Kamala, magic and propaganda

On the deeper layers of recent developments

Kamala Harris. An almost universally loathed political figure, with people on both sides of the political spectrum basically considering her candidacy a bad joke just a few months ago.

“Of course nobody will vote for her”. Broadly considered an atrocious attorney general, supporting draconian marijuana penalties while laughing about getting high in college, and unable to even get significant support in her home state during her 2020 presidential campaign. She now leads the polls not only over Biden’s final results, the then-incumbent, but also over the contender, a former president with a pretty robust base and whose army of online volunteers has been incessantly campaigning for him throughout the alternative media since the 2020 election.

Part of the explanation for this incredible transition is polarization, partisanship and a growing ideological fundamentalism. Many people will vote for anything except Trump and the GOP when offered a binary choice, and would gladly get behind a potted plant or a dog as presidential candidate.

But this surge of such a significant popular approval around this placeholder candidate is something quite different. You wouldn’t actually think that the dog would be a capable decision maker, you wouldn’t tend to perceive the recipient of a protest vote (if that’s their main function) as legitimate on any merits of their own, so when this kind sentiment rapidly emerges in the popular discourse, it’s obvious that we’re dealing with artifically manufactured consent.

I’d consider Kabang above though

So a candidate goes from being unknown, insignificant or even vilified, to an object of overwhelming assent in a matter of days and weeks, something which happens to coincide with her being raised up as heir-apparent by fiat. As if someone just flipped a switch.

And there has obviously been a coordinated effort to produce this outcome. An interesting example is how articles dated two years back, discussing Harris’ lack of popular approval and low rating in polls are now being “updated” and substantially revised to reflect more recent numbers, papering over the obvious discrepancy. The Wikipedia article on Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign, untouced for months and months, of course saw a torrent of edits in the wake of her ascendancy as the 2024 democratic candidate. A key change of the text was to remove any references to low popularity or approval ratings, but older versions of the page still remain (disgression: or so they say - the older versions could still be edited and overwritten in practice, Wikipedia is not on a blockchain).

This emergence of overwhelming assent is not the result of the rational deliberation of sovereign individual citizens. This is not the outcome of any methodical decision process rooted in the informed reflection of the electorate. Neither the ascendancy of Harris, nor people’s overwhelming approval thereof, stems from any sort of process of rational consensus-building that could make these outcomes “democratic” in any meaningful sense of the word.

Manufactured approval

How do I know that? someone may ask. Who am I to say that people’s obvious choices are not really their own? Why is not the public’s affirmation and approval of Harris as a person and symbol a legitimate expression of individuals’ rational consent?

This is a good question, and one that’s not entirely easy to answer.

One immediate observation we can make is that even in the best of worlds, there’s far from enough time in the span of, say, two weeks, for a significant part of the US population to have made a truly rational and informed decision on whether to assent to a political candidacy for the highest office in the state. This is arguably not enough time to make an intelligent decision in terms of buying a vacuum cleaner, and much less so if the issue is to decide the near future of a great power in a historically volatile period.

Another important aspect of the situation is of course that the candidate in question has not been put into this position through anything akin to a democratic process. She has ascended to this candidacy via the internal political machinations of the party apparatus, and the citizens have had no influence over this process whatsoever. This means that, whether the assent is in the end informed or not, the choice between the candidates was artificially limited at the outset.

Finally, and this is probably the most important aspect, we can look at the mode of the assent that is being given. Is it the outcome of an intelligent and factual deliberation where at least important aspects of a complex political situation have been taken into account and given due attention, or does the form or mode of the assent seem to have another character?

This clip above gives us a few interesting examples. No, I’m not on the radical right (I’m an anarchist), I don’t support every single one of Blaire White’s positions (whatever those are), and neither do I believe that these responses are unusual in terms of the quality and mode of political assent they represent (e.g. “this is typical only of Democrats or Kamala supporters”).

I think it’s quite the opposite. This is the quality and character of intentional political assent you normally see across the board in modern mass societies, with the ongoing run-up to the US November elections being something of an extreme example, due to the high stakes, the unreasonable deadlines and the advanced character of the modern propaganda apparatus.

The last respondent of the clip says a couple of quite revealing things. His first reaction is to go straight to the heart of one of the key values of the contemporary Western mythology. Kamala will save democracy, and Donald Trump will destroy democracy.

This is just shorthand for saying that Kamala is good, and Trump is bad. It’s black and white ideological fundamentalism, without nuance, and without being qualified by any sort of argument as to why the policies of this or that representative would be detrimental or fruitful.

But when he’s asked about the accomplishments of the politician in question, what does the man respond?

“She’s brought joy back to this country.”

She is the spring flowers and the bright lights of autumn and birds and bears cried when Kim-Jong Il died in 2011. What?

So this is nothing less than a verbatim repetition of an unusually vapid propaganda slogan that was trotted out some time in August, and which resonates nicely with the religious overtones of contemporary political fundamentalism. Kamala Harris as the “bringer of joy” is about as irrational a warrant anyone could give for their political assent to her candidacy. It’s is basically like a citizen of Orwell’s 1984 telling the world how they love Big Brother because he is strong and wise, and the increasing dominance of this kind of attitude is a quite clear sign of how the political acts of the populace are now at a pretty safe distance from the arena of rational deliberation.

Mass society is not a democracy in any meaningful sense.

But what is it then? And what is it exactly we’re seeing here in terms of the character and quality of political assent? What kind of assent are we even possibly dealing with if it isn’t the democratic, principled and deliberate sort?

Types and modes of political assent

This is another difficult question. To properly answer it in detail, we would have to dig into such complicated issues as the meaning of agency and assent, the nature of modern propaganda, and the character and health of the social embeddedness of human beings in mass societies.

But one initial observation we can make is that assent can either be an affirmation of the individual’s own agency, or it can express an externalization of his own locus of control.

For instance, assent could be the acquiescence to the commands of a superior, and so the acceptance of another’s agency displacing or overruling one’s own. In the extreme form, this kind of assent if perhaps is best exemplified by certain aspects of the relationship between parents and children, where this submission is semi-permanent. Of course, such acquiescence by and among adults can be both rational and warranted, like when you accept the competence and skill of a navigator to safely get you to your destination - but in those cases, it’s almost always limited, circumscribed and situational, and not a permanent or total submission.

Other kinds of assent will on the other hand more strongly reflect the individual’s own agency, such as when you assert some fact you have discovered and want to guide others to it, or when you second another’s conclusion or argument because you have already made up your mind for what she’s trying to say, for your own reasons. These are expressions of the internal locus of control, and immediately brings the individual’s own knowledge, experience and reasoned reflections to bear on the outcome. These are not temporarily suspended and substituted by another’s.

There’s possibly also a third form of assent that fully expresses the individual own agency, choice and reasoned reflection, yet which submits to something he or she disagrees with in the spirit of compromise and consensus. So let’s say I state my case, my arguments and my reservations in relation to some issue, but also finally decide to accept another’s point of view in determining the outcome in spite of my disagreement, then we seem to have a consensus-mode of assent that concedes the decision yet which still more or less fully manifests and expresses the individual’s own agency.

When Jesus had come to the end of all he wanted the people to hear, he went into Capernaum. A centurion there had a servant, a favourite of his, who was sick and near death. Having heard about Jesus he sent some Jewish elders to him to ask him to come and heal his servant. When they came to Jesus they pleaded earnestly with him. ‘He deserves this of you’ they said ‘because he is friendly towards our people; in fact, he is the one who built the synagogue.’

So Jesus went with them, and was not very far from the house when the centurion sent word to him by some friends: ‘Sir,’ he said ‘do not put yourself to trouble; because I am not worthy to have you under my roof; and for this same reason I did not presume to come to you myself; but give the word and let my servant be cured. For I am under authority myself, and have soldiers under me; and I say to one man: Go, and he goes; to another: Come here, and he comes; to my servant: Do this, and he does it.’

When Jesus heard these words he was astonished at him and, turning round, said to the crowd following him, ‘I tell you, not even in Israel have I found faith like this.’ And when the messengers got back to the house they found the servant in perfect health.

Lk 7

The first mode of assent, where there is submission and an externalization of the locus of control, is obviously not appropriate for democratic self-rule nor amenable to the fundamental principles of modern liberalism that our dominant ideologies pay lip service to. And the key reason for this is that it produces a disconnect between the individual’s own agency, which then cannot come to proper expression in the political process. Which then cannot bring the individual’s own knowledge, experiences and reasoned reflections to impact on collective decision-making.

This is normally considered the foundation of the legitimacy of democratic states; they’re adding a certain set of epistemic and evidentiary goods, and they affirm certain fundamental rights and liberties taken to stem from the dignity and value of the human person.

If assent in ostensibly democratic societies on the other hand reduces to an infantile submission to authority, there remains no meaningful distinction from tyranny, oligarchy, autocracy or any other form of authoritarian rule.

So where does then “magic” come into all of this?

Magic and manufactured consent

Human beings are cognitively and emotionally adapted to life in small-scale societies, where embedded, overlapping and quite complex relational networks form the primary environment for experience and interaction. In this sort of context, decision-making through consensus is always the default. This is attested throughout the literature from Caesar’s Gallic Wars to modern anthropolical research, with every “primitive” or small-scale tribal society you can mention practicing some variant of the consensus mode of decision-making and assent when it comes to politics and negotiating their multi-dimensional social networks where an individual always fills many roles throughout an extensive web of relations.

Magic is also almost without a single exception also practiced in this form of societies, generally nested within a framework of myth and connected to what we Westerners would categorize as “religion”. You use magic before a hunt, to welcome and prepare for guests, when you have an illness, when someone wants to get pregnant and so forth. It’s an integrated feature of daily life – yet it’s never for that reason something trivial or mundane, but rather represents something like a steady presence of the otherworldly.

Magic is in a sense an extension of the deep and complex relationality of small-scale societies. It expresses and makes manifest these networks of relationship, and especially their roots in the natural world, in ancestors who have passed on, and their associations with myth and gods or semi-divine beings. Magic is thus a method by which an individual or a group intentionally engages with these deeper layers of embedded human existence, and which allows for an active participation in, rather than just a passive reception of, these massive structures of meaning (which can otherwise weigh quite heavily upon an individual).

If we talk somewhat reductively, the immediate “function” of magic, without ascribing it or depriving it of any supernatural or preternatural properties, is basically to effect enduring changes of perceptions and of modes of the human consciousness by invoking and navigating these deeper connections. And this can be an incredibly powerful thing in high-stakes situations where human conscious agency, perceptions and modes of experience play an important role, such as during a hunt, during battle, or when battling injury or illness (cf. the scientifically established placebo effect).

Magic and ritual are probably best approached, at a minimum, as patterns of intention that get infused into the human consciousness, and which remain as intentions (we for instance adopt them as our own, and our minds then become like these external patterns of intention) and which then are able to shape expectations, perceptions, moods, emotions, goal-oriented behaviour and so forth.

Magic, thus understood, is thus potentially an incredibly powerful tool which can produce significant effects in the world, since it can determine aggregate or collective intentional human action over very long periods of time, and one of the more important roles of magic in traditional small-scale societies is to make a certain mode and flavor of agency to endure over a longer period of time. So the warrior in a sense becomes the lion, and this mode of agency is getting affixed through repeated ritual and the sense in which the ritual awakens or connects with previously established mythology. The Viking warrior would in a sense become one with the Aesir, having their mode or pattern of agency temporarily imprinted onto their own consciousness, seeded through myth and awakened in ritual and through symbolic associations or other methods.

A particular role of magic is thus to affix assent. To produce determination. To have an agent remain in a certain state of mind, produced though a conscious act of reception, whether or not it’s characterized by an internal or external locus of control.

With the above in mind, it’s perhaps obvious why magic on these definitions is something quite relevant in connection to modern propaganda.

To begin with, we’re tribal animals living without real tribes. We’re supposed to be living in small communities constituted by face-to-face relations that last over a lifetime, with other human beings that are independent and self-sufficient. Instead, we live in a strictly regimented, unnatural environment, and sometimes almost exclusively relate to one another in a one-dimensional way.

Any one relationship has a wider range of functions - bears a greater ‘load’ - and its state or condition is correspondingly more important than is the case in our society where many relationships are single-purpose and impersonal, e.g. that between bus-conductor and passenger. But how different it would be if the conductor were also my sister-in-law, near neighbour and the daughter of my father’s golfing partner - I would never dare to tender anything other than the correct fare. In a small-scale society every fellow member whom I encounter in my day is likely to be connected to me by a comparable, or even more complex web of strands, each of which must be maintained in its appropriate alignment and tension lest all the others become tangled. My father’s missed putts or my inconsiderate use of a motor-mower at daybreak will necessitate very diplomatic behaviour on the bus, or a long walk to work and a dismal dinner on my return.

Silberbauer, G. “Ethics in small-scale societies”. In Singer, P. A Companion to Ethics.

Modern institutions are in many ways substitutes for these complex webs of nested and overlapping roles and relationships, and propaganda in mass societies additionally serves the function of simulating real relationships and compensating for their loss, and not least for the loss of coherent and meaningful myths, a topic we have discussed extensively before.

But insofar as magic normally operates on a stable foundation of myth, relationship and structures of meaning, in a situation like that of modern industrial societies where these have been intentionally disjointed and are almost completely malleable, there’s a sense in which certain aspects of the traditional tools of magic become much more potent.

Magic in the above sense is namely a key aspect of modern propaganda. It operates by ritual, incantation, repetition and powerful symbols anchored in both our human psyche as well as the dominant myths and worldviews of our time, towards reproducing certain perceptions and attitudes and prodding us towards certain behavioural outcomes.

And what’s important to note here, is that in the contemporary situation, we have almost no awareness that magic (rituals, incantations, the intentional patterns being imposed) is being used upon us, or that something like advertising can actually operate upon our consciousness in an immediate sense that doesn’t only reduce to “information” being conveyed. Moreover, we have no agency over our relational and mythological environment, and we have no stable and secure worldview that provide us with an identity and a fruitful meaning, (and which, importantly, would both render us more secure and tend to affix the manner, extent and character of how our modes of consciousness could be altered and modified).

So basically, the modern situation allows great leeway for how, when and why our perceptions and modes of thought can be manipulated. Anyone who knows what they’re doing, and who is in some control of the channels of communication, may pick and choose among the bits and pieces of myths and worldviews that we live by (the pre-propaganda of Jacques Ellul), and combine them more or less freely towards an end of their choosing through appropriate incantations and rituals. The effects may be a good bit weaker than if these activities were based on a stable foundation of deep social relations and a coherent and common worldview, but on the aggregate level, that’s perfectly fine, since propaganda in modern mass societies generally only needs to aim for some vague consent of the governed.

And our isolation, the limited agency we as citizens have in terms of our one-dimensional and institutionally mediated relationships, and the lack of independence we have in terms of our basic worldviews and metanaratives (which are disjointed, meaningless and difficult to navigate) will predispose us to a passive assent to an exernalization of our locus of contol when the institutions of propaganda acts upon us to affix our agency.

We do not become the lion. When, in modern mass society, a “mode of agency is getting affixed [in us] through repeated ritual and the sense in which the ritual awakens or connects with previously established mythology”, we instead become submissive to the mythological lion, identified with the ruling powers and their agents.

And my main point here is that rite, incantation and ritual, the toolkit of magic that we find in traditional small-scale societies, is needed to explain the astonishing, rapid and coordinated effects of contemporary propaganda. We simply don’t see these outcomes, these modes of assent reminiscent of cult behaviours, through the mere transmission of information as per the accepted definitions of propaganda. The added observation that propaganda also tends to invoke emotion doesn’t get us very far either.

Propaganda namely does not really operate through “information” in the rational-propositional sense. Propaganda and especially the modern spectacular mode of digitized mass society explains the kinds of assent we’re seeing in the above examples precisely because it ritualistically operates on deeper levels of the psyche, infused with our modern myths and individual attachments, and in a context of social and existential deprivation, to reproduce and recreate the states of mind that characterize infantile and submissive assent. This is not achieved “merely through information”, through a person’s encounter with data, just like the states of consciousness and modes of social integration that characterize the behaviour of cult members cannot simply be brought about through the transmission of factual information.

We do not get the perception that Kamala Harris will save democracy and that she “brought joy back to this country” simply through the transmission of propositional content or factual information. We do not get this character or mode of assent (which would be more appropriate in the cultic or liturgical context) through normal forms of communication.

But we get it through propaganda, which in every sense of the word is helpfully understood as a modern form of narrowly powerful ritual magic that operates through the transmission of complex patterns of (non-physical) intentions.

And all of this has been so much more naked in the years since covid.

A friend of mine many years ago once remarked something to the effect that watching TV ads is more dangerous than smoking crack. I found this amusing, but perhaps too hyperbolic, and I didn’t quite get what his point was. I think I do now.

A final question. Does magic have a supernatural or preternatural component? And I’d say that this depends on our definitions. Magic, as described and defined above, does mainly operate on consciousness, which is non-physical and thus distinct from the “natural world” as modern reductionist philosophy and science generally understands reality (but it’s not as distinct or disconnected according to most traditional philosophy, such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, or Confucianism and most other non-Western traditions). This observation alone would perhaps lead some of you to categorize it as somehow supernatural.

And if this immaterialist ontology is accepted, it of course also opens the door towards testing on their own merits the assertions of a spiritual realm that is generally associated with ritual and magic in traditional small-scale societies, but that’s another discussion entirely.

It does, however, also invite the notion that attempts at manipulating human consciousness towards ends inimical to our nature and well-being are evil in some deeper sense, and that they could be associated to notions of black magic and the demonic. This is perhaps not misguided.

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… assume you walk through a wood during the night, far away from highways and city lights. You see dark shadows, hear strange sounds, you have a feeling of being close to nature, nature 'speaks to you'. Usually this feeling is subjective and sentimental, one has read poems which 'make her speak' and the vague memories of the poems mingle with the even more vague impressions of the present, giving rise to an indistinct and inarticulate state of mind.

Then assume on the other hand, you have been brought up in the belief that the wood is full of spirits, you have walked through it quite often when you were young, your parents explained to you the nature of the sounds, the nature of the spirits that produce them and told you the traditional stories. That gives substance to the impressions, turns them into more definite phenomena, just as the biological instruction gives substance to vague microscopic images. Now turn inward. There are thoughts, feelings, fears, hopes, memories, all of them vague and homeless in the sense that we do not know or even care whether they come from us or from some other agency - they seem to belong neither to the subject, nor to an objective world. But assume you have been taught that the gods may speak to you while you are awake, or in dreams, that they may give you strength when you least expect it, that they make you angry so that you carry out their plans with greater vigour, assume you have been trained to listen to their voices, to expect definite answers and that you have been given examples of such answers - assume all this, and your internal life will again become more definite, it will cease to be a hardly noticed interplay of cloudlike shapes and become a battlefield of the clear and distinct actions of the gods.

Looking at Greek literature we see that this was indeed the way in which the Greeks experienced their surroundings, and their 'inner life'. Their experience of the material universe was the experience of a world full of gods. Gods were not just fanciful ideas, they were parts of the phenomenal world (i.e. the world that we experience). The experience of self, too, was an experience of divine forces and messages, and this to such an extent that the notion of an autonomous self, even of a single, coherent body, was unknown to the Greeks at the time of Homer.

Feyerabend, Three Dialogues on Knowledge, 1990