I think [judges] have an instinctive prejudice […] They’re either open to the case, or they have an instinctive prejudice against it. I think that’s what you’re seeing in courts. Because, remember, a lot of Trump judges threw out Trump challenges. It was just instinctive prejudice. If you were in front of them, you could tell. Same in the vaccine context, same in the lockdown context. This is the professional-managerial class and the prejudice they share as a class regardless of their party, regardless of what president or governor put them in positions of power, regardless of their own political ambitions. They’re just very arrogant, very condescending, they think they were born to govern the rest of us, they have these special degrees and certifications to do it, they’ve been acculturated through the American education system; they’re just not well equipped to govern the rest of us. The professional-managerial class, as a class, has failed, mostly. You could make some arguments for some doctors, […] you could make some arguments for some lawyers and legal advocacy and professional expertise, but as a general rule I think they’ve failed. I mean, how many people died in the 20th century! Again, these were governments and societies ruled by the professional-managerial class. Fascists are overwhelmingly professional-managerial class, communists, overwhelmingly professional-managerial class; corporatists, overwhelmingly professional-managerial class; our deep-state apparatus since the 1950s, overwhelmingly professional-managerial class. What they’ve done is they’ve co-opted every single branch of government. Even the legislative branch is now professional-managerial class; you’ve got to be a professional politician to win! If anybody challenges it, they’re portrayed as a whacky, crazy, dangerous outsider with a bad personal history. It didn’t work against Trump, but it did work against Herschel Walker and Blake Masters. It’s a systemic disease in the method and manner of governance. They’ve taken over the media, they’ve taken over our educational systems, they’ve taken over human resources and marketing in corporate departments that help shape the way corporations work internally and broadcast messages externally. And they’ve taken over the legislative branch, the judicial branch and the executive branch, and we’re seeing the negative consequences of it. This is a class conflict, because this is a class that should not be governing the rest of us. It should have a role, but not a monopolistic, dominant role, because they’ve proven themselves incapable of governing effectively. That’s reality. – Robert Barnes
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. – Attributed to Thomas Jefferson
Introduction
This article sees a return to a style a little more academic than lately on display here. My sense remains that academic rigour is often less persuasive than imagined, but the material we explore below requires a certain deference to that rigour and its several benefits.
Much about the corona years has challenged me deeply, to the degree in fact that I have found myself questioning everything all over again. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, as I look back from time to time at my last three years’ output, I feel a strong need to bring more clarity and coherence to what I’ve learned and written while drifting through the moony twilight that is, for me, the mark of this historical moment. This article is another attempt to effect that clarity.
I recently stumbled across Ellul’s Propaganda (Kindle edition, English translation published in 1965), and am convinced it sheds very helpful light on what’s happening Out There. Of interest to us here is how Ellul firmly situates propaganda in technology, an observation that owes the power of its insight, I believe, to how civilisation totalises.
Civilisation seems compelled to expand ever outward territorially and/or ever inward psychically and spiritually – despite exceptions to this rule that seem held in check or are swept aside by those driven by it; big fish dominate little fish. Perhaps it is helpful to see civilisation’s expansionary urge as a gene that may or may not express, as determined by environmental and historical circumstances. When it does express, particular technological prowess is cumulatively selected for as civilisations evolve in bloody contest and prideful schismogenesis; that prowess, namely, that aids expansion. One of the countless results of technological evolution, then, is civilisation’s apparently existential need for propaganda, obviously a pivotal technology in this regard.
What we’re going to attempt in this article is to cohere the four observations immediately below into an analysis that reveals something fundamental about power – in contradistinction to natural authority –, which, once revealed, helps us to handle power more wisely than before.
- Initially in very crude form, propaganda becomes a necessary evil once civilisation gets up and running. Until humanity has hit the brick wall of propaganda’s anti-life vector, it will develop no meaningful solution to propaganda’s pervasive presence.
- Propaganda is a state-craft technology present in very crude form since forever, but has been rapidly improving since the advent of mass-media technologies and societal atomisation.
- Propaganda’s very effectiveness is its doom. By its nature it breeds mediocracy, mediocracy that cannot help but drag itself ever lower, inexorably, until collapse.
- Community, and perhaps more importantly the love that is community’s healthiest soil, will be one part of humanity’s health-seeking response to the collapse propaganda must deliver.
These individual observations and claims appear in each section with different weighting, either explicitly or implicitly. With luck, the article will prove successful in bringing them together with the hoped-for clarity.
A brief cost-benefit analysis of propaganda
Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into a technological world. […] Propaganda must be seen as situated at the center of the growing powers of the State and governmental and administrative techniques. – Ellul, Propaganda, ppxvii-xviii (my emphasis)
Propaganda is a more complex technology than most imagine. Ellul distinguishes between what he terms “agitation”/“vertical” and “integration”/“horizontal” propaganda, among other distinctions. The former is conspicuous, strident, purposed to effect a specific action, i.e. support for a war. By contrast, the latter is hard to detect, subtle, socially totalising, normative over time, “seeks not a temporary excitement but a total moulding of the person in depth” (ibid, p76, my emphasis). Each mode depends on the other to a degree, with the very effective yet glaringly obvious war propaganda (“agitation”) around Russia-Ukraine being a case in point; its effectiveness rests on years of preparatory “integration” propaganda. Henceforward I leave Ellul’s distinctions otherwise unaddressed and treat propaganda as a lump for reasons of brevity and simplicity of expression.
Propaganda, then, is a suite of techniques whose overarching purpose is to keep the overwhelming majority of its several target audiences – if audience is the right word – adequately integrated into the machinery, operations and ambitions of the state. This integration is a paramount requirement for smooth and coherent state action over time; could there be a permanent state (“deep state”) without it? Perhaps, but a far less powerful one. And power seems always to want more power.
Civilisations and their states – it could therefore be argued – are technical works of normative machinery, machinery that does, however, enable culture to flourish to incredible richness. An infamous and pivotal question emerges from the tension between beautiful culture and over-powerful state machinery, one that guides this article from the shadows: Is trading in some of our freedom for the state’s protection adequately compensated by the culture it affords and the wealth it generates? Rephrased: Is propaganda an inescapable and, on balance, ‘beneficial’ evil? There may well be no final answer to this provocative question, but contemplating it is instructive and, I feel, very important.
More immediate to our task here, however, is the following reasoning on mediocrity: Propaganda skills, just as any skill, improve with practice. One perhaps unavoidable consequence of the growing power afforded to states by ever-improving propaganda techniques is this phenomenon:
Mediocrity metastasises in the absence of meaningful corrective feedback.
The us-and-them mindset that must increasingly bunker itself in the halls of power, precisely because power increasingly accumulates there, slowly pressures those tasked with guarding that power to surround themselves only with people implacably loyal – whether cynically or passionately – to whatever the group’s raison d’être is – which becomes mere survival at some point. Implacable loyalty is seen as essential; it protects the group against infiltration and dissolution of purpose.
This dynamic, however, corrupts the halls of power from within – an insidious form of corruption that is difficult to discern as an insider –, while those without are forced by continuous threat to develop the skills they need to supplant the top dog that so threatens them (e.g. Russia, China versus The West at national level, though no less importantly The West’s increasingly subjugated peoples fighting for their survival). As a result of this dynamic, the pressure to develop effective propaganda systems to mitigate strain and dissent spreads virally from state to state, civilisation to civilisation, above and beyond the systemic need for propaganda the control of millions and now billions of souls demands.
I see this general observation as a direct corollate of the immediately preceding question – Is propaganda a beneficial evil? –, a question that in my view anticipates, or drives, despite itself, the dawn-to-decadence cycle that is the fate of state power, just as it is of civilisation. As freedoms are given up in pursuit of culture, which becomes over time pursuit of convenience and comfort (decadence), growing state power cumulatively seals the ‘elites’ off from the people it is their function is to serve … until collapse. If propaganda is the necessary corrupting worm born of the genuine cultural ‘progress’ (more on ‘progress’ below) that is civilisation’s gift, must civilisation be reborn with deep awareness of this foundational self-destruction pattern guiding that rebirth, so as to inhibit or ameliorate the worm’s effects?
Is such a rebirth now inevitable? For how much longer can humanity bear propaganda’s weight? Charlie Chaplain’s iconic image from Modern Times of a man contorting himself to the unbending demands of monstrous machinery captures our predicament well.
Interestingly, though, it is not the working but professional-managerial class – comfortably convinced they were “born to govern the rest of us” (Barnes) – whose “maladjustments” (Ellul) have been most seamlessly adjusted. After all, it is the professional-managerial class that is the most important to those who effectively own the state’s power machinery. Propaganda’s development is thus likely to be heavily skewed towards controlling this class; they are the executives of “the growing powers of the State and governmental and administrative techniques” that butter their bread – which is precisely where Ellul situates propaganda’s beating heart. Perhaps this causes the prejudice that is the target of the Barnes’ above-transcribed rant. As is so often the case, it is a prejudice they cannot see; they are, after all, only “following the science”. We might say, obeying the machine.
But at what cost? Is even the professional-managerial class now noticing the true price of its loyalty to the establishment? These are thoughts we pursue in more detail below.
One final point to bring into clear relief in this section, is that because some propaganda is tailored to this, some to that segment of a population, most individuals fancy themselves immune to its charms. In fact, none of us is; the propaganda tailored to us must be invisible to us to work, for obvious reasons. We all know it is there, yet the propaganda with the real payload remains invisible, by definition. Perhaps it hides behind the decoy propaganda to which we are proud to announce ourselves immune.
While matters remain this way, the worm that rots us from within goes mostly unnoticed. Noticing we are not immune is, paradoxically, how we begin to minimise propaganda’s effectiveness. I strongly suspect this is happening now, especially in The West.
Let’s turn to how effective propaganda is.
Propaganda: doomed by its great success
The most generally held concept of propaganda is that it is a series of tall stories, a tissue of lies, and that lies are necessary for effective propaganda. Hitler himself apparently confirmed this point of view when he said that the bigger the lie, the more its chance of being believed. This concept leads to two attitudes among the public. The first is: “Of course we shall not be victims of propaganda because we are capable of distinguishing truth from falsehood.” Anyone holding that conviction is extremely susceptible to propaganda, because when propaganda does tell the “truth,” he is then convinced that it is no longer propaganda; moreover, his self-confidence makes him all the more vulnerable to attacks of which he is unaware. – Ellul, Propaganda, p52 (emphasis in original)
The global oligarchy uses media influence to subjugate governments. For example, Germany did not want to get involved in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and against (the will) of the German people or the majority of Germans, the government decided to send more weapons to Ukraine. – Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (link)
Propaganda is alive and well, and as favoured by the state as it ever was. Why? Because it works. The effectiveness of the corona propaganda pumped out day and night for years, right across the planet with very few national exceptions, was so successful we have barely begun to recover from it. It is in fact still very much in evidence today.
For me, the most notable aspect of the so-called ‘pandemic’ – will we ever really know how many died of covid, how many of those deaths might have been prevented using standard medications already available, etc.? – is how dangerous it became to question orthodoxy. Because medical orthodoxy is indisputably beyond criticism as a function of its very orthodoxy and the power that label affords, questioning it “risks lives”. But quashing discourse with the virulence of autocratic diktat in evidence disconnects that orthodoxy from corrective feedback. The careers of countless relevant experts have been negatively impacted or derailed. Doctors have been de-licensed. Trust in orthodoxy has nosedived. Calm discussion is a thing of the past.
The vitriolic, almost hysterical opprobrium aimed at dissenting voices was as uniform and pervasive as it was shrill and unrelenting. Instructive here is that dissenting voices offered a well-founded message of hope, and yet fear, even hysteria, was preferred. “Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality” (ibid, p38). This unhealthy preference is a clear sign high-powered propaganda was in force.
Surely the self-evidently false dichotomy that saving lives is more important than protecting the economy – an argument wielded in defence of extremely expensive lockdowns – could not possibly have spread virally across the western world as influentially as it did without propaganda beneath its wings. Today, as health systems struggle to cope, as excess deaths surge, economic conditions are blamed … a mere two years after such self-evident reasoning was cause for defamation and ejection from polite society.
“Two weeks to flatten the curve”!
We were also told to stay indoors to save lives. Then told to go outside to save lives. We were told masks were ineffective, then that they were effective. No doubt there are other examples.
Now it is as if authorities want to have it that such crassly contradictory propaganda never took place. We only sense its aftertaste. But this sort of on-again-off-again pattern, or alternating sequence of flat contradictions, is in fact one of the hallmarks of persuasion techniques whose desired outcome is the subject’s blind obedience to authority. Subjects are kept perpetually off balance, while some implacable authority subtly informs them only it has command of the solution that brings (temporary!) relief. All we need do is obey, indefinitely, totally.
Propaganda is glaringly effective. So effective, this fact cannot be gainsaid without deliberate and strenuous effort to ignore its obviousness. Nowadays, people fall over themselves demonstrating how immune they are to propaganda. Each side accuses their opponents of propagating “fake news”, but in so doing reveals its ignorance of how propaganda actually works, that the fanatical certainty each side displays is in fact a direct consequence of unquestioning obedience to a cause, a cause likely instilled by skilled propagandists. It is this sort of programmed obedience that fuels the “effort to ignore” that so marks victims of cults, one of which a friend of mine fell victim to. The techniques used by that particular cult’s leader included these flatly contradictory changes of message and purpose. A conversation with an official of the Berlin office overseeing incipient and active cults in Germany brought this detail to my attention.
(Parenthetically, narcissists have an insatiable hunger for total, adoring obedience. The insatiable nature of their hunger stems from an inner void, produced by their total disconnect from anything meaningful in their lives other than their hunger. This means that whim and sudden shifts of impulse characterise their ‘rule’, which is utterly visionless, pointless even; it is in fact the dysfunction of narcissism itself that is self-destructively, compulsively, insatiably in charge.)
In a similarly radicalising way, Western propaganda has also been astoundingly effective at instilling in a large majority of its people the equation “Russia = bad”, and “Putin = bad”. So irredeemably bad are this nation and its leader, any dialogue with them is seen by The West as appeasing evil. Diplomacy between the two nations is now unthinkable. Any communication sent by Russia into the world is brazen propaganda that must be rejected outright. Russia’s security interests are utterly irrelevant; it is apostasy to suggest Russia even has a right to such concerns.
The “Russia = bad” equation is propagated so fervently, it is almost as if The West derives its messianic goodness from Russia’s evil; the fervour has an addictive, needy feeling-tone to it. As I see it, The West’s identity and self-respect have become existentially entangled in this barbaric equation. To lose now against Russia in Ukraine is to lose all credibility and to become, on the dizzying turn of a dime, the Bad Guy. This is a known risk of fanatical over-commitment. Film’s have been produced to highlight this human foible.
The West has fallen for its own messianic hype on multiple fronts. As a result, it has become so far stepped in blood – to paraphrase Macbeth – it cannot countenance any course correction for fear of allowing in the terrible information it has done Bad Things. This fear lies behind the compulsive, now hysterical doubling down currently on display. When we invest too much, too inflexibly, in a doomed venture, we risk having to deceive ourselves about events to cope with the pressure of things slipping out of our control. In seeking to stay sane, we persist in defying reality by insisting on that version of events we so desperately need to be true, and disconnect from reality without noticing. It’s called “bunker mentality”. I believe highly effective propaganda is one of the several required causes of this very unfortunate phenomenon.
As a direct result of blinkered overcommitment to an ideology, a grotesque debacle is unfolding in Ukraine. Ukraine is paying a terrible price as a result, and for its own infatuation with nationalistic fervour, Russophobia, and infatuation with Western bling; I’d wager various sources of propaganda are responsible. To make matters worse, the only path to ‘victory’ for The West is now nuclear war; in terms of conventional weaponry, Russia decisively outmatches The West where it counts in this particular theatre of conflict. The West’s gross miscalculation, a miscalculation it does not want to face, is the fruit of messianic hubris left uncorrected for too long. Our very human susceptibility to propaganda is again at the root of this war, just as is the case with the bureaucratically vicious debacle of lockdowns and “warp-speed” ‘vaccinations’.
Of course Ms Podolyak meant 14.01.2023, referencing destruction of a residential building in Dnipro, allegedly by a Russian missile. To my mind, she, like Ukraine, has been granted too much latitude in racist thinking and sentiment, with insufficient corrective feedback, for too long.
This sort of tragedy happens in war; it’s the very reason we should avoid war with all means possible. The US killed hundreds of thousands if not millions of Iraqis in 2003 for the erroneous and dubious reason that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and was about to use them. Madelaine Albright said the cost in Iraqi lives was “worth it”. For me psychopathic, genocidal behaviour, but I do not wish all US citizens and the USA wiped off the face of the earth. Of course I understand Ms Podolyak’s emotions are boiling over; she is witnessing the destruction of her beloved country in real time! If Ms Podolyak had responded to an Israeli missile hitting a Palestinian residential area like this: “I wish for all jews and Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth!”, how would that make you feel?
Whether this horrible tragedy in Dnipro was deliberate and thus a war crime by Russia – which I find highly unlikely: Why would Russia jeopardise the support it needs from of much of the Global South for zero military gain? –, whether the result of a missile shot down by Ukrainian air-defence systems or an errant Ukrainian air-defence missile, it remains a tragedy of the sort that can happen when two cultures stop understanding one another – and these are sibling cultures. Ukraine has been shelling civilian areas in Donetsk for years, has passed laws banning Russian-language use in Ukraine, etc. Propaganda drives and sustains all such monstrosity.
In the particular case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, I am persuaded that The West (more precisely, those strongly of the neocon mindset therein) is primarily to blame for this unspeakable tragedy. It refused for decades to take Russia’s security concerns seriously regarding NATO’s eastward expansion. As I’ve hinted elsewhere, The West fears “Russmany” (full Russian and German cooperation) and China – Eurasian economic cohesion – more than anything else. This fear lies behind NATO’s eastward expansion, the very expansion that has crossed Russia’s red lines. But, in miscalculating Russia’s ability to withstand the sanctions levied against it, and indeed in overestimating a Ukrainian army handsomely armed and financed by The West, it has condemned Ukraine to a most horrific fate.
But despite all of the above, my intuition remains strong that level heads will prevail, that nuclear armageddon is not humanity’s immediate future. Level heads are starting to make their voices heard, are taking great risks to point out that The West cannot win this one. The fewest fanatics think nuclear war is a viable option, and though some of them are in positions of power, many who know better hold power positions, too.
And for the future we do face, what is perhaps most hopeful about this terrifying ugliness is that the fewest of propaganda’s victims think of propaganda as a good thing. No one wants to be fooled or thought of as a fool, nor are acts of cynical deception seen by anyone as honourable – clever maybe, but never honourable. Moreover, people seem to share an innate desire for fairness, truth and transparency, especially from authority figures, none of whom brag publicly about their powers of deception and narcissistic cynicism when vying for, or while in, power. What else explains our reflexive love of the unselfconscious authenticity babies and infants cannot help but express if not a profound love of truth?
Despite this obviously natural shared desire for truth and authenticity – indeed it is a bi-partisan party-political promise we are invariably seduced with (“Change you can believe in”) –, what we have instead accomplished in The West in the wake of its astoundingly successful propaganda of the last three years is collapsing trust, bitter acrimony, mounting despair. Opposing sides can barely communicate with one another beyond mutual jeers of derision. Various topics that should be innocuous are hotly, oddly taboo (vaccines, viruses, Big Pharma, lockdowns, Russia, Russiagate, etc.). Such a netherworldly social environment does not simply pop up out of nowhere, unassisted. Highly effective propaganda is required.
But none caught up in propaganda's corrosive effectiveness appears to be thriving. We yearn for something healthier.
Perhaps this unbearable state of affairs is cause for hope. Things are so bad, the pressure towards healthier ways of being could not be more coiled for dynamic release. The mere fact of increasing depression, suicide, cynicism, hopelessness, etc., is clear evidence that humans cannot function healthily in such a poisoned environment. We are, it seems, lovers of truth, of love, but are also tragically vulnerable to the many temptations and traps set for us by fear, pride, loneliness, etc. The opportunity to now learn that uncritical obedience to authority in response to these weaknesses leads in fact to very bad outcomes, and also for that learning to occur at mass level, is surely higher than it has ever been.
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Maybe we stand at the threshold of learning how to remain eternally vigilant, systemically, psychologically, compassionately. Do the following quotes fill you with with feelings of hope, of joy? If not, why not?
[P]ropaganda must not concern itself with what is best in man—the highest goals humanity sets for itself, its noblest and most precious feelings. Propaganda does not aim to elevate man, but to make him serve. […] Hate, hunger, and pride make better levers of propaganda than do love or impartiality. – Ellul, Propaganda, p38 (emphasis in original)
[P]ropaganda will take over literature (present and past) and history, which must be rewritten according to propaganda’s needs. We must not say: this is done by tyrannical, autocratic, totalitarian governments. In fact, it is the result of propaganda itself. Propaganda carries within itself, of intrinsic necessity, the power to take over everything that can serve it. – Ibid, pp12-13
Mediocracy: the mechanical product of the totalising urge
Propaganda cannot be satisfied with partial successes, for it does not tolerate discussion; by its very nature, it excludes contradiction and discussion. – Ellul, Propaganda, p11
In March, I wrote that German politics is a machinery of mediocrity created in a milieu of mediocracy that pervades the party state, and seals itself off within. At some point this results in institutional failure; the relevant institutions are staffed from this milieu, primarily according to power-political loyalty – as for example in the Berlin election disaster. – Michael Andrick, Berliner Zeitung, 12.12.2022 (my translation)
The stupidity of governments should never be underestimated. – Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor 1974-82
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. – Lord Acton
Is there something in the nature of the totalising urge – that prodigal offspring of civilisation’s expansionary DNA – that leads to mediocracy? Despite itself, this urge is necessarily constituted, in part, of an imperative to dumb down its ruled subjects by means of the propaganda it must wield to maintain power, so as to prevent the feared chaos its absence would unleash. As this process develops and embeds itself systemically, it drags the lowest common denominator ever lower – in terms of critical thinking, love of freedom and individual sovereignty, ethical and civic maturity, etc. – in part due to the propaganda it soon cannot do without: “He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action” (Ellul, Propaganda, p29). That which will brook no meaningful opposition is doomed to close itself off to meaningful corrective feedback. As I phrased it above: “Mediocrity metastasises in the absence of meaningful corrective feedback.”
Meaningful opposition (corrective feedback) is an existential threat to power. All must conform, or be seen as a threat and treated accordingly.
As I have argued elsewhere, the state is a jealous god, as money and power tend to be. Indeed, Ellul is at pains to highlight propaganda’s totalising impulse, and in so doing also implies, more interestingly, how this impulse leads to mediocre outcomes. Propaganda “does not seek to create wise or reasonable men, but proselytes and militants” (ibid, p27). The implication of Ellul’s analysis explains my decision to quote the lengthy Robert Barnes rant above. It is a rant on how standardisation and an almost maniacal focus on efficiency combine to monopolise control of a society’s power levers into the hands of the unimaginative, the ambitiously loyal, the technocrats, the inflexible few who know too well on which side their bread is buttered. They integrate better than the rest, are gifted at playing the game as they find it, know better than to rock the boat that keeps their status afloat.
This is about pride, not intelligence.
What hope then of wisely and thus humbly taking proper account of corrective feedback from the out-groups at the receiving end of their mushrooming diktats, decreed from an increasingly bunkered mentality?
For me, this core dynamic is a necessary consequence of the technological/materialistic mindset that dominates modernity, ontologically and epistemologically. This paradigmatic domination is a predictable – with hindsight – outcome of the nature of civilisation in its aspect as set against The Wild, as master of The Wild – ‘mastering’ it, of course, technically. Civilisation then becomes increasingly bewitched by its technological prowess, but at the cost of the rest of the organic reality it feels compelled to package into controllable mechanical operations. This self-bewitching reappears, fractally it seems, in the way propagandists seem doomed to believe their own hype in the end, if only to maintain their sanity, their sense of their own decency, their existential conviction they are on the right side of history.
Western newspapers are tragically funny. They keep saying, “Russia is isolated! Russia is isolated!” But when we look at the votes of the United Nations, we see that 75% of the world does not follow the West, which then seems very small. – Emanuel Tod, unknown provenance, translation from French by an unnamed source, read out by Alexander Mercouris (at approx 1:07:30). With the IMF now predicting weak growth for Russia in 2023 in the face of extreme sanctions (soon to be 10 sanctions packages) imposed by The West, the fact of Russia's non-isolation could not be more apparent.
That said, even though the propaganda employed in Russia and China is likely as effective as that of The West, I am not aware of an as significant slide to mediocracy in those states’ professional-managerial classes. Perhaps it only appears that way to me due to The West’s more rapid decay. Or perhaps the reason is that neither nation has enough power to be a global hegemon. Perhaps, then, in their case the external threat posed by The West is such that it encourages dedicated focus. The threat keeps more grounded and alert the internal workings of its state apparatus, regardless of how free its press is. Perhaps, too, with their intimate and bloody experiences of totalitarianism in living memory, they are more effectively aware of the need to not become deaf and blind to corrective feedback; whence their “Fair World Order”, whence the multipolar world they advocate with increasing self-assurance.
In truth I am ill equipped to make a serious assessment of this apparent anomaly. Decadence, rot, encroaching mediocracy are hallmarks of civilisations and states as they approach their sell-by date. Perhaps Russia, China and others are sufficiently in the ascendant to have this outcome further in their future than does The West, now past its peak. It is also possible that these and other nations are not as systemically and culturally committed to materialism/atheism as is The West. Is it possible, therefore, the illusion of hegemonic power – an illusion perhaps better sustained by ever more sophisticated and effective propaganda techniques, as by the spiritual void of materialism’s and atheism’s tenets – corrupts absolutely despite being illusory?
What appears to me to be universal is that living beings want effective command of their own destinies, their own decision making. Living beings seem not to like being manipulated, deceived, to repeat a point made above. There is something about the life force that urges towards freedom of expression, and that expression seems infinitely varied. Trust is pivotal, betrayal a universally horrible experience. What hope then for propagandists, for power, to honour this fundamental property of living existence, of All That Is? Power tends to want more power, corrupting itself in that slippery positive feedback loop. Consequently, when it becomes insatiable in this way, power cannot help but come up against that which it must then see as its opposition; those that must refuse to submit simply because they are alive. This seems fundamental to me, and no propaganda can overcome it.
Life is necessarily stronger than folly, and there is no greater folly than hubris. Which means, to me at least, that the myth of progress is good grounds for hope; it honours something fundamental about life. Perhaps mediocracy quickly peters out despite itself, is the cause of its own demise.
Perhaps we are not destined to live in Idiocracy after all.
Progress is a true myth
[To] warn [man] of his weakness is not to attempt to destroy him, but rather to encourage him to strengthen himself. – Ellul, Propaganda, pxvi
When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian Ramble with them there is no persuading him ever to return, and that this is not natural merely as Indians, but as men, is plain from this, that when white persons of either sex have been taken prisoner young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them. – Benjamin Franklin, quoted in The Dawn of Everything, p32, Graeber and Wengrow
By far the most common reasons [for preferring life with Native Americans], however, had to do with the intensity of social bonds they experienced in Native American communities: qualities of mutual care, love and above all happiness, which they found impossible to replicate once back in European settings. ‘Security’ takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is. – Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, p33
If you push a dog, it resists. – Tom Campbell
I wonder if communities like those described in the two middle quotes directly above can ever be recreated by westerners. We seem culturally so removed from them, so enamoured of our loose IT-mediated ‘friendships’, I’m not sure we even really want to, or could, find our way back to those earlier ways of being. But I’m confident this is not necessarily a bad thing. It is more that history’s twists and turns have outcomes good and bad, and yet health always finds a way to re-express. The outer appearance health adopts when it does reappear may not be predictable, but the contours of the body beneath are unmistakable. This is what I think of as progress.
It is not that dawn-to-decadence-to-dawn cycles orbit a fixed point and thus net out to a zero-sum game. Rather, it is like the Earth orbiting the sun while the sun travels the universe housed in its galaxy, a galaxy that drifts around countless other galaxies, nothing ever in the same place twice. In this manner, history marches ever onward in an ever-changing, yet ever-rhyming and turbulent spiralling. And though ostensibly entire cultures can be lost to this repetition, it appears to be a total loss only to the materialist mindset. Sheldrake’s “Morphic Resonance”, no matter its actual constitution and workings, is at the very least a beautiful metaphor that reflects something true; something is always learning, even as individual egos, and entire civilisations, come and go, some seemingly lost forever.
Many of us feel called to do what is best for humanity and its environment. Human health is sustained by healthy human societies and the healthy environment that nourishes them. Modernity is now far from that happy track. The communities described above are a far cry indeed from us; we look sick to breaking point by contrast. The argument I find most persuasive at explaining the root cause of our predicament identifies mechanical technology, that socially atomising vector, as primarily responsible.
The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass: it is at this point that propaganda can be most effective […] [T]he structure of present-day society places the individual where he is most easily reached by propaganda. – Ellul, Propaganda, p9
In my view, Native American communities were healthier than modernity’s. One feature of their health is their relative imperviousness to propaganda, following Ellul’s reasoning, and thus their perviousness to corrective feedback. Propaganda requires atomised individuals, the only type that can make a mass, a crowd in which each member is in some fundamental way alone.
The following summary logic is pivotal:
- If successful propaganda both depends on atomised societies and then grows stronger due to that atomisation;
- if, further, the increasing powers afforded to the state by successful propaganda tend it toward mediocracy;
- if, further still, increasing mediocracy, diminishing freedoms and shrivelling individual sovereignty act together as a positive feedback loop driving loneliness, cynicism and despair ever deeper into a civilisation’s soul,
- then surely some kind of stronger community is one part of the antidote to the narcissistic emptiness unbridled state power seems to propagate and require.
In a simple sentence: Stronger community is surely one part of what is required for “eternal vigilance” to be possible.
A mass is only possible where there is no real community, no intimate connections binding together souls who know each other well. Individuals as a mass know only surface appearances: status-symbol cues, ranks, relative affluence, etc. Thus they cannot relate to each other intimately, beyond formal, polite exchanges, do not really know how to comfortably and affectionately assess relative values beyond the shallow aspect of surface appearance. As a result, they can become hounded by free-floating anxieties, compulsive and thus fanatical inter-group rivalries, multiple taboo subjects, loneliness, defensiveness, confusion. To repeat, this state of affairs aids and abets the propagandist. “Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins” (ibid, p6).
Modern technology, then, seems to be a key causative factor of the atomised society that propaganda, and thus the state, require to thrive.
And yet I do not believe some form of primitivism, or any luddite rejection of technology, can produce the cure to what ails us.
Technology per se is not the enemy, not remotely. So, like Eisenstein and many others, I argue the need for a progression from mechanical to what I like to think of as organic technology, a profound change that would require a civilisational shift. To my mind, mechanical technology is concerned almost exclusively with efficiency (per Ellul), while organic technology is also concerned with efficiency but as moderated by a similar focus on robust resilience. It would be guided by a profound need to consciously develop itself in harmony with natural rhythms and laws.
As I understand it, organic technology would have as its attractor – that quality around which it evolves – steady-state growth and the mindful development of wisdom generally, albeit while being comfortable with quantum technological leaps.
Mechanical technology, on the other hand, has as its attractor endless state-power expansion as served by the efficiency and money-profit gains its advance has evolved to deliver.
In other words, organic technology would be long sighted and patient, where mechanical technology is short sighted and agitated. Yes, these are cartoonish stereotypes, but the point is to bring into relief ‘mythical’ emphases by way of focussing attention on distinguishing differences as we look around for healthier ways of governing or organising society, and mindfully bringing forth, in service, a new quality of civilisation.
An evolution of the state, perhaps even its dissolution, is a prerequisite to progress from mechanical to organic technology.
From this logic, then, it is not hard to see that organic technology would also foster healthy community, would in fact require it. How such communities are structured, however, would be a matter for each community. What will prove equally vital, I’m sure, is establishing and then protecting international bodies that promote and facilitate inter-community and inter-cultural exchange, a very challenging task not to be underestimated. These bodies should never agitate towards utopian perfection and unanimity, nor be seats of power. Rather they should be focussed on facilitating mutual understanding. We are currently witnessing, yet again, what damage messianic conviction in one’s Ultimate Superiority can do. I dearly hope we have soon had enough of it.
Conclusion
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. – Benjamin Franklin
Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science. – Anthony Fauci
What, if not propaganda, that manipulator of groupthink, keeps us at each other’s throats? Even in the deep past – in prehistory – crude, organic ‘propaganda’ we might think of as groupthink may have compounded at times into hysteria or frenzied inter-group conflict. Perhaps we have been demonising the Enemy Other since we were capable of speech and reason.
What, if not love of wisdom and a humble awareness that submitting to escalating groupthink is dangerous, offers a workable check on our very human susceptibilities? How else might we learn to perceive abundance Out There for all to enjoy? How else might we learn to transcend defensively-aggressively exploiting the perception of scarce resources as justification for perpetuating conflict ad nauseam?
Isn’t the slow and painful journey from fear to love what progress ought to be about, however challenging, however imperfect, however endless? Who begins a garden expecting one or two weeks of work to be enough forevermore? Love is a garden we tend forever. This sort of progress cannot be automated. This sort of progress requires our organic involvement and rewards us with riches of meaning.
There is no purely mechanical vector whose character is love.
There is no purely mechanical vector.
Which is why modern states, including democracies, are “burdened with the task of acting through propaganda” (my emphasis). Ellul tells us that states “cannot act otherwise.” If there exists no people convinced they meaningfully constitute a state, there is no state. Propaganda is mightily constrained by this simple truth, and must act in accordance with how people are, a fact that “burdens” its ambitions and appetites. Caught between the devil and the deep blue sea, caught between systemically opposed pressures – state ambition and The Way Things Are –, propaganda must ultimately fail to deliver the meaning humans need.
I believe we are seeing the bitty and precarious end of propaganda’s power to control whole peoples, and that its demise is a direct result of its effectiveness. The western establishment’s increasing use of outright lies and deception, which directly contradicts central tenets of effective propaganda, is clear evidence of this. The West has soared extravagantly into the heights of its own hype, manic on the vapours of its triumphs. There is now no escape as it watches its great success morph into ignominious defeat.
People need to lead meaningful lives. Fake meaning confected by mechanical propaganda is not good enough; no smart-city safety zoo can be rich enough. No one is healthy and thriving when they feel their life has no value, no purpose. A meaningful life can only come through meaningful, active participation in how society develops over time, through involvement in community, career, family, friendship, civic duties, etc., involvement created in partnership with those around us, but most assuredly not mandated, not automated, not mechanised. In other words, people want an organic stake in their lives, a stake in decisions made by government, by governance. If a governance system fails to deliver this, that system will lose its legitimacy. Instability – leading to societal breakdown if the rot is left uncorrected – will follow.
In other words, propaganda is a ‘necessary evil’ that nevertheless cannot exert total power over a mass, no matter how atomised by poor education, stress, techno-distractions and “bullshit jobs” that mass might be. A human being’s inalienable need for meaning cannot be ignored for ever; it is just too fundamental. Canada’s flourishing but macabre flirtation with assisted dying (aka voluntary euthanasia) is a chilling case in point.
Things are terrible Out There and will likely get more terrible still, perhaps even to a messy collapse of the EU and UK that I cannot rule out. But, in keeping with my fluttering intuition in August 2020 that things have taken a turn to the upside, I still sense the western world will soon pull out of its current tailspin. How much damage is done, how long it takes, I do not know. But I still fancy I can feel health poking up through the thick expanse of malaise and cynicism that has been suffocating it for so long.
Each of these very human, bitter-sweet facts is genuine cause for hope. Health, like life, is opportunistic. No matter what tools any power grouping has at its disposal, it cannot effect control over all outcomes, cannot be in full control even for a moment. Wise approaches stand the test of time, unwise do not. Yes, history is fraught with tragic bouts of hubris and moral decrepitude, but its vector, viewed from a broad enough perspective, must over the millennia favour wiser responses, wiser policies, wiser conventions, etc. History is, after all, embedded in nature. If a system is not fit for purpose, it will fail. Nature, life, All That Is, God, entails this obvious truth, is in part ‘made of’ it, we could even say, is governed by it.
None of this means that a person (or any living being/system) can live recklessly with zero regard for healthy outcomes and expect health to be the magical result. Death, that deepest of corrections, is also a lesson from which life, All That Is, can learn repeatedly, forever. None of us will avoid that feedback. And, one way or another, we must each put in the hours, pay our dues, and tend the garden of our wisdom, our love, if we want the sweet rewards of that endeavour.
Death is not a final ending, just the turning of a page. Fear of that turning is one of many factors that mire us into these historical inflection points. Fear of death, of humiliation, of being exposed for a fool, and other fears of this type must be faced before we can walk the healthier road we yearn for. Yes, it is hard and narrow, but the views are breathtaking.
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