GOOD CAUSES, BAD EFFECTS

The hysterical algorithm of left and right

In these Monday posts I try to explain some aspects of cultural production. Today I look at how rule by media has shaped the perception of our politics.

I revisit the creation of the technique of governance, which has become a sort of algorithm to serve elite power through the sophisticated use of mass-produced imagery with an intense emotional charge.

After a century of this technique - what is left of the Left? What does it mean to be Right?

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CONTENTS

• Left and Right as “Good Causes vs Bad Effects”

• For and Against the Pace of Change

• Who Makes The Pictures in Our Heads?

• The News Cycle - Issuing Issues

• Rage on Demand - The Mass Production of Outrage

• The Poetry of Power - Ezra Pound on the Method of Images

• Blind to the Making of Belief - The Seething Audience Model

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Causes and Effects

From the point of view of the algorithm of governance, the left is defined by cheering good causes, and the right by booing their bad effects.

These forms of group emotion are the personality types of our politics, and their presence is no accident.

They are products, packaged and sold in the same way as any other form of life-filler.

To talk of cause and effect here has two dimensions.

The first is the real cause of our political condition, which is the fact that our politics is mass produced like any other cultural product. The second is that “causes” and effects are the poles around which these politics are organised - the “Good Causes” of progress and the Bad Effects they create.

Neither point of view explores the root of both causes and effects, which is the method of governance by elite power to legitimise the outcomes it produces in reality.

The common perception of politics as left and right, progressive and conservative, liberal and not, map on to these emotional identities regardless of the verbal label.

Politics is not about ideas these days - but about how you feel about the “issues”.

The “issues” are issued to you by the media. Every form of advertising does this, from the news to the pages and images you view. It is helpful to remember that you become, in a sense, what you experience.

This knowledge, condensed into a method, has been refined over a century of cultural production in the service of the military and financial goals of the ruling elite. This means it serves power, not the people. What it serves the people is good for power first, then packaged as good for them.

This is the “cause” of the condition we inhabit. It was not designed as it is today, but emerged in a rudimentary blueprint produced by the advertising experts and other technocrats who designed the liberal system after World War One.

It has been refined ever since, and this refinement has been enabled by advances in technology. Taken as a whole, this process can be called technique. It is the means of managing mankind.

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Here is a short essay on Technique, which mentions Jacques Ellul - the author of a book on the subject.

Technique

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FOR AND AGAINST

To be for Good Causes is to be of the Left, a Liberal, a progressive. Change is good, technology is advancing and so must we. Out with the old!

To be against Good Causes is to be of the “Right”, a conservative. The effects of change are bad. It must be undertaken slowly.

Neither group has much in the way of ideology any more. Both have been assimilated into technique.

Both left and right rely on a moral system that is pragmatic, has no regard for essential value, and simply refers to norms each side creates from its own definition of words.