[Freedom of speech] stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. – John Kerry (source)
Introduction
War is a continuation of politics by other means – Carl von Clausewitz
Politics is a continuation of war by other means – Me
The first casualty when war comes is truth – Hiram Warren Johnson
War is a crime against humanity – Colonel Douglas MacGregor
Am I a fool to want a life of honesty and meaning for all?
Nowadays, I’d guess over 99% of human beings are born and live in one civilisation or other, each built and sustained through war, whether economic or kinetic, over scarce resources. Many argue our lives are a permanent state of war whether we live in a civilisation or a hunter-gatherer band (this is the Hobbesian perspective). Others argue biological life itself is endless warring.
So, if truth is indeed war’s first casualty and all life is war, is honesty among human peoples viable as a guiding social principle? If we cannot sustain honesty because life is war, can we run society with anything other than subterfuge, public relations, and propaganda?
Perhaps, ironically, this dismal truth is why we can’t handle the truth – despite the opposing and apparently incongruous fact that we seem to value honesty so highly. Fundamentally incapable of handling the truth, perhaps we really are best served by whatever confected narrative the elites deem best suited to each evolving historical moment. Perhaps the widespread human gullibility that sustains our generalised Stockholm Syndrome really does create the best of all possible worlds (where a complex society must be kept functional). The elites are, after all, on the front lines; surely they know what it takes to keep civilisation humming. It’s not that they’re perfect or superior by nature, it’s just that any hierarchical system – especially those of high social specialisation – is systemically constrained to spawn an elite. Their systemic presence at the top is a kind of natural proof they know what’s best for that system, more or less, most of the time. It’s not a competition, it’s not some better-than/worse-than judgement, it is simply a function of specialised hierarchies; elites command, plumbers plumb, runners run. While civilisations and states are hierarchical, how could it be otherwise? We plebeians should not expect to be able to handle the truth en masse and, left to our own ill-prepared devices, manage the system well; our view of what’s really going on is simply insufficient to the task, generally speaking.
As a realist who is clear eyed about his idealistic yearnings, I both agree and disagree with this bare-bones rhetoric. Of course there’s far more to it than the cartoon version set out above, but does that matter? Would a faultless, honest, complete and correct critique or defence debunk or verify it to the extent a mass awakening or mature acceptance would follow? I don’t think so. Things will change towards healthier governance systems when people are ready for such change, and words are but a small part of this. As Victor Hugo once put it, nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. But for the time to be right for a radically different idea, events must first break the cultural soil, and profoundly.
Most of civilised humanity still appears incapable of handling the truth; societies are currently not constituted to create such a state of affairs, though the details of how this manifests will vary in emphases from culture to culture, from state to state. We pampered Westerners get by, on the whole, in a corrosive fog of uncertainty and free-floating anxieties, too confused and afraid to tell our arses from our elbows. I can’t speak to the rest of the world with any authority, but from what little I know would humbly suggest that the inability I reference is indeed at work elsewhere, albeit at different stages of the dawn-to-decadence vector, that surely develops with different cultural nuances in each civilisation/culture. In other words, the worldview driving this article is primarily Western.
My own cherished hope – a maturation into true adulthood for societies across the planet – could only come to pass if social processes were designed from the ground up to be honest and transparent all the way through. Getting to that possible future society from where we are now would require a rolling sequence of shocks so culturally and mass-psychologically upsetting, the survivors would finally want to put in the inner work required to be able to start handling the whole truth.
Is something along those lines happening right now? I’m not sure. What do you think? If it is, it’s going almost exactly as I would expect: turbulently, painfully, tragically, horrifically.
But getting from here to a healthier there – rather than to some dystopian future, or nuclear annihilation – would require that life itself can accommodate such a state of full public openness. What follows herein probes the feasibility of my idealistic yearning.
The nature of fundamental war
O, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive – Sir Walter Scott
The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. – John F Kennedy
It’s not so much culture wars that bedevil us; such are somewhat manageable, at least over great tracts of time. What I’m positing here is a war of fundamentals, namely: how fundamental subterfuge mutually excludes the trust social life fundamentally requires. Is this an intractable problem that’s built into the very fabric of reality?
Subterfuge is fundamental to biology; think Venus fly traps, spider webs and the behaviours inspired by human sex drive. And yet trust is fundamental to social life. Because of the vital importance of trust to social life, whether civilisational or primitive, each instance of subterfuge must undermine society by undermining trust to some degree. Thanks to mass communication, and especially instant international communication, social life – in which I include trade, law, politics, banking, journalism … in short all information-based exchange – has become truly international and mind-bogglingly complex. Does this mean international openness, transparency, and honesty have become fundamental to human survival? Does this mean we must now be structurally and culturally aware of, and thus more alert to, the details and perils of subterfuge? Is the nation state – a creature of secrecy and subterfuge (see below) – thus under threat, or no longer fit for purpose?
(Procreation is also fundamental to biology; life without procreation is impossible. It entails selfish-gene-based strategies, that include nurturing, parenting, the formation of social groups, etc., that add nuance to the warring angle I’m foregrounding in this article. Such strategies are, however, downstream of and thus serve ‘selfishness’ and the primacy of the survival instinct. In the interests of brevity, I am not going to probe this aspect any more deeply than this.)
Accepting that subterfuge is fundamental, knowing that states have official-secrets acts, knowing that corporations make money on proprietary secret sauces for every conceivable product and product component, knowing that intelligence agencies deal in all manner of deception and wrongdoing (see below), etc., how can I possibly know what’s really going on, e.g. in the war in West Asia and between Russia and Ukraine / NATO / the West? How can I trust that vaccines are “safe and effective”? How can I know pesticides and herbicides and fertilisers and GMOs are good for human health? Knowing that I am deemed a “domestic terrorist” for questioning any state-sanctioned narrative, knowing that “follow the science” means no such thing, knowing that scientists can be corrupted by money and prejudice just as all human beings can, what and whom can I trust?
When I am mandated to believe a thing, I cannot trust that thing, nor the person or entity mandating it. I suspect most humans are like this, somewhere deep down, otherwise honesty would not be such a highly valued quality, otherwise Stockholm Syndrome would not be a syndrome but a perfectly healthy response to power.
I want to know the truth but cannot; governance structures forbid it, foster war, foster hatred. To foster hatred (dehumanise), war must first murder truth. It takes a lot of persistent effort to train a soldier to kill, to hate, but hate is everywhere. How is this so? Labour supporters hate Conservative supporters, Democrats hate Republicans. The AfD is hated by the German establishment, and so on and so on. In such a polarised and generalised state of war across so many fronts in so many modalities, what can we trust? Without trust, what becomes of society? And who actually wants societal breakdown?
The powers that be have done terrible things both to become and stay the powers that be, and we are all a part of this devil’s pact. Wittingly or unwittingly it does not change the core dynamic; we are in it together, thick as thieves, with nowhere left to hide. The tension between the fundamental nature of subterfuge and our fundamental love of truth appears to have created a kind of glass ceiling we do not know how to break, or even clearly discern.
We admire honesty, but resort to subterfuge
We developed a CIA in order to carry out the subversive side of the political struggle – William Colby, former Director of the CIA
There are doubtless similar examples from every nation, but the following story of political subterfuge at international scale is both clearly documented and powerfully illustrative of how systemic subterfuge is, and also originates in that shining city on the hill, that bastion of truth, justice and freedom: The United States of America. (Hat tip to Mike Benz.)
To ensure the Italian Communist Party did not win the 1948 general election in Italy – 60% of the vote was predicted for that party –, the CIA spent $10m on propaganda and other underhand methods, including recruiting mafia thugs and Hollywood stars, to persuade that nation’s electorate to vote for Italy’s Christian Democrats; the US deemed Italy’s geopolitical importance too great to allow it to fall to communism.
The CIA endeavour was successful; the Communist Party was not elected. Recently declassified documents reveal its success was fully capitalised on, namely by inaugurating the Office of Special Projects (aka The Department of Dirty Tricks), an act its sponsor, George Kennan, later said was “the greatest mistake I ever made”. In a nutshell, it plans and oversees covert operations designed to sustain US hegemony. Below is the document’s definition of perhaps the most important powers granted to it:
As used in this directive, “covert operations” are understood to be all activities (except as noted herein) which are conducted or sponsored by this Government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them. Specifically, such operations shall include any covert activities related to: propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world. Such operations shall not include armed conflict by recognized military forces, espionage, counter-espionage, and cover and deception for military operations. – National Security Council directive 10/2 formalising the creation of the Office of Special Projects
Perhaps, in terms of the threat at that time, the CIA was right to establish the practice of political warfare by covert means, perhaps not. It doesn’t really matter; duplicitous is the opposite of how people and nations prefer to appear to others (honesty is revered). Action of this type must therefore be both secretive and plausibly deniable to be lastingly effective. It must, therefore, be an ever growing web of lies:
This is the problem with diplomacy through duplicity. Because you lie to the outside world, you need to also lie to your own citizens, to keep the outside from finding out. So while the lies may help you to successfully acquire an empire, you now have to maintain an empire of lies. – Mike Benz
Otherwise known as: “O, what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive.“ Or: Decisions are investments in the future. Or: The means are the ends. One ends up believing one’s own propaganda, one’s own hype, because one gets caught up in its entangling momenta, the compounding nature of deception. Today, “domestic terrorists” are the new hostiles the state must also monitor and deal with. Subterfuge builds on itself like an insatiable hunger that corrodes trust and weakens the interwoven fabrics of affected societies.
This is the truth we cannot handle. But, as implied above, statecraft of this type is as old as the state; subterfuge is a fundamental part of reality which statecraft cannot escape. Perhaps Stockholm Syndrome is the most rational response; fighting all-powerful fundamentals is futile.
And yet things change, history happens. Today, the potential cost of not properly addressing subterfuge and the bitter enmities that thrive in its wake could not be higher; our combined destructive potential could end life on earth.
I would be stunned if there were a nation on earth of sufficient size that has not granted itself similar powers. To cut a very long and complex history short, the upshot of what is now an international frenzy of such statecraft – in the wake of past ‘crimes’ being covered up and compounded by ever greater ‘crimes’ – is a stormy sea of disinformation and polarised mistrust. Redlines square off against opposing redlines, across multiple geopolitical axes; every flashpoint one examines seems existential. Consequently, causatively, fundamentalism and fanaticism abound. This is the predictable outcome of rampant dishonesty and the pervasive mistrust it births.
And yet, come what may, we revere honesty; stories of courage, decency and nobility always move us, especially in the worst of times. We hunger for them. We suffer under the weight of pervasive corruption, sicken from existential dread, crave news of true decency and honour, are horrified by depravity. And while we can float arguments of pragmatics and realpolitik to cast these dangerous historical junctures as predictable and natural, it is always with a sense of regret, of sadness.
Why? Why do our hearts beat against the grain of the very biology that evolved them? Because we fear death? I think not. People yearn for death as escape from oppression, psychological torture, persecution, criminality, etc. So I feel I am justified in asserting that our need for honesty and decency is in fact more fundamental than subterfuge, and, further, that subterfuge, dishonesty, deception, betrayal, etc., come in very different flavours, and can serve very different ends.
There are important and rich distinctions to be drawn here; i.e., playfully wearing lipstick and eyeshadow to attract someone on the one hand, and going behind a friend’s back in hurt anger and betraying her, are obviously qualitatively different acts. There are important differences, contexts, justifications when it comes to deception. When we expose some instance of cruel or malicious dishonesty, we want all the details, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so we can assess how to react, so that the right type of healing atonement can happen, both in the victim and the perpetrator. When someone engages in playful deceptions to please or entertain us, the opposite is the case. The mysterious deception spices up our life.
Truth heals wrongdoing, but not all deception is wrongdoing. It takes wisdom to be able to tell the playful from the cruel.
In other words, what we need is wisdom, equanimity, humility. This, in turn, requires freedom of speech, access to all public information, zero secrecy for public affairs (means are ends). And, because wisdom would be needed throughout a population, we need, for starters, educational processes that are primarily concerned with instilling in our young – or rather encouraging to robust fruition – how to handle the richly complex vicissitudes of human life, this before subjects like chemistry, geography, physics, etc. Not to their exclusion of course, but as an underpinning: wisdom acquisition as a fundamental goal of schooling. Once something like this is established, democracy would truly flourish.
(Do you think nation states would welcome such educational processes? If they wouldn’t, why not?)
Mike Benz’s broader commentary on the CIA and other intelligence agencies (“the blob”) closely matches what my portrayal of power as forestaller of correction predicts. Diplomacy through duplicity is only feasible when you have sufficient power to wield it successfully. It is also very seductive to groups whose primary raison d’être is power, i.e. nation states. Attempts to constrain systemic subterfuge will fail over time, assuming that the state continues to grow in power. The logic of deception – ever more entangling webs of lies – all but guarantees this. Folded into this equation is that trust is under threat when the system you live in includes in its institutional fabric the need for monopoly power, as is the case with nation states and, I argue, civilisation. And propaganda is necessarily a part of state-based governance architecture; there is simply no way of creating the deep, reflexive cultural sense of being a people except by propaganda, myth making, etc. Which, as I echo elsewhere (referencing Ellul), ends up propagandising its propagators.
In a winner-takes-all battle, whose timescale seems perpetual, one side may well defeat one enemy group, but in doing so will create others. If one side manages to destroy all its enemies, it will have become so large it would instantly start to fracture into warring groups upon its final ‘victory’, if not before. The means are the ends; enmity ensures continuing enmity. If we perceive reality as war, we will create war as our reality.
The problem is thus one of perception, and also noticing it is a problem of perception. This makes it extremely difficult to address, but not impossible. But to repeat, the stakes are high, which means the pressure to take on this challenge may well be sufficient to get us started and asking the right questions.
Conclusion
Are we not threaded by the same weave/By the wind, terra firma and unparted sea?/Whether by accident or fortune/You and I, we are matter, and it matters. – The Oh Hellos
Curiosity killed the cat. Satisfaction brought it back. – Anonymous
We are social animals and moved by love. We thrive in love and sicken in enmity. And we are both endlessly curious and (thus) subject to endless change. Even phenomena as ancient as nation states, as ancient as power itself, are subject to our curiosity, as to the endless invention and experimentation curiosity drives.
What is more important to healthy societal functioning than trust? When we no longer trust our neighbours, and our neighbours no longer trust us and can destroy us, we are emotionally justified in wanting to destroy our neighbours preemptively (dehumanisation thrives on such tension). This is an incredibly difficult situation to handle wisely; fear inhibits impartial analysis, existential fear yet more so.
But no matter how difficult such tensions are, if we don’t want to destroy each other and perhaps all life on earth, radical honesty and openness are the way forward. Perhaps the love-wisdom-health trinity I advance here at Econosophy is not as soppy as it seems at first glance. But to embrace it properly, deeply, from the top to the bottom of societies right across the planet, will take enormous courage and radical change. Nothing is more threatening to the system than love.
While I was writing this, Charles Eisenstein published a beautiful article that eloquently sets out how the habit of blaming the ‘bad guys’ for the evil in the world chains us to the very problem we hope to solve by identifying the guilty party; fear-filled/hate-filled blaming perpetuates enmity; it is driven by dehumanisation. Drawing on a Chris Hedges article, he argues that not blame, but total truth is the way forward. Total truth unearths what must be unearthed and processed before deep healing can occur. Without deep healing, both individually and at societal scales, the cycle of violence continues, as we witness across history.
Of course individuals cause wildly different amounts of death, destruction, injury, malfeasance, etc. Of course peoples and societies and cultures have very different qualities of atonement to endure. But blame is not the point. Compassionate, determined unearthing of the truth is. True dialogue affords this, where dialogue means a willingness to discover where you err in your understanding, and to own up to wrongdoings you have committed or abetted. Done properly, dialogue heals. Truth heals. Of course it hurts, disrupts, upends, but better that than total annihilation.
Think of it this way. If my basic position at Econosophy is wrong – namely that meaning is obviously fundamental to life because humans become cynical and/or despondent without it – then there is no point struggling against war for something better. If materialism is correct and I am wrong, I predict history would proceed as follows:
Those humans who become despondent because their lives are meaningless will be selectively bred out of existence. ‘Fitter’ humans will become progressively more and more narcissistic, sociopathic, psychopathic – such types do not hunger for meaningful lives. This will destroy society as trust corrodes. When trust corrodes to zero, society will atomise into non-existence. Human life will finally become a war of each against all until disparate lone survivors, the ‘winners’, die of old age.
If such a prognosis does not inspire you, does not fill you with joy, why not? Are you one of those deluded fools who wants a meaningful life? If you are, how do you need this immeasurable, undefinable thing, meaning? Because of your bio-chemistry? Because of neuronal-electrical webs that experience clouds of meaning-chemicals? Can you explain to your own satisfaction how bio-chemistry and electricity together produce both the need for meaning and meaning itself?
We have been led by the logic of power, scarcity and subterfuge to drift, culturally, so far from love, wisdom and health, the latter grouping appears, to so many today, like a rainbow-surfing unicorn. The truth is that power, scarcity and subterfuge breed enmity, which breeds mistrust, which leads to today’s world in which very, very few lead truly meaningful lives. And we all suffer for it.
That we suffer is, for me, absolutely pivotal to my argument. If we are Hobbesian beasts biologically wired to war, each against all, then why does warring, each against all, depress us?
Here’s the thing: “You and I, we are matter, and it matters.” In my view, what we call matter is an experience in consciousness. Being human is, fundamentally, being subject to matter’s merciless and disciplining immediacy as it constrains and oppresses our deeper nobility through fear, self doubt, meaninglessness, etc., or alternatively, ego inflation, mania, hubris, narcissism, etc. Our suffering in matter is a sign of our deeper nobility; otherwise all would be robotically functional.
We are human, I believe, to learn grace under pressure, to discover, adore and sustain the beauty of what we experience as physical existence. Nothing teaches grace more profoundly, more richly, than matter. As society grows in complexity, so the challenges we face grow in difficulty. We might fail the tests we currently face, but we may well succeed.
Wouldn’t that be beautiful.
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