Merry Christmas.
So in the last couple of articles, we’ve gone over the basic character of the structures for reproducing (Western) hegemony in the framework of the contemporary global political order.
At the bottom level, we have the fundamental colonial economic relationships that still remain in place, albeit in different guises. These relationships are probably best exemplified in the constitution of export-dependent economies in the third world, but the same sort of dynamic is also present in such phenomena as the opposition between urban and rural areas, and how colonial relationships are manifest in the class structure and internal geographies of the proper imperial domain as such.
This internal colonial tension is reproduced in almost every nation state in the developed world, and is for the most part an artifact of the centralization of power inherent to industrial civilization. The ghettos, barrios and reservations of the US are thus equivalent to Romanian Moldavia or the rural north of Sweden being exploited for resources, subjected to brain drain and entrenchment of class divisions &c.
Divide and conquer. As above, so below.
Above this bottom level, we have the various sorts of imperial mechanisms for maintaining and recreating these fundamental economic relations upon which the entire edifice rests. This is basically equivalent to what Louis Althusser called “ideological state apparatuses”. A key aspect of these are the political institutions of governance, the ostensibly participatory liberal democracies which afford legitimacy to the fundamental economic power structure, and which create conditions for the citizens’ identification with authority.
This identification, in its various modes, is probably the single most important psychological factor in permeating the system’s power structure.
Arguably, all methods of propaganda and structures of ideological reproduction in some way target this basic psychological relation and our understanding of who we are and what tribe we belong to.
Experimental observations such as those of the Milgram & Asch experiments should probably be interpreted as evidence of the strength of these sorts of attachments rather than simplistic hypotheses such as a lack of critical thinking capabilities of the majority.
Politics under spectacular mass society is always something like a game of ice hockey. The very nature of its marketing engine is going to target identity formation and brand attachment as the main social movers, as the central factors in shaping and catalyzing human behaviour. In that sense, identity politics is both a core feature of capitalism as well as a sign of the social decay of its later stages when it’s fully present.
The brand-identity nexus of the modern political marketplace is namely a far cry from Athenian democracy or even the deliberative communal governance of the Germanic tribes attested to in Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War (accurately or not):
They do not pay much attention to agriculture, and a large portion of their food consists in milk, cheese, and flesh; nor has any one a fixed quantity of land or his own individual limits; but the magistrates and the leading men each year apportion to the tribes and families, who have united together, as much land as, and in the place in which, they think proper, and the year after compel them to remove elsewhere.
For this enactment they advance many reasons-lest seduced by long-continued custom, they may exchange their ardor in the waging of war for agriculture; lest they may be anxious to acquire extensive estates, and the more powerful drive the weaker from their possessions; lest they construct their houses with too great a desire to avoid cold and heat; lest the desire of wealth spring up, from which cause divisions and discords arise; and that they may keep the common people in a contented state of mind, when each sees his own means placed on an equality with [those of] the most powerful.
… When a state either repels war waged against it, or wages it against another, magistrates are chosen to preside over that war with such authority, that they have power of life and death. In peace there is no common magistrate, but the chiefs of provinces and cantons administer justice and determine controversies among their own people.
(Caesar, Commentaries on the Gallic War, book IV).
The modern substitution of peoples’ actual independent governance of their immediate environment is really a regressive reduction of human collective agency to a narrow and impaired version of herd behaviour.
In its natural and pristine form, it’s a beautiful thing, and one that can synergize with our rational faculties. It’s clearly seen among animals, and even in the bond between man and dog. When I and our two distorted wolves are out hiking, there’s present an objective tendency towards stalking prey together. Likewise, we have a clear but unspoken agreement to defend each other from predators, no questions asked.
What mass society does, is to first isolate the individual, and then entice this herd behaviour to emerge in a one-dimensional and distorted way, anchored only in the spectacle without the corrective of an actual reality to navigate, or real, living pack members to lick your wounds or tell you when you’ve gone astray.
It’s akin to how destructive cults operate. It’s with less intensity, yet an almost total societal diffusion. The influence is everywhere, and it conditions us to identify with the system’s foundational myths, to internalize its authority, and to feel like its enforcers and ruling elite are part of our own pack. (This tendency has been quite intensified in the latter years, and the social ostracization directed against covid or Ukraine wrongthinkers are typical of authoritarian and destructive sects.)
Although we’re profoundly isolated as individuals. Most of us are really not part of any pack whatsoever.
This inevitably creates a sort of existential cognitive dissonance at a primordial level. There’s a loss of real relation, a sense of being boxed in, trapped in a cage, with no actual connections to significant others. No avenues of self-transcendence.
Interestingly, R. D. Laing remarked that the contemporary Western expressions of psychosis are precisely the manifestation of our culture’s denial of will, agency, consciousness and real relation in the existential experience of sensitive individuals.
This, he argues, presents as a profound sense of ontological insecurity, which surprisingly often takes shape according to recurring patterns: as a fear that one is really dead; a fear that one is somehow not real; or that other persons don’t exist.
Or a fear that one does not actually have free will.
The sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.
Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial management buildings and exhibition centers in authoritarian countries are much the same as anywhere else.
The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening.
Even now the older houses just outside the concrete city centres look like slums, and the new bungalows on the outskirts are at one with the flimsy structures of world fairs in their praise of technical progress and their built-in demand to be discarded after a short while like empty food cans.
(Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944.)
This breeds discontents.
There are a hundred ways to define this dissatisfaction, but I think Ted Kaczynski’s perspective is very useful. He terms it a “disruption of the power process”, a sort of loss of the basic communal agency from which we derive the existential security that stems from being able to control our surroundings and sustain ourselves independently. A frustration of natural human drives that inevitably triggers a hindbrain response of dread.
In those of us that don’t crack, in those of us that endure, this creates a desire to rebel.
To Freud and Kaczynski, modern culture and social organization are to a great extent shaped to function as a coping mechanism for this very problem. They provide us with surrogate activities that to some extent ameliorate our discontentment, while also inevitably being geared towards reproducing the system and its power structure. Many of these surrogates are simply outlets for the various expressions of our rebellious impulses, and either disarm them or recuperate them as tools for the system. This is, not incidentally, a central theme of modern popular culture.
The rowdy delinquent who becomes a cop. The feel-good ending of Good Will Hunting where the young rebel joyfully becomes a productive member of bourgeois society. Finding Forrester. The Intouchables. Examples abound.
And here’s, I think, the key to how soft power in modern mass society neutralizes meaningful internal insurgencies.
Most of us have no real idea why we’re frustrated. We’re pissed off, we’re depressed, we’re petrified, but we’re not quite sure why or what to do about it.
For those of us who aren’t placated by mainstream surrogate activities and outlets for our impulses (not least the young and yet unestablished), more radical options become attractive. Yet the system of course markets a wide set of products and “lifestyles” to cater to this demand as well.
Contemporary tethered activism is probably the best example of this process, which almost entirely disregards structural macro issues in favour of minor grievances, identity or symbol politics. The end result is a form of pseudo-rebellion where the activists’ dissatisfaction is directed against issues that are structural impediments to the system, or to the social transformations that always must take place in the wake of extractive capitalism and its breaking the ground of new markets.
As activists, we’re also recruited to act as spearheads of social transformation, as the avant-garde of the system and its institutions, since the minority activist organizations are shaped to deliver and market extreme versions of what’s later blunted in the system’s official “compromise” solution.
In between that, the general public of course “rebels” against the activists, buys an SUV just to spite Greta, and then finds itself pacified by the “reasonable compromise”. This goes double for the resentment and dissatisfaction of the conservatives and reactionaries.
Two steps forward, one step back.
And to reiterate, nothing of this would be possible without spectacular mass society, and the radical centralization of power effected in the global mediatic framework.
Again, there are seven major multinationals that control the press and the legacy mass media (Disney, Comcast, Warner Bros., Paramount, Access, Hasbro and Amazon). They’re all American.
There are five major multinationals that own almost the entire global digital infrastructure (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft). They’re also all American.
BlackRock’s AI, “Aladdin”, manages wealth in excess of 20 trillion USD. That’s seven times the GDP of the entire continent of Africa.
Suck on that.
So. Corporate colonialism continues unabated, and nobody on the "left" even seems familiar with the age-old structures undergirding the whole mess anymore. As useful idiots and faux-rebels, we willingly took the covid bait, and suddenly, the thing plaguing our resource colonies is the lack of "vaccine equity", not the rapine and plunder on which the entire wealth of the global north depends.
The corporate commodification of nature we now see taking place is nothing but a global legal scheme to maintain control of the resources of the third world, at precisely the very moment when peak oil and resource contraints are threatening the hegemony of the West.
At this point in time, climate change narratives are the chief tool in this agenda.
Notwithstanding the actual facts of the matter, the empire’s marketing of climate change narratives reduces to a massive propaganda operation designed to obstruct the industrialization and internal development of our colonies so they won't be able to claim or defend the resources we need for themselves.
It’s imperialism. You always knew that, right?
… and a happy new year, everyone. Let’s do our best to put a dent in this thing.
It is not because you do not know the truth that I am writing to you
but rather because you know it already
and know that no lie can come from the truth.
(1 John 2:21)
It's fascinating to me how every person in the dissident community (for lack of a better term) is looking at what's going on, and seeing completely different things.
This seems right to me:
"the contemporary Western expressions of psychosis are precisely the manifestation of our culture’s denial of will, agency, consciousness and real relation in the existential experience of sensitive individuals"
But Paul Kingsnorth looks at our situation from an Eastern Orthodox POV, and sees idolatry of the self and self-will. Rudolph Riggery, a physicist, sees a corruption of science, superstition, and irrationality. Jeff Childers, a populist conservative lawyer, sees Marxism rampant.
So what is it that we are actually looking at?
Anyway, in regards to your post, I've been thinking about how my father railed against "the Combine" all of his life (he got the term from Ken Kesey), and wound up swallowing MSNBC's propaganda. If he were alive today he'd surely be railing for war against Russia, and would be unable to see the hypocrisy in wanting other people's children to die for an obscure political motive, when he'd spent so long condemning the government for Vietnam.
As he went, so went the Left in America.
This article, so helpful. Thanks. Hey, on this line:
“ Experimental observations such as those of the Milgram & Asch experiments should probably be interpreted as evidence of the strength of these sorts of attachments rather than simplistic hypotheses such as a lack of critical thinking capabilities of the majority.”
…was just in conversation about this. Seems like critical thinking capabilities are not applied where needed most. I mean, the general characteristic is either refusal, or loss of ability to, apply critical thinking capabilities <<to one’s own tribe>> (profession, nation, class, race, self, whatnot). And when lost here, what value are such capabilities applied elsewhere? The least of the effects of this loss is reinforcement of precisely the lack of critical thinking capabilities. I don’t know, I think though this points at meaning having evaporated from your sentence