"Endarkenment" (A Local Etiology)

(enquired in e-mail)

"One question: did you invent the term 'Endarkenment'? If so, I'll unhappily congratulate you on naming a concept that perfectly describes what's going on right now."

No. I cannot take credit for an original flash of brain which raised that percept (the word) in my consciousness. What happened when I first saw it is that the concept -- the counter-Enlightenment -- was instantly tagged with the word as a perfect distillation of everything I saw in various histories of philosophy (principally; Marxism, and pretty much everything downstream of Pragmatism) and politics, both theoretical (myriad rationalizations against freedom) and applied (Bolsheviks, Nazis, etc.), all currently at work in the west at large and in America in particular. The sum of all of it represented an enormous shadow falling over the time of my life, where the light of freedom had once informed world aspirations and built what had never been built before.

That word stated that sum.

I first saw it at the hand of a Usenet snipeshoot artist who blew a small whirlwind through AC-ECW in 1998:

"the ends justify the means, and
der fuhrer's own ends require
means which may have, in the remote
primitive past of peon evolution,
been considered unethical. however,
in the new age of endarkenment, it
is essential to destroy the donut
part of society in order to save
the hole. this is the courageous
path to clixegrity and inner dark
which our visionary fuhrer is boldly
following us to. a peaceful void
will soon bring equality to perfection.
-- "

(joel parrill -- "clixegrity")

He was an odd thing. I thought he was pretty funny, and sometimes hilarious, just in his facility of phrase and at such slashing economy, too. I watched for about a month before I nodded out-loud in front of everybody. He was a pure spouter, without inclination to discussion, but simply paint-splashing these cold bare-concrete chunks at the group. The look of his posts almost brought to mind something out of "THX 1138" -- the idea of a self-aware species, slipping-under. He established a "Clixon" image early in his posts, and then ran-off on it completely without elucidation or expoundment. Instantly as I saw it, I figured a contraction of Clinton and Nixon. In any case, this character played an almost strangely onomatopoeiac/alliterative/echo-chamber effect with daily posts there for some time: the "clix" prefix evolving to condition various mauling swipes at the times. (e.g.; "clixty minutes", and "clixophants" -- in which he validates my Nixon connection.)

He left his integrations to implication, and so with "Endarkenment". I put it work on my own project.