The Age of Plastic

Accessories Sold Separately

According to Tradition, first fully articulated in the Classical Period, there are four Ages of Man, five if one includes the Greek Age of Heroes.  The succession of Ages marks a descent from a primordial connection to the divine into a condition of materialism and immorality, to a fallen world, prelest, jahiliyyah.  As the Industrial Revolution broke the Malthusian cycle, so too did the Enlightenment create the conditions for a new Age, the one in which the West now finds itself.  Ours is the Plastic Age.

“Behold the Weltanschauung" was the original subtitle.

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It is a basic precept of reactionary thought that we live in a fallen state.  This fundamental notion sets the true man of the right apart from the liberal and the normiecon, for whom the story is one of progress, and is the greatest conceptual barrier to outsiders.  It seems axiomatic to those steeped in the spirit of the age that things are better than they were and will continue to get better in the future; the biggest difference between any kind of conservative and any kind of liberal is not their underlying moral structures but the threats they see to the progress they both envision.  The liberal fears a pumping of the brakes, while the conservative fears the speed is so great that the train of progress will derail. 

No doubt.

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Not so the reactionary.  He does not look around for answers, nor backwards as some imagine, but up, to wisdom that shines its light on all times at once.  The reactionary accepts the utility of Classical schemas like the Ages of Man because he shares a spiritual kinship with his forebears; to the degree this is true, the idea will make sense.  First expounded by Hesiod in his Works and Days, and later expanded upon by Ovid in The Metamorphoses, the basic idea is that there was once a Golden Age, in which men lived like gods, followed by a Silver Age where men lived like children at their mothers’ sides until a brief and terrifying adulthood came upon them, during which they neglected the gods and were punished by them.  The third race of men arose during the Bronze Age, not the historical period, but an era characterized by ubiquitous war, when men reverenced Ares above all.  The Bronze Age was swept away by the Great Flood of Classical Myth, that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, whereupon came a resurgent Age of Heroes, in which men took on the best characteristics of the previous ages, being at once divine, unprepossessing, and warlike.  This brief resurgence ended in what for Hesiod and Ovid was the current period, the Iron Age (again, not to be confused with the historical period) during which men toiled and suffered and mistreated one another, it was a dishonest and calculating age, a selfish age, a low point. 

Much has been made of this schema in the more esoteric places in reactionary thought.  Evola compared the Ages of Man to the Hindu Yugas, and posited that the Iron Age was the Kali Yuga, the lowest and most material period.  For Rene Guenon, the key to understanding the Ages was to keep in mind that to the ancients metals had not merely a material and quantitative value but a qualitative one, they meant something.  This value as a qualitative signifier is important for understanding its value as an interpretive tool.  The Christian legacy in reactionary thought similarly posits a Fall, and it is possible to see in our exile from Eden and the extended but slowly decreasing longevity of the Patriarchs a more gradual degeneration through successive periods.  Notably, God first speaks to men directly, then through prophets, then through signs; the connection grows thinner until the curtain between the sacred and the profane is torn asunder by the victory of Christ.

What is plastic?  True plastics are synthetic materials for which the primary ingredients are polymers.  They are fully the creation of humans, the rearranging of matter at the fundamental level.  Plastics have existed since the dawn of the 20^th century but only came into widespread popular use after the Second World War, alongside the triumph of liberalism over its sister ideology fascism.  Its characteristics made it useful for the world coming into being.  Plastic is cheap.  It can be molded and pressed and extruded with ease by industrial processes.  It can be made into any shape and size needed, and en masse.  Plastic can be easily made sterile, and thus can be used for things involved with human well-being, like food packaging and medical supplies.  Because of its low cost and the scale of plastic production, it can be tossed away when done with.

Not everyone approves.

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These are its material characteristics.  However, as Guenon would have perceived, there is a spiritual dimension to plastic, one so pronounced as to give its whole character to this Age.  The commercial cheapness of plastic goods strips them of any significance.  While in the Iliad every bronze tripod or iron ring had a colorful backstory, receiving a plastic gift is tantamount to being authorized to throw it away.  Its malleability and general usefulness makes it ubiquitous, where it crowds out other materials wherever practical.  Plastic represents sterility and longevity while at the same time being synonymous with pollution and disposability; our immortal things will outlive us despite being cast away, like Frankenstein’s Monster, haunting faraway places.  Men of the Golden Age were golden, Plato told us, because they took on the qualities of gold.  We are literally becoming plastic, as we eat and drink the polymer ashes of our synthetic world.

So what is Plastic Man?  Plastic Man is not a fundamentally a man, though mass man is imbued with the qualities of plastic, but a woman, or rather, a perversion of a woman shaped into a plastic imitation of the same.  Plastic, after all, is a female-amenable material; it lacks the heft and solidity of wood and metal, and when domestic and public life were more sharply delineated between the sexes it was women who benefitted most from the ascendance of plastic home goods.  There is no male equivalent to the Tupperware Party.  Plastic Woman is the model force of the Age of Plastic.  She is Barbie, with Ken only in attendance.  Rather than a longhouse, there is the Malibu Dream McMansion, instead of some multigenerational feminine collective Marija Gimbutas would have recognized there are only single women, in spirit if not in fact.  She is not seated in some nesting circles of identity, family, community, nation, faith- to the degree those things are a part of her life they are signifiers of some material status, as it were, accessories.  Accessory is an important concept; Plastic Woman is a blank onto which are added other bits of plastic as approximations of personality.  Plastic Woman has no inner life.  She is wholly centered on the self and her sense of self is held together only through constant external validation.  She is the plastic she consumes, and the boundaries between her body and the goods she adorns it with break down as the art of plastic surgery advances (interestingly, plastic has never been much used as a fine artistic medium, save in the area of human sculpting).

When the Fembot coding gets the Critical Theory patch.

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Plastic Woman can be found in real life but her true habitat is social media, where her visual presentation is most amenable to being shaped and molded into what she would prefer herself to be.  You can find her selling things on Instagram, rattling off the names of the corporations that send her things to hawk.  Plastic Woman makes for a great saleswoman as there is no pretense; she genuinely enjoys surrounding herself with things and singing their praises.  She molds herself to suit her plastic job.  If she presents as physically fit, it is not because she cares about her health as such, but because her outfits demand she be a certain size.  She stuffs her plastic breasts into plastic bras as she informs her viewers that she is “augmented,” like some cyborg- half woman, half sexbot, all plastic.  Her attractiveness, however, is wholly sterile; she seeks not to be desired, but earned, to be a companion to a proper accessory of a man who will cheerlead her lifestyle and serve as a reflection of her material value.  Her charm is superficial, a tool to be used to move goods and maintain image. 

Deep down there is a longing for significance that is kept suppressed with SSRIs, vacations to plastic places (they all seem to like Destin, Florida), and decorating her McMansion to resemble a hotel.  Her deepest fear is that she is disposable, which she masks by disposing of people by way of anticipation.  There is a reason women initiate nearly 4/5 of divorces: a boring man risks being bored in turn, and a man unable to maintain material security is no better than an umbrella with a hole in it, better to toss it for a new one.  In any case, a man who sees her up close, sans good lighting and pancake makeup, can never give her the validation of a worshipful, curated audience. 

All of those signs are ads.

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Plastic Man, such as he is, comes in two varieties.  He is the aforementioned Ken, a blank accessory like Plastic Woman’s matching handbag, or he becomes a Plastic Woman himself.  The former sort of Plastic Man will often present as an “alpha male” social media figure, mocking lesser men while surrounded by expensive consumer goods and Plastic Women.  The truth of course is that the Plastic Women would retain their desirability without him, while he would be nothing without them in the background. An alpha animal is a leader and a reproducer, while the Plastic Man is as sterile as his female counterpart and exists only to exploit others for his own gain, so as to have the resources to maintain a harem of Plastic Women.  As for the latter, the Age of Plastic promises infinite customizability, and for Plastic Man the chance to become the star of the show is sometimes quite literally irresistible.  The logic of the Age of Plastic is that one is as one presents; plastic, after all, is used for facades, not inner structures, and with appropriate amounts of plastic surgery and being shaped, molded, and extruded onto social media, he can be the woman of his dreams.  The most fully realized plastic woman is in fact Dylan Mulvaney, for he is what they all aspire to be, a being whose femininity is wholly artificial and the product of an act of will upon nature through the agency of the same scientific process that created cellophane and rayon, a thing repulsive to anyone with any connection to any transcendent goodness or beauty, but perfect for Bud Light.

Well not really perfect . . .

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Hesiod believed that there had been an Age of Heroes sandwiched between that of Bronze and Iron.  This was a kind of recapitulation of the best of the preceding three Ages, the spirits of whom still inhabited the earth as teachers to those wise enough to perceive them.  So too can it be for us.  We will always be shaped by what surrounds us; the trick is to cultivate a sense of awareness that what we see most directly is not what is most important, that there are deeper forces at work, and to flee the superficial.  We can be wise and innocent and bold if we reach out to those spirits as we find them, and we can cull from our lives those things which strip us of our potential for excellence and our humanity.  Start today- read some Hesiod, read Ovid, read Evola and Guenon.  Above all read the Bible, the summit of Divine wisdom.  Then get up, strip away all the plastic you can from your presence, slonk some raw eggs, touch some grass, and feel the sun on your neck.  If you are seeking a companion, that is where you will find him or her, beneath the open sky, contemplating the spirits of the prior Ages.