Chris Bray with a link-filled post about the modern malaise of western society:
We’re getting there. We can all see it, especially as it gets ready to die.
But a more and more widely shared diagnosis is still producing explanations that don’t quite fit together. Take some time over the holidays, or just over this weekend, to read two remarkable new essays that offer different explanations for the same sickness:
At Tablet, David Samuels describes the creation of a messaging system designed to advance untruth and herd people into compliance — and he discusses “Obama’s role in directing the entire system from above”. In this telling, the system of social manipulation is a party instrument. Democrats did it.
At the same time, on his Substack page, Lorenzo Warby has just posted a deeply argued essay concluding that “we in the West do not live in Party-States. We increasingly live in activist-network states.” In this formulation, our descent into a societal atmosphere of enforced untruth is distributed, not centralized — through “networks and (interactive) signalling”.
What you’ll find striking about these two essays is how much they overlap in description while offering different explanations. We live in an atmosphere of dishonesty and manipulation — an age of psychic warfare — but we’re not quite sure who to blame for it.
However it works, whatever force or system or personality is driving, the social illness caused by the cultural compliance exercise has been obvious for years. Samuels: “The effect of the permission structure machine is to instill and maintain obedience to voices coming from outside yourself, regardless of the obvious gaps in logic and functioning that they create. The clinical term for this state is schizophrenia.”
An argument against Obama did it is that the “it” is global, and more obviously horrible in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK, and nearing its grotesque apogee in Germany. The pandemic-era narrative enforcement efforts of people like Daniel Andrews, Jacinda Ardern, and Canadian Prime Minister Derek Zoolander surely make American commissars swoon with jealousy. Another argument against the claim that Obama created a new compliance system is the behavior of Václav Havel’s greengrocer, which suggests the use of new media tools for an old job.
An argument against socially guided networks that aren’t top-down party-state systems is the astonishing degree to which the US government is now known to have weaponized the corporate-state coordination of narrative control.
