The Collapse of The Modern Industrial Economy, A Crisis of White Masculinity, The Post-Industrial Rise in Service Security Surveillance, the Transubstantiation of Formative Non-Virtue, and the Phenomenon of the Targeted Individual
After the election of Barrack Obama and the manifestation of racially coded rhetoric espoused by the Tea Party, an outbreak of articles and roundtable discussions arose concerning the decline of American men. This decline in (white) male masculinity seemed to suggest the deterioration of masculinity had reached a point where patriarchal privilege was finally over and where women appeared to be gaining fast in major social indicators (Salam 2009; Rosin 2010; Zincenko 2009; Ashbrook 2009; Pew Research Center 2010; Schmidt 2010). They noted this decline was not mild either. These commentators warned; it was a grand epochal change in power, as the patriarchal system that had benefited men for over one million years was in its final days. Then came such titles as the “Death of Macho” “The End of Men” “Male Decline in the 21st Century?” “The Rise of The Wives” and “Women Outpacing Men in Income, Education” have populated the media since 2009.
The main culprit in the perceived decline of men is the collapse of a modern, industrialized economy that supported and held up male advantage. Indeed, the perceived decline in any human being can be attributed to the collapse of supportive avenues toward individual successful outcomes, and here I am referring to the decline in a population electronically targeted by the development and need for a post-industrial service security surveillance economy and the rise of the Targeted Individual. The forces of globalization and technological innovation have reconfigured the economy in a global context where information and communication are some of the main drivers of economic success. The rise of a post-industrial service economy values skills in communication, listening, as well as knowledge in other modes of surveillance, and teamwork. Ironically, all skills are associated with women. The postindustrial economy's reliance on technology and relatively transparent information flows and displaces the need for physical strength and risk (Rosin 2010). Manufacturing is now largely located in developing nations, leaving American working-class men in particular without employment or purpose.
The psychoanalytic logic and crime research statistics regarding homicide support “Women are always and everywhere less likely than men to commit criminal acts.” As “…. homicide research remains largely male-centric, with patterns unique to female offenders and victims often lost in the aggregate. Although males constitute the overwhelming majority of both homicide offenders and victims, it is important nonetheless to identify gender differences and similarities in trends and patterns of homicide.” And this is true not only of homicide but also in terms of individualizing gender differences in patterns and trends of human behavior.
An article from the journal of Violence and Gender states, “For women to kill, they generally must see their situation as life-threatening, as affecting the physical or emotional well-being of themselves or their children.” Overall, it is often noted that males and females tend to see the utility of violence in radically different ways. Whereas men tend to employ violence as an offensive move to establish superiority, women typically view violence as a defense of last resort. And, “Unless the murders of women are examined separately from the murders of men, that is, disaggregated by gender, little can be known about this type of murder which is otherwise lost within the larger number of male–to-male homicides.”
It is my personal opinion that when it comes to aggressive violence perpetrated by females it's primarily passive-aggressive in nature, the kind of which may violate boundaries but not necessarily kill instantaneously. It is for this reason the utility in the type of service provided by security service surveillance mimics the passive-aggressive boundary violations often associated with the female gender. Since women are caregivers, they are the guardians for the well-being of their husbands and children and may already be well versed in establishing felt security. Here, the term security becomes the issue. How secure do the proponents of service security surveillance already feel in their own masculinity or femininity? Women are already groomed for second-class status, it is this very status that supports their necessity to, not only utilize the best modes of behavior but find the best avenues that will foster their success. Sometimes the best avenues are antisocial ones which including clandestine surveillance and even sometimes murder. It is for this reason women make excellent female intelligence operatives. Where men have a tendency to utilize brute force as part of their established sexuality, women look for subtle angles and avenues that don’t require physical violence. This tendency to be more “passive-aggressive” in the boundary violations and violence they employ is even demonstrated in the weapons of choice when women commit acts of murder. When it comes to women killers, they tend to murder by smothering, drowning, suffocating, poisoning, or strangling their victims. These are clearly less messy alternatives than the brute force of masculine bloodletting.
The Great Recession has only exacerbated a trend in, not only a crisis of white masculinity, but it may be affecting a small population of females as well. Since 80% of the jobs lost in 2008 had been men, this has left some commentators to opine that the country is in a “he-cession” or “man-cession” (Salam 2009) alluding to a dramatic crisis of white masculinity. The financial industry, construction, and heavy manufacturing were all hit the hardest during the Great Recession leaving their female counterparts additionally stressed.
Is it any wonder then, we see the transubstantiation of male formative non-virtue as the phenomenon of the Targeted Individual rose and continues to effect a small population of American citizens? The phenomenon is now one of the biggest threats to the liberty and the freedom of free-thinking men and women in American democracy.
It is here we can make the connection I had mentioned earlier regarding the telemarketing polls conducted into Tea Party members during the Obama administration, 40% of whom were women, and their demographic comprising mostly white, older, middle-class males living in rural areas (and their wives no doubt), and the connection to an early historical crisis in white masculinity regarding the closing of the Western frontier and the rise of bureaucratic control over business. Mens’ need to conquer and control territory, preferably unrestrained control, has never changed. It has only shifted over the course of time from one area to another. The conquering territory, and not the physical landscape of the Western frontier where bravery, physical strength, bravado, and the willingness to take risks to new forms of wildlife, has now become the landscape of service market economies in the post-industrial American economy where men can openly face the fierce new opportunities in an unpredictable market. This idea is nothing new in academic thinking. However, what is new is the global need for an expanded service security surveillance economy and one that includes the makeup of electronic targeting. The male dominant need to control and conquer, not only new territories and new expanding markets, but the existing and exploding territories of human bodies, that vast majority that makeup overpopulations of human beings and their need for, not only service security surveillance, but service security medical surveillance in attempts to thwart the death instinct, develop new advancing medical technologies, and “save lives.”
Thus, the transubstantiation of formative non-virtue into an unregulated market territory where the far-right radical, conservative republican can enjoy his libertarian philosophies and with the unbounded freedoms of deployment of technology rooted in boundary violations of Other are a very real and existing phenomenon (as we now enter the era of directed energy weapons). Even at the turn of every corner in the invisibility of electromagnetic frequency and microwaves. I would truly love to know what the philosopher Michel Foucault would have thought of today’s post-industrial, service security surveillance phenomena!
I use the term “transubstantiation of formative non-virtue”, a play on words from one of my favorite authors and from one of the most informative books ever written on religious Christian philosophy, Dante’s Purgatorio. In Canto XXV of Dante’s Purgatorio, Dante then describes to the best of his 12th-century knowledge, a very interesting idea on how the shades (spirits) materialize upon death. It has to do with an idea of Informative Virtues, a philosophical idea that the regenerative powers of the seed create similar life. As in, like begets like. An example Dante used in this Canto was a sea-fungus, when it undertakes the reorganization process of meiosis, the seed takes on the virtue from the progenitor’s heart. Upon death, the soul takes on an aerial body and will stand either on the River Archeron (to await Hell) or stand on the River Tiber (to await salvation). Thus, upon death, all souls according to their hearts are either damned or saved. The allegory used here recalls Luke 6:43–45 where Jesus taught that good trees produce good fruits and likewise, bad trees will produce bad fruits (logic). Thus, the act of human breeding (progenitors-to-offspring) scientifically explains how human reproduction works in the vaginal vase of the women’s womb where “good seed” (ova/female sexual intellect) and “good seed” (sperm/male sexual intellect) produce further “good seed” (the fetus/”birthing new advanced future technologies”/brainchild). (Logic) Fashioning another explanation after the proverb found in the New Testament, The Parable of The Mustard Seed, when Jesus was asked the question, “What is the Kingdom of God Like? To what can I compare it?” To which Jesus replied, “The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed (good seed) a gardener planted in his garden and a great tree grew (good seed of future offspring). It grew so big that all the birds and the fowl of the air could come and take refuge in it.” In Bible study, the comparison of this verse is made with the sudden, secret growth, an immense development, as “good seed” (logic).
Except this big tree is the new digital global panopticon and the development of directed energy weapons, the biggest threats to freedom in the creation of service security surveillance sector that will support market economies and secure our national borders from threats of “terrorism” following 9/11. Then Republican president, George Bush, turned every U.S. citizen into a foreign national giving the unbounded freedom and right to the authority of the NSA, CIA, and other U.S. government agencies to surveil in the name of national security. The question becomes, “Who will this great tree serve?” And will there be clandestine secret foreign agents flocking to this “big tree” to target U.S. citizens? Where is the human logic, or even human need to torture?
This transubstantiation of formative non-virtue seems to have exponentially multiplied during and after the presidential Obama administration and the Great Recession of 2008. For it was the economic harbinger that forced the rise of a post-industrial need to service an economy, by the way crippled, an economy that is supportive to the needs of a paranoid bunch of Republican libertarians and experts hell-bent on violating the liberties and freedoms of U.S. American citizens are rooted in community policing. A service security surveillance economy that values skills in communication, listening, intelligent gathering among other modes of surveillance, and teamwork. Another connection made to the patterns and trends of individualizing sexuality and gender is the passive-aggressive violence that the service security surveillance economy represents. Its need for a different set of skills. The skills required for electronic targeted assault and unbounded boundary violations represent a similar method to passive-aggressive “feminine masculinities” demonstrated in female human communications; clandestinely subverted, creating feelings of felt security. These skills are strongly associated with women, listening and establishing felt security, and the need for coercive control over their children. They are the passive-aggressive tones needed to mother effectively but are also connected to the high functioning male psychopath. The difference between female masculinities and high functioning male psychopaths is in their reasoning employed behind their need for control. Men tend toward conquering, controlling, and dominating, even coercively, in order to exert and establish manhood and dominance, especially when it comes to the female maternal form. Women’s utility for coercive control tends towards the preservation of life and continued well-being.
The Great Recession of 2008, and Barrack Obama’s two terms in office, gave rise to one of the worst Republic presidents America has ever seen! And is it any wonder that a white belligerent, far-right radical, conservative-libertarian Republican president was elected in the aftermath of “witchdoctor Barrack Obama” Tea Party era and Tea Party leadership that explicitly used racial coded rhetoric and the use of derogatory signs with the word “nigger” printed on them. Or when Dale Robertson, leader of the Tea Party group called “1776,” endorsed Pastor John Weaver, former chaplain of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, who espoused ideologies at the Christian Identity, a movement that believes Jews are a satanic force and people of color are not fully human (Burghart & Zeskind 2010). It is my opinion that whoever is behind the phenomenon of the electronic targeted tortured individual shares the same type of ideologies Pastor John Weaver shared with the Christian Identity. These proponents are cut from the same corrupt fabric of white supremacist Nazis who believe that the South will one day rise again and that people of color are not hardworking. This certainly explains the phenomenon that occurred when a group of rabble-rousers ascended the Capitol steps to create what has become known as the Capitol Insurrection on January 6, 2021. It’s important to consider the threat to homosexuals, the threat to the mentally ill, the threat to those living with lowered social status due to disabilities, individuals living on welfare who are perceived by these certain types as “inferior” and “lazy.” These are the same types of ideologies that extend out of the far-right, radical, conservative, libertarian, Republican rhetoric. I suddenly feel unsafe knowing they walk among us.
Subnote: The citations cited in this post can be found in the book American Identity in the Age of Obama.
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