The Liminalist # 69.5: The Soft Machine of Society (with Sean Kerrigan)

SeanK2

Part two of conversation with Sean Kerrigan, on the cover of Bureaucratic Insanity, corporate identity, sociopaths and bureaucrats, a killer alter, a violent robot world, child sex abuse and schooling, data collection for control, the commerce & pursuit of sacred information, schools as laboratories, AI & social constructs, how school shootings escalate, lack of meaning, lack of caring, the desire to justify one’s existence, framing children as criminals, how to create terrorists, thriving on opposition, community & taboo, tearing down taboos, radioactive taboo dust, identifying enemies, political correctness and the need to disagree, industrialization & insanity, Americanism & religiosity, revolutionary times, Trump’s appeal, the social engineers’ sorcery, Trump as capitalism’s karmic backlash, the mega-machine, the global elite cogs.

Sean’s site.

Songs: “El Mariachi” & “Monkey Said” by The Freak Fandango Orchestra; “This Nation,” by Neon Karma; “Crooked” by Kristin Hersh.

3 thoughts on “The Liminalist # 69.5: The Soft Machine of Society (with Sean Kerrigan)”

  1. Yikes. No comments again; don’t understand the lack of interest. Hope you’ll continue with guests like Mr. Kerrigan. A good back and forth, very accessible. Your chances of amplification are greatest with conversations like this.

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  2. Excellent two-part interview, thanks to you both. I found of particular interest the point at which you discussed the way that “Americans” have never defined themselves positively, but that their identity has always been defined by what they are NOT. I heard the writer and social critic Morris Berman echo this same sentiment on numerous occasions, and as someone who has spent a fair amount of time studying American history both formally at a university and on my own, I find a great deal of veracity to this observation.

    One thing that concerns me, as a US citizen in early middle age, is that just about the only thing holding US society together is this notion of the American Dream. This was defined before the closing of the frontier as getting a place of one’s own to make a self-reliant life (defined against, of course, the natives that you were taking the land from), and since then has come to be defined by commerce and accumulation of financial capital. I never realized it until I typed it, but in both of these instances the dream is defined by gaining freedom from a community, as opposed to being a member of one. As the current manifestation of the American Dream appears to be little more than a thin veneer of consumerism over a rotting corpse of a culture, I cannot help but view with dread the coming erosion of that veneer, because it will only expose the complete lack of community and society beneath.

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