are either simulacra or palliatives at best. They all are boiling in the same soup of the global “greedism”. None of those movements tackles a key political problem of changing power relations between an independent individual and a mass controlled from above. Everything that runs today through a wide social field uses the same wheels of the vertical hierarchy “a slave and a lord” as a millennium ago. Only coloring of that ancient cart changes while its very essence remains the same: the majority controlled by privileged minorities absorb individuals. Reforms address only models of consumption. And they all aim at increasing its intensity.

That’s why nobody cares what changes happen inside social structures. They all never go beyond a closed framework of the System. Munchausen capable of getting himself out of a swamp lives only in fairytales. But the present consumer society has merged with human greed so seamlessly that no fairytales are needed to politically lull the consumers.

Consumers have no time to worry, freak out, and rebel. They are involved in the circulation of consumer items being objects of consumption themselves. They do not see a too large difference between them and things around them. Consumers without their smartphones look pathetic and disabled. But they are enthusiastic to obey wise suggestions of their voice assistants. They completely trust their “smart” homes, cars, switches, fridges, etc. They unconsciously equate themselves with those “smart” objects in existential terms.

That’s why, by the way, the so-called object-oriented ontology is a pseudo-postmodernist movement. It represents what is naturally going on in consumer society as a leap into the future. The equation of objects and people (more precisely consumers) in a common ontological field has long been the case of a typical consumerist routine. The object-oriented ontologists negate nothing in fact. They reside in the same matrix as any random consumer does. Here we see one of the simulacra that use postmodernist discourse leading nobody to nowhere since no political challenge is available in it.

The present global consumers are deprived of any political influence not because some “dark force” prevents them from stepping on a political stage. The consumers themselves do not see any meaning in it since all possible meanings are focused on their bodies only. The bodies seek comfort while the ambient world of objects delivers small portions of comfort every minute.

Typical consumers never stay head-to-head with their inner selves. They continuously circulate in the midst of objects and bodies (bodies-as-objects) whose creation, distribution, utilization, and development are regulated with numerous listings “on demand”. The listings are continuously uploaded into the matrix (society) by the owners of discourse — the elites. A golden dream (which is, in fact, a hidden purpose of existence) of a typical consumer is a full dissolution in consumable items that is a primitive sequence of absorbing and regurgitating of more and more objectified images of happiness. That’s why the only place where a modern consumer feels really good and happy is a shopping mall.

Human greed appears a herding animal since it follows all actions of consumers and even controls their consciousness. Being left in solitude it usually starves and oftentimes dies. That’s why lonely heroes are unavailable in a consumer society. But there are lonely psychopaths who suffer from their loneliness. Those who look for meaningful solitude to leave reactive masses are impossible among consumers. This is because human greed needs society with its consumption diversity to feed and survive. Being left alone individual greed has nobody to be jealous of. Nobody can suggest what to wish if a society with its conventions and consumption models is absent.

Postmodernity as a negation of modernity with its consumer society should have special conceptual characteristics. It is hard to define such characteristics due to the broad nature of the subject — we are trying to address a new paradigm, after all.

However, to approach the understanding of what can be the relationships in a post-society we should consider some desirable (if not mandatory) personality traits along with behavioral characteristics of an individual in the “true” postmodernity.

1. A post-human is a lonely individual who visits one or another society from time to time by choice without being hypnotized by collective identities. S/he is not embedded in a matrix of consumer society since the latter erodes independent personhood through absorption by human greed. S/he is antisocial, but not in a sense of hurting society. S/he merely ignores society as a system of power hierarchies with their inescapable dialectics “a slave & a lord”.
2. A truly postmodern individual completely disrespects the so-called universal human values since they are nothing but a code of conduct of a collective consumer. The true post-humans have their own highly personal criteria of perception of the world that cannot be shared with anybody since the exemplary public ideals are meaningless for the post-humans. Thus, a post-human sets his/her own self as an exemplary standard since his/her personal existence is unique and unprecedented.
3. A post-human is a subject of history in contrast to non-subject crowds of consumers. The political will makes him/her a highly effective operational unit capable of negating any kind of socio-political model proposed by the global “greedism”. First of all, a post-human rejects a formula of obedience “a lord — a slave” neutralizing it with “no”: no lords — no slaves. The same simple method is applicable to reject the traditional social dichotomy “mates — foreigners”: no mates — no foreigners.
4. Post-humans shirk any communication with masses using only a peer-to-peer mode of communication. They commit nobody to their public images since their identities are “liquid” — they are changing at will according to circumstances. They make no claim to the truth of the highest instance. They require nothing from anybody since their greed has evolved into post-greed.
5. Post-greed of the post-humans does not eat images of happiness from the endless consumption listings of consumer society any longer. It is mutated into a lonely self-sufficient being whose food is unlimited cognition along with variable creativity. Post-greed of the post-humans of postmodernity is a natural wish to have more. And this is not about objects of manifested substance but about the fullest possible personal existence in every consciously lived unit of time.
6. Post-humans are consistent in the rejection of all dogmas of former paradigms. They equally disrespect both religious doctrines of premodernity and a scientific image of the universe inherent in modernity. Religious cults are negated due to the available hierarchical structures in which a ruling minority — clerics usurp the right to the truth while the voiceless flock personifies the future silent majority of consumers. Using the achievements of the fourth industrial revolution (information technologies) post-humans disdain the so-called scientific image of the world that is turned by late modernity into another consumptive value. Science has lost its gnoseological function being transformed into another institution of social coercion when the minority of elites oppress the silent majority of plebs. Forcing society to have deals with radical individuals the post-humans push the System to a permanent cognitive dissonance in which no socially acceptable solution is possible in terms of both science and spirituality.
7. The fate of post-humans is tragic by default. They defy Matrix which modus vivendi excludes any heroic archetype. Post-humans realize the value of their time since they constitute a non-digestible element for global consumer greed. Their post-greed that lost the test for material wealth makes them go perpendicular to the movement of the chewing masses.
8. Where consumer society ends, postmodernity begins. The final objective of post-humans comes to achieving the maximally tense degree of personal existence as “being-toward-death”. This is the biggest difference between post-humans and the people of modernity who are hiding in the endless consumption listings as in collective hypnosis to deny personal finiteness. Post-greed that is always hungry for authentic existence transforms post-humans into kamikaze who rams the historical destiny of “homo publicus”. At their limit, post-humans are to go beyond the biology of homo sapiens as of beings immanent to society that swallowed the entire phenomenology of creation. Thus, the true end of history will come when a certain critical number of post-humans appear and the very fact of their availability will make a further spiral of social evolution impossible.

As we can see, an image of a true post-human includes neither chthonic features nor behavioral deviations. However, the whole lifestyle of post-humans can be recognized as a huge behavioral disorder if it is viewed through the prism of consumer society. Besides, post-humans have no trace of a revolutionary impulse since any permutation of parts in economic tasks of society is meaningless. And their “natural greed” hasn’t gone anywhere, how odd it may sound. It has merely turned into a different animal together with its carriers: a modus of insatiable greed for things is replaced by an insatiable greed for knowledge.

Let’s recollect from what the present blog-post starts: can another socio-centric world order occur in the future? It might be either neo-communism or neo-fascism. The present neoliberalism is a sort of such an order as well. Yes, any of them can appear in the future as another modification of modernity. But in any case, there will be some lite-version compromised by consumer society.

Consumerism is incurable with conventional nonviolent methods. But since pacifism as a defense against human-caused armageddon is inbuilt in human greed, no fully-fledged world war is possible in the nearest perspective. Doesn’t this mean that postmodernity might never come to replace the present consumer society?

Forecasting is a thankless job. Artificial black swans in the form of fake pandemics are able to preserve consumer society for quite a long time. However, the very availability of postmodernist discourse (whatever quality it might be) indicates some covert tectonic movements in human self-reflection. That’s why there is reason to believe that sooner or later some special conditions under which a small part of the global population can get a chance to escape from the obsolete consumerist modernity will occur. Such a breakthrough was indirectly predicted by many mighty minds beginning from Nietzsche and Heidegger and up to Dougin and Dzhemal.

People with innate defects of greed should benefit from those conditions. The innate defects reflect vivid and active greed, but the greed of a different sort. It means a post-greed capable of being fed with knowledge in the quest for a meaningful existence. The conditions should include a critical mass of post-humans with “defective” greed and purely virtual technology that allows to digest knowledge in mass beyond official scientific standards and cognitive limitations of consumer society.

Postmodernity will come, but strangely it won’t be a global paradigm to which the whole population arrives. It will be a parallel world of a specific post-human minority having almost nothing in common with the self-obsessed world of thoughtlessly consuming crowds. The true nihilist postmodernity will be antisocial by nature. Maybe (and even most probably) the true post-humans will appear marginals with their post-greed “out of this world”.

At the same time, a real fork in the road of human history will happen to be available. People will either go along a wide avenue of society or pursue a narrow path of dis-society. It will be possible to either starve and gorge in the consumer reality or avoid those two choices in the post-consumer virtuality. And finally, it will be acceptable to either surrender to Fate and rely on crowd wisdom or tell time to go screw because time is powerless without society.