The most common criticism of critics is directed at an omission or refusal to offer alternatives. Whether in a reductive sense as genetic engineering – to which everyone but the engineer is seen critical when they respond "Leave it the fuck alone!" – or in the more expansive "social engineering" which, ironically, almost everyone supports, at least when hiding behind euphemisms like "political organization", particularly in its more revolutionary forms, I must ask the anti-critics demanding alternatives this: "why should the critic of engineering itself be expected to draft a substitute plan for a new and different fabrication?"
Why oppose the construction of blueprints in the effort of designer trees or food reeking with poison because it has been altered to resist a herbicide (or produce a pesticide) by avoiding its metabolism, but not oppose the similar plasticization of society? Did I say similar? Are we not conditioned, even medicated to resist trauma only to find ourselves exposed to increased levels of toxicity (or exploitation) tomorrow? I suppose the short answer would be "trees and tomatoes aren't prone to temper tantrums like children and other creepy-crawly critters". To conceive a social life without meddling must be as difficult as live organs without bodies. But on the other hand, "Leave me/us the fuck alone!" is the most obvious sentiment in the world observed in the targets of other's meddling.
Critique irrupts in the single generalization, "mob". Uppers protest: "They do nothing but complain!". Downers moan: "They don't complain enough!" The paranoid but wise are excluded when they insist "the mob" refers to the conspiratorial organization at the top pulling the strings (or greasing them), not to the puppets being drug along behind. Hegel said progressive democracy must always include the organizers, the counter-organizers and the counter-counter-organizers - thesis, antithesis and synthsis - rolling along like a wheel. Refined by Marx, historical materialism illustrated that even the puppeteers may be unwilling. Freud found that the force of history may be closer than the politically oriented (that is, the engineers) can imagine: they were all, one way or another reared with the force of childhood trauma. Put another way, even the bioengineers are collateral damage of bioengineering, or what sticklers for precision call biopolitics.
And so we're back to the dualist religion of utility and futility and still within the hyphenated paradox noted by Charles Fort: "One can't offend anybody with any statement that is interpreted as applying to everybody else". "The People" itself is the second most virtual (and useful) prestidigitation or trick of a magician's mirrors, except that the magician has not only gone missing from the stage, there never was one in the first place. The first most biggest social lie, of course, is that children are born naughty. We know this to be a lie, else they would have by now conscripted infants as experimental subjects to map and then modify the genetic code generating crime, rebelliousness and other sins, rather than concentrate all their forces upon pharmaceutical intervention onto childish brain chemistry persisting past puberty. I mean, who even considers kids beyond "just another toilsome responsibility" adding even more stress upon everyday struggle? Disobedience is the most frightening idea to the discoverers and their progeny of circular logic symbolized by the wheel.
The youthful genius of destruction is that the young instinctively know, as if informed by Saturn's muse, that creation comes of itself when left to its own devices. Fire is the saving grace when the sun has been occluded. And so is amusement, providing warmth to frozen spirits.
- see Reverse Engineering
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