Pejorocracy

 A note in Laudator Temporis Acti on Ezra Pound's coinage "pejorocracy", rule by the worse

One thing that puzzles me about pejorocracy is this — why the comparative degree and why not the superlative (pessimocracy, from Latin pessimus = worst)? 

There is also the delightful "kakistocracy", the Greek version of rule by the worst, with echoes of Musil's Kakania, of "catastrophe", of "caca".

Rule by the worse seems suitably lukewarm and half-baked, the pejorocracy not being capable of the superlative in any field.

I have the feeling that this year marks the end of the West as a going concern, its inmates abandoning the last of any functional understanding of "reality" or "civilisation", its pejorocrats fumbling their way to the rubbish heaps.

May Day

Sudden nostalgia for the 22nd May 2007 and a day when I was free, living in Brighton, rolling in money, drinking my head off when I felt like it...

...now life amid a vast miasma of torpor and ugliness, stupidity no longer impedance but become a galvanic industrial resource, of which "we" have limitless reserves.

Perhaps enlightenment is to be found in cliodynamics, and Peter Turchin's Ages of Discord for example, or somewhere in the pages of the great Valéry, with the Zürau Aphorisms always to hand. Perhaps I will just go down to the corner shop and buy a huge bag of sweets.

5 From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

The goal, if there ever was one, is not the or any point. If I must reach the point of no turning back; then I am already at it: if it is a point I must reach, I cannot be at it. Per ardua ad ardua and so forth.