On a different but supportive note, I read an essay* by an historian who
pointed out that the South had lost the war but won the peace. He attributed it
to the resilience of a hegemonic social structure, and its refusal to accept a
military resolution of a disagreement - rather like Iraq and the emergence of
Daesh, one might point out. The interesting thing is that historically
speaking, the social minority that thinks that it has a prescriptive right to
steer society in the right direction rarely takes notice of ephemerals like war
or legislation. The kinds of superior intellects that have been spotted reading
Bernard Cohn on the Indian response to the introduction of western
jurisprudence might be able to do more with this than I managed with my
forty-year old pack of crib-sheets on social science and history.
* Have been trying to locate both the essay and its author in vain for some
weeks now. That's what senescence does. bonobashi
On Thursday, 28 January 2016 1:24 PM, Udhay Shankar N <[email protected]>
wrote:
And another super thought provoking post from Charlie Stross. I believe
that India has already had its first such "telepathy" mediated election,
and the outcomes are still playing themselves out.
Thoughts?
Udhay
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/01/some-american-political-marker.html
The paranoid style in 2016
By Charlie Stross
I like to keep track of US politics, because it's generally less traumatic
to contemplate someone else's smoking wreckage than one's own house when
it's on fire.
2016 is a Presidential election year in the United States, and I make no
predictions as to the outcome. However, a lot of my friends and
acquaintances are looking at the Republican party primary debates in
slack-jawed disbelief and coming out with variations on, "OMG, we're
doomed! Did he really say that?"
Well yes, in most cases he did. What we're seeing is the climactic
efflorescence of tendencies that have been running in American right-wing
politics for longer than I've been alive, so none of this is a surprise:
but if you find it bizarre or confusing and want to know where it's come
from, carry on reading.
In the earlier "Long-range forecast" thread, one of the regular commenters
said, my human side wonders if the toxins can be sucked out and hatreds
healed and works on that assumption. (Innocence-with-awareness).
I fear that her human side is wrong, at least in the short term, for values
of "short" on the approximate order of my lifespan. I have two essays I'd
like to cite, both by historian-journalists in search of the heart of
[American] darkness.
The first one, by Richard J. Hofstadter, was published a month after I was
born, so it's over 51 years old and predates Nixon's Southern Strategy: The
Paranoid Style in American Politics. It tells you how deep some of the
taproots of crazy go. The essay's a classic. In it, Hofstadter explores
(per wiki) "political paranoia against Illuminism (intellectual
subversion), freemasonry (corporate subversion), and the Jesuits (religious
subversion), then progresses through U.S. politics to its contemporary
(1950s-60s) modern incarnations of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society."
(Note that the John Birch society was co-founded by Fred C. Koch. His
children's political activities today should require no introduction.)
The second one is more recent. It's by Rick Perlstein, published in 2012,
and it's all about the motives of the people who irrigate those taproots:
The Long Con: mail-order conservativism. The key point is that the
conspiracy tendencies Hofstadter pointed to in the 1960s are still around
and in use to this day by opportunist hucksters who rely on Republican
party mailing lists to milk donations from the gullible and frightened,
just as televangelists use variant theology to solicit donations from their
own flock of believers.
If you've read and inwardly digested these, and have an understanding of
Altemeyer's book on Authoritarian Followers (wikipedia crib notes here),
then you're equipped to understand how this deeply toxic meme complex
perpetuates itself—or at least how it did so up to roughly 2007.
2007 is when the human species accidentally invented telepathy (via the
fusion of twitter, facebook, and other disclosure-induction social media
with always-connected handheld internet devices). Telepathy, unfortunately,
turns out to not be all about elevated Apollonian abstract intellectualism:
it's an emotion amplifier and taps into the most toxic wellsprings of the
subconscious. As implemented, it brings out the worst in us. Twitter and
Facebook et al are fine-tuned to turn us all into car-crash rubberneckers
and public execution spectators. It can be used for good, but more often it
drags us down into the dim-witted, outraged weltanschauung of the mob.
It turns out that when you take the old paranoid-style driven
give-us-all-your-money mailing list scams (and their old-media spin-offs
like Fox News and Clear Channel's talk radio shock jocks) and add
telepathy, what you get is the whole festering stew of the Neo-reactionary
movement, a scream of rage directed against the modern world. (Let's not
forget that the ideological roots of the neo-reactionaries, notably Nick
Land's writings on accelerationism, emerged during the late 1990s, not at
all coincidentally at the same time that internet access among the western
bourgeoisie was becoming A Thing.) When you add telepathy to the toxic stew
of rejection of the Enlightenment legacy you get an ad-hoc movement of
angry ideologues who have jabbed their fungal hyphae into the cerebral
cortex of Reddit and n-chan to parasitically control the rageface
collective.
Of course higher-order top-down parasites like the NSA, GCHQ, the Five Eyes
and the 50-Cent Party have also noticed this fertile disinformation vector
and are using it to provide evidence to justify their existing bureaucratic
imperatives: and combat newer ad-hoc upstart rivals. Oh, and to drag it all
in a circle, if you look at Da'esh and the Neoreactionaries? East is East
and West is West and this is your face in a mirror.
But here's the key take-away: 2016 will be the first US Presidential
Election where the outcome will be visibly influenced by telepathic
broadcasts direct from the political id, with the more plugged-in
candidates (cough, Donald Trump) speaking in tweets rather than TV-friendly
sound-bites and making their play in real time to their audience reactions,
much like the plot of a novel co-written by Neal Stephenson before he got
famous. If you've wondered why Trump can say the things he says, it's
because his core constituency want him to. If you want to know why Islamic
State are so awful, you can find the answer in Hofstadter and Altemeyer's
work—just add Islam instead of Capitalism as a guiding ideology. And if you
want to know what the worst possible case outcome for the USA looks like
(caveat: I think it's highly unlikely it'll go that far), now you've got
the tools to figure it out for yourself. It looks kinda like Da'esh's
caliphate, only with the NRA instead of religious police, Facebook instead
of the Friday sermon after the call to prayer, and a surplus of unhappy
zoned-out worker-consumer-units on tranquillizers.
Posted by Charlie Stross at 13:17 on January 17, 2016 |
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
