CONSPIRACY OR MASS DELUSION?
Perhaps it was inevitable that the lockdown would conclude with violence, as the coiled tension of a shut-in Spring snapped back like a rubber band. Was that the plan? Perhaps it is enough to recognize that there are plans, in the sense of definite agendas, some interlocking, some conflicting, which aggregate into a general tendency, revealed in flashes, as if by lightning. If you were a tightly networked global cultural political economic media technological elite, with an arsenal of intricate and subtle means at your disposal for exerting power, what would you do?
You are not an aristocracy, tied to specific territories, and committed to definitive traditions, but an oligarchy, or a party, with no organic popular support, but with vast political and technological capacities, including endless capital to pour into a global network of influential NGOs, and total domination over global social media, through which you can deploy advanced techniques of psychological manipulation.
Remain concealed. Deceive, deflect, project, distract. Make everyone confused and angry through a strategy of tension. You have detailed information on the emotional dispositions of every social media user in the world: you know exactly what they like, and hate, and share, in private, or in public, and with whom.
Engineer an informational armada of precisely calibrated data to provoke a global symphony of emotional reactions. Direct specifically infuriating, or terrifying, or deranging images to Leftist users, and completely different images to Rightists. Play both sides against each other, promote the most insane and idiotic voices, and canalize aggression towards the centre. Flood the zone with your frontmen and spokesmen, and your agents. Incentivize defection and appeasement. The politicians, or the institutions, or the scientists who you don’t already own, you neutralize or overwhelm with star games. Some you bribe, completely legally, with prestigious sinecures and contracts, or their own vanity. The moral choice, everywhere, is always the same. Don’t you just want to make content? Why get involved in politics? What’s the difference, really, between the virtual and the real?
Your priority is to eliminate your rivals, not only politically, but also spiritually. In the meantime you want to neutralize the forces that you can’t control, and co-opt them. Let them say anything they like, so long as it puts nothing on the line. Imbeciles are always useful. Anon losers entertaining adolescent rape fantasies are fine, but target anyone who speaks the truth under their own name. Ultimately there can be no school of philosophy or associated social body in opposition to your fundamental interests, or beyond the reach of your control.
You don’t need a total, instant victory, only to maintain a situation in which your power is unchallenged, and increasing. With this in mind, you conceive, design and launch operations, or psy-ops, with the goal of terraforming the political and social landscape to create one to closer to your interests: the new normal. Probably, you’re not particularly interested in ideology except to the degree it serves your interests, or opposes them, but nonetheless, you have a definite political and social vision consistent with your strategy of power.
In short: suppose the revolution has already happened, and the new regime is in control. What then? Should we consider much more pessimistically the mediological reality of Trump, the Twitter President, playing Punch and Judy with the Deep State, to no obvious reward? What better function does the circulation of the lurid details of rumored secret practices of a Satanist elite serve except diversion from a cold strategic logic? Why is it, actually, that in the eye of the tornado of the most consequential techno-social transformation of the world in centuries, if not ever, the media has spent the last four years raising fascist specters, #MeToo hysteria, transgender children, demon story hour, ad infinitum, like the parade of silhouetted objects on the wall of Plato’s cave, as Facebook calmly scrapes their server farms of data of what creates emotions: the tech consultant generals of the global psychic wars.
STRATEGY OF DECEPTION
Yesterday, the information atom bomb of global plague, and slaughter in the nursing homes of New York, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, as nurses dance on TikTok, now pay your last respects on Facetime. So now you know, all civil liberties and even funeral rites can be summarily suspended with the panicked declaration of a biopolitical emergency, points of views which contradict the official global narrative will be deleted, and the global public, bribed with virtual money, will comply.
This goes on for months. Opposition starts solidifying. Then suddenly the focus shifts, like someone changing channels. Now, suddenly, we have a race war. All the same politicians, broadcasters and activists who barely a month ago were demanding the punishment of people for surfing on an empty ocean, or opening their hair salon for business, or protesting a groundless and illegal lockdown, are now supporting mass public demonstrations.
A captive, strung-out population scrolls through timelines filled with videos of police brutality, or riots. Hundreds of businesses are looted, dozens of individuals are killed. Antifa are interviewed, applauded, and claimed not to exist. After months of clapping for a death cult on command, a brainwashed planet, on the information superhighway to Canossa, now takes the knee. Millions black out their Instagram profiles, and those who don’t are questioned; those who do are later asked for money. A Disney actor reads a script at Hyde Park Corner, and the media informs us he is brave. A thousand epidemiologists produce a solemn open letter arguing that racism, not plague, is now the menace to society. Petitions start to circulate demanding ideological compliance. Random monuments are desecrated, including monuments to abolitionists. The liberal opinion editor of the New York Times resigns for publishing a piece which contradicts the party line. A UCLA professor is suspended for declining a request to exempt black students from an exam, and placed under police protection. Together with the global story on the virus, Black Lives Matter, and their program now also can’t be criticized. The media reports on “mostly peaceful” protests as buildings burns behind them.
MYTH OF VIOLENCE
The death of George Floyd, a nightclub bouncer with a drug addiction, and a conviction for armed robbery, in Minneapolis on May 25, was the second incident of lethal interracial violence to go viral in the past three weeks following the release of a clip showing the death of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia three months earlier, on May 5. As with the death of Trayvon Martin in Florida in February 2012, recently the subject of an astonishing documentary, and the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson in August 2014, the details of both cases were instantly elided, as the men were elevated into symbols of American police brutality and white racist violence, despite the fact that no evidence suggest that racist motives were involved in any of these cases. But racism does not require any evidence.
Floyd seems to have known his killer personally from their work at the El Nuevo Rodeo; his autopsy revealed positive results for fentanyl, methamphetamine, and Covid-19. What did his death really mean? The claim that there is a racial bias in American police shootings has been refuted. From Daniel Shaver to Tony Timpa, American police kill white men too. But these deaths, like incidents of black on black, or black on white on crime (not to mention fentanyl deaths of any race) don’t detonate in the US media with the same symbolic force, or provoke international protests, iconoclastic destruction, and looting. Why? Because only certain kinds of violence are legible politically, just as only certain forms of speech are recognized officially as hate speech, irrespective of the cruelty involved.
What is decisive are not facts, but the presence of a particularizing myth of violence, at the centre of a cultic mental structure. Some crimes are more equal than others, some are understandable, some glow with sacred meaning, some are insignificant, and for others, anyone who mentions them must be regarded as suspicious: on the one hand Louis, on the other, Emmett Till.
Who was George Floyd? What did his life mean, for him? Joel Gilbert’s heroism in his recent documentary, covered nowhere, consists in centering this question with respect to Trayvon Martin: not the symbol, but a specific individual, who died. But myth proceeds the other way, trailing discord, like the circulation of fake dollar bills.
It doesn’t matter if a myth is true or not: what matters is its function in a ritual economy of sacrificial violence, where the product is more violence. Accused of supernaturally exceptional atrocities, irrespective of their transitive empirical comparability, a single person, or a group of people, or a race of people are dehumanized, humiliated, and ultimately killed. It’s happening right now.
Conspiracy or mass delusion? If, from the perspective of a true fanatic, tormented by his inner demons, nothing can be permitted to prevent the slaughter from occurring; from the perspective of a calculating realist, the mechanism can be usefully employed. But only to a point. A frenzied crowd is easier to summon than disperse, like a city, or a civilization, is easier to destroy than build. In principle, there’s no limit to how bad things could get, except the one imposed by the determination of individuals of courage and integrity to end this cycle on their feet, and not their knees.
The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Violence is universal, not confined to one side of a decolonized equation, a specific race or culture, or a specific set of individuals. This shameful spectacle of intellectual and moral cowardice must end. Racism does not exist: what exists is man, God, and the devil, and the devil, probably, is man.