So a couple of weeks back, Steve Kirsch wrote something to the effect that if we could just get all of the unadulterated data out there, if people would just see the numbers, this entire shitshow could be turned around.
It’s not that I don’t sympathize with this. I’m struggling in that same crusade for truth, and I’ll die on the barricades to publish that information, absolutely.
But I also remember when the official Swedish mortality numbers for 2020 dropped. I remember them unambiguously screaming that the murder-death-pandemic year had a mortality way below average in comparison to the last twenty years. I think it was the fourteenth worst year of the last twenty.
And almost nobody cared.
The same cognitive dynamics also underlie how Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, now openly admits that “this was began in 2014”, and adds exactly what we deranged conspiracists maintained since the beginning of last year - that the treaties since were merely feints to forestall a confrontation until Ukraine had been properly armed and capable of functioning as an effective proxy force.
But now they’re selling this as a perfectly laudable move of geopolitical strategy rather than one of the key factors behind the current conflict.
This is properly Orwellian. It’s perfectly equivalent to the switch towards us always having been at war with Eastasia when they just last week were our venerable allies.
On Monday, the day that Biden arrived in Kiev, the New York Times published an op-ed advocating the destruction of Russia as a nation-state, declaring, “Russia will not be a democracy until it falls apart.”
The expansion of the US war aims confronts the reality, however, that the official stated policy of Russia is to use nuclear weapons to defend its territory, including Crimea.
In response to this reality, US officials are making clear that they fully accept the prospect of nuclear war.
(wsws.org)
During the last few days, I’ve been giving some thought to how this situation gets socially and psychologically instituted, i.e. in terms of how people’s underlying worldviews and attachments get recruited and transformed to support a cognitive and emotional environment where political power becomes almost irreproachable, and where its word is taken as law.
In a sense, we find ourselves in a context of effectively enforced cognitive martial law, and, crucially, this is not effected by authoritarian fiat or any form of direct violence, but rather by our own voluntary assent. Or at by least something close enough.
“Propaganda” is of course central to the process, but that’s almost a platitude. The question is exactly how we get from a situation of mass-marketed narrative control through a series of emergencies to a situation where people more or less are ready to believe absurdities.
1. ”Seymour Hersch is a lame-brained conspiracy theorist”
2. The pipelines DID blow up
Putting 2 and 2 (or 1 and 2) together, here’s what I come up with:
THE LONE GUNMAN THEORY
Yep. I mean, what else could it be? The resurrected corpse of Lee Harvey Oswald vested a dive suit and blew those mothers up.
Solid.
Case Closed
And I think the key to actually understanding this complex situation lies precisely in the fact that we don’t really believe anything anymore. Not in any conventional sense.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s plenty of fanaticism here. People are far from lukewarm. There’s lots of fervor and zealotry, yet in a sort of irrational and inebriated sense, almost entirely disconnected from reflected and consistently held propositional beliefs of the “that-type” other than the most superficial caricatures.
In this cultural landscape, we see all the fewer clear and coherent abstractions that can be assented to as true, or rejected as false, in any meaningful sense.
Instead, we have slogans. We have the Uncle Ben’s “I feel like chicken tonight” song. Properly capitalized advertising tropes. “Just Do It - Because You’re Worth It”.
Human knowledge does not reach only to sensible beings insofar as they are sensible. It is not limited to phenomena. Instead, it reaches that which is intelligible in sensible things. That is to say, human reason does not seize only facts. It seizes also the raisons d’être of facts—it seizes the why, τὸ διότι.
Where does this knowledge come from? It comes from that which differentiates the intellect from the external and internal senses (even the most elevated of these); it comes from that which the intellect has for its first object—neither color, nor sound, nor physical resistance, nor physical extension, nor the internal state of consciousness, but being or the intelligible real.
This appears from the fact that the three operations of our intellect (conception, judgment, and reasoning) are all related, not only to color, nor to sound alone, nor to internal events of consciousness, but to intelligible being. Indeed, every conception or notion presupposes that most universal notion—being. Every judgment presupposes the verb “to be.” To say, “Peter runs,” is to say, “Peter is running.” Every demonstrative reasoning expresses either the raison d’être for the thing that is so demonstrated (if it is a demonstration a priori) or the raison d’être for the affirmation of the existence of something (if it is a demonstration a posteriori).
Since the intellect has being for its object, it searches out the raisons d’être of facts and of things. Does the child cease in multiplying his or her question, “Why?”
Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The Sense of Mystery - Clarity and Obscurity in the Intellectual Life
And to wind up in this sorry situation, I think we first must stymie and suppress what Garrigou-Lagrange describes in the quote above. We need to blind or obscure the vision of the intellect so that people are rendered dependent upon authority in a more immediate sense.
This is by all accounts a multi-generational process, with roots in the dismemberment of traditional societies, superseded by a consumerist individualism. But as I must have mentioned tens of times before here, the development has been in overdrive during the last couple of years.
And I think this is due to a certain set of synergies that happen to align at this particular period:
To begin with, in tandem with the structural and sociological alienation inherent to the last 150 years of transformations under capitalism, secularization emerged as a set of supporting ideologies. This is also a complex topic, but it’s safe to say that the most important fruits of this development was the unsettling of absolutes and overarching moral realities.
The reductionist impetus of secular, post-Cartesian philosophy enthroned this image of a clockwork universe where realities of wholeness, relation and transcendence were obscured or outright denied. Where the individual was all and nothing, and we as Sartre put it, are condemned to this absolute and utterly meaningless freedom. Say what you will about them, the atheists of old at least did not put up with childish illusions. There was no nonsense about “religious naturalism” or any such tripe.
Anyway, in this situation, under secularism, there is no stable (and hardly any acknowledged) moral order outside of desire, outside of the tangible goods of immediate experience.
And this obviously stands in a reciprocal relationship to consumer society. Secularism both reproduces the lifestyles and implicit ethics of consumerism, and gets indirectly reinforced by their operation.
I would argue that what results can be defined as a consumerist ethics of desire. A perspective on existence where the individual’s pleasurable experiences are the highest good and the key source of meaning.
The sense in which utilitarianism early on emerged as a supporting ideology of capitalism is a clear expression of this admittedly complex phenomenon. The precepts and objectives of the market and of the owners of the means of production were thereby translated into socially sanctioned individual needs.
However, this consumerist ethics of desire - it's not hedonism in the classical sense, where a complex notion of happiness can at least in principle carry a good bit of metaphysical weight, and even indirectly anchor the value of our access to transcendental absolutes.
It's rather a narrow and distorted sort of hedonism almost entirely defined by the spectacle, by mass media's and the advertising industry's particular framing of worldly goods and of valuable experience.
This symbiotic relationship finally renders consumer society as the only conceivable source of hedonic pleasure.
This incidentally connects with transhumanist ideals, to redemptive scientism and the ideologies of progress, where only the positive experiences structured within technology and capital are potentially valuable. Where pleasure is inconceivable outside of the spectacle, and where the transformative objectives of capital finally become a substitute for actual nature (against a background of an ethics of desire).
And these objectives of capital thus get regarded as irreproachable. As immediately and self-evidently natural.
So if pleasure is more or less inconceivable outside of the spectacle, and if pleasure moreover is the highest good exempt from any possible justification, then mass consumer society will inevitably become established as an irreproachable moral good in the immediate experience of the human being.
The capitalist corporate state gets enthroned as a kind of secular theocracy. Herbert Marcuse defines this as “existential politics”.
‘By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.
(Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four).
Here’s then the foundation of the fact that people now seem to believe absurdities and assent to almost anything that’s authoritatively proclaimed by the social order.
With the entire edifice behind this secular ethics of desire, we not only obscure the transcendent foundations of morality - we also end up with a denial of metaphysical absolutes. The basis of any stable and coherent set of truth-claims whatsoever.
All of this renders the contemporary person’s worldview extraordinarily unstable. Lacking any anchoring in stable moral and metaphysical principles, it’s just dry tinder in a conflagration. When people sincerely believe that there’s no truth, or that objective truth in any case is utterly inaccessible to reason, their worldview will give at the slightest push. There’s no tangible support.
This is also a fact of material conditions, people establish no enduring avenues of criticism since their rational thought is more or less unfettered from meaningful and complex work interconnected with the world around them.
It’s not that reality, or intelligible being, is completely obscured.
It’s still accessible in principle. We can, as always, structure a rational framework of criticism and anchor it in our immediate access to the world - but any such framework gets drowned out in the incessant barrage of the spectacle and its often contradictory information, and by the structural processes behind good old Marxist alienation.
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. … For those who think I am here guilty of hyperbole, I offer the following description of television news by Robert MacNeil, executive editor and co-anchor of the "MacNeil-Lehrer News-hour." the idea, he writes, "is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required... to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time." He goes on to say that the assumptions controlling a news show are "that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism."
(Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death)
So we have a cognitive framework that effectively undermines any attempts at complex theorizing, replete with information overload, a disorienting chaos of mass media projections.
Added on top of this is the libidinal attachment to the social order as a moral absolute. This brings us quite close to something akin to a secular theocracy that serves as the arbiter as well as guarantor of your access to the worldly goods defined and delineated by the spectacle. By the marketplace. By consumer society and the objectives of capital.
This becomes the nature to which the entire social organism refers. The immutable metaphysical foundation which legitimizes institutional authority. This ushers in something aptly designated “existential politics”, following Marcuse.
Science in the contemporary public discourse is a good example. It’s not really legitimized with regard to any external justification in objective truth any longer. It’s legitimized by its utility in reproducing the objectives of the social order. By politics. Scientists affirming the consensus positions are lauded as good and dutiful, while wrongthinkers are branded as extremists.
As for the systematic manipulation and control of the psyche in the advanced industrial society, manipulation and control for what, and by whom? Over and above all particular manipulation in the interest of certain businesses, policies, lobbies – the general objective purpose is to reconcile the individual with the mode of existence which his society imposes on him. Because of the high degree of surplus-repression involved in such reconciliation, it is necessary to achieve a libidinal cathexis of the merchandise the individual has to buy (or sell), the services he has to use (or perform), the fun he has to enjoy, the status symbols he has to carry – necessary, because the existence of the society depends on their uninterrupted production and consumption. In other words, social needs must become individual needs, instinctual needs.
And to the degree to which the productivity of this society requires mass production and mass consumption, these needs must be standardized, coordinated, generalized. Certainly, these controls are not a conspiracy, they are not centralized in any agency or group of agencies (although the trend toward centralization is gaining momentum); they are rather diffused throughout the society, exercised by the neighbors, the community, the peer groups, mass media, corporations, and (perhaps least) by the government. But they are exercised with the help of, in fact rendered possible by, science, by the social and behavioral sciences, and especially by sociology and psychology. As industrial sociology and psychology, or, more euphemistically, as ‘science of human relations’, these scientific efforts have become an indispensable tool in the hands of the powers that be.
(Herbert Marcuse, Negations. 1968.)
Under this existential politics, the political and moral order get inseparably intertwined - and then, any sort of emergency always and immediately takes on a tangible moral quality.
In this situation, the (capitalist) state is socially and experientially constituted as a primarily given existential foundation, an inevitable moral fact as undeniable as a child’s need for its mother, and its core precepts, the root mythology, becomes inaccessible to a rational critique.
And whatever can plausibly be portrayed as a threat to the metaphysically constituted social order becomes a moral evil. It will also be perceived as immediately and acutely threatening to the individual whose personal needs have been substituted by the social needs; whose cognitive and material independence is almost entirely eradicated.
And in that situation, anything perceived as a defense of the political Other is impossible by default.
What sort of result will follow if this socio-psychological edifice is filtered through a series of emergencies? When you run this sort of society through a gauntlet of crises that seem to threaten our existential foundation? Covid. Ukraine. Climate change. Imminent financial collapse.
Well, all sorts of irrational forces will come to the surface, individually and collectively. The masses will draw near to institutional power for safety and comfort, and will internalize the fragmented propaganda narratives, less in terms of concepts and ideas than magical wards.
The nature of propaganda in mass society, in Postman’s entertainment frame of discourse, further exacerbates the situation. In this context, propaganda more or less functions through disorientation. It can’t really operate by inculcating a coherent worldview since there’s no stable foundation for any such thing, so it rather functions by eliminating any semblance of one. Any basis for “oppositional narratives” to form.
The result is the dissemination of inconsistent and contradictory “opinions” which are only semi-rational, and forcefully emotionally and libidinously charged, enabling us (the masses) to be effectively manipulated by hammering on these primal drives while we can muster almost no rational resistance.
This gets you pretty close to what Orwell called “doublethink”. Challenge a denizen of the “secular theocracy” scared shitless by a set of interlocking crises, and he’s going to respond forcefully by throwing three or four mutually incompatible statements against you, quite incapable of seeing that their inconsistency is actually a problem.
Or how it even could be. You’re in fact taking a stand against that which is irreproachably good, and he’s merely affirming this existentially primitive fact.
The face of the mother in the institutional authority of the state.
But once he claims a state of fact as existential, all those who do not ‘participate and partake’ in its reality are to keep silent. Predominantly political conditions and relations are sanctioned here as existential, and within the political dimension it is the relation to the enemy, or war, that counts as the simply and absolutely existential relationship …
A total activation, concretization, and politicization of all dimensions of existence is demanded. The autonomy of thought and the objectivity and neutrality of science are repudiated as heresy or even as a political falsification on the part of liberalism. “We are active, enterprising beings and incur guilt if we deny this our essence: guilt by neutrality and tolerance”. The proclamation includes the affirmation that “all science is life-conditioned, reality-oriented, historically conditioned, and situationally bound”.
There is no fundamental or general criterion in existentialism for determining which facts and conditions are to be considered existential. That remains left in principle to the decision of the existential theoretician.
…
And within the political sphere all relationships are oriented in turn toward the most extreme ‘crisis’, toward the decision about the ‘state of emergency’, of war and peace. The true possessor of political power is defined as beyond all legality and legitimacy: “Sovereign is he who decides on the state of emergency”.
Sovereignty is founded on the factual power to make this decision (decisionism). The basic political relationship is the ‘friendenemy relationship’. Its crisis is war, which proceeds until the enemy has been physically annihilated. There is no social relationship that does not in a crisis turn into a political relationship.
Behind all economic, social, religious, and cultural relations stands total politicization. There is no sphere of private or public life, no legal or rational court of appeal that could oppose it.
(Herbert Marcuse, Ibid.)
Isn't this just the logical progression of western political structure into its final form of socialist Empire? By socialist here, I mean nothing more than the eclipsing of the individual for the purposes of the State, and State can mean whatever you want. If you take the basic western socialist assumptions that began in Prussia, this would to me be where you end up. It seems to be an issue that is inherent in western European culture, as it crops up time and time again (especially on the continent), as if there is an internal tendency to send things this way.
Even the criticism of it presumes its importance and shares its assumptions. The whole western idea of propaganda has within it an assumption that people can be 'possessed' by someone else's (or the system's) will. This is quite a strange assumption that is based way back deep in religious western thought, and not a universal way of looking at the world (an Ancient Greek would laugh at this as a ridiculous abstraction).
Ellul to me is the only western thinker to try and get out of this loop, and argued that propaganda is made by and for the urban dislocated mass, only works on them, and they only have themselves to blame for it. It is a necessary requirement of the conditions, and no one is necessarily 'willing' it. If you want it gone change the conditions, namely get out of the urban mass, and not just physically, mentally too.
Money can’t buy me love... and as God is love, money can’t buy me God either. And as God and love are the underlying conditions of real meaningful happiness, in the secular theology of the utilitarian elite, happiness must be commodified as a purchasable entity without meaning or value, a mere artifice of attention to avoid being human, a shallow grave to lie down our corpse for others to feast.