Amorphous Boot on a Definite Face
Touring Substack this morning, we see Aaron Kheriaty describing the Anatomy of Coercion: acts of power undertaken “with no locus of responsibility for the decision and no liability for the outcomes.” Meanwhile eugyppius describes an increasingly potent status group, “this whole odious internationally networked enterprise of Virus Astrology, from virologers to sequencers to testers to planners to nudgers to vaccinators.” We face a cloud of power, distributed systems of influence and control that push our lives in a direction chosen by others who often can’t be plainly and fully identified.
The philosophy professor Crispin Sartwell offers a useful term for this system of control:
squishy totalitarianism: the political/economic/aesthetic/psychological system or syndrome shared in common, for instance, by contemporary China, the European Union, Russia, and the United States. It is characterized by a complex so-called 'technocratic' merger of state and capital; large-scale mechanisms of subject-formation such as compulsory state education and regulation/monopoly ownership of the media; welfare-state or 'safety-net' programs that stabilize consumption and render populations (within limits) secure and dependent; a relative tolerance for some forms of diffuse dissent and scope for individual choice, particularly in consumption, combined with pervasive state and corporate surveillance; overwhelming police and military force and sprawling systems of incarceration; entrenched extreme hierarchies of wealth and expertise; regulation of the economy by monetary policy and central banks in conjunction with banking concerns; an international regime of national sovereignties combined with international state/corporate mechanisms for the circulation of wealth.
That’s not exactly how I would put that, but close enough. Underlying an integration of government authority and corporate power — the President of the United States says you must consume Pfizer’s product, while Pfizer and the FDA fight side-by-side in court to slow the release of the safety data on that product — we face a totalitarian yearning that remains squishy because it’s built on a foundation of signals and predilections. The amorphous social and cultural police are Christopher Lasch’s new elites, and they’re Angelo Codevilla’s ruling class, people trained through a kind of self-hypnosis in a not-entirely-conscious social consensus. I mean, my god, you have to take the COVID vaccines — what are you, some Trump person? Are you, like, a trailer park type?
The difficult thing about fighting squishy totalitarianism, distributed power “with no locus of responsibility for the decision and no liability for the outcomes,” is that it’s hard to find a clear target for counteraction. But the easy thing about it is that it relies on unconscious compliance through those signals and predilections, through status anxiety and social manipulation. Consciousness alone begins to defeat a squishy system that relies upon your unconsciousness. The first and most powerful act is to notice; the second is to decline the artificial consensus. Details TK. But see it, and it starts to lose power.
