An Unreal Existence

Posted on November 12, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Richard Fernandez

At the end of the 20th century people believed in the truth. While they had several truths, — liberalism, conservativism, classic Communism of the kind once espoused by Che Guevara and in places a naive form of apocalyptic Islam — at least each believed the world’s problems could be solved if their truth should triumph over the rest.

The clash of civilizations since September 11, 2001 has left every culture wounded and guilty in its own way. Western civilization, dominant through the modern era appears to be destroying itself in self-hatred, literally choosing extinction. “In 2015, all European Union countries had a sub-replacement fertility rate.” With the replacement fertility at 2.33, the average for the EU was 1.58. At the same time Islam was tearing itself apart in a global civil war while the United States was riven by discord.

No one seems to have the answers any more. Technological warfare only seems to increase entropy rather than reduce it. Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan are stories of one set of villains replacing another. So many Black Swans have appeared that they are no longer novelties. The old status quo faces the possibility that Brexit, Trump, Catalonia and the North Korean nuclear breakout far from being exceptions to the rule are harbingers of things to come.

What seems to have changed is our mental furniture though we don’t quite understand how it happened. Globalization has allowed drastic mutations that biologist Ernst Mayr notes often originates “in a relatively small and isolated population” to propagate very rapidly into a new normal. The new normal in Europe is depopulation, don’t ask how because the periphery can now become the center with surprising speed. The New York Times report that “major liberal donors, posing an insurgent challenge to some of the left’s most venerable institutions — and the Democratic Party itself” are no longer funding politicians like Hillary but the Resistance itself should come as no surprise.

“We’re in a disruptive period, and when we get through it, the progressive infrastructure landscape may look different,” said Gara LaMarche, president of the Democracy Alliance, a club of wealthy liberals who donate at least $200,000 a year to recommended groups.

The new variability is overwhelming the old political elite. As the World Wars and the Black Death demonstrated upheaval can produce wild mood swings in a populace. “The tremendous emotional shock [of the Black Death] … created a state of … depression and sometimes even panic” which turned people to fanaticism as others sought scapegoats for their troubles or lost themselves in a debauchery made famous by Poe’s Masque of the Red Death and the wild abandon of Weimar.

The underlying disruption is creating a similar volatility today. Currently we are obsessed with 71 genders but a nuclear or biological disaster can can flip decades of political correctness and deference to technology into their opposite. Considering all the freedoms and privacy the West has already given up to preserve the status quo the mantra “we can’t let it change us” is mockingly ironic. It is change, not changelessness which is characteristic of the present.

Perhaps the world is living through history’s first information epidemic and like the medievals who fell to unseen pathogens we can scarcely understand the catastrophe befalling us. Many are at a loss to explain entropy and anomie on a scale never seen before. But we cannot respond effectively to chaos without realizing the threat is not merely physical but an information corruption challenge.

At least Hillary’s call for more censorship on social media shows the old establishment is belatedly waking up to the informational nature of the threat without fully understanding it. “This is a new kind of Cold War — and it is just getting started,” Clinton said in a speech at Stanford University, using the language of 1945 to describe 2017. Clinton seems to regard the machinery of manipulation per se as acceptable as long as it does not fall into the wrong hands and is probably counting on it to restore order. She fails to see that manipulation itself — the Narrative — is the root problem and that the Narrative is likely to master her rather than the other way round.

Human sanity was long anchored in reality. Religions might have been flawed but they usually tried to explain things in the light of contemporary knowledge. Common people spent the greater part of their day in contact with society and family in a smartphone-free world that seems to be lost forever. They were innoculated against much craziness. That world had a self-centering property that is now missing.

Today we have live in an environment where whole populations are immersed in an ocean of deliberate lies. People can believe anything — and often do. The Narrative is malware corroding our sense of humanity and reality. Instead of increasing privacy so data miners cannot engage in the targeted lying which makes “fake news” so effective we decrease it the better to help the manipulators. We’ve reached the point where having real human networks instead of social ones is slightly suspicious. “Fear the man,” we are told when pondering Steven Paddock, “with no digital footprint.”

Perhaps humanity was better off with rival truths rather than rival lies. In retrospect the status quo got bitten by its own creation in 2016 after Putin wrested a surprising chunk of the Narrative from the Gatekeepers. But the politicians far from learning their lesson want the handlers to take a firmer grip on the snake instead of defanging it. It will bite them again and more venomously next time.

Washington D.C. is Swarming With Unaccountable Parasites

Posted on November 7, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

In theory, Americans should be proud of their national capital and all the important work that gets done there. In theory.

In reality, our nation’s capital is an utter cesspool of self-serving, unethical and unaccountable parasites. We all know it and, even worse, it’s probably a hundred times more grotesque than we can imagine. A distressingly high number of people attracted to this swamp don’t go there to do good public work or help the American people. They go in order to enrich themselves at our expense.

A particularly degenerate strain of D.C. cretin is the lobbyist. These people swarm into Washington to influence the purse-strings of the U.S. government and funnel as much American treasure as possible in the direction of their clients, including Wall Street oligarchs, defense contractors and barbaric foreign monarchies like Saudi Arabia. We’re told that Washington D.C. exists specifically to protect and benefit the American public, yet the average citizen is the one constituency which has virtually no actual representation there. Helping the vulnerable doesn’t pay very well.

Over the past couple of days, I’ve be reading political stories describing the “beltway buzz” in the aftermath of the Paul Manafort and Rick Gates indictments. I’ve found these articles quite instructive. The common theme is that hordes of the shady crooks who operate in D.C., and add absolutely zero value to society, are panicking that their gravy train of legalized corruption may be coming to an end.

To see what I mean, let’s examine two recently published articles. First from Politico:

Washington lobbyists who represent foreign powers have taken comfort for decades in the fact that the Justice Department rarely goes after them for potentially breaking the law. That all changed on Monday.

The two-tier justice system works quite nicely for D.C. crooks.

The news of Tony Podesta’s resignation from his namesake firm and indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates sent K Street scrambling, as lobbyists rushed to make sure they’re in compliance with the rules. The developments also renewed calls for Congress to pass legislation beefing up the Justice Department’s enforcement of the law, which lawmakers in both parties have derided for lacking teeth.

“Firms are going to be even more careful than they have been in the past in the foreign lobbying arena,” said Trent Lott, the former Senate majority leader who’s now a lobbyist at Squire Patton Boggs, where his foreign clients have included Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Prosecutions of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act — which requires lobbyists who represent foreign governments, political parties and other groups seeking to influence American foreign policy to register with the Justice Department — are rare. And it’s not clear whether the Justice Department will follow special counsel Robert Mueller’s lead and start cracking down on foreign lobbying violations.

The DOJ unit dedicated to enforcing FARA is small, and has focused in the past on prodding lobbyists to comply with the law voluntarily, rather than going after them by pressing criminal charges. Mueller’s willingness to indict Manafort and Gates instead of just hounding them to file has struck fear into lobbyists that they could be next.

If you’re a D.C. power player, you get asked politely to follow the law. Must be nice.

“It used to be [that the Justice Department would work with you to become compliant,” said another foreign lobbyist, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. “Now there’s a fear that they’ll just prosecute you.”

Oh, the horror. They might “just prosecute you” like a common peasant.

But the bar for criminal prosecution is high. Under the law, prosecutors can go after lobbyists only for willful violation of the law — a tough standard to prove.

“Policy makers are here to serve the interests of the American people, so we need to know when someone is pushing the priorities of a foreign interest,” Grassley said in a statement. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen time and again how lobbyists of foreign principals skirt existing disclosure laws to conceal their clients’ identities and agendas.”

But Lott said he wouldn’t hold his breath waiting for Congress to pass the legislation, especially with President Donald Trump still pushing to move a tax reform bill by the end of the year.

“There’s not much of anything happening right now in Congress, to be perfectly frank,” Lott said.

Of course not. Criminals run the place and they’re not going to prosecute themselves.

Now let’s turn to a few nuggets from a similarly themed BuzzFeed piece:

WASHINGTON – The threat of serving hard time for failing to disclose foreign lobbying work is rattling Washington’s multi-billion dollar influence industry following Monday’s 12-count indictment against Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates.

And although the charges have largely been seen as a blow to the White House, Monday’s actions by special prosecutor Robert Mueller also sent shivers down the spines of Washington’s lobbyists, both Democrats and Repulicans.

“It’s a swampy place, and the swampy stink knows no partisan allegiance,” said one senior Democratic congressional aide.

A September 2016 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general identified a series of problems with how DOJ had handled FARA cases in the past. There was disagreement within the department about what types of cases should be prosecuted, the inspector general’s office found, and the FBI felt DOJ attorneys were slow in reviewing FARA cases and reluctant to sign off on criminal charges. The report also found that the FBI and local federal prosecutors reported feeling frustrated at being overruled by attorneys from the National Security Division about cases that they believed were worth pursuing.

Hold on a minute, what the heck is the “National Security Division” and why is it preventing rank and file FBI agents from prosecuting criminal lobbyists?

So that’s how the law works for D.C. lobbyists. Let’s now examine what happens if you’re a protester who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time during Donald’s Trump inauguration.

What follows are some very disturbing excerpts from a must read article published in The Nation, The Prosecution of Inauguration-Day Protesters Is a Threat to Dissent:

Late next month, the first mass trial will be held for some of the roughly 200 people facing years—or even decades—in prison after being arrested during an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist protest that took place on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration. The “J20” cases, as they are known, offer a glimpse at the treatment of dissent in this country, and the story they tell is one of overreach and criminalization. Defense lawyers have described the government’s approach as “unprecedented,” its indictments as “littered with fatal irremediable defects.” Sam Menefee-Libey of the DC Legal Posse, a group of activists who provide support to the defendants, was more blunt, criticizing the cases as “blatant political prosecutions” designed to “chill resistance.”

The story of the J20 protesters should frighten anyone concerned about the future of both free assembly and dissent in the United States. The charges—which include felony rioting, inciting or urging others to riot, conspiracy to riot, and property destruction—all stem from the same mass arrest, during which police indiscriminately swept up protesters, journalists, and legal observers. What makes the charges all the more troubling is that prosecutors then failed to allege that the bulk of defendants did anything specifically unlawful; rather, merely being at the protest was a crime.

A case in point: The prosecution charged all of the defendants (at one point numbering 214) with breaking the same windows. Prosecutors, of course, know that 200 people cannot break the same windows. But the logic of the case dictates that the defendants’ mere presence at a protest during which property damage occurred makes them guilty…

Few people dispute that property destruction took place during the march. Some individuals smashed windows, including those of a Bank of America branch and a limousine; prosecutors allege that there was more than $100,000 in property damage and that six police officers received minor injuries. Where things get thorny is that many of the people who have been charged did not commit property damage or violence but have been deemed guilty by their mere presence at the protest.

The problems began during the arrests themselves—arrests deemed so troubling that the ACLU has brought a lawsuit against the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) accusing its members of using excessive force, making unconstitutional arrests, and more.

Among the controversial practices police engaged in that day, lawyers and observers say, was a tactic called “kettling.” Kettling is a form of indiscriminate mass arrest, wherein police block off a given area and arrest everyone within it. To be lawful, an arrest requires probable cause based on individual suspicion. Yet, inevitably, this heavy-handed tactic often sweeps up other protesters and bystanders whose only offense was their physical proximity to the alleged crime. Indeed, a report on the inauguration by the DC Office of Police Complaints noted that “it seems that proximity to the area where property damage occurred was a primary factor” in the arrests.

The mass arrests gave birth to the next government overreach, mass “felony riot” charges against those arrested. Felony rioting carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a $25,000 fine, and applies when the alleged riot results in more than $5,000 in property damage. This is opposed to misdemeanor rioting, which can get you only 180 days in jail.

Attorneys who have long represented protesters in DC report never having encountered mass felony charges stemming from a protest before. Not the least of the reasons is that it’s difficult to produce enough evidence to sustain felony charges against dozens—or in this case, some 200—people. Yet, rather than backing down, prosecutors expanded the case by filing additional charges, and, in April, a grand jury returned a superseding indictment that added inciting or urging to riot and conspiracy to riot to the list of crimes. These new charges brought the number of felony counts up from one to eight and the amount of time defendants could face from 10 years to more than 70 years in prison.

The government’s overarching theory, then, seems to be one of guilt by association. Or that, as Assistant US Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff asserted during a hearing about dismissing the charges, it is “the group that is the danger, the group that is criminal.” Thus one need not have committed an act of vandalism as an individual; just being present at the protest makes one guilty. (The DoJ declined to comment for this story, as the cases are currently pending.)

Among those swept up in this overbroad approach was a group of at least seven journalists who were covering the J20 protests. While prosecutors ultimately dismissed the felony rioting charges against the bulk of the journalists nearly as quickly as they were filed, two journalists remain in the crosshairs: Aaron Cantú, then a freelancer who has published with The Nation and The Intercept, and Alexei Wood, who livestreamed the event. In April a grand jury brought a superseding indictment of eight felony charges against both reporters along with the other defendants. They face as many as 70 years in prison, possibly more.

The indictment against Cantú deploys the same guilt-by-association approach that mars the entire case. Per prosecutors, Cantú moved in proximity to the march—something that would be necessary in order for him to do his job as a journalist. But prosecutors have additional evidence against Cantú: He wore the color black.

Blade Runner And The Synthetic Panopticon

Posted on November 5, 2017 by Reid Mukai

Truth Is Always An Open Question

By James Curcio

Source: Modern Mythology

This Is Only A Model

We are living in alternate realities. In one reality people see Trump’s incessant lying, and no one in power seeming to doing anything to stop it. Others see him as battling the deep state. Some see Brexit as a blind idiot kamikaze mission, while others see it as fighting back the evils of globalism. These are not equivalent claims, but they are both claims, narratives that claim to represent the way things are, and that’s what I’d like to examine here.

“All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails is a function of power and not truth.” — Nietzsche

Note that this aphorism doesn’t say “there is no truth,” nor does it question whether we all ultimately inhabit a single reality, only that whichever interpretation of the truth prevails is a function of power. Truth relies on an accurate or corresponding representation of reality. In this sense, we can talk of them singularly. But we only have our narratives and experiences with which to evaluate what that is.

And what is power? That demands at least an article in itself, but a popular 1984 quote lays the heart of what it’s purpose is: more of itself.

We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

This interpretation of social dynamics doesn’t contest the legitimacy of the scientific method, iteratively approaching closer approximations of truth (a model) distilled from reality, through experimentation. In fact, this premise was presented by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow in their 2010 book, The Grand Design.

Model-dependent realism is a view of scientific inquiry that focuses on the role of scientific models of phenomena. It claims reality should be interpreted based upon these models, and where several models overlap in describing a particular subject, multiple, equally valid, realities exist. It claims that it is meaningless to talk about the “true reality” of a model as we can never be absolutely certain of anything. The only meaningful thing is the usefulness of the model.

However, social dynamics aren’t exactly like physics, either. Not being able to recognize the difference between the ideal (an appeal for rationality, consistent methodology, and balance), vs. how people actually engage with interpreting it is a serious problem. And got to catch up. Fast.

In other words, the appeal for truth — whether CNN’s recent “this is an apple” advertisement, or Fox New’s old “fair and balanced” — itself enters into the marketplace of ideas. Or perhaps a more apt metaphor is a battlefield, especially when we consider the amount of capital, technology and labor that states, corporations, and billionaires can throw at furthering their personal agendas.

Cognitive biases, innate responses like tribalism, the myopia of fear, etc. are all being leveraged via media, all around us, all the time. This includes all forms of media, since it’s all digital narrative building of a collective sort. Myth making, even. That’s the real point, and it seems to be drowned out across the spectrum. We’re all too familiar now with the ideas of dis/information wars, but all of them are fundamentally a contest over who gets to define the narrative. If we recognize that this is fundamentally about power, do we also recognize that it operates on dynamics that have absolutely nothing to do with our dearly held moral values?

An assumption some may draw from this is that vested interests have distorted reality; therefore there is no reality. However, that obviously isn’t quite right, either. What obscures clear thinking on this is that reality essentially has two meanings: the “state of things as they are”, which makes no assurances of what that state is, and the question of if things exist at all. The first poses an epistemological framework, the latter, an ontological one.

The former we might consider the social-linguistic definition. That shouldn’t be conflated with the absolute existence of a thing. No, it can only speak to the identity and meaning that we apply to what we’re given.

The Hierarchy of Reality

This may seem like a tangent, but consider the Turing test:

The Turing test, developed by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. … If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test.

In other words, the appearance of sentience is all we ever get. An AI that behaves as if conscious is, from the outside, precisely the same as a conscious agent. If we appear to be having a conversation, then so we are. But does that prove we’re real in some definitive sense? No. Again, we are being presented with the social-linguistic layer of reality, that speaks to perceptions.

The relevance here to society is to be found within Blade Runner, which of course takes a great deal of inspiration in its core mythos from the problems posed by the Turing test. The world presented there is a hierarchy of power based on perceived degree of reality.

There is, within this, the implications of Benthamite Utilitarianism, and Foucault’s later elaboration on those ideas: that we may consider the world based on externalities that are socially determined rather than based on our internal experience. This seems in some sense precisely the opposite of “lived experience,” which seeks to situate our internal experience as the center of our concerns.

This directly enters into Blade Runner 2049, for instance, Joi, who seems the lowest on the hierarchy of reality, is seen as a pure surface, and all but K seem to question whether she has any lived experience at all. Mariette observes to K, “Oh I see, you don’t like real girls,” and later to Joi, “I‘ve been inside you. Not so much there as you think.”

Of course, this question is always open, one must always be judged “sufficiently real.”

Another example of this dilemma can be found in a current medical crisis. As many Americans know, we have something of an opiate epidemic in the United States. Although there is no end of debate over why this is the case, for doctors concerned about liability and patients concerned about being in pain for the rest of their lives, much of the politics boils away.

The problem comes down to the nature of pain itself. We may exhibit external signs of pain, but some patients will present with those more or less, for various cultural, personal, and even biological reasons. So the appearance of pain or lack of it is little use, when trying to determine whether a patient is “drug seeking.” Even if we test the biological response of different patients who are experiencing pain, we find that it is very difficult to tell. This is especially true with those who experience chronic pain. For instance, blood pressure often rises when you’re in pain, but higher blood pressure isn’t proof, and one must also ask what the baseline is. All of this calls to mind the lie-detector style tests used in the first Blade Runner movie to assess the reality of the subject, from the outside in.

Patient reporting was seen as the golden standard for pain level diagnosis during the years that doctors were ostensibly over-prescribing. But this too is no better than asking a Replicant whether they’re “real” or not. What we’re left with is a dependence on trust of people’s own stories about their lived experience, but of course, people can also lie. It comes down to a matter of faith and trust, and those are commonly in short supply.

This outside-in valuation is also the basis for what has recently come to be called — with some contention — neoliberal capitalism.

… it [Utilitarianism] presupposes a very concrete theory of nature as well as human nature: an understanding of human beings not as unique, irreplaceable beings — as neighbors, friends, or members of a community oriented toward justice and fairness — but rather as nameless, faceless, calculating, hedonistic, atomistic units. Alongside of this it understands nature and the natural world of plants, animals, trees, oceans and mountains not as intrinsic goods in themselves, but merely as ‘things’ that have only human use-value.

This gives us a clue to understanding why utilitarianism is so attractive to a modern bureaucratized, consumerist culture that is prepared to uphold profit maximization over human health, environmental safety, clean water and nutritious food. In other words, utilitarianism is widely embraced precisely because it replaces the living, breathing, emotional and experiencing human being with the human as pleasure or profit maximizing machine; it prizes the quick technical fix over the difficult task of understanding the human condition; it valorizes thoughtless calculation over thoughtful ethical discernment and practical wisdom. — CounterPunch

So Blade Runner presents an acceleration of the myths many of us already apply to the world around us, one which is deeply suspicious of our ability to find singular truth, or maybe more aptly, to avoid inflicting our power fantasies, needs and fears upon one another, forever.

The Authority of Authorship

When we engage with narratives online, in the press, in the media, we need to remain constantly aware that it is presenting a view of the world, and it is a view which in many ways is likely to be self-serving. There is, at the same time, an invisible architecture at work underneath the ways the world is re-presented to us, and this composes one of the fundamental anxieties that Baudrillard presented in Simulacra and Simulation. We cannot always discern even our own motives, or the reasons why we feel that one thing is more true than another when truly sufficient evidence has not been provided. Because interpretations of truth are malleable. And there has never been a mass-surveillance, mass-behavioral and linguistic analysis machine like the Internet.

It is easy for us to apply this sort of cynicism towards our presumptive ideological enemies, but will always remain more difficult to apply that same consideration to narratives that immediately go, “ah, this seems true!” Again, truth is always a claim, which must be proven — and never finally.

All authority that seeks to stop this process and say “put no others before me” are plays at power. Even within our own minds and hearts this is true.

We mustn’t forget that.

Are We Living Haunted Lives?

Posted on October 29, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

‘Fear has many eyes
And can see things underground’
~Cervantes, Don Quixote

The world as we know it has gone from being flat to round; from being the center of the universe to the center of the solar system; from being animistic and supernatural to raw in tooth and claw; from being particle-atomic to wavy-quantum. And now we are disappearing into the digital domains of virtual-augmented spaces and false information, bombarded with the spectacle and the image. And somewhere in the midst of all this is the human soul, still largely wrapped and unopened. If there’s a crime here then it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to become haunted – to live haunted lives that lack significance and meaning.

The ‘objects’ or values that we have attempted to live by, or that we pursue, – such as power, truth, understanding, dreams, work, love, and the rest – have all seemingly vanished into some warped, elusive reality where the presence of these things no longer tangibly exist. However, the doubt, uncertainty, and pain of their absence – or ‘fake presence’ – are indeed real enough to affect us deeply. We seek the already disappeared and stalk their substitutes.

We are now close to the stage where we end up just acting out our fantasies upon the phantasmal theatre of our lives and thinking it is reality. This theatre, or screen, of fantasies and the fantastical is like the cave wall in Plato’s allegory where the flickering shadows that move across are taken to be the real. In an updating of Plato’s famous allegory we no longer have shadows projected upon the cave wall; they are now projected upon the green screens that form the back-drop for computer-generated imagery (CGI) that adorn our movies, television programs, and video games.

Whole societies, notably in the technologically-advanced western world, are arranging for our lives to be enacted amidst a scenery backdrop of events and issues artificially projected for us as CGI onto a fake canvas. Within this encroaching visual world, full of misinformation that influences our worldview, we are made to believe in a different kind of reality. It is a reality that is uncertain and insecure, and that requires for us to hold deep obedience to our state institutions to protect us. And within this projection of reality, meanings are provided for us as ready-made meals. In other words, full of too much salt, saturated fats, and laziness.

These socially manufactured meanings are provided as a substitute for the genuine lack. Of these choices offered we often take our pick, as consumers in a marketplace. It may be career, wealth, fame, achievement, or a combination of these and more. Yet the manufactured consent in our sense of meaning, no matter how thoroughly pursued and potentially obtained, is still not genuine. And like the ready-made meal, it soon leaves us with a continued hunger. The illusion of meaning is a vital illusion, yet it still remains an illusion. We may say then that the world we have come to know is a great spectacle of illusion and play; of movement, distraction, simulation, and excess. Yet rather than critically confronting the illusions and distractions we are cleverly persuaded to indulge in them.

The world we share now is also shared with our collective doubts, fears, anger, and frustrations. And these new emotions upon the global stage are blurring our picture of the world and its future. Whilst there are many of us who are excited and genuinely inspired by this increased complexity and diversity there has been a cultural backlash, in the western nations especially, to cover this up with a sheen of simplicity through generic news, bland reporting, and excruciatingly trivial entertainment. This clash of the complex with the simple is creating an odd reality where things just don’t feel right anymore.

We are participants on a ride through the flippant and the flimsy, the significant and the necessary, as we are expected to find our foothold – our human soul – in a world seemingly on the verge of insanity. In such a world, Disneyland may seem to some as the greatest of sanctuaries; whilst to rest of us it stands as a superficial sign of our times.

Most of us do not have the capacity to verify the truth claims of the mainstream media and yet we are more than willing it accept the veracity of their claims. We suspend our own disbelief by trusting in others, especially when it comes to authority and experts. In other words, we have been conditioned to respect the positions of authority and ‘the expert,’ often without critical thought.

And this is the context which frames the telling of his-story and also our-stories. The singer-songwriter Lou Reed once sang, ‘Don’t believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.’ Documentary film-maker Adam Curtis discusses this phenomenon of how the mainstream media projects a simplified, fake reality in his film HyperNormalization (2016). The term hypernormaliztion was taken from an account of life in the Soviet Union during the twenty years before it collapsed. In this account everyone knew the system was failing but they couldn’t envision any alternative and so everyone is resigned to maintaining the pretence of a functioning society. Over time this delusion is accepted as real, an effect termed as hypernormalization. In other words, when the fake is finally accepted as the real then we are living in a hypernormalized state. Does this sound familiar?

The question is – does Reality ever take place?

Our bodies of authority, our mainstream media channels, and our centers of learning – that is, a majority of our significant institutions – have turned, or are in the process of turning, into advertising gimmicks. They peddle publicity and propaganda as endless programs stuck on a loop. They serve to produce the appearance of reality; yet they fail to represent a sense of reality. And this fundamental difference has produced a feeling of living haunted lives. We wander as ghosts in liminal zones, hungry for meaning.

In this sense of loss we no longer seem to know, or distinguish, between oppositions. Almost all of our value systems are based on relative terms – good, bad, my history, your history, etc. Often, the values we take to be ‘our values’ were inculcated in us depending upon which culture we happened to be born into. It is true there are some values more universally shared – such as thou shalt not kill – but the majority of them are culturally relative. Take for instance, sex before marriage – good or bad? Same-sex partnerships? Freedom of religious speech? Eating pork? Eating rats? Democrats or Republicans? Labour or Conservative? Which is good and which is bad? In the case of political parties it is neither – they are false oppositions. More than that, they are also distractions. When you’re arguing (sorry, debating) over political parties you are not observing the system behind them that created this false lack of choice in the first place. False oppositions plague our haunted hinterland. We don’t see this if we are the aimless ghosts, or the walking dead. It’s not pleasant – it’s eerie. And we are in eerie times.

Modernity in its current form is haunted by a sense of loss; of not knowing where it is heading. There are a great many aspects of our age that are in disruption and dislocation. All forms of stability are in question; old and incumbent patterns and models are in dispute; and too many people are experiencing moods of despair and anguish. It is as if our human civilization has come loose from its moorings and is now adrift upon the waters of uncertainty, insignificance, and the loss of meaning.

And so it seems that our civilization is careering dangerously close to some kind of blind spot where we no longer can tell what is true or false anymore. Truth is replaced by a fake substitute and the false becomes a parody of the truth. They are the haunted spaces where the mist drifts by. It’s like a Zen joke. It’s the same as a voice whispering in the darkness saying there is no such thing as a voice whispering in the darkness. They couldn’t have written a better riddle if they had tried.

So what went wrong? Where did it all go? What is it, in fact?

A profound sense of unease has crept into many of us, and also into our social systems, our cultures, our art, our news, and into the very collective soul of humanity. It is an eeriness; an uncertain disquiet – almost an unsettling foreboding. Something has come loose, and we’re not sure what it is. Further still, most of us are fairly certain that those institutions supposedly ‘looking after our best interests’, or running the show – whether they be governmental bodies, financial elites, or shadowy organizations and cabals – are not really in control or are sure either. It feels as if something is amiss, and we just can’t quite put our finger on it. Welcome to our haunted modernity.

We have disarray over a consensus concerning climate chaos, stock market panics and economic crashes, offshore tax evasions and leaked documents, political scandals, pandemic threats and contested vaccines, state and terrorist violence, congenital anxiety and existential fear – a whole cauldron of terror, dread, disquiet, nervousness, angst, and what-the-hell-is-going-on collective confusion is bubbling both under and over in many of our societies.

We have been infiltrated with a virus and it is infecting not only our bodies but our very minds. It’s a pure mind-bending virus and it’s playing havoc with our insecurities and indulging in our sense of lostness. The Spanish have a phrase for this state – “de perdidos al río” – and it roughly translates as from lost to the river. It may not make complete literal sense in English but that’s just it; you can get the sense of it and its vagueness is exactly where we are – from lost to the river!

In such ‘haunted lives’ we can easily become accustomed to metaphysical anguish as just another pain. It is like a pulled muscle or a sprained ankle; something unpleasant and yet we continue to move around with it. In the end we learn how to direct and project this metaphysical anguish onto other things – we choose intoxicating entertainment, sports, and other cultural pastimes and diversions. Angst just becomes a factor that appears to come as a default setting with our species. There is the danger that we become accepting of the ghostly flimsiness to life, which ends up being hypernormalized so that the sense of absence of something real becomes the new reality. There is the dangerous potential here for a state of indifference to emerge and seep into our cultures, which then becomes an ennui-creep into the world until…oh, well, what does it matter anyway?

During these years of disarray and turbulence it is essential that we create meaning for ourselves, otherwise the ‘distant algorithmic’ universe that runs the life around us will create a deep sense of alienation. In a world of scrambled code and big data, transcendence will seem another chimera not within grasp or even real. Or, at worse, the very notion of transcendence will seem the delirium of unstable minds – for those people not able to ‘get real’ with the world of Now.

In this instance, transcendence will appear as a form of spiritual autism. And yet the notion of going beyond ourselves, of developing our capacities for higher perception, are the saving grace inherent within our human species. We are incomplete, and this haunts us, and yet it should also give us meaning and a higher aim in life in knowing that there is further to go. In knowing that there are tools within us for creating, shaping, and cultivating these finer faculties. In being haunted we are also being reminded of what is lacking and this urge should compel us to find a solution within ourselves. We are in fact being ‘haunted into remembrance.’

However, for many of us a haunted modernity offers us a conditioned life where there is little or no space for transcendence. In such social and cultural hauntings there are no navigable locations. We have stepped into an unsouling from the wilderness. We are compelled to walk on.

The conspiracy to censor the Internet

Posted on October 27, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Andre Damon and Joseph Kishore

Source: WSWS.org

The political representatives of the American ruling class are engaged in a conspiracy to suppress free speech. Under the guise of combating “trolls” and “fake news” supposedly controlled by Russia, the most basic constitutional rights enumerated in the First Amendment are under direct attack.

The leading political force in this campaign is the Democratic Party, working in collaboration with sections of the Republican Party, the mass media and the military-intelligence establishment.

The Trump administration is threatening nuclear war against North Korea, escalating the assault on health care, demanding new tax cuts for the rich, waging war on immigrant workers, and eviscerating corporate and environmental regulations. This reactionary agenda is not, however, the focus of the Democratic Party. It is concentrating instead on increasingly hysterical claims that Russia is “sowing divisions” within the United States.

In the media, one report follows another, each more ludicrous than the last. The claim that Russia shifted the US election by means of $100,000 in advertisements on Facebook and Twitter has been followed by breathless reports of the Putin government’s manipulation of other forms of communication.

An “exclusive” report from CNN last week proclaimed that one organization, “Don’t Shoot Us,” which it alleges without substantiation is connected to Russia, sought to “exploit racial tensions and sow discord” on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr and even Pokémon Go, a reality game played on cell phones.

Another report from CNN on Monday asserted that a Russian “troll factory” was involved in posting comments critical of Hillary Clinton as “part of President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to influence the 2016 election.” All of the negative commentary in news media and other publications directed at Clinton, it implied, were the product of Russian agents or people duped by Russian agents.

As during the period of Cold War McCarthyism, the absurdity of the charges goes unchallenged. They are picked up and repeated by other media outlets and by politicians to demonstrate just how far-reaching the actions of the nefarious “foreign enemy” really are.

While one aim has been to continue and escalate an anti-Russia foreign policy, the more basic purpose is emerging ever more clearly: to criminalize political dissent within the United States.

The most direct expression to date of this conspiracy against free speech was given by the anticommunist ideologue Anne Applebaum in a column published Monday in the Washington Post, “If Russia can create fake ‘Black Lives Matter’ accounts, who will next?”

Her answer: the American people. “I can imagine multiple groups, many of them proudly American, who might well want to manipulate a range of fake accounts during a riot or disaster to increase anxiety or fear,” she writes. She warns that “political groups—on the left, the right, you name it—will quickly figure out” how to use social media to spread “disinformation” and “demoralization.”

Applebaum rails against all those who seek to hide their identity online. “There is a better case than ever against anonymity, at least against anonymity in the public forums of social media and comment sections,” she writes. She continues: “The right to free speech is something that is granted to humans, not bits of computer code.” Her target, however, is not “bots” operating “fake accounts,” but anyone who seeks, fearing state repression or unjust punishment by his or her employer, to make an anonymous statement online. And that is only the opening shot in a drive to silence political dissent.

Applebaum is closely connected to the highest echelons of the capitalist state. She is a member of key foreign policy think tanks and sits on the board of directors of the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy. Married to the former foreign minister of Poland, she is a ferocious war hawk. Following the Russian annexation of Crimea, she authored a column in the Washington Post in which she called for “total war” against nuclear-armed Russia. She embodies the connection between militarism and political repression.

The implications of Applebaum’s arguments are made clear in an extraordinary article published on the front page of Tuesday’s New York Times, “As US Confronts Internet’s Disruptions, China Feels Vindicated,” which takes a favorable view of China’s aggressive censorship of the Internet and implies that the United States is moving toward just such a regime.

“For years, the United States and others saw” China’s “heavy-handed censorship as a sign of political vulnerability and a barrier to China’s economic development,” the Times writes. “But as countries in the West discuss potential Internet restrictions and wring their hands over fake news, hacking and foreign meddling, some in China see a powerful affirmation of the country’s vision for the internet.”

The article goes on to assert that while “few would argue that China’s Internet control serves as a model for democratic societies… At the same time, China anticipated many of the questions now flummoxing governments from the United States to Germany to Indonesia.”

Glaringly absent from the Times article, Applebaum’s commentary and all of the endless demands for a crackdown on social media is any reference to democratic rights, free speech or the First Amendment.

The First Amendment, which asserts that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” is the broadest amendment in the US Constitution. Contrary to Applebaum, there is no caveat exempting anonymous speech from Constitutional protection. It is a historical fact that leaders of the American Revolution and drafters of the Constitution wrote articles under pseudonyms to avoid repression by the British authorities.

The Constitution does not give the government or powerful corporations the right to proclaim what is “fake” and what is not, what is a “conspiracy theory” and what is “authoritative.” The same arguments now being employed to crack down on social media could just as well have been used to suppress books and mass circulation newspapers that emerged with the development of the printing press.

The drive toward Internet censorship in the United States is already far advanced. Since Google announced plans to bury “alternative viewpoints” in search results earlier this year, leading left-wing sites have seen their search traffic plunge by more than 50 percent. The World Socialist Web Site’s search traffic from Google has fallen by 75 percent.

Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms have introduced similar measures. The campaign being whipped up over Russian online activity will be used to justify even more far-reaching measures.

This is taking place as universities implement policies to give police the authority to vet campus events. There are ongoing efforts to abolish “net neutrality” so as to give giant corporations the ability to regulate Internet traffic. The intelligence agencies have demanded the ability to circumvent encryption after having been exposed for illegally monitoring the phone communications and Internet activity of the entire population.

In one “democratic” country after another governments are turning to police-state forms of rule, from France, with its permanent state of emergency, to Germany, which last month shut down a subsidiary of the left-wing political site Indymedia, to Spain, with its violent crackdown on the separatist referendum in Catalonia and arrest of separatist leaders.

The destruction of democratic rights is the political response of the corporate and financial aristocracy to the growth of working class discontent bound up with record levels of social inequality. It is intimately linked to preparations for a major escalation of imperialist violence around the world. The greatest concern of the ruling elite is the emergence of an independent movement of the working class, and the state is taking actions to prevent it.

Financialization, precarity and reactionary authoritarianism

Posted on October 25, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By increasing global competition, the precariousness wrought by financialization has laid the foundations for reactionary authoritarianism around the world.

By Max Haiven

Source: ROAR

Financialization: Fictitious Capital in Popular Culture and Everyday Life, released last month in paperback from Palgrave Macmillan. The book argues that financialization is not just the increasing power and authority of speculative capital over the global economy, but also the way the it seems into and is reflected in politics, social institutions and the realm of cultural meaning.

This section comes at the end of a chapter on the ways financialization both drives onward and depends on the increasing precariousness of workers, putting us into global competition with one another and also infecting our sense of value and success. Haiven argues that this situation produces a tendency towards reactionary authoritarianism based on a “forgetting” and a loathing of our shared human condition of precariousness. He concludes by asking us to consider other models for thinking about debt and precarity that stress radical interdependence.

It is followed by a brief authors’ note reflecting on the piece four years since it was first penned in 2013.

Precarious fear and loathing

Today precariousness is the norm, not the exception. Our current precarious moment, one dominated by market and financial forces and manifesting itself as a violent form of hyper-neoliberal austerity (which is producing ever more and deeper economic precariousness), is only one particularly pernicious manifestation of an underlying ontological condition. It is worse than many such manifestations precisely because it is so successful in privatizing precariousness through the logic of individualism and competition.

We come to blame ourselves, rather than the system, for our precariousness, in part because, unlike some rigid caste-based system or a slave society, we are (most of us) legally and technically free to escape precariousness (though, ironically, to escape by embracing precarity, by using every skill, talent and asset we might possess to leverage ourselves into fabled prosperity). It is a system that works by promising that we can, each of us, alone, escape our existential condition of precariousness by getting rich, by obeying the system’s axiomatic dictates and playing our role.

The constant barrage of images and tales of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, of celebrities and of others who have “made it” do not exist (as they did in a previous era) to show us the right social order and the natural superiority of certain sorts of people. Rather, these ubiquitous dream-images promise each of us a life without precariousness or, more accurately (if we think about the cinematic depictions of the Wall Street predator) a life where precariousness is mastered and leveraged.

This helps explain the virulent disdain that grows and grows towards the poor, the refugee, the (almost always racialized) populations deemed to be “at risk.” To the extent that we succeed in leveraging ourselves out of the total liquidation of our lives by building up a life of financial prosperity and (the illusion of) security, we are compelled to close ourselves off to what Judith Butler, drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, calls the “face” of the other: the empathetic image of existential suffering. In fact, to the extent participation in financialization has come afford us the privilege of forgetting our inherent shared condition of precariousness, we come to loathe the face of precarity, loathe the way it calls us back into a fellow precarious human body.

The colors of risk

As a result, we should not expect that the almost universal adoption of the free market will lead to any sort of peace or cosmopolitanism in the world, as neoliberal thinkers like Fredrich Hayek or Francis Fukayama believed. Nor should we assume that the financialized age of austerity will prompt such a wave of popular discontent that radical social transformation is inevitable. To the extent that we are made more and more precarious, we brew an existential anger, a self-loathing that can easily be displaced onto convenient others.

Ironically, it is not easily displaced onto the architects and beneficiaries of financialized capitalism, but instead gravitates towards the more precarious, the more abject: they who call us back into the shared precarious what Marx called our “species being,” our shared precarious condition as imaginative cooperative animals dependent on one another for joy and survival. While this may or may not manifest itself in the form of new nationalisms, it will manifest itself in the form of hatred towards the homeless, towards refugees, towards welfare recipients and towards others.

It is vital to note that, in North America and Europe, and in different ways elsewhere, this precarious vitriol cannot be separated from the history of race and racism. Older modes of racial enslavement, apartheid and segregation served the same function, similarly allowing those read as “white” to posit a superior form of humanity which both occluded a shared precariousness and elevated the material wealth and security of whites at the expense of immiserated, exploited and impoverished non-whites (in different ways, in different times and places).

Indeed, earlier moments of capitalism explicitly mobilized whiteness and its real and perceived benefits vis-a-vis precariousness to divide workers along color lines, a condition that fed, and was fed by, the existential precariousness of non-whites who, as second-class citizens, slaves, migrant laborers or perpetual “outsiders,” were not afforded the same personal safety or security (neither de jure nor de facto).

The current reigning assumption is that we have entered a “post-racial” moment, that racism is merely a marginal anachronism, and that racialized people face no systemic barriers to achieving a non-precarious life like “everyone else” — in other words, they are as free to enter the market as anyone else, and the market does not “see” race. The opposite is, in fact, the case: racism and racial inequality towards non-white people persist and, in some ways, are even worse thanks to the mechanisms of financialized market which also works to make those inequalities functionally invisible.

Banking on resentment

On another level, we might speculate that precariousness, in both image and concept, is already racialized, that our understandings of what it means to be precarious, and the negative associations with which this term resonates, are already coded as non-white and call up a legacy and a present of racialized images of abjection, destitution, subservience and shiftlessness. Indeed, we might ask to what extent political systems in the West base their legitimacy on the invisiblized darkness of precariousness. The politically expedient citation of the disappearance of “hard-working Americans” and “the middle class” (both of which are imagined as white) into a dark miasma of economic depression is indelibly associated with popular depictions of ghettos and menial racialized workers.

Suffice it for now to say that we can certainly see these trends as played out in largely white backlash movements which have arisen to confront non-white peoples’ or groups’ claims to social and economic justice. From anti-Muslim organizing in Western Europe (framed in terms of defending a white national heritage and white workers), to anti-Black “whitelash” in the United States (from the Detroit Riots to Rodney King to Trevon Martin), to the anti-Indigenous vitriol in my home country of Canada, these seemingly spontaneous “social movements” speak not only to the politics of ignorance and fear, but also to the socio-economic conditions of precariousness, as well as the perceived failure of the state to live up to its promises to prevent precariousness for white people, all coupled with a history that locates precariousness along the axes of race and racialization.

This deeper existential and ontological crisis and anger is joined by another: the crisis of the middle class. Those professional or semi-professional workers who have been taught to expect middle-class incomes and job security are quickly finding themselves disposable in a vast pool of precarious workers, leading highly indebted, precarious lives with little hope for reprieve. In the coming years, increasingly fascistic political powers will gain ground by offering hollow promises to rebuild the middle class and to end precarity, through neocolonial geopolitical adventure or by creating or maintaining localized under-classes of hyper-precarious migrant or abject workers.

The cult of risk management

What would a politics look like that promised not to end but to embrace precariousness, not as an inescapable economic “reality” (which is what our current system of financialized austerity pledges) but as a socio-ontological sine qua non?

The answer is yet to be determined. But, ironically, an answer may be emerging out of the financialized paradigm that has driven precariousness to a new level of universality and acuity. The speculative ethos that animates financialization is one intimately and irreducibly acquainted with the ontological realities of precariousness. “Risk” and “risk management” are, underneath all their trappings of quantitative and scientistic rigour, mythological constructs for engaging with, navigating through and manipulating the cultural fabric of precariousness. Investments are, at a certain abstract level, attempts to leverage precarious life into more advantageous out- comes.

Finance, as a broad sphere of activities, is a mechanism by which individuals and society at-large seek to gain agency over the precariousness and contingency of the future. It is a particularly perverse mechanism, and one whose logic and mechanisms are either occluded from sight, or so complex, rapid or vast to be fully grasped, even by their primary engineers and agents in hedge funds and investment banks. Yet finance reproduces itself by cultivating and mobilizing the energies, creativity and hope of almost everyone in their attempts to thwart or diminish precarity, and aggregates all these individual and institutional actions into a system which, tragically, only drives greater and greater precariousness.

Generative debts?

The silver lining is perhaps this: what financialization reveals is the inherent futurity of precariousness. The word itself derives from the Latin prex or prayer, with strong connotations of begging or soliciting: yearning for future outcomes, throwing oneself on the mercy of fate or divine provenance. What our financialized moment might reveal is that our shared precariousness, which is the condition both of disastrous authoritarianism (including the disorganized and diffuse totalitarianism of finance capital itself) and of solidarity, does not only emerge from our shared material and ontological conditions; it is also a horizon of shared futurity. That is, precariousness carries encrypted within it a shared relationship with the future.

In this sense, nascent anti-debt organizing in the United States and elsewhere bears a great deal of potential. As Richard Dienst, David Graeber and Andrew Ross all affirm, the politics of debt, if they are to be a radical challenge to the financialized empire, cannot simply be a demand for some libertarian fantasy of complete individual freedom. Rather, they must embrace a broader, more capacious concept of the ontological wealth of social bonds that make life possible, that render all of us precariously reliant on one another. In this sense, they, each in their own way, encourage us to envision an expanded notion of (non-monetary) debt beyond as a grounds for crafting and building common futures through the entanglement of our social relationships.

Likewise, Angela Mitropoulos insists on the importance of moving beyond the limited concepts of financial debt and “debt servitude,” which depend upon and exalt the ideal of the individuated (white, masculine) self, the esteemed, contract-making personage at the heart of Western liberal political and economic philosophy and law. She notes that behind today’s politics of debt there reside the unacknowledged debts germane to the worlds of social reproduction and affective labor on which we all rely, which today are increasingly commodified in the so-called service sector. Indeed, the growth of precarious, feminized service-based labor over the past few decades cannot be separated from the rise of debt as a means to discipline workers and extract surplus value. Beyond the hollow promise of an ideal state of freedom from all obligations, radical potentialities might emerge from the affirmation and recognition of shared interdependency, of the shared need for what today is misrecognized as “service.” As she puts it:

The question it seems to me is not whether our debts can be erased, but what the lines of indebtedness are, how debt is defined, whether it takes the form of a financial obligation or some other consideration of relational inter-dependence, of the forms of life that the routine accounting of debts lets flourish or those that it obscures behind propositions of a seemingly more natural order of individuation, dependence, and obligation.

Beyond the colonial bond?

Glen Coulthard articulates a radical Indigenous reenvisioning of obligation that goes well beyond the Western philosophical canon:

Consider the following example from my people, the Dene Nations of what is now the Northwest Territories, Canada. In the Yellowknives Dene (or Weledeh) dialect of Dogrib, land (or dè) is translated in relational terms as that which encompasses not only the land (understood here as material), but also people and ani- mals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on. Seen in this light, we are as much a part of the land as any other element. Furthermore, within this system of relations human beings are not the only constituent believed to embody spirit or agency. Ethically, this meant that humans held certain obligations to the land, animals, plants, and lakes in much the same way that we hold obligations to other people. And if these obligations were met, then the land, animals, plants and lakes would reciprocate and meet their obligations to humans, thus ensuring the survival and well-being of all over time.

Coulthard’s articulation of a broader field of grounded land-based obligation, reciprocity and care demonstrates the radical potentialities that might emerge from a reconsideration of the bonds of debt and the conditions of shared precarity, were we open to re-envision their meanings beyond the hollow promises of security proffered by capital and the state.

Since the publication of Cultures of Financialization I have felt unhappily vindicated in my suspicion that financialization would give right to revanchist authoritarianism. But were I to approach the topic of this excerpt again, I would take more care to locate the origins of the loathing of precariousness within the specific histories of anti-Black racism. I would approach this by making more explicit the origins of finance capital in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slave economies in the Americas. I would follow this tendency through to the present-day ways that anti-Black racism and white-supremacy, as the template and operating condition of all forms of modern racism, is manifested again and again in the machinations of the financial empire, from the continued neocolonial pillage of Africa to the racialized dimension of the sub-prime loan crisis which led to the single largest theft of Black family wealth since Reconstruction.

Were I to approach this topic again I would also stress more centrally the ways in which settler colonialism destroys and denigrates a cooperative relationship with land, most horrifically by seeking the systematic elimination of autonomous Indigenous presence and power on land. I would seek to understand (as I have elsewhere) how settler colonialism has always been a financialized project, and how financialization has, historically and in the present, been enabled by settler colonialism.

I think that only with these in mind can we seek to understand how financialization has given rise not only to new forms of authoritarianism that promise (white people) respite from the precarity financialization has created, but which are fundamentally based on the acceleration and intensification of white supremacy and settler colonialism.

Finally, were I to approach this chapter again I would caution myself against a conclusion that could appear to call for a kind of new universalist embrace of shared precarity. I would have concerned myself with the way such a universalism, while noble in a certain abstract sense, can work to erase precisely the continued centrality of (anti-Black) racism and settler colonialism. Instead, I would have stressed that overcoming financialized precarity and these systems of oppression and exploitation will be based not only on high-minded virtues but meaningful relationships of militant solidarity and the collective invention of new forms of power, new institutions of care and new frames and practices of revolutionary thought and action.

Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Denis Rancourt

Source: Dissident Voice

SUMMARY: Societies of social animals, including humans, are dominance hierarchies. Civil rights are codified in law to protect mechanisms of essential counter measures against excessive exploitation of the hierarchy by elite classes, which destabilizes the entire society. Systemic pathology arises when elite classes can change the regulatory codes themselves, including civil rights protections, with impunity. Laws that quash civil rights are pathological in that they impede the system-repair mechanisms that are: free expression, free association, class opposition, and negotiated structural adjustments (otherwise known as democracy). Present anti-speech laws are extreme examples of pathological laws, the application of which is a measure of the degree of totalitarianism in the society. The history of the USA of recent decades is an eminent illustration of the concepts.

*****

The USA meltdown has been decades in the making and is the collateral result of an elite predation that has degraded structural elements needed for a healthy and resilient nation.

The aftermath is “too much regulation at the bottom, not enough at the top”: a pathological legislative and institutional structure in which elite interests have too much freedom to challenge and exploit democratic nation states, whereas middle, working and professional class actors, including small and medium-size private business, are economically, ideologically and politically constrained and suppressed to an excessive degree.

It has been a class war in which the predatory classes have barricaded themselves while inflicting humiliating defeat and loss of power, purpose and identity on the lower-stratum classes, which are incited to fight among themselves within the confines of new rules and the guarded illusion that these rules are an actuation of natural order.

In this way, personal and community motivation and inventiveness are sapped. The very motor of a vibrant modern society is jammed and the entire system becomes a system of debt-ransom extraction and management of globalized exploitation for the benefit of a secluded elite.

In this emergent system of excessive class exploitation, civil rights that protect critics and organizers become a threat against the exploiters rather than needed protections of personal and community emancipation that sustains economic production and innovation.

Allow me to explain, starting from fundamental considerations.

Arguably, the most fundamental statement that a social scientist can make is that humans interact by both violent and non-violent means, both individually and as groups, to establish and maintain societal dominance hierarchies. Call it by any name (tribalism, capitalism, socialism, totalitarianism…) humans always establish, maintain and grow dominance hierarchies, using whatever technology of the day.

The political end-point concept of “anarchy” is the theoretical absence of dominance hierarchy, which has never been ideally achieved and which is evidently unstable against growth of and replacement by dominance hierarchy. The reality of social animals is dominance hierarchy, which spontaneously adapts itself to environmental conditions and to the population size, while integrating accumulated knowledge and technological advances.

Within a dominance hierarchy (within a society), the essential counter against destabilizing excesses of dominance is push-back from individuals and groups — engendered by the individual desire for life, freedom and local influence — which acts in every stratum of the hierarchy.

In historically recent human societies, essential push-back is formalized with written laws that protect the individual against dominance encroachments that would be so severe that they would threaten hierarchical stability by increasing the potential for rebellion. These laws were at times deemed to be God-given and are now referred to as “civil rights”. They include both: (1) protections of the individual and of the nuclear and extended family against arbitrary attacks by the state or by rogue elements, and (2) protections for the individual and groups to seek redress and express grievances.

All laws are evolving codes to organise, stabilize and enforce an ever changing (often growing and complexifying) dominance hierarchy. “Good” laws find a “balance” between the graded benefits of hierarchy and the stratified oppressions against individuals and groups, a balance which stabilizes the whole system against deterioration (“injustice”), complete overhaul (“revolution”), or extinction (“downfall”).

Predictably, the codes themselves are often “hacked” by upper-strata groups that are overly ambitious in seeking additional relative advantages. The hacking upper-strata groups will recklessly change the laws for their own advantage in ways that materially threaten overall stability. This produces “pathological” laws that destabilize the overall hierarchy by driving society towards an intolerable degree of totalitarianism.

A now recognized on-going example is the decades-long elite attack, by taxation and global-finance reforms, against the USA middle class, which has prematurely destabilized the USA-centered global empire and its domestic internal society. The blowback from and defences against the USA’s practice of aggressive global dominance has also contributed, where the latter practice is similarly enabled by hacked foreign-policy and global governance laws.

When law-makers themselves can be bought by selfish elites self-segregated from the broad or domestic society, it is a recipe for disaster. In the USA and Canada law-enactment errors are multiplying, and there are no substantial Senatorial safeguards. Law-makers are formed or trained into compliance by career-enabling elites, rather than informed, principled and concerned about public service. Political parties are systematically controlled and constrained by the highest hierarchical echelons, which control the economy and the media.

When the backbone structure of the dominance hierarchy is thus degraded, as with the present crisis of the middle class, there is an impulse for both societal groups and lawmakers to become frantic and for the barricaded elite to exploit and ride out the storm rather than participate in repair. Every new manifestation of rebellion is interpreted as a fire to be extinguished rather than as necessary pushback needing to be allowed to play out. Decades of built-up fuel in the underbrush and extended drought are conditions for a devastating inferno but our “representatives” are successfully goaded into superficially addressing every new spark and violently suppressing every outbreak rather than dealing with the fundamentals.

Over decades, a complete restructuring of the relation between the state and the economy has been engineered, which, in its oppressive excesses, has led to the present crisis. The assault was accompanied by massive propaganda campaigns regarding the security benefits of government control and the welfare benefits of corporate rule. For example, predatory corporate take-over “investment” in public-service infrastructure is now presented as a good thing that should be actively sought using public funds.

The restructuring included: rolling back taxation of the wealthy while maintaining taxation of the middle and working classes, reducing or eliminating corporate taxation, increasing capital mobility, allowing investment flight, allowing infiltration of government-oversight and regulatory agencies (especially in the finance sector), gutting corporate regulatory agencies while transferring to self-regulatory models, unprecedented ideological control of professional workers in the public service (teachers, police, scientists, public servants, judges…), unrestrained lobby and think-tank influence, and unprecedented limitations (regulatory burdens) imposed on small and medium-size private businesses.

Top-level elite desires and machinations have become embedded into the very institutional structure of the economy and of the “deep state” more than ever previously. This is the result of decadal erosion of democracy and continuous increase of integration of government itself into the hierarchical power structure. The global-scale project is enabled by owned military, surveillance, communication, transportation and resource-extraction technologies; and surveillance and projection-of-power capabilities are unprecedented in history.

The resulting decadal overhaul of Western nations — in the march towards USA-centered globalism and the neutralization of Western middle and professional classes — has built-in deleterious structural features, as follows.

Mega corporations and financiers and their deep-state partners have not only militarily and covertly occupied the exploitable globe, they have also installed predation against the Western middle classes and Western public infrastructures. They have gutted mass education and maintained only elite schools for their managers and engineers. And they have gutted the Western middle and professional class mind and ethos and replaced these with canned concepts devoid of emancipating political thrust. More importantly, the educational and societal-maintenance institutions themselves have been transformed by removing professional independence and responsibility and replacing them with ideological obedience and observance of dictated think-tank-produced mantras.

The consequential suicidal pathology of the system’s operational code is twofold.

First, the new freedom and power of the USA-centered mega entities are used to eviscerate the very nation state whose structure evolved to optimally stabilize the nation-based dominance hierarchy. Even the world structures of international relations are hijacked and eviscerated to a higher degree.

Second, the middle and professional classes palpably lose many of the benefits accrued from accepting hierarchical domination, including loss of influence, and consequently suffer a crisis of identity, meaning and outlook… driven by real economic threat (loss or degradation of job and home).

Macro-economic data reveal the decadal transformation since 1980 but do not explain its source or describe its cultural, psychological and class impact. The data are generally cast as the result of an accident that can be fixed by more of the same from one of the two front parties.¹

In the real circumstances of the worsening middle-class crisis, it is natural that grievances are aired and solutions are sought to recover lost status. But at the same time, advocacy and the potential for an organized response are threats to the top-layer elites and embedded deep-state managers who have intentionally driven the system towards greater hierarchical control and increased upper-stratum gain.

That is why the system reacts by removing civil rights and sabotaging any technology or application venture that would enable communication and free association.

Whereas expression and grass-roots political response would repair the edifice, the needed remedy is aggressively quashed by those at the top who judge that the crisis is not one that can truly threaten them, is one that will dissipate with time or can be fixed synthetically, and that the distributed spontaneous solution is unacceptably risky in its potential to expose them.

There results the paradox that the system delays self-repair, builds up the pressure for repair, and creates worsening societal conditions rather than allow the proven natural remedy: free expression, free association, class opposition (based on the actual grievances rather than surrogates), and negotiated structural adjustments.

The pathology of the system in rejecting self-repair can be understood as follows.

Dominance hierarchies are both stable and evolutionarily advantageous only if effective balancing forces against creeping or runaway totalitarianism are admitted. A dominance hierarchy is doomed when its highest codes allow an elite class to have disproportionate power, including the power to modify the highest codes without restraint. In particular, in a society in which the state — controlled by an elite class — effectively has a technological monopoly on lethal force, the balancing mechanism of free expression, free association, and real influence — otherwise known as “democracy” — must be allowed.

It follows that any code that prevents free expression and free association is itself pathological. If all expression and all association are allowed, then the optimal conditions for self-repair are realized and a stable and resilient hierarchical structure will result. Since it is grounded in free expression and free association, then it will be optimally just. Justice is a thus self-organized and maintained hierarchy, not elite-given “equity” within a totalitarian matrix.

For free expression and free association to be meaningful many necessary conditions are implied: access to information, actual institutional transparency, access to the travel and communication infrastructures, absence of imposed barriers to association, absence of controls over personal choices, real opportunity for decent economic conditions that allow significant democratic participation, and the very novel concept of uniform application of just laws… Any rule that in-effect bars a necessary condition is also itself pathological.

I end this essay with a consideration of the special features that make anti-expression laws pathological, in the above sense of preventing self-repair of the societal dominance hierarchy.

The anti-speech laws, whether cast as “hate speech” criminal code provisions, or civil defamation law, or civility “codes of conduct” on campuses, have been manipulatively introduced by the elite because the elite are those most threatened by free speech and free association.

Speech is the means by which individuals use non-violent persuasion to acquire influence in society. It is the means that enables politics. In the USA, where citizens have a beneficial right even to bear arms for any required overthrow of the government²,³, freedom of expression was meant to be absolute, in that the USA constitution does not have a “balancing” clause as is common in other Western jurisdictions.⁴

Laws that enforce punishment for individual speech allegedly “causing” negative personal reactions in society at large are antithetical to democracy, and are immeasurably harmful to human emancipation and personal development. The above-mentioned examples are such anti-speech laws, notably including defamation law.⁵ They enforce punishments against individual speech that is alleged to “cause” an emotional or persuasive effect in others, which is deemed an unacceptable effect that must be targeted for elimination by state intervention against the presumed “cause”.

The said “emotional or persuasive effect” alleged to arise from the spoken words, in different laws, includes:

being induced to feel “hate” (anger, hostility, animosity) against a group in society
being induced to have a negative overall opinion about a specific person
being induced to adopt an ideology or political stance deemed impermissible (“hateful”)
being induced to commit suicide
being induced to participate in actuating a genocide
being induced to commit crimes of physical aggression or property damage

The underlying principle of these laws is that the person speaking words carries a punishable liability for what those words might induce in unspecified others, irrespective whether any actual physical crime occurs and irrespective of whether the words determinatively “cause” an actual physical crime. To be clear, under these laws, a judge arbitrarily (without needing evidence beyond the impugned words themselves and their method of delivery) decides whether the words induce deemed undesirable thoughts, opinions and attitudes in unspecified persons at large. Nothing else is required to establish liability or guilt, and by design it is impossible to disprove the charge, nor is an attempt to disprove admitted in court.

No matter how it may be masked with legalese or scholarly rationalization, this is precisely the nature of the anti-speech codes that are: “hate speech” criminal code provisions, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-historical-revisionism laws, anti-obscenity laws, the common law of civil defamation, and campus codes of conduct. One could add any “norms of expressive conduct” law.

For example, in defamation law, the impugned words are presumed to “cause” a low opinion of the plaintiff in the minds of unspecified others at large. In legalese: “general damage to reputation is presumed”. No causation proof is required of the claimant. Intent to harm is irrelevant (malice is presumed). No actual damage (loss of job, etc.) need be established. The words themselves as perceived by the judge are sufficient evidence. The judge must only opine, not on the intended meaning of the words, but on the meaning of the words in the mind of an imaginary listener. Such is civil defamation law, and there is no legal limit on the quantum of damages or the duration of gag orders that may be ordered under penalty of jail.⁵

These anti-speech laws, of course, are distinguished from laws that address harassment and intimidation of a specific target person (actual victim) or that address chain-of-command orders to commit crimes. They are also distinguished from the tort (law) of injurious falsehood, which “consists of the malicious publication of a falsehood concerning the plaintiff that leads other persons to act in a manner that causes actual loss, damage, or expense to the plaintiff,” irrespective of any effect on “reputation”.⁶

Thus, the anti-expression laws are eminently pathological from a systemic perspective. They directly impede repair of the dominance hierarchy, without providing any systemic benefit. They achieve this by suppressing the individual impulse to influence by communication, which is the elemental foundation of democracy.

As such, a study of the development of and pervasive use of anti-speech laws informs us both of the intensity of harmful elite efforts to protect illegitimate advantages and of the degree of totalitarianism in society. The present USA (civil) war on “hate expression” and its condoning by large swaths of society is a measure of a high degree of totalitarianism and a concomitant high degree of manipulation of public sentiment. It is an indicator of fundamental internal instability of the kind that accompanies the collapse of an empire.

“Our Broken Economy, in One Simple Chart”, by David Leonhardt, The New York Times, 2017-08-07. [↩]
“Negroes with Guns”, by Robert F. Williams, 1962 (Martino Publishing, CT, 2013). [↩]
“How Nonviolence Protects the State”, by Peter Gelderloos, 2007 (South End Press). [↩]
“Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 2016-11-15. [↩]
“Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, 2016-02-01. (And published in Dissident Voice: Part-1, Part-2). [↩] [↩]
“Injurious Falsehood”, mcconchie law corporation (legal encyclopedia), accessed on 2017-09-06. [↩]

Organized Chaos and Confusion as Political Control

Posted on October 19, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Dissident Voice

There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

— Buffalo Springfield 1967

It’s not supposed to be clear, now or then. If you’re confused by the news you’re hearing, you should be. They want you to be. They try to make you be. But you don’t have to be.

Who are “they”? They are the corporate mainstream media (MSM) that serve as mouthpieces for the power elites, who are connected through an intricate system of institutions and associations, both obvious and shadowy. They run the show that the media produce for the masses. To paraphrase the illustrious American propagandist, Edward Bernays: This is the engineering of the consent of the ignorant herd by the intelligent few.

That this has been going on for a long time should be obvious. That such propaganda is surround-sound today is a fact. It is total and non-stop. Even its critics are often seduced as they are horrified.

But I utter the obvious to explore the obscure. In particular, the ways the elites try to manage the public mind by confusing contradictions, half-truths, multiple and conflicting narratives, and revelations proffered to conceal more fundamental facts.

The basic way people’s thinking is controlled today is by confusing them and creating a perpetual state of mental vertigo. Muddled and disordered by double-speak, illogical reporting, and a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of conflicting reports, the average person is reduced to a mental mess. “To the average man who tries to keep informed,” writes Jacques Ellul in Propaganda, “a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he can’t understand.”

Take Donald Trump. He is regularly castigated by the media for his endless stream of tweets and contradictory statements. He is called a moron, mentally imbalanced, and a clown. But what these critics fail to grasp is that he is beating them at their own game of sowing confusion. He is our modern mythic Johnny Appleseed, wildly spewing seeds of bedlam to incite and confound. He is no anomaly. He has stepped out of our celebrity reality-TV screened world to carry on the media’s task of what Orwell said was a necessary task for the rulers in a totalitarian society: “to dislocate the sense of reality.”

The mainstream media do this daily. Think of their reporting of some recent news and ask yourself what exactly have they said – Russia-gate, the Iran agreement, the Las Vegas massacre, Catalonia, health insurance, etc. Gibberish piled upon gibberish, that’s what they’ve said. A salmagundi of contradictory verbiage that leaves a half-way sentient person shaking one’s head in astonishment. Or leaves one baffled, devoid of any sense of the truth.

While the gross Harvey Weinstein, buddy to Democrat politicians who took large sums from his deep pockets, dominates the MSM’s spotlight, as if his exploits suddenly appeared out of nowhere, the U.S. war against Syria and so many other countries “isn’t happening,” as Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel acceptance speech when he said the systematic crimes of the United States have been disappeared behind “a highly successful act of hypnosis.” The nuclear threats to Russia and China aren’t happening. It doesn’t matter right now anyway. We might get back to that next week or next month, if we are finished with Weinstein by then or if Stephen Paddock’s autopsy report isn’t back from Stanford where they are studying his brain tissue to find the cause and manner of his death – you know what deep secrets brain tissue can reveal. And yes, we will be exploring a question a brilliant reporter asked the Las Vegas authorities: “Do you think Paddock did it because he could?”

In 2003 the Bush administration blatantly lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to wage a barbaric and criminal war against Iraq. Then Obama glided in on the giddy fantasies of liberals, the same people who supported Clinton’s savaging of Serbia in 1999. He smiled and smiled and spoke articulately about the need for war, drone assassinations, the bailing out of Wall Street and the big banks, the need to confront Russia over his own administration’s engineered Ukrainian coup, and a crackdown on whistleblowers. For decades the media echoed the blatant deceptions of these men. From slick to obvious to slick went the propaganda. And then the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s election. How to deal with one of their own, one spawned from the entertainment-media-news complex? Trump accused them of creating fake news. He relentlessly attacked them, as if to say: you hypocrites; you accuse me of what you do. Then he continued to tweet out his messages meant to confuse and inflame. He continued to make statements that were then contradicted. What were the poor media to do except one-up him. This they have done.

We have now entered a new phase of propaganda where sowing mass confusion on every issue 24/7 is the method of choice.

But therein lies hope if we can grasp the meaning of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical statement: “When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.”

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