We Know We're Sick / We Don't Know Why
one diagnosis, two explanations
We’re getting there. We can all see it, especially as it gets ready to die.
But a more and more widely shared diagnosis is still producing explanations that don’t quite fit together. Take some time over the holidays, or just over this weekend, to read two remarkable new essays that offer different explanations for the same sickness:
At Tablet, David Samuels describes the creation of a messaging system designed to advance untruth and herd people into compliance — and he discusses “Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above.” In this telling, the system of social manipulation is a party instrument. Democrats did it.
At the same time, on his Substack page, Lorenzo Warby has just posted a deeply argued essay concluding that “we in the West do not live in Party-States. We increasingly live in activist-network states.” In this formulation, our descent into a societal atmosphere of enforced untruth is distributed, not centralized — through “networks and (interactive) signalling.”
What you’ll find striking about these two essays is how much they overlap in description while offering different explanations. We live in an atmosphere of dishonesty and manipulation — an age of psychic warfare — but we’re not quite sure who to blame for it.
However it works, whatever force or system or personality is driving, the social illness caused by the cultural compliance exercise has been obvious for years. Samuels: “The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia.”
An argument against Obama did it is that the “it” is global, and more obviously horrible in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK, and nearing its grotesque apogee in Germany. The pandemic-era narrative enforcement efforts of people like Daniel Andrews, Jacinda Ardern, and Canadian Prime Minister Derek Zoolander surely make American commissars swoon with jealousy. Another argument against the claim that Obama created a new compliance system is the behavior of Václav Havel’s greengrocer, which suggests the use of new media tools for an old job.
An argument against socially guided networks that aren’t top-down party-state systems is the astonishing degree to which the US government is now known to have weaponized the corporate-state coordination of narrative control.
But I can’t simply reject either argument, while seeing that they point in different directions, and I think the diverging explanations are worth exploring. We’ve been living through a deep but low-grade nightmare, enmeshed in falsehood everywhere — and seeing that falsehood elevated as virtue.
We all see it, we all see it that it’s falling apart, and we don’t quite agree where it came from. We should keep pulling at the thread.
But for now, I propose silence and a return to family, and I plan to shut up until a few days after Christmas. Let’s have some peace, and then get back to it.
If we're throwing reading material onto the pile I'd like to add Burnham's "The Managerial Revolution", which nails our moment, though it was written in 1941 (!):
"What is occurring in this transition is a drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class, by the social group or class of the MANAGERS (as I shall call them, reserving for the moment an explanation of whom this class includes). This drive will be successful. At the conclusion of the transition period the managers will, in fact, have achieved social dominance, will be the ruling class in society. This drive, moreover, is worldwide in extent, already well advanced in all nations, though at different levels of development in different nations."
And Christopher Lasch's “The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy” from 1991:
"Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency—against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life—the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.
The culture wars that have convulsed America since the sixties are best understood as a form of class warfare, in which an enlightened elite (as it thinks of itself) seeks not so much to impose its values on the majority (a majority perceived as incorrigibly racist, sexist, provincial, and xenophobic), much less to persuade the majority by means of rational public debate, as to create parallel or 'alternative' institutions in which it will no longer be necessary to confront the unenlightened at all."
All I can add is that it seems that just like for centuries people were controlled and menaced by various monarchs, aristocrats, warlords, religious fanatics, etc etc, in our time it seems we're stuck with an elite managerial class who are formed and processed through the finishing schools of academia and then emerge looking to take their places at the top of the social pyramid—which leads them to believe they were born to tell the rest of us what to think, do, feel, create etc.
But this iteration of managerial aristocrats has wrecked everything they've touched, are bleeding credibility from their massive litany of lies being exposed, and can feel their power slipping. Hopefully they'll all be replaced soon by something wiser and more authentic—or at least hopefully soon we can at least have a ruling class that doesn't hate their own people and nations.
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO CHRIS AND TO EVERYONE!
My wife took the blue pill. She doesn't want me talking to her about anything you wrote! I thought I was red-pilled but now I think I'm black-pilled. I think I need a blue, red, and black pill ornament for my Christmas tree.