In this second post about the panic which now radiates from the vacant seat of secular power, I move on from NATO hysteria to the theatre of the absurd we see in the dark twin of reality.
You can find the first part here:
What is going on with Google? Its ambitions to meddle in everything from the pictures in our heads to the practice of regime has resulted in a debacle.
I will show how this predicament arose from the century-old project to shape the ends of man by means of a mechanism he cannot comprehend.
Finally we shall see that the would-be authors of reality have lost control of their own story.
CONTENTS
PART ONE
THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD - PIRANDELLO AND PUBLIC OPINION
GOOGLE IT: THE DARK TWIN
PART TWO
THE AUTHORS OF REALITY - FROM LIPPMANN TO NULAND
THEATRE OF THE ABSURD
"Si mundus vult decipi, decipiatur"
("if the world will be deceived, let it be deceived")
-St Augustine, De Civitate Dei contra Paganos1, 5th Century AD
The Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello wrote Six Actors in Search of an Author in 1921. In the same year, the Council on Foreign Relations was founded. Both events reflect Pirandello’s belief, that man is driven to deception by himself.
“I think that life is a very sad piece of buffoonery; because we have in ourselves, without being able to know why, wherefore or whence, the need to deceive ourselves constantly by creating a reality (one for each and never the same for all), which from time to time is discovered to be vain and illusory . . .
My art is full of bitter compassion for all those who deceive themselves; but this compassion cannot fail to be followed by the ferocious derision of destiny which condemns man to deception.”
His play shows six characters who invade a rehearsal to demand the director stage the story of their lives.
These six characters tell the actors and director that they have their own story, but, having created them, their author lost interest in them and they are now in search of an author who will tell their story for them.
The actors are seeking a new author to adopt and complete them. The play within a play ends in chaos. A story of sexual desire reveals the limitations of the actors within their own perspectives, which cannot be resolved according to the limitations of theatre.
Two of the actors die, but no one knows whether their deaths are real. One leaves the theatre screaming. Where has she gone?
No one can story this chaos into credibility.
The role of the director was assumed in the liberal order by organisations such as the CFR, whose founding member Walter Lippman wrote extensively on the need to manage liberal democracy by means of the elite production of public opinion.
In the year following the foundation of the CFR, Lippman published his liberal-elite manual, Public Opinion.
He coined the word “stereotype” to code negatively the traditional mnemonics of accumulated human experience, seeking to make virtuous the replacement of the source code of culture:
The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society.
He used the word “propaganda” with a refreshing sincerity:
But what is propaganda, if not the effort to alter the picture to which men respond, to substitute one social pattern for another?
Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922
We live at the moment where the director, the audience and the actors find themselves in the answerless conclusion of Pirandello’s play.
The results is an inverse of the Gordian knot, a problem of complexity and its resistance to resolution under the current rules. We have no Alexander to cut through this tangle, because it has unmade itself.
There are too many threads, and no one can fashion the rope.
GOOGLE IT
The inspiration for Pirandello came from two main sources: the Freudian idea that Man is directed by forces within himself that he can neither comprehend or control, and the figures of the Commedia dell’Arte.
One of these stock figures was Scaramouche. Pictured above without his customary mask, he was a rogue who incites troubles in the audience he cannot resolve.
Scaramouche (or Scaramuccia) has his origins in the capitan, the quarrelsome Neapolitan with a tendency to flee the fights he regularly provokes2
He was made famous in Europe by the actor Fiorilli, who
…with his bodily postures and his grimaces [could] imitate anybody and anything he wished
The wishes of imitation are expressed today in real time, producing a virtual traduction of history by digital Leviathans.
Google’s ongoing controversy returns the mischief of Scaramouche with a devastating new flourish. There is no actor to exit the stage, having provoked uproar in the audience.
In his article “Google's Culture of Fear: inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini's disaster”, Mike Solana asked on March 4th
How is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?
He was investigating the colossal failure that was the launch of Google’s Gemini, a “hyper-woke” AI image generator which “erased white people from history”.
It is also “obviously inferior” to its competitors, and has seen Google lose 70 billion dollars from its share price.
Solana found several answers. The first is obvious.
Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true.
But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company’s far greater problems.
The Emperor is no more real than his new suit of clothes.
First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator’s Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model.
Second, and probably more importantly, nobody’s in charge.
Google is partnered with the United States Government and that of Germany to refine digital methods of “regime change”. These are intended to be applied at home. In yours.
When you look for the actor and for the author who directed him, you find nothing there. This is the heart of the machine, tasked with the mass production of meaning. It is not even inhabited by a ghost.
For an insight into our digital overlords, see this brief response to the Gemini “debacle”
PART TWO: THE AUTHORS OF REALITY
THE PICTURES IN OUR HEADS
Lippman said in his book on Politics, published in 1913
Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.
The propaganda machine he helped to build was intended to replace the miasma of personally limited impressions with a responsibly managed public information. Drawing on the beliefs of Adam Smith, he saw the potential to create another system by which
…people were led to meet the needs of others they will never meet, by means of mechanisms they do not comprehend.3
Lippman believed that the narrative made by the machinery of public opinion was better than that made by men for themselves.
Those features of the world outside which have to do with the behavior of other human beings, in so far as that behavior crosses ours, is dependent upon us, or is interesting to us, we call roughly public affairs.
The pictures inside the heads of these human beings, the pictures of themselves, of others, of their needs, purposes, and relationship, are their public opinions.
Those pictures which are acted upon by groups of people, or by individuals acting in the name of groups, are Public Opinion with capital letters.
Enacted symbols equal power, said Lippmann. Harold Laswell went further, defining “propaganda” as “the control of opinion by significant symbols”.
In 1936 he completed his study on Propaganda Technique in World War One. In it, he said4 it was the elite which must determine which symbols would move the minds of men and motivate the actions of their leaders:
At best the propagandist is selective.
He discerns a potential reservoir of discontent or aspiration and searches for ways of discharging the discontent and harnessing the aspirations so that they harmonize with his policy’ objectives.
He said the method of public propaganda was confined to four “patterns” in the liberal democracies, which he thought had more need of propaganda than communism and fascism.
The available means of mobilizing collective action depend, in turn, on words and word equivalents whose signification is already circumscribed by the predispositional patterns present in the political arena.
Furthermore , the existing predispositional patterns themselves set limits on what can be done.
These patterns are familiar today. They are “our values”, other myths, techniques of control and the control and distribution of natural resources.
This system rewards loyalty with real life treats and with virtual ones. It is, as Theodore Kaczynski pointed out5, no longer dirigible - by our values or by those of anyone else. No one is directing the mass society, whose sacrament is death.
The panic of the elites is palpable, and it derives from the fact that they no longer feel in charge. Populism is their nemesis. This is the voodoo curse they apply to the politics of people radicalised by reality. Who made this world?
“WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY”
The neoconservatives we have are not those of yesteryear. They have vanished, like the snows of Villon, into anguished longing.
For a breath of beauty in the midden of the modern, see here:
Irving Kristol, their reputed godfather, described6 the insistence on “peace processes” as a fantasy - resulting from the application of social science theories to international relations.
It is thinkable that such an approach to marriage counseling might in some cases be productive, but its extension to the level of statecraft, or to any conflict between collective entities, is an extreme case of academic hubris.
Prescriptions for peace were mandated by a power which thought itself entitled global supremacy. Its ambitions were not limited to writing these alone.
Kristol was replaced by neoconservatives who replaced his thought with action. Their actions, they believed, made them the authors of a reality that the rest of us were condemned to merely witness.
It was Karl Rove who is credited7 with formalising the hubris of these would-be creators of a new world order.
People like you are still living in what we call the reality-based community.
You believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore.
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.
And while you are studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.
We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Rove, and many of the neocons he served, has exited the stage. The latest one to do so is former Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.
The architect of the Ukrainian coup in 2014, she is being replaced by John Bass - the man who oversaw the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
She leaves a Europe without answer to the crisis she has helped to usher in, replacing the Great Moderation with a grand panic. The fanatics have no remedy to the fever they have spread.
Look for the authors of the reality you inhabit and they have vanished, like Scaramouche, leaving only their mischief to play out around the raging crowd.
If you like what I do, consider paying my wife to permit me to continue doing it.
If you would like to read my archives and cannot afford to do so, email me and I will let you in.
Why bother with the Latin? St Augustine’s book is better known as “The City of God” - versus the “city of Man”. What the Latin preserves is valuable, which means “On the State of God against that of the Pagans”.
Pagans worship gods which did not create the world, and use men for entertainment in the games they play to pass the time. They were the gods of current things, like madness, war and wine.
Gianni Papi, An Important “Theatrical” painting by Pietro Paolini, Galerie Michel Descours.
Paolini was a notable “Carravagisti” - one of many painters making use of Carravagio’s dramatic use of darkness and light known as chiaroscuro.
The quote is not from Lippmann, but from (I think) Professor John Eldridge of Glasgow University. It is taken from his page Lasswell and Lippmann on Propaganda, published as notes on his course “The Sociological Imagination”.
He explains the route from Adam Smith through Lippmann to the machinery of propaganda and elite theory as follows:
Lippmann is referring to ‘the great society’ as put forward by Adam Smith in ‘The Theory of Moral Sentiments’, here peoples’ specialized activities are not coordinated by direction to perform various tasks, but by an impersonal mechanism of the market.
Through the pursuit of economic self-interest, and by the price system, people are led to meet the needs of others who they will never meet, by means of mechanisms that they do not fully comprehend.
For Lippmann the highest social set consists of those who embody the leadership of the Great Society. In so far as it is bound together, the hierarchy is bound together by the social leaders who at any one level are involved in a social set of the social leaders, the ‘radiant points of conventionality.’
Here the big decisions about war, peace, social strategy, and the ultimate distribution of social power are “intimate experiences within a circle of what, potentially at least, are personal acquaintances.” See: Lippmann ‘Public Opinion’, p. 35-36. This is akin to C. Wright Mills’ conception of the ‘Power Elite’.
To be fair to Lippmann, though he remained dedicated to the “Great Society” explained above, by the end of the 1940s he was saying US military interventionism was
“an impossible foundation for the foreign policy of a nation… Our people are coming to realize that in this country one crusade has led to another.”
Lasswell, Harold (1971) ‘Propaganda Technique in World War I’, p. xv, the MIT Press.
The Unabomber, as he was known for his campaign of terrorism, published a book in 2016 making this and other excellent observations called Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How.
In it, he not only argued that mass society was too complex to be rationally directed, but also that even totalitarian states were subject to human limitations.
He warned that attempts to modify the environment, through processes such as aerosols sprayed into the upper atmosphere, threatened a far greater environmental disaster than that it is intended to correct.
Writing before the lockdown and “vaccine” era, he was prescient to caution that the medicine is often worse than the malady.
Conflicts That Can’t Be Resolved, Irving Kristol, American Enterprise Institute, September 05, 1997.
Kristol’s warning about the presumption of a workable peace between Israel and the Palestinians is but one dimension of his argument about the mistaken belief in “conflict resolution”, which has resulted in a therapeutic approach that now shades all aspects of mass-society messaging. This includes politics and education.
Rove was said to be the “unnamed official” source of the quote, reported by Ron Suskind in the New York Times Magazine on October 17, 2004 in his article Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of GW Bush.
Rove was the then Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Adviser to the President, in an administration noted for its “neocon” persuasions. I have written a guide to the neocons, who made permanent war a patriotic duty, here.
Fantastic article, but more importantly -- fantastic insight. More and more I find that I am looking toward the future with a sense of hope, excitement and, dare I say it, opportunity.
What an excellent piece I learned much. No one is in charge. I am convinced.
Why is this so? The “ selective advantage of dominant ideas and the inability of regressive ideas to compete” is a possible explanation. This dynamic propels us forward, I call it the intersection of practical considerations and natural healthy human ambition.
Think about a newly graduated science student going to work, first job, and suggesting that climate science is overblown, exaggerated and captured by political considerations. Bad career move junior. To get ahead you gotta get along. That’s the way this world works. Your mother told you this. If you don’t, you’ll be labelled a weirdo.
Distortion is the consequence.
This is why our collective actions inevitably lead to disaster: it is this fallen world in all of its simplicity.
I run a large company, many employees, this dynamic is omnipresent.
I also read the Irving Krystal essay on conflict resolution, he finishes saying that the Israeli’s were at the end of their tether, in 1997. He was wrong, or at least early, but today he would be right.