In 1936, Dale Carnegie published his self-help sensation, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It became a kind of holy scripture for legions self-promoting hucksters and salespeople worshiping at the idol of Success. Politicians, too. In my own most recent online publications, I can boast of the opposite. Taken together, these jeremiads might suitably be titled, How to Lose Online “Friends” and Piss Off Others. This will be my latest chapter of that tome. Don’t take it too personally; what I write nowadays is mostly motivated by the self-criticism of an old man reviewing his own regrets.
I’ve come to realize how many of my stated motivations in the past were cover-ups for my deeper (often more venal or neurotic) motives. Like a lot of other people who can look a lot further backward than forward, I often entertain fantasies of having known better then, wherein things would have turned out differently. In reality, of course, plenty of people are worse off than me, so these time-travel fantasies are just another form of (mostly harmless) self-indulgence. I sublimate these fantasies, again as old folks are wont to do, by passing along my own self-criticisms as unheeded warnings to others, especially those who are younger. Also to narrate some of my own discoveries about myself that give the lie to the notion that I invented/chose/discovered my “self.” The longer I live the more I realize how often I’ve hopped as someone shot at my feet and convinced myself I was a dancer.
Dividing my life into very overgeneralized phases, I had a dislocative slacker childhood, an army career, and a political period. These were divided into roughly 20-year increments, with family stuff that overlapped these periods. It’s the political period on my mind today, because one of the regrets I’ve begun nursing in my dotage is my repeated failure to be honest with myself and others. And to be honest (ha!), most of my regrets probably revolve around the times my own dishonesty caught me out or led to some subsequent embarrassment. (Motives again.)
Honesty is a loaded topic, as we all know, and one that we all have to lawyer up on. Is honesty simply telling the truth? Or does it entail disclosing secrets, too? Is it a moral absolute (if it is, we all fail)? Most of us can construct the kinds of moral quandaries about honesty that preoccupy ethicists. Most good novels and films will center somehow on secrets and lies (that’s even an actual title). In my provocative title here I used the word liars; an easy epithet, and one that could easily be applied to the vast majority of us at one time or another. We live in a manipulative, combative, dog-eat-dog society, where scrupulous honesty would require a kind of herculean spiritual effort and a willingness to be punished or shunned . . . a lot. At the same time, bluntly calling someone a liar is “fightin’ words.”
Honesty as an absolutist moral simplification is a kind of perverse mental experiment. We all know damn well that there are plenty of circumstances where “telling the truth” can be hurtful and harmful, and we all have secrets that are best left unsaid. This post is not such an experiment. It’s about the role of deception in public life, where these deceptions are employed in the service of power or power-seeking (and, as I’ll explain, a form of denial).
With all those caveats, my clickbait title stands. Politics, even the politics of those who feel they are on the side of the angels, bends toward deception, prevarication, exaggeration, misrepresentation, fallacy, and demonization. Politics, as some have noted, is an instrumental practice, and a consequentialist one at that. The ends justify the means. Where have we heard that? Politics, after all, is a recursive reproduction and reflection of our society — manipulative, combative, and dog-eat-dog.
Politics not only provokes us to distort, deceive, and dissemble; it opens us up to believing (and then repeating) dishonest accounts that appear amenable to our political cause. There are lies we readily believe, because they fit nicely into manipulative, combative, dog-eat-dog political narratives. The easiest of the easily believable lies is that everyone who opposes us is irredeemably evil; and the follow-on belief is that since the enemy is pure evil, it is acceptable to accuse them of anything, whether it’s true or not . . . because they have it coming.
Politics often entails another form of dishonesty — projection. Projection is a common experience even in our non-political lives. No one is more wary of thieves than a thief. The unfaithful spouse feels an almost unbearable suspicion about his or her spouse’s fidelity. The passive aggressive deals with his anger by accusing the object of his anger of being angry with him. But also the kind of projection in which one’s own central political preoccupation, phenomenon, or enemy is centralized in the interpretation of events and incidents. The Highland Park mass shooting is in the news as I write this, and it seems everyone has his or her own spin on what “caused” it, or how it fits into some larger narrative. Certainly, there are valid interpretations of such an incident, but it’s dishonesty when one interpretation is privileged over all others or represented as the whole or only story. Projection, like other forms of dishonesty, tries to simplify the complex . . . projection is, after all, a psychological defense mechanism that also entails denial to insulate the subject from things that feel threatening.
My last post about religion has within two days attracted a half dozen projectile misinterpretations.
In that post, I discussed the controversies surrounding religion and politics, and while I was putting the link on Facebook, I ran across a hoary trope about the injustice churches not being taxed. In the background of this grievance are a number of fallacies, giving rise to the fallacy that stands in the foreground. Of course, the baddies were megachurches and rich-ass televangelists who’ve been promoting the right wing agenda that’s managed to manifest itself in an “activist” and unaccountable right-wing Supreme Court. The foreground fallacy is that churches, as churches, are tax exempt. This is plainly not true, but why do the homework when it fits the narrative. Churches are largely tax exempt in the US, but not because they are churches. Most churches in the US are incorporated under the Internal Revenue Service as 501(c)(3) non-profits — a status for corporation ostensibly organized for charity and public education. The same tax exemption these churches enjoy is shared by organizations as diverse as the Smithsonian Institution, Habitat for Humanity, Veterans For Peace, the Hoover Institute, the DSA Fund, and the Adrian Amateur Radio Club. Churches are not tax exempt because they are churches. So the background notion that the state is privileging “religion” is wrong, but also in the deceptive background are the ideas (1) that a megachurch is representative of churches (the average church membership fluctuates around 75 people), (2) that all churches are teaching and doing the same things (they emphatically are not), (3) and that church-goers are overwhelmingly Republican (they only slightly lean that way overall, and in fact, the numbers are split even within congregations). But “tax churches” makes a good (white people) meme that aims at the heart of an imaginary enemy. (Churches were the institutional organizing base for the US Civil Rights Movement.)
People who were passing along this trope weren’t mostly liars; they were the victims and re-perpetrators of a common dual human failing — credulousness and confirmation bias. My title was provocative and bent the stick a good ways. It could have been, “Politics makes bullshitters out of us all.” I’ve not been the exception.
Of course, for political lying on a large scale, few can compete with big media and politicians themselves. The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New York Post, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, Newsweek, NPR, the Associated Press, BBC, and most of the other well-knowns have all been caught out repeatedly making false claims; and even so-called “fact checker” sites like Snopes and Politifact have been busted for lying. Donald Trump topped 30,000 lies during his tenure as Idiot-in-Chief, and his popularity seemed to grow with each falsehood. President Joe Biden is an inveterate liar, as are both Bill and Hillary Clinton. Even Saint Obama pumped out some racing grade horse shit. It’s difficult to find any successful politician who’s not a manipulative, calculating liar.
It’s equally hard to find a political “activist” who won’t “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative” on behalf of some policy fight. “Don’t say anything bad about Joe Biden, because Republicans!” Lying by other means.
Politics is war by other means (and sometimes war is politics by other means). It’s all war; and all wars are accompanied, in the words of a murderous imperial prick named Winston Churchill, “by a bodyguard of lies.” That’s where things go when the ends justify the means.
Lies become legends, and legends become myths. We lie, we bullshit, we talk out of our asses. Because we have an agenda . . . an imaginary general’s mission.
What an abundance we have now . . . of correlation posing as causation, substituting deceptive statistics for reality, and plain intentional deception. The reason? These tactics work (but only with partisans). Speaking of deception, it can also be a preface. Which is what you’ve read so far. My deceptive preface.
What?!
There is a deeper deception afoot than the mere tactical prevarications of pundits, politicians, and partisans, also birthed by war . . . and sustained by blind consensus. Let’s put some history out there, a little personal experience, and a little Ellulian sociology. History first.
Politics and war have always involved deception . . . they always will. These archons drink deception, and anyone who’s paying attention knows it. Last week, Gallup released a new poll that showed Americans’ trust in institutions at record lows, and falling.
Trust in the presidency is now 23 percent, down 15 percent since the incompetent Biden took the office. Trust in the Supreme Court is 25 percent, down eleven since last year. Trust in the police is 45 percent, a drop of six percent. The medical system dropped six to 38 percent. Religious institutions lost six percent and stand at 31. Banks bled out six percent to achieve 27 percent confidence. Public schools had 32 percent approval last year, and have 28 percent in 2022. Mega-tech companies had 29 percent love last year and fell to 26. Newspapers went from 21 to 16, big business 18 to 14, television 16–11, and Congress . . . oh Congress! In 2021 Congress was trusted by 12 percent. This year, the magic number is seven. Only labor unions held their anemic trust level, 28–28.
Even the military, the love of which is an article of faith in the American civil religion, lost five percent of the public’s confidence, falling from 69 percent to 64. Which brings me to my own past career in the military.
When I went to Vietnam, the most complicated technology we used, as infantrymen, were PRC-25 radios, one per squad. Those bastards weighed 25 pounds before you added the extra batteries, which weighed as much as a baseball bat. The helicopters that dropped us off on the tangled hilltops of the Central Highlands were the old Hueys that would have a life expectancy of about ten minutes today, six passengers each. We communicated with our families and friends “back in the world” by writing letters, which we gave to a crew chief during resupply drops, and he’d put the letters in a mail sack, which was carried to a base somewhere, and sent back by airplane. Crew chief to addressee, up to two weeks. We’d never heard of computers. We didn’t have kevlar helmets or body armor or night optics. If we took casualties, we had to schlep them through heavy vegetation and across steep ground to someplace open enough and high enough and far away enough from enemy fire to allow the Medivac birds to land. Sometimes, we’d have to clear vegetation with machetes and explosives to make the landing zone. If it was night time, we often had to wait for daybreak. The day I collapsed with 104 degree malarial fever, it took almost six hours to put me on a chopper.
When I went to Somalia in 1993, more than two decades later, we were outfitted with petite digital personal radios, body armor, flip-down night-vision, Blackhawks and “little birds” that could fly “blacked out” at night, satellite surveillance, etc. etc. You get the picture. We were far closer to the cyborg troops that were pulled out of Afghanistan last year.
In 1983, I went to 1st SFOD-D, popularly called Delta Force then. The unit was only them beginning a tech-transition of its own. Originally composed not of cyborgs, but a bunch of alcoholic military misfits, the unit was a footnote in the Army. Our assault uniforms were coveralls dyed black, and our “building clearing” weapons cheap .45 caliber submachine guns called “grease guns,” with Colt .45 autoloaders as sidearms. We built our own explosive charges with non-standard (commercial) products. We wore dyed sneakers as foot gear. Later that same year, we transitioned from “grease guns” to German MP-5s, from coveralls to specially-designed Nomex fire retardant uniforms with a bunch of bells and whistles, and we started conferring with contractors to study a host of other new gadgets.
At the same time, we were the most advanced organization in the country in the development of tactics to conduct hostage rescue operations in buildings, buses, airplanes, et al. We ended up training, while I was there, the FBI’s new “Hostage Rescue Team,” and several large metropolitan SWAT teams. These tactics were then highly classified, but as the saying goes, “If you want to keep a secret, don’t tell anyone.
The cops we trained took the tactics during the “war on drugs” and repurposed them for military style assaults to serve non-knock warrants. This led to further dissemination.
Today, some of the same tactics are taught to small town cops, and these tactics can be found online for the edification of cosplaying militias and the like. Also note the panoply of war-tech gear sported at militia cosplay events and Capitol insurrections.
Even more to the point, one of the most longstanding and essential military technical advantages has been portable communication, whether it was the BC-1000 in World War II, the PRC-25 in Vietnam, or the GD-300 wearable computer used by troops in Afghanistan. Today, 85 percent of Americans use some kind of cell phone. We all have portable communication devices, just like cyborg soldiers and militarized cops.
But we have far more than portable communications devices, because most of these are “smart phones,” portable computers hooked together by another military innovation — the internet.
Remember back at the beginning, when I divided my life into the slacker, solider, activist phases? The bridge between the soldier and activist phase was my first personal computer in 1995, when the phone dial-up made all those weird pinging noises to connect to the net.
Backing up again, for a bit more personal/historical perspective, I was born in 1951. In 1948, two years before me, just two percent of American homes had a television set. By the time I was four, 70 percent of American homes had at least one television.
What I’m getting at, anecdotally, is how mediation works. By mediation, I mean the mediation of experience, knowledge, and practice. By the time I was four, I was having the world mediated by my parents, by language, by the environment in Southern California, by technologies from washing machines to automobiles, and by television. I set television apart because it’s not merely a mechanical mediator, like a car, but a symbolic/lingusitic/narrative mediator. As such, it has tremendous power; but let’s not forget it also had and has a power beyond that exercised by storytellers and advertising propaganda. It had constructive power, that is, it established the modern living room and initiated the development of the smart home — and so not only changed architecture, but the built social environment writ large. It inaugurated a rapid process of social atomization.
I was reprieved to a minor extent from the totalizing technical uniformity of what Ellul called technique — or conformity to and subjugation by a culture evermore mediated by its grids and gadgets — by older parents. My mother was a child of the Depression, and my father was born in 1906 . They both liked vegetable gardens and fishing, and my father ran traplines until he was around 75 years old. But even he, as cancer took his mobility, his sight, and finally his life, was confined to a living room, where he listened constantly to the television. My mother had even come to believe that televisions made children smart faster.
Electronic media vastly accelerated the hegemony of technique, which Ellul, in a bit of French hyperbole, called a form of terrorism (without the terror). What he meant by that was political, a method of diffusive politics that imposes a despotic uniformity on all. Technique, mediated by electronic media, has been far more efficient at mind and body control than Stalin’s terror, with its ham-fisted show trials, gulags, and mass executions. The computer age is a pied piper, and we’ve all danced merrily into the streets to follow it.
Ellul broke human history into three epistemic stages: mediation by nature, mediation by society, mediation by technique. These are not discrete, well-defined borders with dates and places, but tidal changes that pull us off the beach like grains of sand. Roughly speaking, mediation by nature was when people’s attention was forced to focus on weather, terrain, flora, fauna, etc.; mediation by society was when we were locked into social systems that transcended nature, controlled by kings and generals; mediation by technique is when the technology itself is in command. The latter is remarkable inasmuch as even those in command are under the command of technique.
If you aren’t sufficiently tech-savvy now, you won’t get a job. If you want a post-collegiate job now, you’d best avoid the humanities and learn the technics. Your children now are educated in such a way that computers are not an adjunct to learning, but an absolute necessity. If they don’t master computers, they will fall behind as losers in technique’s rat race.
Again, these are not simple historical stages. I went fishing yesterday. I paid attention to the weather, the water temperature and depth, underwater structures, the behaviors of various paraphyletic species, where the gulls flew, and so forth. I had to have my fishing license in hand, a form of social control. I arrived by automobile with my boat, and powered the boat with a battery. I have a little gadget mounted on the boat that tells me the water temperature, the depth, and even chirps at me when fish pass within 20 feet of the boat. All three stages at once. But my life on its day-to-day basis, like yours, is mediated, sustained, and controlled by “information technology.”
Jean-François Lyotard, when he wrote The Postmodern Condition, said we no longer have metanarratives as forms of validation and legitimization, that we instead have petit récits, itty-bitty narratives through which we only need legitimize ourselves. Not a pre-modern idea, but also not a modern idea, therefore it’s a post-modern idea. Foucault came along and stirred this with some Nietzsche and this “post-modern” approach came to be an academic dogma. Ironic, eh? It’s really not post-anything. It’s just another imperial metanarrative — and one that serves capital very well.
And yet, even the empires are being homogenized by technique . . . because they’ve always been homogenized by the technics of war in a kind of Spencerian cycle of survival and dominance.
Conservatives have seen this homogenization, but they’ve mistaken it for a cultural shift. The cultural shifts, though, are epiphenomena. They are lined up like the rest of us, dancing down the street behind the piper called technique. Cultural diversity is every day more performative and less substantial, as every “identity”can be found with its inevitably physical face buried in the screen of a smart phone or laptop.
Rebellion against this imposed uniformity provokes many conservatives to oppose globalization . . . and on that, I’m with them. Unfortunately, their response to globalization is to oppose it only to nationalism. Not only are all nationalisms not equal, but to actually restore the kinds of attachment to place and traditions that could undo the damage of our global homgenization via technique, we would need to go much further than national autarky, into bioregions or watersheds, then evermore local, in some form of subsidiarity that effectively co-locates most forms of production and consumption tightly enough to overcome our fossil hydrocarbon and nuclear power dependency. None of this will happen, of course, except by a long and painful process of grid failures and attrition in a strip-mined world. We can’t unhook from the generalized material condition of technical dependency.
This is not to say we are entering into some hypercontrolled Gattica. Grid failures will happen. Has anyone kept up with news from Sri Lanka? Think of it as a canary in the coal mine.
Far from imposing some trekky future on us, this rule by technique has systematically dissolved the connective tissues of sociality. We’re being carried along, but not by Meta or some other rich guy’s goofy daydreams. What technique has simultaneously accomplished is generalized danger and social inertia — a perfect storm. As the general breakdown already entrained advances, this inertia isn’t translating into some hypnotic consensus. We’re still humans. Our responses are denial, rage, despair, and nihilism.
Our tendency to lie in the service of politics is pre-catastrophic — a form of denial as yellow eyes close in around the campfire. The rest is coming.
TYTY as always. Both interesting and thought provoking. May be a good time to reread "Religion."
No need, but wondering what You have against nuclear?
"Foucault came along and stirred this with some Nietzsche and this “post-modern” approach came to be an academic dogma. Ironic, eh? It’s really not post-anything. It’s just another imperial metanarrative — and one that serves capital very well...."
No surprise, then, that the designation "post-modern" is basically Branding- labeling for the purpose of advertising hype, to sell a product. Like "giving 110%." And as with that popular trope, a logical impossibility (verbal hyperbole has never felt much obligation to concede anything to practical reality.) The prefix "post-" is a prepositional modifier connoting "after"; "the future". "Post" combined with the noun "modern" nods in the direction of intimating an ability to outdistance modernity. An "intellectual discipline" forever on the cutting edge- perhaps even capable of conferring the power of Precognition, for the Adept.
The alternative label New! Improved! Modernism, while amply deserving of skepticism as far as its fact claims, at least wouldn't partake of a subtext insinuating that the content of the teachings had the power to confer preternatural abilities on its practitioners. But the verbiage of "New! Improved! Modernism" is overlong and it scans clumsily, so the sophists would summarily reject it simply on style points. Postmodernist professionals make it a point of pride and considerable virtue to exercise such hyper-acute awareness of those details.
I'm more fond of the label "Faux-modernism" to describe my take on that particular philosophical niche. But I'll grant that there's something about the phrase "New! Improved!", when connected to the noun "Modernism"as a descriptive modifier. It's thought-provoking. Meta. Doesn't Modernity have a way of implicitly soliciting unthinking assent to the turf claim that "New" = "Improved"?