Contrary to popular belief, the educated and intelligent are more prone to cognitive disonance than are the uneducated and unintelligent, because the educated tend to wrap up more of their sense of self in abstractions such as beliefs and affiliations, and because the educated are better at symbol manipulation, that is, coming up with elaborate justifications for doing what they want to do or for doing what the tribe wants from them.
I think that the humanities and social science university faculty look down on the rest of humanity as beneath them. Unbeknownst to them, the science and engineering faculty looks down on them the same way.
Great stuff, Graham, I look forward to the full series of essays and hope you're collecting your work into book form. You might appreciate the late Frank Zappa's statement that, "Politics is just the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex."
It's important too to understand, in the context of the crowd psychology studies of McKay, LeBon, Bernays, Ellul, et al., that this has now been weaponized by the military-intelligence complex, as some describe it. What was formerly directed against enemy nations in the form of propaganda is now considered a standard tool of domestic governance, as indicated by recent revelations about the military psyops experts deployed to massage public opinion about Covid. Canada is now openly bragging about its new psyops public health unit, established in 2022. https://www.rebelnews.com/public_health_agency_of_canada_releases_first_report_on_psychological_manipulation_of_citizens?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Part of this social engineering that keeps people trapped in the media circus is the "outrage cycle," so well pictured in the After Skool video written by Mark Manson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUcYFBYP2dw
As a journalist, I've fallen into this trap too many times, on the mistaken belief that the counter to misinformation is better, more properly researched information. Most people don't really want to know, don't want to do the hard mental work of sorting out the false from the true by themselves.
You might hate me citing him, but David Icke made a good point in a recent interview with indie journalist Derek Broze when he explained that not just the mainstream but much of the alternative media is all war-gamed. So we get fake heroes like Elon Musk or Trump designed to capture the "malcontents," as you call them (or conservatives) and keep them in a controllable corral. Icke also makes the valid point that the conservative sphere has been captured by the Christian Right through mega-players like Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson. I don't agree with some of Icke's wilder ideas, nor do I fall in with the idea of Conservatives claiming the only path back to civilizational sanity is some form of Christian fundamentalism.
Which leaves me back where I started: skeptical of all politics and their potential to really change anything. And in your camp, along with Toynbee and other historians, that there seems to be a kind of historical cycle playing out that is all but inevitable.
"Alternate media" is definitely invaded. I relegated my regular staples to once per month so that I'm more sure that I'm not in a new echo box talking about the old echo box.
The political solution is in the chaos it creates. Chaos begets rebellion. Unfortunately, the rebels will probably not realise their complicity in supporting the shills and fools they're overthrowing. It's cold comfort in finding community through rebuilding what we destroyed, and knowing that grandchildren will care even less about history.
X, journalism, books etc, AI will become unaffordable to the masses, and Microsoft, Alphabet and the Pentagon will ensure that we get 100 versions of the news they want us to hear. The words of the writers we rely on will be reshaped and spat out under fake names, demons wanting to possess us. My optimism is dying.
As to current elections, I revert to my old, fatalistic words when I was realising that no one was going to protect me from the corrupt politicians I exposed:
I'm only a cynical bastard if what I say is mostly untrue. This isn't about exceptions such as activists, investigative journalists, real leaders and revolutions. This is about “everyday life” wherein we're frustrated at our shrinking living standards but still able to drink a beer on the weekend.
Politicians from the majors know where they stand with us. They must be nice to get allocated an office by their party. Then we're a nuisance to be tolerated the next four or five years. If they engage, we'll keep asking for more. So, it's better to speak in generalisations, and avoid us as much as possible until we're mentally exhausted into silence.
Unless it arrives with destruction, protest has as much chance of survival as a television news cycle.
But the politicians repetitively turn up for the Media to say something they know we want to hear. It makes no difference whether it's positive or negative, they just must resonate our too often uneducated opinion about the latest topic. They need us to know they exist so that we can forgive them before the next election.
We're conditioned to hope and hate, forget and repeat... and live in a box designed by someone else's intention for us.
I'm inside a 'pretty' box that feels real, taught to believe that everything outside is terrifying darkness. No matter how much my little-little box keeps shrinking-shrinking, I'm going to bend and squeeze to stay inside it... and never discover that inside is the lie, and everything outside is all that matters.
Constitutional democracy is more for the politicians than voters... which makes them fear other politicians more than us. There's always someone who wants their chair, or to fight them for the chair with the bigger cushion. From our viewpoint, them switching places doesn't change much. Different faces don't alter the nature of politics, only who builds the boxes.
We've little to do with who rules the DA or the ANC, or the Democrats and the Republicans, or Labour and the Tories. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Cyril Ramaphosa and their kind live in a world of chairs not boxes.
You're right if you pointed out that there's leeway at the bottom. At some point, they had to climb out of the box and onto the chair. It's more probable that someone lowered a ladder. No matter how they got there, ask yourself how many local politicians names you knew when they got elected in your backyard. And if they later got kicked out of Council for being a thief, was it because of Public action... or because another politician or their own party wanted their chair? And of all those thieves that lost their chairs, how many got sent to that box called jail?
There are too many useful idiots and not enough anarchists.
It isn't democracy, just fucking boxes and chairs.
In order to survive the information deluge when I became consciously aware of its existence and its pervasiveness, I had to create a sort of triage methodology to simply continue a productive personal life with myself and my family.
Assume that all incoming media information is fronted by an effective headline that, as conscious as I am, I will still respond to. That being the case, the triage It is:
1) Is it essential, or even marginally useful, for me to know about the topic? If "yes" continue to follow the topic to a reasonable stasis point of understanding. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you find that the topic is important, but on examination you find that you have very little, or maybe even no, control over it, seek to minimize time expended on it. It's going to happen anyway,and if it's negative, dodge it entirely if you can. It's not the last battle, and hence not a hill to die upon.
2) Am I interested in it even though it does not pass step 1? If yes, go to #3.
3) Do I have time to devote to this interest? If no, stop.
4) Continue until some level of understanding is reached, always bearing in mind that this is non-essential and need not be highly accurate. It can be considered a default position subject to on-going testing.
I'd guess that maybe 80% never passes #1, which then allows me the time/energy to devote to a more nuanced understanding of topics I have identified as important to me and my family.
I do not have the luxury of entertaining strong beliefs in areas over which I have little or no control and which *might* affect me and mine only tangentially.
All of the above is based on my personal evaluation and is not absolute., It is imperfect, but I work to improve it and never write it in stone. "Written in stone" is reserved for personal relationships, only.
Perhaps the next step is to question if having to do this is good for you, and do you have alternatives. Does this procedure lead to the good life, for you and yours?
"The details of change crowd out the time and energy that would otherwise go into reflection..... People become, in a word, shallow. Here then is a new form of consciousness evolving under the spur of improving technology.” Kenneth R. Minogue
This quote summarizes the whole article in one sentence--maybe summarized the whole series.
I think one of the problems we have with today's centrist politicians is that they have become imbued with Isaac Asimov's "Zeroth law," which states that "a robot cannot harm humanity or allow humanity to come to harm through inaction."
Asimov's First law was of course expressed in terms of individual humans, and Asimov had much fun in posing conundrums for his robots. The impact of the Zeroth law was far darker, resulting in the slow burn destruction of Planet Earth and the shutting down of the robot that caused it.
In the case of immigration, for example, it is easy to say that we should give succour to all the deserving cases, but as a rich country, the Zeroth law would demand that we pack this country with up to 4 billion people.
Dogma is always trumped by realism, just as, in a more light hearted way, Prostitution, principles and integrity (Oscar Wilde's anecdote) pointed out.
I'm all about this my friend. I thought the technology was uniquely, for me, poignant. I usually skip technological arguments because I don't really have an opinion on it and it mostly comes off as Ted k stuff to me and I'm a techno-optimist generally but I think your point about it is really good and I think we actually find a lot of societies dealing with this historically with the same symptoms. Augustan era England, when the printing presses became privatized, everything became political and satirical to include every great work then. You think it's some great work and the whole book is literally a parody of another book. Imagine substack culture like that. It'd be wild but these are whole books everyone reads. Anyways the ancient Egyptians also had to reconceptualize foreign technology imports in terms of ma'at (divine balance like karma if karma was the ultimate god itself) and their religion. In this information overload, and our liberal individualist enchantment, we interpret everything in terms of how it makes us feel and then we gather up a pseudo enchantment narrative based on the adjacency of how things make us feel. I don't want to say technology is "controlling" us as ppl sometimes describe it but it's more that we can't pull things into a national consensus or culture like in the 90s where there were movies and shows just everyone watched. So even when you get bangers for culture like memes or vaporwave or really cool stuff they're really ethereal because we can't assign meaning to them where ig survivor spoke to us or the matrix or whatever 90s films so yeah I think it's really a meaning question. You can have quality ideas but if the culture can't take it and propagate it then it doesn't impact us culturally and we're stuck to base emotions corralling us.
Contrary to popular belief, the educated and intelligent are more prone to cognitive disonance than are the uneducated and unintelligent, because the educated tend to wrap up more of their sense of self in abstractions such as beliefs and affiliations, and because the educated are better at symbol manipulation, that is, coming up with elaborate justifications for doing what they want to do or for doing what the tribe wants from them.
Very true. It begs the question of what we mean by "intelligent". Is it a unitary concept or are there in fact different kinds of intelligence.
Perhaps distinguish "complex" (twisted rationalisations) from "intelligent."
Plus, their place in life may be more secure, and this allows protection from non-productive or counter-productive belief systems.
I think that the humanities and social science university faculty look down on the rest of humanity as beneath them. Unbeknownst to them, the science and engineering faculty looks down on them the same way.
Also true.
I differ here.
They *know*, but are whistling in the dark. The train has left, they know it, but do not want to admit that they missed it.
Maybe so.
Great stuff, Graham, I look forward to the full series of essays and hope you're collecting your work into book form. You might appreciate the late Frank Zappa's statement that, "Politics is just the entertainment wing of the military-industrial complex."
It's important too to understand, in the context of the crowd psychology studies of McKay, LeBon, Bernays, Ellul, et al., that this has now been weaponized by the military-intelligence complex, as some describe it. What was formerly directed against enemy nations in the form of propaganda is now considered a standard tool of domestic governance, as indicated by recent revelations about the military psyops experts deployed to massage public opinion about Covid. Canada is now openly bragging about its new psyops public health unit, established in 2022. https://www.rebelnews.com/public_health_agency_of_canada_releases_first_report_on_psychological_manipulation_of_citizens?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Part of this social engineering that keeps people trapped in the media circus is the "outrage cycle," so well pictured in the After Skool video written by Mark Manson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUcYFBYP2dw
As a journalist, I've fallen into this trap too many times, on the mistaken belief that the counter to misinformation is better, more properly researched information. Most people don't really want to know, don't want to do the hard mental work of sorting out the false from the true by themselves.
You might hate me citing him, but David Icke made a good point in a recent interview with indie journalist Derek Broze when he explained that not just the mainstream but much of the alternative media is all war-gamed. So we get fake heroes like Elon Musk or Trump designed to capture the "malcontents," as you call them (or conservatives) and keep them in a controllable corral. Icke also makes the valid point that the conservative sphere has been captured by the Christian Right through mega-players like Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson. I don't agree with some of Icke's wilder ideas, nor do I fall in with the idea of Conservatives claiming the only path back to civilizational sanity is some form of Christian fundamentalism.
Which leaves me back where I started: skeptical of all politics and their potential to really change anything. And in your camp, along with Toynbee and other historians, that there seems to be a kind of historical cycle playing out that is all but inevitable.
"Alternate media" is definitely invaded. I relegated my regular staples to once per month so that I'm more sure that I'm not in a new echo box talking about the old echo box.
I'm looking forward to the rest of this, thank you!
Good to know.... and thanks.
"There are two fundamental ways of thinking about politics....a limited conception and a grandiose one."
That is exactly what prompted this piece... https://rathercurmudgeonly.substack.com/p/the-problem-of-politics
The political solution is in the chaos it creates. Chaos begets rebellion. Unfortunately, the rebels will probably not realise their complicity in supporting the shills and fools they're overthrowing. It's cold comfort in finding community through rebuilding what we destroyed, and knowing that grandchildren will care even less about history.
X, journalism, books etc, AI will become unaffordable to the masses, and Microsoft, Alphabet and the Pentagon will ensure that we get 100 versions of the news they want us to hear. The words of the writers we rely on will be reshaped and spat out under fake names, demons wanting to possess us. My optimism is dying.
As to current elections, I revert to my old, fatalistic words when I was realising that no one was going to protect me from the corrupt politicians I exposed:
I'm only a cynical bastard if what I say is mostly untrue. This isn't about exceptions such as activists, investigative journalists, real leaders and revolutions. This is about “everyday life” wherein we're frustrated at our shrinking living standards but still able to drink a beer on the weekend.
Politicians from the majors know where they stand with us. They must be nice to get allocated an office by their party. Then we're a nuisance to be tolerated the next four or five years. If they engage, we'll keep asking for more. So, it's better to speak in generalisations, and avoid us as much as possible until we're mentally exhausted into silence.
Unless it arrives with destruction, protest has as much chance of survival as a television news cycle.
But the politicians repetitively turn up for the Media to say something they know we want to hear. It makes no difference whether it's positive or negative, they just must resonate our too often uneducated opinion about the latest topic. They need us to know they exist so that we can forgive them before the next election.
We're conditioned to hope and hate, forget and repeat... and live in a box designed by someone else's intention for us.
I'm inside a 'pretty' box that feels real, taught to believe that everything outside is terrifying darkness. No matter how much my little-little box keeps shrinking-shrinking, I'm going to bend and squeeze to stay inside it... and never discover that inside is the lie, and everything outside is all that matters.
Constitutional democracy is more for the politicians than voters... which makes them fear other politicians more than us. There's always someone who wants their chair, or to fight them for the chair with the bigger cushion. From our viewpoint, them switching places doesn't change much. Different faces don't alter the nature of politics, only who builds the boxes.
We've little to do with who rules the DA or the ANC, or the Democrats and the Republicans, or Labour and the Tories. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Cyril Ramaphosa and their kind live in a world of chairs not boxes.
You're right if you pointed out that there's leeway at the bottom. At some point, they had to climb out of the box and onto the chair. It's more probable that someone lowered a ladder. No matter how they got there, ask yourself how many local politicians names you knew when they got elected in your backyard. And if they later got kicked out of Council for being a thief, was it because of Public action... or because another politician or their own party wanted their chair? And of all those thieves that lost their chairs, how many got sent to that box called jail?
There are too many useful idiots and not enough anarchists.
It isn't democracy, just fucking boxes and chairs.
In order to survive the information deluge when I became consciously aware of its existence and its pervasiveness, I had to create a sort of triage methodology to simply continue a productive personal life with myself and my family.
Assume that all incoming media information is fronted by an effective headline that, as conscious as I am, I will still respond to. That being the case, the triage It is:
1) Is it essential, or even marginally useful, for me to know about the topic? If "yes" continue to follow the topic to a reasonable stasis point of understanding. IMPORTANT NOTE: if you find that the topic is important, but on examination you find that you have very little, or maybe even no, control over it, seek to minimize time expended on it. It's going to happen anyway,and if it's negative, dodge it entirely if you can. It's not the last battle, and hence not a hill to die upon.
2) Am I interested in it even though it does not pass step 1? If yes, go to #3.
3) Do I have time to devote to this interest? If no, stop.
4) Continue until some level of understanding is reached, always bearing in mind that this is non-essential and need not be highly accurate. It can be considered a default position subject to on-going testing.
I'd guess that maybe 80% never passes #1, which then allows me the time/energy to devote to a more nuanced understanding of topics I have identified as important to me and my family.
I do not have the luxury of entertaining strong beliefs in areas over which I have little or no control and which *might* affect me and mine only tangentially.
All of the above is based on my personal evaluation and is not absolute., It is imperfect, but I work to improve it and never write it in stone. "Written in stone" is reserved for personal relationships, only.
Good point.
Perhaps the next step is to question if having to do this is good for you, and do you have alternatives. Does this procedure lead to the good life, for you and yours?
It has for >25 years, so far as I can tell.
Basically it just identifies where to spend your finite energy/time.
"The details of change crowd out the time and energy that would otherwise go into reflection..... People become, in a word, shallow. Here then is a new form of consciousness evolving under the spur of improving technology.” Kenneth R. Minogue
This quote summarizes the whole article in one sentence--maybe summarized the whole series.
I think one of the problems we have with today's centrist politicians is that they have become imbued with Isaac Asimov's "Zeroth law," which states that "a robot cannot harm humanity or allow humanity to come to harm through inaction."
Asimov's First law was of course expressed in terms of individual humans, and Asimov had much fun in posing conundrums for his robots. The impact of the Zeroth law was far darker, resulting in the slow burn destruction of Planet Earth and the shutting down of the robot that caused it.
In the case of immigration, for example, it is easy to say that we should give succour to all the deserving cases, but as a rich country, the Zeroth law would demand that we pack this country with up to 4 billion people.
Dogma is always trumped by realism, just as, in a more light hearted way, Prostitution, principles and integrity (Oscar Wilde's anecdote) pointed out.
I'm all about this my friend. I thought the technology was uniquely, for me, poignant. I usually skip technological arguments because I don't really have an opinion on it and it mostly comes off as Ted k stuff to me and I'm a techno-optimist generally but I think your point about it is really good and I think we actually find a lot of societies dealing with this historically with the same symptoms. Augustan era England, when the printing presses became privatized, everything became political and satirical to include every great work then. You think it's some great work and the whole book is literally a parody of another book. Imagine substack culture like that. It'd be wild but these are whole books everyone reads. Anyways the ancient Egyptians also had to reconceptualize foreign technology imports in terms of ma'at (divine balance like karma if karma was the ultimate god itself) and their religion. In this information overload, and our liberal individualist enchantment, we interpret everything in terms of how it makes us feel and then we gather up a pseudo enchantment narrative based on the adjacency of how things make us feel. I don't want to say technology is "controlling" us as ppl sometimes describe it but it's more that we can't pull things into a national consensus or culture like in the 90s where there were movies and shows just everyone watched. So even when you get bangers for culture like memes or vaporwave or really cool stuff they're really ethereal because we can't assign meaning to them where ig survivor spoke to us or the matrix or whatever 90s films so yeah I think it's really a meaning question. You can have quality ideas but if the culture can't take it and propagate it then it doesn't impact us culturally and we're stuck to base emotions corralling us.
Interesting thoughts.... hope they will persuade you to subscribe!
There you go friend all yours
Are you familar with the book by Chris Hedges titled American Fascists _ The Religious Right & Its War Against America.
Please find some leading edge advocates of such applied politics
http://www.nerdreich.com/unhumans-jd-vance-and-the-languge-of-genocide
http://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2024/03/08/cpac-attendees-america-under-attack
And this 2019 essay describing re the leading edge nature of the intelligentsia behind applied right-wing Christian politics
http://opentabernacle.wordpress.com/2019/03/22/resurgence-of-the-catholic-political-right-under-trump The current essay on the above website provides an update on the situation
Thanks Jonathan for these links.