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aldous huxley
Slogan Voters - The Road to Political Masochism
Make America Great Again, Drain the Swamp, and Lock Her Up!
Jun 06, 2018
Nearly a year and a half into his presidency, Donald Trump continues to hold his base and maintain an approval rating of around 40% - close to the same percentage he polled at just after his inauguration. Let's try to figure out why.
It can't be because he lies as a matter of daily routine. It can't be because he's giving away our store to big business - engaging in crony capitalism, creating more tax loopholes for corporations, shredding corporate crime enforcement, knowingly exposing Americans to more toxic pollution, committing more business fraud, adding more hazards to the workplace, cutting access to health insurance, and thereby making America dread again.
It can't be because he's taking your tax dollars away from repairing your infrastructure back home - schools, public transit, bridges, highways, airports, power grids, drinking water systems, etc., and pouring money into the bloated Pentagon budget beyond what even the Generals requested. (The huge "infrastructure project" he promised has yet to be proposed to Congress.)
It can't be because he is soiling our society's moral and ethical fabric and breaking the Golden Rule. (Trump is a peerless Oval Office bully, lashing out against the weak, powerless and defenseless.)
It can't be because he is openly holding onto his business interests and enriching himself from foreign vendors in unconstitutional ways, violating the Emoluments Clause (cases challenging his personal gains while in office are now in federal court).
Maybe it is because he is expediently against a woman's right to choose and common-sense gun regulation, selects corporatist judges, and keeps saying he loves his country (what politician doesn't?).
President Trump's words and deeds have not changed the minds of 40 percent of people polled. What else is going on here?
One answer is Slogan Voters. I've spoken to many people who are still for Trump despite all of his lies and misdeeds. They don't pay much attention to politics. When they do, they reveal themselves as Slogan Voters. They are content with Trump's rhetoric and rarely look beneath the surface at the details. That is, they are not bothered by being fact-deprived in political matters.
Here is what they tell me: They hate Hillary. They like Trump. They repeat the three slogans: Make America Great Again, Drain the Swamp, and Lock Her Up! Over and over again.
When I politely ask whether they are specifically aware of what Trump and his heads of departments and agencies are doing, they draw a blank. They explain that President Trump is shaking up Washington and draining the swamp. They believe that's the reason why he generates such an uproar from the swamp-dwellers. In a bizarre way, the more outrageously false and nutty Trump's tweets and actions are, the more these people feel that all the outrage is because he is draining the swamp and the swamp is lashing back at him.
Unless someone comes up with a secret key to awaken the minds of Trump's Slogan Voters, the best response is to draw some of the more than 100 million eligible non-voters to the polls for the crucial November elections.Slogan Voters stress their belief in self-made men and women. They are often college-educated. They are not seen as bigots by their co-workers. They believe if you fail at something, it's your own fault.
They agree there are bad things going on in government, but it's not Trump's fault. Their reaction to bad things that are openly, brazenly, and admittedly Trump's fault - such as shutting down a consumer agency designed to stop Wall Street and the financial/credit industry from cheating you, crashing the economy, or crippling environmental health protections -- is: It's all part of draining the swamp.
Trump has become homeostatic -- whatever goes around, comes around to his advantage for the Slogan Voters. Evidence against Trump is turned around to justify Trump. More than anyone else, Trump has understood this and fed these strange conclusions by inattentive minds.
What would the eminent philosopher of science, Aldous Huxley, think now? He said in 1927: "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." But they do for Trump and his Slogan Voters. He creates his own web of delusion, and his supporters say he is draining the swamp and making America great again.
It wouldn't matter a whit were they to receive critical articles, books, DVDs, or even Trump's own self-contradictory words and record through the years. Recall his boastful sugarcoating as his giant casinos went bankrupt while he profitably escaped their draining impacts on others (e.g. the employees and unpaid contractors he hired to build them).
Unless someone comes up with a secret key to awaken the minds of Trump's Slogan Voters, the best response is to draw some of the more than 100 million eligible non-voters to the polls for the crucial November elections. There are far more than enough votes to surpass the choices of the Trump Slogan Voters for the Congressional races.
One thing you have to credit these Slogan Voters for: THEY VOTE!!
Yeah, "Making America Great Again, Drain the Swamp, and Lock Her Up!"
Not Even Orwell or Huxley Could Have Imagined 'Totalitarian' Threat Posed by Facebook and Google, Warns Soros
Billionaire investor says there is serious threat of tech giants and authoritarian states teaming up to "bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance."
Jan 26, 2018
In addition to warning that U.S. President Donald Trump represents an immense "danger" to civilization, billionaire George Soros used the spotlight of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday to urge the international community to take seriously the threats posed by Facebook and Google, which he said could ultimately spawn "a web of totalitarian control" if they are not reined in.
"They claim they are merely distributing information. But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations."
--George Soros
Particularly alarming, Soros said, is the prospect of Facebook and Google--which he scathingly deemed a "menace" to society--teaming up with "authoritarian states" to "bring together nascent systems of corporate surveillance with an already developed system of state-sponsored surveillance."
Such "unholy marriages" could result in a strain of authoritarianism "the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined," the billionaire investor cautioned.
Soros went on to compare the tech giants' impact on the internet--and social media in particular--to the effects of fossil fuel giants on the environment.
" Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment," Soros said, warning that the days of internet monopolies like Facebook and Google "are numbered."
"They claim they are merely distributing information," Soros added of the tech giants that are frequently denounced by critics of corporate power for abusing their market dominance. "But the fact that they are near-monopoly distributors makes them public utilities and should subject them to more stringent regulations, aimed at preserving competition, innovation, and fair and open universal access."
If tech companies are permitted to retain overwhelming control over information, "far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy" could result, Soros concluded.
"The power to shape people's attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies," Soros said. "It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called 'the freedom of mind.' There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it."
Below is a short clip of Soros's speech. Read his full remarks here.
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What Was Verifiably Great About America: Fragments of a Memoir Set To A Musical Soundtrack
The music tells a story, but that doesn't mean it will end well
Dec 17, 2017
Having been born in a coal and steel company town but destiny delivered, as an adult, to reside, during extended intervals, in the East and West Coast cities of Los Angeles and New York City, and, at present, the continent of Europe, I have come to conclude, people born into situations providing economic advantage, both liberals and conservatives alike, experience difficulty, more often than not, envisaging the lives of those born into a labouring class existence. Worse, a wilful obtuseness, in combination with a supercilious posture is, all too often, evinced, by reflex, towards those scorned as "hillbillies," "trailer trash," and "genetic retreads."
"That is what Woody meant by, 'This machine kills fascists.' His music and that of other inspired troubadours kills the soul-dead ideology of fascism with the life-vivifying veracity of truth."
Among groups possessing economic advantage, a lack of curiosity prevails as to the nature of the lives of individuals who have spent their lifetime subjected to the life-defying tyrannies of full-spectrum, company town capitalism. Life circumstances, under the present, neoliberal order, that are, in all but rare cases, intractable; wherein, the meagre and fraught with economic instability livelihoods earned as a mine, mill, factory worker, and, in the service industry economy in the US wage and debt slave archipelago of fast food outlets, Big Box retailers and Dollar Discount stores, and as a domestic worker, presents, for the vast majority of workers, the degrading, anxiety-inducing option of submitting to low pay, no benefits, long hours of tedious, vastly under-compensated labor or facing homelessness and hunger.
I was born in the foothills of Appalachia. I know, bones to brain, the painful plight of the labouring class. I will go so far as to say, the transforming, I would even suggest, redemptive element, in my life was a house stocked with books and an indomitable yearning to seek out the music indigenous to the region.
My family, later, moved to the then small, Piedmont region city of Atlanta, Georgia. Shortly thereafter, in the living room of a musician, science fiction writer, and general Beat polymath my father had befriended, I swooned--was, I suspect, transformed--when a guest in the home (where a young Bob Dylan used to crash when in Atlanta--which was, at the time, a rundown, mafia-owned apartment house but where, decades earlier, Margaret Mitchell had penned Gone With The Wind--North Georgia-born folksinger and activist Hedy West played her most famous song, "500 Miles Away from Home" also known as "Railroaders' Lament."
During childhood, a period of life in which one is transmigrating through a wilderness of archetypes, for me, the experience of being in West's presence felt as if I had been transported to glens and gardens inhabited by a veritable muse.
In the year, 1970, in the summer I turned 14, in Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia, the Allman Brothers, among other bands, would perform free, impromptu concerts for a tie-dye-clad, reefer-reeking, bell-bottoms-caressing-the-Georgia-red-dirt gatherings of "freaks"--which was the preferred tribalist term, as opposed to the media-created, socially pejorative--hippies ... which, when bandied among counterculture insiders, was generally applied ironically.
Although the park was located only a few miles from my family's home, undertaking the trip presented a degree of peril. To make one's way to the park included traversing a tough, in-town, White working class neighborhood (now a gentrified into soul-sucking blandness, yuppie enclave) where, from the perspective of its denizens, their world, and all they held in reverence and reference, was under siege.
And, although inchoate, their animus was instantly distilled, simply upon a glimpse of the untamed tresses of a singular, thin of wrist, dirty hippie, commie faggot--whose mere presence was considered an affront to their pomade-crowned, muscle car-thundering parcel of redneck paradise.
Accordingly, the locals were pledged to do their part to fight the scourge ... by increasing their intake of PBRs and Jack Daniels, and, upon sight of said dirty hippie interlopers, bestowing ass-stompings -- and for no-extra-charge--involuntary haircuts upon errant longhairs caught in their midst.
Yet as the era progressed, the savage dance between hippie freak and redneck belligerent changed in tone and tempo, an extemporaneous type of metaphysical jujitsu occurred, in which the predator was subdued and seduced by the prey ... as if by cultural contact buzz, redneck fury yielded to counterculture insouciance.
"When the individual feels, the community reels" --Aldous Huxley
Briefly, this was the anatomy of the seduction: In their pursuit of fleeing freaks into the park, the young males of the cracker tribe happened upon a few of the things of this vast and vivid world even more compelling than the possibility of ass-kicking ... in the form of attractive young women.
Yet to the young men, the hippie sphinxes, sirens, waifs and gypsy queens were baffling, unapproachable; these women were less than taken by their greasy, pompadoured forelocks and aggressive bearing.
In short, and to appropriate the parlance of the era, the hippie chicks didn't get off on these young men's "bad vibes ... it, like, really harshed their high."
But these great, great grandsons of the Lost Cause proved much more malleable in countenance than the ossified in memory, now enshrined in marble statuary, of their confederate forefathers.
Consequently, a kind of cracker Lysistrata started to unfold. The pomade lacquer faded from stiff pompadours, yielding to lank, draping locks of hippie plumage. The habit of rebel bellicosity was sublimated into an avidity to "boogie." The zealots of ass-kicking became the acolytes of acid and devotees of the gospels of kicking back and getting down.
As time passed, on weekends, as the Allman Brothers preached Sunday sermons vis-a-vis guitar and drum solos, these newly minted freaks could be found in positions of repose and reflection upon the grassy hills of the park, eating Orange Sunshine and drawling, "aw mahn, Dwayne's guitar is shootin' sparks into mah brain..."
Or as Marcel Proust put it, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes."
If the US is great in any regard, it is not because of the psychotic belief in its own exceptionalism or its risible grandiosity involving the claim to be the one and only "indispensable nation." Conversely, its best quality is evinced in the voices of the country's economically bereft rabble, as expressed in the blues, in jazz, folk, country/western, and hip hop music, in which the powerless find a voice that moves the heart by inducing the soul to be able to penetrate the thick walls of shame that the class-based capitalist prison state imposes on the laboring class.
Waylon Jennings rendition of Billy Joe Shaver's outlaw country classic, and its Cracker Zen philosophy of: The more adept one becomes at growing down--even composting--one's pride, ego, pretensions, and careerist striving the richer the soil of the soul grows.
(Billy Joe Shaver's mother, eight months pregnant with him, was severely beaten by her husband and left for dead in a ditch. Later spotted labouring in the scorching heat of an eastTexas cotton field, a child harness to her back, young Billy at her side, by a recruiter for local honky-tonks scouting the area to fill waitress positions. Shaver's red-haired mother's good looks proved providential for exposing him to venues of country/western music.)
The early 1980s. I am attempting to navigate, and failing on a psychical basis, the vales and canyons of Los Angeles. It is the advent of the Reagan years. The idiot stare of the encompassing dome of the LA sky is too much for my Appalachian Hill country psyche. There is no green-on-green canopy to filter the relentless sheen of sunlight. It renders me manic, angst-ridden, and sleepless.
The damp evening air envelops one at sundown in LA. It gets damn cold. A clinging chill wafts from the Pacific Ocean. But the phenomenon is not weather related; instead, the cold is the embrace of the ghosts of the dead dreams of the city's inhabitants.
X captures in tone and limns in lyric the effects of the atomised LA landscape upon my besieged psyche... I slouch in the direction of The Whiskey to catch them.
This song, by Elizabeth Cotten, here, interpreted by Rhiannon Giddens, seems to me, concerns the type of release borne of lament, whereas one has lost everything and made every attempt to right oneself with circumstance and fate but to no avail. Every worldly possession is in hock...but destitution has not been dodged.
Oh Lordy me, didn't I shake sugaree
Everything I got is done and pawned
Everything I got is done and pawned
Yet a stark, painfully beautiful, indomitable truth rises up from the soul. I am still here. My voice still rises heavenward. The deathless heart of my song endures in the face of misfortune and grief.
Wallace Stevens captures the sentiment in verse: Excerpted from his poem: A Weak Mind in the Mountains:
Yet there was a man within me
Could have risen to the clouds,
Could have touched these winds,
Bent and broken them down,
Could have stood up sharply in the sky.
One can imitate, with virtuoso precision, musical and poetic technique--but the verities garnered from life lived cannot be counterfeited, no matter how perfect the mimicry. The performance will remain at surface level.
Conversely, as is the case with Roscoe Holcomb, the sublimity of his exquisite rawness arrives from the authenticity of his experience. Listening, at least in my case to his Appalachian cadences, causes my wounded heart to bleed lambent light.
As I write these words, it has been dark for hours here in Munich, Germany, as, collectively, we, in the Northern Hemisphere trudge into the long, dark nights of the dying year. Short daylight hours, haunted with grim and grisly news. Our era, lit up but not illuminated, by twenty four/seven artificial light. Perpetual media distractions at our finger tips. Nature banished. Communal experience atomised.
We attempt to grieve, but remain empty, by means of the same Mephistophelian illusion that has left us estranged from the beating heart of earthly life. Conversely, the US blues/gospel/folk tradition captures the cadences of grief wrought by the knowledge of the vastness of creation, within which unfolds the tragic dance between the fragility of human life and the reality of ever present human folly.
This ballad by the Carter Family defines the form and reveals what has been scoured away by Mephistophelian light. (As a general rule, songs about trains are about anything but trains.)
Pete Seeger, a few years before his death, told me and a small group of others this anecdote about he and Woody Guthrie. The two of them were playing a gig for striking coal miners, deep in the Ozarks. Because no one present could afford babysitters, the union hall was filled with women and small children. A short time into their performance, a squad of large, brutal company goons, wearing long coats concealing clubs and other weapons, entered the hall.
Pete inquired of Woody as to how they should respond. Woody told him to keep playing, and play for all they were worth, which they did. They continued their show and no trouble came to pass that night. Afterwards, one of the members of the goon squad approached Woody and Pete and confessed to them. "We came here to bust up the meeting. But what was going on was not what we were told. You seem like good people."
Pete related, Woody, much taken with the declaration, returned to their quarters and wrote his song Union Maid, in a single sitting. That is what Woody meant by, "This machine kills fascists." His music and that of other inspired troubadours kills the soul-dead ideology of fascism with the life-vivifying veracity of truth.
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Reopening The Doors Of Perception
As the president soon put it, America’s mission was to “rid the world of evil.” They concocted what might as well be called the War To Promote Terror.
Nov 30, 2017
In a time of endless war and triumphant cynicism, I found myself the other day unexpectedly walking through the doors of perception. Yeah, those doors.
"You know the day destroys the night/Night divides the day/Tried to run/Tried to hide/ Break on through to the other side . . ."
The words, the music -- the Doors, the voice of Jim Morrison -- ignite not just the Summer of Love but a crazy something I don't dare call hope, because those days of cultural and political revolution overdosed and imploded, didn't they? War won. The Vietnam War dragged on, millions died (or thousands, if the only death toll that matters to you is that of U.S. soldiers), MLK and RFK were assassinated, the Cold War quietly morphed into the War on Terror and eventually the 911 attacks gave the military-industrialists the "new Pearl Harbor" they needed. Today's military budget is securely bloated.
Knowing this, I was blindsided by the impact a remarkable exhibition I recently attended with my daughter had on me. And the star of the show was born in 1757.
The show, running through next March at Northwestern University's Block Museum of Art, is called William Blake and the Age of Aquarius. Curated by art history professor Stephen Eisenman, it draws a link between the poetry, art and philosophy of Blake -- an anti-authoritarian proponent of free thought and free love, a believer that every human being has a direct relationship with God -- and many of the activists and artists of the '60s, from Allen Ginsberg to Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix.
Blake spoke a complex truth. He embraced a far-flung, wildly loving philosophy of life: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."
These words, from Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (the title itself shows the convergence of forces he revered), gave Aldous Huxley the title of his book The Doors of Perception, about his experiences with mescaline. Then they gave Morrison the name of his rock band. And eventually they gave millions of young people, coming of age as a pointless war simmered and raged and Jim Crow stood its ground at the schoolhouse door, a glimpse at a world beyond the cruel and small-minded order that ruled the day.
This was not a simple world that flickered momentarily. This was not a tranquil, easy peace: "We chased our pleasures here/Dug our treasures there/But can you still recall/The time we cried/ Break on through to the other side . . ."
The cultural breakthrough was only partial. The political breakthrough still, often, feels to me like a complete dud. The Vietnam War went on for eight years beyond the 1967 Summer of Love; it finally became unfightable and ended in retreat and 16 years of proxy wars and "Vietnam Syndrome." The American public was sick of war and the pointless sacrifice of young men and women. Then the powers that be ended the draft; and they saw in Saddam Hussein the perfect face of evil. In 2001, the towers went down.
And once again an extraordinary door of opportunity opened. But the country's leaders had no wisdom beyond their own agenda of global hegemony.
Stephen Glain quotes Richard Clarke, counter-terrorism adviser for Bush 43, in his book State vs. Defense: The Battle to Define America's Empire, recalling a cabinet meeting on Sept. 12, 2001, in which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: "You know, we've got to do Iraq. There just aren't enough targets in Afghanistan. . . . We need to bomb something else to prove that we're, you know, big and strong and not going to be pushed around by these kind of attacks."
As it turns out, I had come across that quote, in an excellent essay by Danny Sjursen, the day before I went to the William Blake/Age of Aquarius exhibit, and it had become seriously lodged in my consciousness -- not as a surprise or a shock, just as a banal "of course." The world was trembling, international compassion flowed, and the leaders of the world's most powerful nation were plotting in utter ignorance a war that would make them look big and strong.
As the president soon put it, America's mission was to "rid the world of evil." They concocted what might as well be called the War To Promote Terror.
And the '60s -- the Summer of Love, the peace movement -- is sandbagged by history's cynicism, or so it has seemed until I saw the exhibit at Northwestern. Suddenly I felt the raw hope of those days come back to life: the outrage and the music and the possibility. The doors of perception reopened. And there was William Blake.
O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
To drown the throat of war!
When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand?
Many people were standing. Politicians, even at the national level, dared to run on peace platforms and hippies stuck flowers in the barrels of guns. Oh, the cliche of that. Indeed, one of the pieces in the exhibit was a 1967 photo by Marc Riboud, taken during the march on the Pentagon that year, of a young woman confronting a soldier's bayonet in her face with a flower. In the context of the exhibit, this wasn't a cliche. It was courage.
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We -- or Him?
We live as never before in a time when oppression emanates from the individual—or indeed, millions of individuals.
May 24, 2017
When President Donald Trump last week began a tweet with "we" and then deleted it, Trumpwatchers on Twitter seized on the opportunity to turn it back on him. According to The Hill, a onetime aide to Hillary Clinton used the tweet to start the #We hashtag, encouraging others to "tell Trump how you really feel." The "We" is a fitting ripost of the anti-Trump resistance, expressing the collective sensibility that has exploded since January 20. And this "we" sharply rejects Trump's megalomania as it rejects the great man-centered assertion on which Trump was elected, the cult of his own personality that convinced people that "I alone can fix it."
The anti-Trump "we" helps make sense of the deeper historical moment. Nearly a hundred years ago Evgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We depicted the unfolding scourge of the twentieth century, a totalitarian society that oppresses its inhabitants in the name of the collectivity. Zamyatin's novel, the first great chronicle of that assault, was followed by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 and, in a very different register, Allen Ginsberg's Howl and then Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man. A century later the problem is reversed: we live as never before in a time when oppression emanates from the individual--or indeed, millions of individuals.
"What has been happening since January 20 tells us not only about the meaning of the Trump presidency but also the 'we' now taking shape in the United States."
In the last generation this has expanded in a way that can best be described by a term that is usually used medically: hypertrophy. Personal responsibility, and individualism more generally, have grown disproportionately, resembling an organ or body part that is excessively enlarged. In a society dominated top to bottom by the fantasy and reality of the "free market"--as our culture grows more heavily influenced by psychology and therapy, as personal demands and technologies explode, and as individuals are increasingly fated to take control of their lives bounded by few traditional roles and customs, we are required to make endless decisions about education, job, place of residence, lifestyle, and family. In my just-published book--We: Reviving Social Hope--I describe this as the "privatization of hope": society and its most vital purposes, including the common good, are under assault by individuals and corporations run wild, and neoliberalism is ranged against collective efforts to solve our collective problems.
In 2016 people turned out by the tens of thousands, and voted by the millions, against neoliberalism's plans for all of us. Rejecting the atomizing trend from both ends of the spectrum, they responded to the social pain of our troubled times: the Great Recession and the neoliberal projects of austerity and privatization, rising inequality, student debt resulting from the decline of social funding for education, the loss of well-paying manufacturing employment due to globalization, and declining working-class incomes and social power. These sources of the Bernie Sanders and Trump movements are widely understood. What is not well recognized is the same abrupt turn at the heart of both campaigns: the rejection of the individualized society, its smugness, and the experience of living in the free-market maelstrom shaping people's lives.
Without saying so explicitly, the Sanders and Trump campaigns rejected the privatization of hope, making neoliberals in both parties aghast. Obviously, there are enormous differences between the two movements, including the fact that the Sanders hearkened back to the sense of "we" solving our problems collectively while the Trump phenomenon, never an authentic social movement, veered toward an authoritarian cult of personality constructed around his "I."
What has been happening since January 20 tells us not only about the meaning of the Trump presidency but also the "we" now taking shape in the United States. The "we" of the Resistance is a movement of social self-defense: to preserve the collective attainments of a certain historically evolved level of civilization, which are threatened with deliberately being undone. The goal is to protect the entire web of social goods, regulations, amenities, constitutional provisions, their accompanying level of culture, science, and even literacy--that have characterized contemporary American society. With no central direction millions of people are acting as "we," some alone on the telephone and the internet, others in small groups, still others in demonstrations and mass meetings. The movement is everywhere. They are talking to each other, planning, strategizing. People are acting amid vast fears about what is about to happen, not in the hope of achieving anything new--although "Medicare for all" is rearing its head as one obvious solution to the crisis Trump and the right wing are creating over the Affordable Care Act. Most important, in the anti-Trump resistance a new militant "we" is beginning to assert itself against his "I," affecting the courts, the media, and perhaps eventually Congress. Noone can say where this movement will lead, but it has been growing with an energy equal to the magnitude of the threat.
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A Nation of the Walking Dead
Opioids and experiences that simulate the deadening effects of narcotics are mechanisms to keep us submissive and depoliticized. Desperate citizens in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World" ingested the pleasure drug soma to check out of reality. Our own versions of soma allow tens of millions of Americans to retreat daily into addictive mousetraps that generate a self-induced autism.
Apr 03, 2017
Opioids and experiences that simulate the deadening effects of narcotics are mechanisms to keep us submissive and depoliticized. Desperate citizens in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel "Brave New World" ingested the pleasure drug soma to check out of reality. Our own versions of soma allow tens of millions of Americans to retreat daily into addictive mousetraps that generate a self-induced autism.
The United States consumes 80 percent of opioids used worldwide, and more than 33,000 died in this country in 2015 from opioid overdoses. There are 300 million prescriptions written and $24 billion spent annually in the U.S. for painkillers. Americans supplement this mostly legal addiction with over $100 billion a year in illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. And nearly 14 million U.S. adults, one in every 13, regularly abuse alcohol.
But these monetary figures are far less than what we spend on gambling. Americans in 2013 lost $119 billion gambling, with an additional $70 billion--or $300 for every adult in the country--spent on lottery tickets.
Federal and state governments, reliant on tax revenues from legal gambling and on lottery ticket sales, will do nothing to halt the expansion of the industry or the economic and psychological toll it exacts on those in financial distress. State-run lottery games had sales of $73.9 billion in 2015, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. This revenue is vital to budgets beset by declining incomes, deindustrialization and austerity. "State lotteries provided more revenue than state corporate-income taxes in 11 of the 43 states where they were legal, including Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Dakota," Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic. "The poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets," he noted. Gambling is a stealth tax on poor people hoping to beat the nearly impossible odds. Governmental income from gambling is an effort to make up for the taxes the rich and corporations no longer pay.
Slot machines and other electronic gambling devices are engineered to draw us into an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. They, like our personal computers and hand-held devices, cater to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt and social stagnation and a dysfunctional political system. We become rats in a Skinner box, frantically pulling levers until we are addicted and finally entranced by our compulsion to achieve fleeting, intermittent and adrenaline-driven rewards. Much like what happens to people using slot machines, the pigeons or rats in Skinner's experiments that did not know when they would get a reward, or how much they would get, became the most heavily addicted to operating the levers or pedals. Indeed, Skinner used slot machines as a metaphor for his experiments.
The engineers of America's gambling industry are as skillful at forming addiction as the country's top five opioid producers--Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, Insys Therapeutics, Mylan and Depomed. There are 460 commercial casinos, 486 tribal casinos, 350 card rooms, 55 racetracks and hundreds of thousands of gaming devices, many located in convenience stores, gas stations, bars, airports and even supermarkets.
The rush of anticipation, available in 20-second bursts, over hours, days, weeks and months creates an addictive psychological "zone" that the industry calls "continuous gaming productivity." Heart rates and blood pressure rise. Time, space, the value of money and human relationships hypnotically dissolve. A state of extreme social isolation occurs.
Gambling addicts, like many addicts, are often driven to crime, bankruptcy and eventual imprisonment. Many lose everything--their marriages, their families, their jobs, their emotional health and sometimes their lives. Gambling addicts have the highest rate of suicide attempts among addicts of any kind--1 in 5, or 20 percent--according to the National Council on Problem Gambling.
Donald Trump is in large part a product of gambling culture. His career has not been about making products but about selling intangible and fleeting experiences. He preys on the desperate by offering them escapist fantasies. This world is about glitter, noise and hype--Trump called the Trump Taj Mahal, his now-closed casino, "the eighth wonder of the world." The more money you spent, the greater your "value," the more you were pampered, given free hotel rooms and gifts, handed passes to special "clubs" with lavish buffets. Scantily clad hostesses hovered around you serving complimentary drinks. If you spent big, you were invited to exclusive parties attended by supermodels and famous athletes. Decorated chips--some featuring a photo of Donald Trump--turned cash into a species of Monopoly money. But in the end, when you were broke, when there was no more money in your bank account and your credit cards were maxed out, you were thrown back, in even greater financial distress, into the dreary universe you tried to obliterate.
Roger Caillois, the French sociologist, wrote that the pathologies of a culture are captured in the games the culture venerates. Old forms of gambling such as blackjack and poker allowed the gambler to take risks, make decisions and even, in his or her mind, achieve a kind of individualism or heroism at the gambling table. They provided a way, it can be argued, to assert an alternative identity for a brief moment. But the newer form, machine gambling, is an erasure of the self. Slot machines, which produce 85 percent of the profits at casinos, are, as the sociologist Henry Lesieur wrote, an "addiction delivery device." They are "electronic morphine," "the crack cocaine of gambling." They are not about risk or about making decisions, but about creating somnambulism, putting a player into a trancelike state that can last for hours. It is a pathway, as sociologist Natasha Dow Schull points out, to becoming the walking dead. This yearning for a state of nonbeing is what Sigmund Freud called "the death instinct." It is the overpowering drive by a depressed and traumatized person to seek pleasure in a self-destructive activity that ultimately kills the organism.
"It is not the chance of winning to which they become addicted," Schull writes in "Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas," "rather, what addicts them is the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play."
Gamblers are closely tracked by the casino industry. The length of time gamblers spend on machines increases the profits for the casino. The science of keeping people in front of slot machines--called "time on device" within the industry--has led to the creation of ergonomic consoles, the appealing, warm screens on slot machines, seductive video graphics and surround-sound acoustics.
The industry also invests heavily in surveillance. Gamblers carry player or loyalty cards. They insert these cards into the slot machines when they play. These cards, linked to a central database, are used by the industry to build profiles of gamblers. The value and frequency of bets are captured, along with wins and losses. The industry knows when the players take breaks, where and what they eat in the casinos, what they drink and what hotel rooms they select. Slowly the traits and the habits of the gambler, triangulated with demographic data, are pieced together to allow the industry to build a personal profile. With the profile, the casino determines at what point a player will accumulate too many losses and too much pain and is about to walk away from a machine. A few moments before that pain level is reached, a hostess will magically appear with a free drink, a voucher for a meal or tickets to a show. Casinos can also use profiles to project how much a player will spend gambling during his or her lifetime.
The industry was the human laboratory for refinements now incorporated into the security and surveillance organs of the state. "Many surveillance and marketing innovations first used in casinos were only later adapted to other domains," Schull writes, "including airports, financial trading floors, consumer shopping malls, insurance agencies, banks, and government programs like Homeland Security."
"They have an algorithm that senses your pain points, your sweet spots," Schull told me. "The zone is a term that I kept hearing over and over again as I went to gamblers' anonymous meetings and spoke to gambling addicts. This really describes a state of flow where time, space, monetary value and other people fall away. You might say a state of flow, or the zone, sounds very different from the thrills and suspense of gambling. But what the casinos have hit upon is that [they] actually make more money when [they] design a flow space into these machines. People don't even know that they're losing. They just sit there. Again, it's time on machines."
"When you look at contemporary slot machines, they don't operate on volatility," she continued. "One designer of the mathematics and algorithm of these games said we want an algorithm that makes you feel like you are reclining on a couch. The curves, architecture and the softly pixelated lights, they want you to sit back and go with the flow. I just couldn't make sense of that for the longest time in my research. Gamblers would say, 'It's so weird, but sometimes when I win a big jackpot I feel angry and frustrated.' What they're playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. Winning disrupts that because suddenly the machine is frozen, it's not letting you keep going. What are you going to do with that winning anyway? You're just going to feed it back into the machines. This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don't just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we've all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate is a desire to really lose a sense of self. They lose time, space, money value, and a sense of being in the world. What is that about? What does that say? How do we diagnose that?"
"It's the flip side to the incredible pressure, which is experienced as a burden, to self-manage, to make choices, to always be maximizing as you're living life in this entrepreneurial mode," she said. "We talk about this as the subjective side of the neoliberal agenda, where pressure is put on individuals to regulate themselves. In this case, they are regulating themselves, but they are regulating themselves away from that. This really is a mode of escape. It's not action gambling. This is escape gambling. You can see it on their faces. The consequences and ethics are distasteful. It's predatory. It's predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They're not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They're kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it's a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don't want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don't see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want--in this case escape--and [to] profit from that."
Trump understands this longing for escape and the art of creating an updated version of P.T. Barnum's "Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan & Hippodrome." Trump used his skills as a con artist to pull in hundreds of millions of dollars and then to achieve the presidency.
"People have called it a mode of ludo-capitalism," Schull said. "In a way, you can connect that to the ludo-politics that we see. Pleasure. To get what you want. What you want is to escape into a flow, to be taken away. We see this in the political domain a lot--in the rallies, in the surging of feelings, the distraction. If you look at the way a casino is designed, and you remember that Trump is a designer of many casinos, including his non-casino properties, they follow the same design logic of disorientation and trying to sweep people away from themselves, away from rationality, away from a position where they have clear lines of sight and can act as decision-making subjects. You see that on the floors of casinos, you see that in political rhetoric today."
The corporate state will expand our access to a variety of opioids and numbing situations to temporarily alleviate our stress, financial dislocations, depression and anxiety. Aided by state and local governments, it will build new pleasure palaces. It will lure millions into its glittering and seductive Venus' flytraps. It will make sure we have tempting retreats within easy reach to achieve a death-in-life experience. Much of the society will be put to sleep. Those who refuse to become zombies, who rise up to resist, who seek at all costs to remain distinct individuals, will be silenced with the corporate state's cruder tool for submission: force.
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Fake News is Not New and Huxley, Not Orwell, is the Messenger
Why it's time to reread Neil Postman
Feb 10, 2017
The news business is in a sweat about fake news. The temperature has been rising since the November election of Donald Trump as President and it went febrile on February 2 when his press secretary Kellyanne Conway claimed the president's restrictions on immigration announced on January 27 were justified by the massacre carried out by Iraqi refugees (some time ago) in Bowling Green, Kentucky. There had never been a massacre but she got away with saying it on the Chris Matthews MSNBC news show--and that has news critics apoplectic. How could mainstream journalism, which has to include presidential press secretaries, have fallen into such an embarrassing state?
The idea of "fake news" became a talking point during the fall election season when stories such as Hillary Clinton's involvement in a pizza-house pedophilia ring circulated. Few, if any, legitimate news organizations bought into that story, or into post-election White House claims that the president lost the popular vote because of voter fraud.
Going back several years, though, the press and television news organizations have compiled a troubling record of reporting stories that were false. The most spectacular of those were The New Republic's gullible acceptance of editor Stephen Glass's fabricated stories before finally firing him in 1998; CNN's 1998 investigative report--later retracted as "unsupportable by the facts" and skewered as more fantasy than fact--that sarin nerve gas had been used on a 1970 covert raid by U.S. special forces to kill a group of GIs who had defected to the North Vietnamese on the Ho Chi Minh Trail; The New York Times 2003 admission that its reporter, Jason Blair, had filed numerous false stories before his editors owned-up to their own collusion in his duplicity and canned him.
Orwell, Postman pointed out, "warned that we will be overcome by externally opposed oppression"... whereas Huxley, in Postman's reading, sees that "people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
Only now, however, with untruths flying out of the White House like chaff from a speeding grain truck--Trump charges that the press has underreported terror attacks and crime rates, both wrong--do establishment figures appear worried about the declining credibility of pillars-of-information-exchange like press secretaries and the journalists to whom they speak. Writing on the front page of the February 6 New York Times Business Section, news-watcher Jim Rutenberg noted that "blowback over the whole Bowling Green yarn" had effects on the reputation of journalism that could not be reversed, and then called-out other recent stories that put strain the reliability of news reporting.
Rutenberg then reported that sales of George Orwell's book 1984, published in 1949, and was back on bestseller lists. In that novel, Orwell had warned of the power of big government to control its people by controlling the information they got. The fictitious head of Orwell's totalitarian fantasy was Big Brother who employed information specialists to create false news stories and rewrite the history of the nation's people. Big Brother's objective was to build a permanent warfare state. "Orwell's classic seems all too familiar," writes Rutenberg, capturing in the words of Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, "a world in which the government insists that reality is not something objective . . . ." And now, continues Rutenberg, Mr. Trump "renews those fears."
Rutenberg, it should be said, is one of many observers invoking Orwell as a way to frame what is going on in our own world of fake news. Their concern is valid and their attention to Orwell has merit but they're pointing us in the wrong direction--maybe even 180 degrees off course.
Media critic Neil Postman took up the matters of information and power in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Postman was writing out of concern that an actor, Ronald Reagan, had become president. The televised debates leading to Reagan's election had, said Postman, displaced oral engagement and discourse, the currency of debate, with "'giving off impressions,' which is what television does best." Television, he said, is a medium in which credibility refers "only to the impressions of sincerity, authenticity, vulnerability or attractiveness conveyed by the actor/reporter" (emphasis added). The problem, as Postman saw it, was not that television was a medium through which misinformation could be conveyed more easily--the Orwellian problem--but that it had so dumbed-down the American public that voters were more persuaded by the entertainment value of candidates' appearances and presentations than what candidates actually had to say about the issues--the problem cited by Aldous Huxley years earlier.
Postman was, of course, counterpoising Huxley's 1931 novel Brave New World with Orwell's 1984. He found Huxley's work to be more powerful for understanding a world filtered through electronic media that fractures information and ideas into soundbites, eroding thereby our ability to comprehend complex ideas and follow patterns of events across time. And without the permanence necessary for accountability, he thought the journalism of the electronic age had been lured into story lines more fit for entertaining an "audience" than enhancing public political agency. It was the degraded state of American journalism that he held responsible for yielding an electorate that put a grade-B actor into the White House. He wrote in the early 1980s with attention to television but with a premonition of the twitified "fake news" era that was to come.
Orwell, Postman pointed out, "warned that we will be overcome by externally opposed oppression"--the Big Brother boogie that Jim Rutenberg that worries us with--whereas Huxley, in Postman's reading, sees that "people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think."
Postman dichotomized Orwell and Huxley in other ways:
Orwell feared those who would ban books; Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban books because nobody would want to read one.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information and conceal the truth; Huxley feared the truth would be drown in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture; Huxley feared would become a trivial culture.
In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain; in Brave New World, people are controlled by inflicting pleasure.
Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us; Huxley feared that we will love what will ruin us.
Postman's insight, ala Huxley, is that what is said is less important than the way it is said, the medium through which the information is conveyed; said another way, if a totalitarian power, Orwell's Big Brother, can control the means through which information is delivered, the content is of little importance. Put in Postman's terms, the problem is an epistemological one, not informational.
Leaving the matter at that, however, misses what Rutenberg and others miss when they channel Orwell for an understanding of the current spate of "fake news": It is nongovernmental institutions, private media and information technology companies which today make big-time profits off sales of the very technologies that Postman predicted (above) would undo people's capacities to think. The "enemy," to sharpen the point, is not an Orwellian big government that generates false stories in order to control the populace, but a government that will not limit the power of private media companies to numb the electorate with the visual spectacles of televised sports, mindless sit-coms, and the addictive attractions of always-on handheld information devices; the enemy sits in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Seattle--not Washington, D.C.
There is irony in the cliched borrowing-on-Orwell responses of news reporters fumbling for what to say about "fake news." Newspapers and television news broadcasters have for years provided product-placement furniture for every new piece of information technology, hard or software, coming to market. Many of us saw links to online sources embedded in New York Times stories first--having then to figure out what they were for; reporters and celebrities were speaking of Twitter well before the IT elites on my campus knew what it was.
Tellingly, news professionals are empodded in a solipsistic reality constructed of their own Twitter and Facebook feeds. That they even pay attention to Trump feeds, treating 140-character fragments as a press conference, is remarkable; that an otherwise obscure tweet exposed Press Secretary Conway's faux pas is valorized as a social media triumph over conventional journalism, as Rotenberg does, is kind of tragic.
Neil Postman ended the preface to his 1985 book with a dedication to "the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." Oh, if he could write now of journalists pointing fingers at Big Government for fake news while comfortably pleasuring themselves with the tools of their own destruction!
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The Derangement of Journalists Against Transparency
Officials from President Barack Obama's administration collude with Wall Street executives to push for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The FBI monitors "professional protesters" in Baltimore and Ferguson. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's aides discuss whether to release a video showing the extrajudicial killing of a young black man by the city's police.
Sep 08, 2016
Officials from President Barack Obama's administration collude with Wall Street executives to push for the passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. The FBI monitors "professional protesters" in Baltimore and Ferguson. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel's aides discuss whether to release a video showing the extrajudicial killing of a young black man by the city's police.
Michigan Governor Rick Snyder withheld the results of lead testing in Flint. Immigration and Customs Enforcement privately lobbied against California legislation to reduce deportations of law-abiding immigrants. State Department officials likely colluded with TransCanada executives as early as 2011 on the Keystone XL pipeline project.
All of these stories share something in common. The public learned about what government officials were doing because emails were subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. Journalists obtained those emails, and the public was able to use the information to mobilize opposition to government action.
Vox's Matt Yglesias recently outed himself as a Journalist Against Transparency or a jatter. He argued, very incorrectly, that emails and other electronic records produced by "conversational" communication tools should not be subject to FOIA.
Over at Muck Rock, a site dedicated to helping the public pursue FOIA requests, Michael Morisy appropriately corrects Yglesias. He failed to mention anything about privacy exemptions or the so-called "deliberative process privilege," which exists to protect officials from the exact thing he railed against in his piece: to enable frank conversations among government officials.
Morisy makes two key points about the ideology behind Yglesias' post. "These types of requests have proved [to be] an essential tool for journalists in an era when the press is significantly diminished and agencies have become increasingly sophisticated in spin."
And, "Leaving emails and other routine documents subject to FOIA encourages a general culture of transparency within agencies while creating another reminder that government employees work for the people."
The problem is jatters like Yglesias do not support the journalism being done around Hillary Clinton's emails. He favors increasing restrictions on what government records can be released to journalists and the public because he identifies with a candidate, who has been dogged by the fact that she tried to keep her emails out of the purview of FOIA when she was the Secretary of State.
Beyond his inability to grasp how FOIA works (and correct his misunderstanding in his post), Yglesias wrote:
The issue is that administration officials and other executive branch aides don't want to leave a record of the conversation that might come to light one day. Not necessarily because they have anything scandalous to say. After all, we live in a world where something as banal as Doug Band, a top Clinton Foundation aide, asking Huma Abedin, a top State Department aide, for a special diplomatic passport for a hostage rescue trip to North Korea and being told he can't have one can be spun as a scandal by a determined team of reporters and editors.
If Band had made a phone call instead of sending an email, Hillary Clinton would have been spared the bad--and totally unjustifiably so--news cycle she suffered last week. Which is why prudent staffers want to do basically everything, no matter how innocent, over the phone.
Essentially, Yglesias' opposition to journalism with right wing ideological motives leads him to advocate for curtailing government transparency. Or, in other words, he would like to reduce the flow of information so there would be less reporting and less speech about Clinton that was negative.
Yglesias is tired of dealing with the manufactured scandals of conservative media mavens, and aren't most people sick of it? But that scarcely justifies closing off access to types of records that could contain bombshells, which may impact Clinton when she is president.
Another jatter, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones, outed himself too, as he condemned the "weaponization" of FOIA:
...What we've seen with Hillary Clinton is not that she's done anything especially wrong, but that a story can last forever if there's a constant stream of new revelations. That's what's happened over the past four years. Between Benghazi committees and Judicial Watch's anti-Hillary jihad, Clinton's emails have been steadily dripped out practically monthly, even though there's never been any compelling reason for it. It's been done solely to keep her alleged corruption in the public eye.
Leaving aside the issue of whether Clinton has "done anything especially wrong," which is highly, highly debatable, the idea that FOIA should be restricted because conservative organizations are "weaponizing" it is brain-dead and ill-conceived.
Who decides what information should not be used for political purposes? Clinton allies and progressive pundits have had it with the damn Clinton emails and all things Benghazi-related, but what if a Republican was the target? Would Drum and Yglesias want anyone telling them not to constantly cite emails to criticize and educate the public on questionable and corrupt practices?
Drum does not have any more clue about FOIA than Yglesias. He ham-handedly advocates, "Less transparency, but faster, more effective transparency. Even journalists might buy this trade. I believe that cabinet officers need to have a certain amount of space to have policy discussions without fear of every word they say becoming public."
Good news, Mr. Drum. In the United States, cabinet officers do have a "certain amount of space to have policy discussions" and do not have to fear "every word they say becoming public." Records of cabinet meetings with President Obama are not pasted all over the internet, jeopardizing honesty and forthrightness in government.
In addition to this unfounded fear, Drum also makes no reference to the privacy exemptions and so-called "deliberative process privilege," which allows officials to shield certain records from FOIA.
Yglesias has merely generated the latest round of debate that allows members of the public to separate journalists, who favor strong investigative journalism, from journalists against transparency, who are quick to advocate for limits on what we know about the government.
It never occurs to Drum or Yglesias that government officials could simply not do the thing they are unwilling to defend in public.
National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden helped us identify several jatters. The New York Times' Thomas Friedman declared, "I believe Snowden is someone who needed a whistleblower. He needed someone to challenge him with the argument that we don't live in a world any longer where our government can protect its citizens from real, not imagined, threats without using big data -- where we still have an edge -- under constant judicial review."
"It's not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale attack gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater."
Stuart Taylor Jr., a contributing editor at Newsweek and columnist for the National Journal, suggested the media was "too loose in publishing anything they can get their hands on." Although noting some exceptions, Taylor argued the trend was, "if we can get our hands on it, some secret program, we publish it. And I think there has not been enough attention to which of these leaks do real damage to national security and which do not."
The rise of WikiLeaks has inspired several journalists, including entire editorial boards, to proclaim that publishing government documents is not journalism.
A 2013 Indiana University survey by David Weaver and Lars Willnat showed, "The percentage of U.S. journalists endorsing the occasional use of 'confidential business or government documents without authorization' dropped significantly from 81.8 percent in 1992 to 57.7 percent in 2013." That represents a stark development, like journalists are increasingly unwilling to make decisions about documents being in the public interest.
This culture against transparency, whether because journalists ideologically identify with security agencies or certain politicians, remains entrenched among U.S. media and periodically bubbles to the surface. And, to use a phrase from Aldous Huxley, their "excruciating orgasms of self-assertion" betray a great tradition of muckraking and contribute to the decline of journalism.
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Campaign 2016's Brave New World
As the U.S. election shapes up as a battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, the prospect for the public hearing anything approaching a truthful exchange of ideas appears hopeless
Jun 14, 2016
In 1958, a quarter century after publishing Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote a reflective essay on the themes of his book that ring with prescient truth. His analysis delves into the rise of deceptive candidates who prioritize personal interests over supporting democracy.
Huxley wrote: "From a pulpit or a platform even the most conscientious of speakers finds it very difficult to tell the whole truth. The methods now being used to merchandise the political candidate as though he were a deodorant positively guarantee the electorate against ever hearing the truth about anything."
Huxley's words precisely describe the techniques used in the current presidential campaign. The core issue is the motivation behind the candidates' words.
Hillary Clinton promotes herself as the first female presidential candidate without embracing the pacifist foundations of feminism. She has supported many of the aggressive military actions of the United States in recent years. Her use of liberal rhetoric belies her ties to military and corporate interests and membership in the American oligarchy. Clinton's deceptive techniques in gaining popularity rely mostly on omission of truth. Except for a few grudging mistakes-were-made formulations, she admits to no faults.
Donald Trump brings distortion of truth to a new level. He is an iconic salesman, offering a magic potion that will cure all social and political ills. And in that tradition, he repeatedly assails the status quo, claiming to identify and empathize with the downtrodden and ignored. He intentionally attracts followers in hypnotic, pied-piper fashion, repeatedly asserting he will solve all their problems.
Trump drives this home by encouraging the disenchanted to project their discontent onto current leadership, rather than considering their own role in, or awareness of the dysfunctions in U.S. politics and economy. He offers no real solution to the individual except, "Vote for me."
This subversive approach of spewing emotion while ignoring facts appeals to the darkest recesses of the human psyche and has become the norm in elections. In that sense, U.S. politics has reached a new low with the Trump candidacy. Very few of Trump's supporters can delineate his policy or position; rather they cite his attack on the establishment or his "honesty" or "strength" as reason for allegiance. Trump's act uses manipulative tactics aimed at stirring the unconscious forces of repressed discontent and frustration.
Trump repeatedly compliments himself on his own simple common sense values as his rhetoric fuels the hostile impulses of his followers. Trump's intolerance and bullying are symptomatic of undisguised fascism.
Different Styles
Candidate Clinton relies on more subtle techniques. She promotes conventional wisdom and the false premise that the U.S. is the arbiter of democracy in the world to justify military intervention. She makes her case for use of force citing "strategic" interests, omitting the corporate and financial motives that are the foundation of her policies. While her arguments appear more logical than her opponent's, they are no less deceptive.
Though candidate Trump criticizes Clinton's penchant for "regime change," he often suggests that forceful intervention or violence is a viable remedy in resolving international crises, stopping extremism, or punishing those who voice protest against him. This resonates with frustrated voters and encourages followers to act out personal anger against those who would doubt the supremacy of their leader. Trump's arrogance and self-absorbed persona are catalysts for unchecked hostility both domestically and internationally.
In his essay of nearly 60 years ago, Huxley describes how propaganda is used to justify violence:
"Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty."
Huxley had observed the rise and fall of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. His evaluation of the social psychology of U.S. politics did not shy away from the universal similarities in human behavior at its worst. That perspective is no less valid today. Both presidential candidates can be assailed for their use of propaganda with "incomplete evidence."
Clinton's appeal is to the status quo, supporting a United States where military expenditures represent the highest proportion of tax revenues, where interests of big business and banking come first, and where mass shootings are a cultural norm. She has an advantage because of her appeal to the majority of voters who cling to normalcy. Clinton attacks Trump as unpredictable and dangerous.
Trump counterattacks by portraying her as deviant, abnormal and criminal, "Crooked Hillary." He also taps into the dissatisfaction with government and the reasonable belief that politicians have led the country astray, calling American leaders weak and incompetent in contrast to his supposed strength and skill.
He relies on a cult of personality and a searing indictment of current leadership to raise his status. Rather than appealing to factual data and proposing viable solutions, Trump is the supreme authoritarian targeting the unchecked emotional forces of those who are entranced by his bravado.
Riding the Discontent
Trump is the voice of collective dissatisfaction, projecting and revealing one version of the American reality. He describes a political world that he also embodies: "Washington is broken, and our country is in serious trouble and total disarray. Very simple. Politicians are all talk, no action. They are all talk and no action. And it's constant; it never ends."
Trump gladly enters this disarray, the realm where he is most comfortable. His stream of consciousness oratory and narcissistic candidacy bring a new bizarre character to the stage in U.S. politics, yet his rise in popularity is the extension of a growing phenomenon. For decades presidential candidates have harvested the bounty from conflicted emotions and despair to gain votes. Their empty sales tactics are often forgotten when they are elected. (In 1988, even the supposedly responsible Republican George H.W. Bush exploited racism with the Willie Horton commercials and promised, "read my lips, no new taxes," before raising taxes as President.)
Fear of Trump's words and demeanor has prompted critics and rivals to show distain, but attacks on him are hurled back with vindictive force. He succeeds in deflecting criticism and bringing former enemies into his camp. We witness the potential rise of an unpredictable tyrant.
Trump initially flaunted his independent wealth, claiming immunity from the pressure of lobbyists. With this, he unwittingly confessed allegiance to personal economic interests and policies that also favor the wealthiest Americans. Many of these same power brokers come to his side as he becomes the likely Republican presidential candidate.
Now that he could be elected, Trump's conflicted presentations of domestic and foreign policy have yet to alienate the politicians, millionaires and billionaires who join his campaign. The real list of priorities for them is short: little else matters but money and profits. Despite concerns about the personality and idiosyncrasies of their candidate, those who not long ago scorned the idea of a President Trump join an extremely dangerous bandwagon.
A billionaire with no leadership experience rises as the voice of the maligned and economically downtrodden. A candidate whose wealth is more telling than any of his stated positions has become the defender of those who suffer from an economy that overtly favors the richest individuals and corporations.
Beyond recognizing and criticizing his blustering racism and fascism, there is minimal challenge to Trump's most ludicrous claim: to represent any other economic class than his own. Trump's greatest vulnerability lies in his status as the super-rich candidate who dubiously presents himself as someone who will come to the aid of the economically challenged.
Allies of the Wealthy
Yet neither wealthy presidential contender - Trump nor Clinton - can be expected to do much that will discomfort the comfortable. While claiming to have altruistic motivations, they are inextricably tied to the forces that drive policies favoring profiteering over basic needs. The most costly impact of Trump's candidacy to America's economic elite will come when the public finally recognizes that the wealthiest Americans have gained vastly disproportional influence.
The founding principles and structure of the U.S. democracy rest on keeping power out of the hands of a small clique of people and their indiscriminate financially based decisions. An oligarch reaching for political office by any means confirms that the interests of an elite class are an entrenched priority.
Yet despite his crude emergence, Trump is not an anomaly. The rise of extreme nationalism in the face of economic crisis is a consequence of decades of corrupt domestic and international policies. The crisis that faces the United States is certainly exemplified by the rise of Donald Trump and would be seriously exacerbated by his presidency, but will not be resolved by his electoral defeat.
Huxley, as early as 1958, adds perspective to a continuing syndrome: "At this point we find ourselves confronted by a very disquieting question: Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge? Does a majority of the population think it worthwhile to take a good deal of trouble, in order to halt and, if possible, reverse the current drift toward totalitarian control of everything?
"In the United States of America is the prophetic image of the rest of the urban-industrial world as it will be a few years from now; recent public opinion polls have revealed that an actual majority of young people in their teens, the voters of tomorrow, have no faith in democratic institutions, see no objection to the censorship of unpopular ideas, do not believe that government of the people by the people is possible and would be perfectly content, if they can continue to live in the style to which the boom has accustomed them, to be ruled, from above, by an oligarchy of assorted experts."
Trump, the self-absorbed snake-oil salesman, may self-destruct as quickly as he has risen; however we cannot dismiss the illness allowing his candidacy. Materialism cloaked as patriotism needs to be faced head on and not blamed on a single candidate.
Perhaps Hillary Clinton is more subtle about the forces she is tied to; and clearly has more political experience and a better understanding of the constitutional system. Yet whoever is elected president of the United States will be wed to the identical economic forces. The presidential election of 2016 will be remembered as when Americans were forced to realize that their power has been handed to the economic elite.
Huxley's question becomes more relevant: "Do we really wish to act upon our knowledge?"
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Four Lessons from Iceland and Greece for Movements Fighting Austerity
After dining on cod on July 7, European leaders representing the economic elites went back to work figuring out how to run over the Greek majority in Europe's first democracy. The serving of cod, presumably from Iceland, is ironic considering that it was the Icelanders who six years ago defied European investors -- and by doing so saved their economy and bolstered their well-being. Movements for justice around the world have much to learn from keeping in mind both of these national dramas.
Jul 09, 2015
After dining on cod on July 7, European leaders representing the economic elites went back to work figuring out how to run over the Greek majority in Europe's first democracy. The serving of cod, presumably from Iceland, is ironic considering that it was the Icelanders who six years ago defied European investors -- and by doing so saved their economy and bolstered their well-being. Movements for justice around the world have much to learn from keeping in mind both of these national dramas.
When Iceland's 1 percent brought the economy to its historic crisis in 2008, Icelanders could not get any money from their ATMs. It was the worst economic collapse in Europe since World War II.
When Greece's 1 percent brought the economy to its downward economic spiral in 2010, Europe's 1 percent stepped in and Greece's centrist government accepted the imposition of austerity measures. The result of the ensuing five years of austerity? Greece now threatens to beat Iceland's record as Europe's worst economic collapse.
When Iceland fell apart it initially followed the rules, turning to the International Monetary Fund for help. However, the people brought down the ruling government and installed a leftist government that defied the IMF's prescription. Iceland quickly rebounded, avoiding high unemployment and preventing people's loss of their mortgaged homes. Iceland's democracy refused to bow to the IMF's austerity requirement, and bailed out the people instead of the banks.
In contrast to the results in the United States and Europe of post-2008 austerity, where the wealth gap has widened, Iceland's solution produced a shrinking of its wealth gap. Iceland increased its social safety net, increased taxes on the rich and reduced taxes on low-income people. In the U.N.'s 2012 World Happiness Report, Iceland came in number 1 in the world.
During a research trip to Iceland in 2014 I interviewed education professor Hanna Ragnarsdottir and asked her about the impact of the collapse on Icelandic education. "We had to tighten our belts, or course," she responded, looking solemn and pausing in thought for a moment. Then, to my surprise, she told me that they avoided laying off teachers or other staff. They did leave vacant some positions and put off new projects, but "now things are looking up again," she said.
While there are many economic differences between Iceland and Greece, I'm struck by the overwhelming determination in both countries to take charge of their own economies. Their popular movements understand that austerity is actually a weapon in the class war. In Iceland, the majority was able to reclaim self-determination and create a left solution to their economic crisis -- and it worked. Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said, "What Iceland did was right. It would have been wrong to burden future generations with the mistakes of the financial system."
At the moment, the Greek majority is fighting for the same freedom, but the famously undemocratic European Union has no intention of allowing anything except its 1 percent solution.
What does this mean for social movements in the United States and elsewhere?
Make transparent the costs of the austerity weapon.
Health economist David Stuckler's statistical studies have shown that austerity triggers psychological depression and predictably increases the incidence of heart attacks and suicides.
Fortunately, when the IMF urged cuts in health care Stuckler and his colleagues were called in by the Icelandic leftist government for a consultation. The government learned that going along with the IMF would mean increased disease, injury and death for Icelanders.
Using international statistics, Stuckler demonstrates that the United States and other countries have been suffering unnecessary disease, injury and death by allowing the economic elite to run the economy. Social movements could empower nurses, doctors and social workers to tell the truth about the terrible price to our health.
Don't wait: Create crises to expose the role of the economic elite.
In both Iceland and Greece the majority allowed the minority to create their crisis through wrecking their economies. The U.S. majority up until now seems willing for the 1 percent to wreck our economy through its climate policies.
As strategist Bill Moyer pointed out in his 2002 book "Doing Democracy," the role of social movements is to create a mini-crisis that alerts the majority to what has been going on behind its back. That's what the campaigns of the civil rights movement did in Birmingham, Selma and elsewhere. Some activists do understand the need for a "crisis" and try to induce one by creating one-off mass actions where the power-holders gather, but mass bashes at summits and political conventions have diminishing value.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Martin Luther King Jr. showed that a crisis created by a nonviolent campaign is the more effective wake-up call to the majority. Strategic 1 percenters sometimes realize this and attempt to head off crises that expose them by giving way, making compromises and accepting our demands. The movement gains whichever response the economic elite makes: either concrete gains that give a despairing people hope that action matters, or stonewalling that provokes a deepening crisis that puts a brighter spotlight on the greed and incompetence of the economic elite.
It's easy at a distance to say that Icelanders and Greeks could have saved themselves a whole lot of trouble by mounting focused mass nonviolent direct action campaigns to stop the abuses of the elites in their countries, for example, the avoidance of taxpaying in Greece. If the series of nonviolent campaigns grew -- as they did in Norway and Sweden in the 1920s and 1930s -- the economic elite would have found their position eroding and a power shift might have occurred. A tiny glimpse: Norwegians can go online and read the tax return of anyone in the country. Those are the kinds of tools made available once the majority has established a real democracy.
Build alternative institutions that build confidence, the skills of cooperation, and teamwork.
Middle class Americans are generally brought up to be competitive with each other. At the same time, they are socialized to accept the overall norm of fitting in, including joining the larger agenda of the owning class. That's one reason why middle class white anti-racist activists compete with each other ("Who's more politically correct than whom?") while refraining from campaigns that could actually dislodge racist institutional patterns.
Dealing with one's own compulsion to be competitive is tough, but a useful arena for change is community, and we can create community in our living choices, activist organizations and co-ops.
Assist the majority to realize that the economic elite plays by different rules.
The willingness of national elites in Iceland and Greece to support international muscle to hold on to wealth at the price of the suffering and death of their compatriots can be hard for majorities to wrap their minds around. Nationalism still has its appeal, and it is especially challenging for people raised middle class to be duly cynical about their masters -- in the United States, as well as in other countries.
Many of us need to learn cynicism. As Aldous Huxley wrote, "It's good to be cynical, if you know when to stop." The stopping point for me is at the point of movement-building, to be warm and welcoming to members of the owning class, who courageously join the rest of us in putting the common good first. That kind of togetherness -- solidarity -- is the best alternative to nationalism.
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