Posts Tagged ‘Disinformation’

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Neoliberal Rorts

February 5, 2017
In Australia, politicians from all sides do things like rort expenses. However those on the right seem particularly prone to do this as a group and in a big way. Why?

We could argue that they are stupid. After all, after one important politician loses her position because she chartered a helicopter to make a 20 minute car drive (or whatever) to a party fund raising event, it could seem problematic to charter an aircraft to fly a normal commercial car route? Apparently not.

While it is tempting to dismiss the right as inherently stupid, I don’t think this can be done. They do not seem stupid.

What is probably the problem is that the right is composed almost entirely of ‘neoliberals’; that is people who think that the free market is good/god, and that wealthy people should be rewarded and poorer people punished. Wealth is the only value, and it should reward virtue.

As they are virtuous people (because they believe in , defend, and act on neoliberal principles) it follows that they should be entitled to wealth like corporate executives are.

So by claiming transport costs, holidays in resorts, or charter flights on the taxpayers, they are not being criminal, or stupid, they are simply carrying out the principles of neoliberalism.

In the same way, automating Centrelink and fishing for overpayment or threatening people on social security (what we now know as “robodebt”) is also part of neoliberalism. According to the theories and hopes of the right, virtuous people, living in the market, should always have a full time job, and if they don’t they are rorting the system and should be punished.

Of course robodebt primarily punishes those people who have managed to “have a go” and get some work, no matter how small, but, in neoliberalism, punishment of relative poverty is always appropriate.

Politicians on the right are also more prone to lying, because of their commitment to neoliberalism, as the only evaluation is profit. Whatever makes a profit is true.

The reality is that giving corporations more power through free market talk and tax cuts has not delivered liberty or prosperity for most people, as was promised. It has delivered stagnant wages, a punitive state, ecological destruction and cultural warfare (as a distraction).

If the right accepted this truth, then they would have to recognize that the last 35 years of right wing policy has failed, and they would have to change. It is easier to continue to lie and rort the system, while hoping they will survive, even if their electorate does not.

So the argument is that they rort because they are dedicated in hope to a failed system and its values. For them, there is still no alternative which would maintain the power and wealth of the establishment. They rort to make neoliberalism true.

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Paranoia Time?

February 5, 2017

Will Republicans, as a political movement, object to Trump behaving unethically, or riding roughshod over the traditions they value?

NO.

Mr Trump, is doing exactly what the Republicans have said they wanted to do for years. This is not a threat to them. His first moves seem aimed at making it safe for corporations to pollute, poison and take over people’s land and property without any constraint if they think it is profitable.

The Share Market is booming, the insurance market for investment is slumping (or so I read) which means investment houses think he is doing well for them. Warren Buffett has bought US$12 billion in stocks since the election. He clearly does not expect surprises. The financial elites seem relatively happy, and now we hear that the rules put in place to help stabilise the financial markets are to be removed, so we can look forward to another bubble and crash, but plenty of profit for finance, and probably taxpayers money to help them out when the crash comes.

Religious people love the end of abortion and the conservative legal and judge appointments.

Fossil fuel companies are cheering the rebirth of oil and potentially coal, and the removal of regulation that might hinder them poisoning people, wrecking the environment or risking profit.

He is pleasing the important people in his electorate. and he is removing those who might hinder him.

The Elites will probably get a war in a few months to a year, which means it that it will become unpatriotic to criticize him.

Its all going to plan.

For about the last 20 years the Republican elites seem to have been gearing up for a total war against ‘liberals’ who they see as oppressing them.

Online comments make this easy to see. it takes not time at all to find someone declaring that they will cheer when Trump destroys all you liberal scum.

In total war there is no ideal of fair play or proper procedure, hence they have no objection to the arbitrary way Trump behaves. [Do you really believe they would not object if Clinton had behaved remotely similarly?] You ally with your enemies enemy (in this case Putin), and if you win that proves you were right to do so. You can lie without scruple, disinformation is part of warfare, and you use any method at all to win. Life is at stake.

They will not be satisfied until the last liberal is whimpering or dead.

America does not have a democracy, it has an elected king. Previous presidents don’t seem to have realized this.

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‘Human Greed’ and the Anthropocene

December 16, 2016

We often see human greed, blamed for ecological destruction, and even the Anthropocene itself. However this is not the case. “Human greed” is not the problem. Most humans, even today, are not generating emissions, pollution and ecological problems at a suicidal rate and they are not craving the ‘untapped resources’ of the Amazon, the Indonesia rain forests, the Liverpool plains in Australia, or the poles. Most humans do not like it when their ecologies change, and frequently protest against it, as they are not the direct cause of that change. Do any of the local residents near me, for example, relish the idea of having unfiltered pollution stacks, near their homes, for the tunnels to take a highway which is to push 75,000 extra cars per day over an already blocked bridge? No, it is not their greed that is responsible. It is not the billions of Indian villager’s greed, or even the greed of the average inhabitant of Delhi, which makes the air unbreathable. The inhabitants of Tuvalu or Kiribati have not contributed to the climate change which will destroy their homes. Most people  on the planet generate small amounts of emissions.

It is a relatively few humans, acting within particular social arrangements, that cause the problem.

Gareth Bryant argues that 71% of contemporary greenhouse gas emitters in Europe are responsible for only 4% of European emissions, while 9% of emitters are responsible for 83% of those emissions. According to Richard Heede, just 90 organisations have been responsible for two thirds of greenhouse gas emissions between 1854 and 2010.

Half of these emissions have occurred since 1986 after the triumph of neoliberal corporate dominance, when people became aware of climate change, and when particular corporations began sponsoring climate change denialism for what seemed like their own political and economic advantage. They had to engineer the state we are in. It was not natural.

Realising that the cause  of our climate problems is not just ‘human greed’, but the greed and activity of particular humans, in particular social organisations, changes the possibilities for ending the problem. If the problem is human greed then there is no chance, or we must get rid of humans. If it is particular people in particular social organisations, then yes it is possible. It  is just politics, persuasion, risk and effort. It is standing up to power. It is not easy, but it is doable.

 

 

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We think with metaphor, myth and analogy

December 2, 2016

This post is largely an elaboration of a response to an important post by John Woodcock on metaphors and thinking or being – John’s post is probably better.

John reminds us that we think and feel with analogy, myth, metaphor and feeling.

Some of that feeling will arise because of our patterns of thinking, and of interpreting what happens in the world, but some will arise because of unconscious processes. Indeed we could suggest that the processes of thinking themselves are largely unconscious, because the forms or patterns that guide that thought, or that the thought and feeling takes in manifesting, are not conscious. Thoughts and feelings are likewise not separable – thoughts generate feelings, and the feeling reinforces the thought, or the type of thought likely to come next. (For example, if you are angry, you are thinking thoughts that make you angry, and that anger then limits the range of thoughts likely to arise for you).

As a result, we often let our symbols (and their patterns and dynamics) do our thinking for us, and that is a problem for both political and personal life. Once the metaphor is announced a particular result becomes probable – and the more it is used, the more that result is reinforced, or becomes a settled pathway. I suspect that the experts on propaganda know this well, and that this cultivation of metaphors (this art of metaphors) has been part of the activity around Trump.

Trump’s talk appears to have been powerful and resonated with, or raised anger present in, his audiences, but it could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. If you did not trust Clinton because of the 30 year smear campaign and the feeling/sense that something must be wrong about her (even if you could not point to anything real), then you could select what you wanted to hear from Trump’s metaphors, or take what could have been literal as ‘only metaphor’. And his metaphors tended to be repeated to reinforce them.

His phrase ‘drain the swamp’ (exampled by John) sounds good because it says he is going to remove the icky, sticky stuff that you can get lost and die in. Its a visceral image involving bringing light into darkness and solidity from squelch. It implies a simple set of dichotomies: swamp/non swamp; bad/good; action/stuckness. Who can resist this? Who will say this is bad?

Some kind of awareness of analogy helps, us to navigate our way here.

Extracting ourselves from auto-thinking and feeling takes effort and rebellion against the norm. It takes awareness of the analogies we are using, their connotations and our automatic responses to begin with, as well as the knowledge that our thinking is not always voluntary or right, and that our feelings are not always accurate or real. We are potentially partially conscious creatures, not automatically fully conscious – we can be misled and wrong (even in our sense of being misled). Becoming conscious, might be tedious.

This is a place in which depth psychology and science can possibly help, by setting up exploration, experiment and reality testing.

Trump’s usage is definitely not depth psychological (there is no sense the darkness and stickiness is something to be faced, possibly explored and projections removed) and it is not ecological (swamps can host whole families of creatures, and store and purify water, they can protect. They are places of bounty as well as danger). Outside of these psychological or scientific frameworks, the metaphor does its thinking for you, and that is the natural way. It is a metaphor encouraging avoidance, which sums up fear, and puts virtue with the cleansing group.

Given the election is over, it will be interesting to see how the so called “alt.right” defend the president elect’s apparent attempts to fill the swamp with far worse, but openly visible, creatures who are completely beholden to the corporate elite, and who do not mind poisoning workers in the name of profit. I presume the swamp will now become portrayed as a field of light, clarity and genius (perhaps even ‘spirit’) – because light dazzles the critical faculties. Perhaps they will simply continue to attack everything else, because the good/evil dichotomy seems so real, that if the others are bad, then they must be the light.

Perhaps, disillusionment will settle in, but I doubt it for one prime reason. People on the right in general, tend to cultivate a perception of themselves as living in a world in which they have no say, and are oppressed. They think the media is leftist, they think Marxists rule academia and education, they think gay people and Jews run the entertainment industry as propaganda, they think all scientists are communist conspirators, they think unions control and hobble business. Judging by some of the remarks I’ve heard recently, some think that Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, George H and W, Bush etc. were raving socialists, who actively suppressed free enterprise and right wing dissent. In this view, any information which can be branded as official is probably a lie, unless it agrees with this fundamental truth that they are the victims of the evil left. So we can assume that the loving alliance of Trump with parts of the corporate sector will not be recognised, for who will report it but the evil left?

Trump’s apparent lack of control in his expression also promised that he would allow the expression people thought was being suppressed.

While non of this may seem real to those of us who identify as being on the Left, it is the starting point for much of the Right. They see themselves being oppressed, hence the anger. In their own minds they are heroic, fighting the triumphant forces of darkness against amazing odds. This of course may be the position that others wish to assume, by assuming *all* people who vote for this right are deliberate racists or nazis or whatever. It is a monotheistic position that blames the world for evil, and feels right. All of us may feel the forces of darkness are triumphing and that we fight against them. We seek scapegoats to blame and expel for whatever we perceive is going wrong, and as long as this benefits those in power (by identifying some group that is relatively powerless), then this will probably be encouraged.

If we do understand this position and its appeal to all of us, then maybe we can start trying to free ourselves. First of all by observing our own metaphors and patterns and their consequences and testing them out, finding pain, and perhaps eliminating our own binaries, or bringing them into open confrontation within. And then attempting to communicate, not by appealing to reality or attempting to refute the other’s delusion, but by entering into the fantasy and undermining its binary nature. We all feel repressed.

But again, this suggests going out into the field (which may seem a swamp) and doing some exploratory work ourselves.

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Corporate society, transition and the Toynbee Cycle

November 24, 2016

[This is an elaboration of some of my comments on the previous article, arguing that economic imperatives supporting change may not be enough]

This blog was extensively rewritten in November 2019

Introduction: The Cycle

When I was arguing that Trump may well seek to ‘over-rule’ apparent economic realities and help produce climate disaster, I was guided by a theory which I will call the ‘Toynbee Cycle’ after the historian Arnold Toynbee. The basic proposition is that Civilisations or societies, if they are to succeed and survive, have to adapt to, or solve, problems in their environment (which includes various ecologies and other societies).

If people succeed in ‘solving the problems’ the society continues (or splits), until it faces the next set of problems, or generates a new set of problems. The cycle represents the alternation of solutions and problems, or the social failure to solve problems. It also points us to the insight that societies are both problem solving, and problem generating, devices.

This cycle is tied in with power relations, as in many cases, social learning and problem solving may involve a challenge to the dominant people, or an alteration of the dominant people and/or the ideologies they embrace, as established dominance tends to be wedded to the old order, which builds hierarchies, ways of knowing, ways of living and so on. The established dominant groups can be supported in this order by other groups as well.

These groups may be economically based classes, but they do not have to be. Their position can be decided by other sources of power: religious, organisational hierarchy, military violence, control of communication, position in the technological system and so on.

Dominant groups may not even know there is a problem, as the groups who deal with the problem directly may be different to them, separated from them, and the problem may not fit with the world views of the dominant groups; it could be declared impossible. For example, they may assume the seas cannot rise significantly, small amounts of CO2 cannot make a huge difference to the weather, God controls everything, humans are passive reactants to the forces of nature, nature is harmonious, or society cannot function without coal.

In short, societies face challenges which the society either overcomes, adapts to, or fails. Facing social problems can become social struggle between different groups, and change society.

A failure, does not necessarily mean the society collapses. For a fortunate society, a failure can be a learning experience and produce better adaptation later on, especially if the previous dominant groups’ hold on the society weakens, or changes its basis, or new people with new understandings and techniques rise up the hierarchy. It is a mistake to think the dominant groups are always unified; some can recognise the problems, and there can be a struggle within the dominant groups, but those with useful solutions may find it difficult to win.

Toynbee’s oft repeated point is that societies which have been successful, do not fail so much as commit suicide. This suicide is usually promoted by the dominant groups not wanting to risk loss of dominance, or not being able to see the world in terms other than those of the tools (conceptual and technological) they use.

In my terms, the order the rulers seek can create the very disorder they fear, especially if the environment/ecology is changing, because then reality may no longer appear to work the way the dominant faction want it to, or demand that it should. Unintended consequences pile up, and social functioning gets more and more difficult.

Problems of success and new classes

Sometimes, and unfortunately, challenges can arise out of the very factors that have helped to generate the society’s success. Something important to the society’s success generates problems, as when fossil fuels as energy sources produce destruction of fertile areas, displace people, poison the environment, and produce rapid climate change which threatens social stability. Problems generated by success seem particularly hard to address, because the hierarchies, ways of living and so on, are ingrained with that success and heavily defended against challenge. People in those groups may not know how to act differently, and may face massive uncertainty, and even loss of power, if they deal with the problem.

For example, imagine a society in which extreme military proficiency has expanded its landholdings and conquered peoples until the point where the costs, financial and social, of maintaining that success and dominance depletes the ruling society of resources and the capacity to respond to new challenges; either military or otherwise. Not all problems can be solved equally well with violence. Change may be demanded, and yet non-military people may have been suppressed, or they may not have the investigative skills required. Challenge to the military order may most forcibly come from people who don’t have the necessary problem solving skills either, perhaps the dominant people in the main organized religion.

Similarly, problems may arise when a fixed group of people has been able to commandeer the use and propagation of the cosmologies, economics, or technologies etc. of a society, and that group restricts membership and does not allow newcomers. Such a group is likely to resist innovation and change, even if it kills them, because they have little competence or experience in anything other than preservation and conventional problems. Other people may not have the ability to use the technologies or cosmologies effectively as they have been kept ignorant.

Letting in new groups of people, provided they appear talented or qualified is always a good strategy to generate new ideas. There is no guarantee these ideas will be useful, which is one reason the dominant groups may be reluctant to admit new people, or share power. However, restricting entry to kin, and existing group members, is usually harmful and stultifying. [This latter point comes from Pareto’s idea of the ‘cycle of elites’]

Resistance to Change

Some standard ways of dealing with challenge, which seem likely to ensure social collapse, are:

  1. Trying to impose the required and familiar order more rigorously.
  2. Pretending that the signs of disorder are illusionary, irrelevant or passing.
  3. Pretending to be solving the problem, often with a knowing wink to those who benefitted from the old solutions, but to carry on as before.
  4. Attacking those who might be trying to solve the problems (usually as traitors, or radicals).
  5. Emphasising the problems in transition and playing down the problems of staying inert.
  6. Oversimplifying the problems to make them seem manageable.
  7. Stirring up distractions to get people’s attention focused elsewhere, especially if that problem seems solvable by the current order, or
  8. Locating a scapegoat to blame for the problems and arguing everything will be well when that scapegoat is purged.
  9. Punishing people for objecting to the established order and the problems it generates.

In the West, and throughout the world, we largely seem to have a society dominated by corporations. Corporate cosmologies, forms of organisation and economic power seem to be embraced almost everywhere. This mode of ordering has relatively intense control over most social functions, and it has been extended even where it may not be appropriate (as with universities or churches). This kind of ordering, which has intensified over the last 40 years, is most readily known as neoliberalism. It usually involves State talk of free markets, protection of the corporate class, and state hostility towards those of other groups, who might object to the order (workers, artists, dissident intellectuals, scientists, religions focused on the poor and dispossessed etc). This neoliberal order has consequences for social survival. In terms of the Toynbee cycle: it could be the case that not all problems can be solved by talking about free markets, protecting established business, and attacking its opposition. Likewise, established business may be ‘unintendedly’ generating the problems the society faces.

Supporters of neoliberalism appear to be dedicated to all of the defensive techniques named above:

1) The economy is not working very well and most people are not progressing or meeting promised expectations – climate change and ecological destruction does not make this better. However the most promoted solutions often involve imposing more ‘free market’ neoliberal discipline on workers (as a cost cutting exercise), persecuting people on social welfare to force them off, handing more power to the corporate sector, and making sure the wealthy become even more wealthy. The governments in Australia and the US, have promised to encourage more fossil fuel burning and promote fossil fuel exports so that more people can burn them and produce more greenhouse gases. The government in the US seems to be striving to reduce the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and to encourage people to pollute heavily. The aim seems to be, to reimpose conditions which worked in the past to bring power and prosperity, and (incidentally) benefitted wealthy people and corporations; as that seems the best way to solve problems. The problem is that this completely ignores the growing ecological problems, it also ignores the increasing alienation of people from alliances with the dominant business groups, who do not seem interested in their problems. These impositions of old order are unlikely to solve the problems generated by success.

2) Dominant groups, or their representatives, claim that the climate change generated by society’s economy and success is not a problem, is not happening, is some kind of conspiracy, or is beyond human remediation. Climate change is unreal, is a natural process unaffected by human behaviour, will return to normal, and so on.

3) Many dominant groups seem to want to embrace a ‘solution’ to climate change which supports coal burning. Not just new mines, but ‘clean coal’ (often through Carbon capture and storage, which does not seem to work) and fracking for cheap ‘clean’ gas despite the leaks and destruction of land. The Australian government claims it is meeting all commitments, even while its own figures show increasing emissions. As part of this strategy, dominant groups can do the kind of things discussed in the previous post such as, support regulations on possible solutions, offer subsidies to continue the problem causing activities, invent new problems associated with solutions (such as health issues for windmills ignoring health issues for mines), reduce restrictions on existing modes of behaviour (such as lower requirements for clean water and air) and so on. They seem to aim at inhibiting change.

4) Dominant groups encourage attacks and smears of scientists, greens and anti-coal protestors who recognise some of the problems and propose possible solutions. Climate change is called a socialist conspiracy. It is a theory dreamed up by China to weaken the West. It is said that people who recognise climate change as a problem, are elites who want to spread even greater costs onto ordinary people.

5) Governments play up the problems of renewable energies; they will not keep the lights on, they are intermittent, they are costly, they destroy the view, while they downplay they problems with fossil fuels such poisonous pollution, vulnerable to supply disruption, fall over if powerlines collapse, produce climate change, destroy the land they are taken from, and destroy the view. The coalition government frequently blames power failures on renewables, even when the coal power stations have collapsed, the storms have ripped down power cables, or the payment systems did not work as expected.

6) Living systems are complex, and multiply-interactive. It is fundamentally difficult to understand a living system completely. However, human knowledge systems often take themselves as definitive. These leads to radical simplification of problems, or even to the ignoring of fundamental parts of the problem. Thus supporters of the current system, who recognize problems, may assume they can be fixed by clean fossil fuels, or that the problem can be completely solved by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energies. Renewable energies are useful, and may solve a large number of problems, but they are not a complete solution, they do not solve the problems of over-fishing, deforestation, peak-phosphorous (and other parts of the so called ‘metabolic rift’ in which limited and essential nutrients are flushed into the sea where they are hard to recover), over-grazing and greenhouse emissions from industrial agriculture. The problem is that almost everything contemporary society engages in, in order to be productive seems irreparably destructive of ecologies.

7) Corporate media, tends to distract people by focusing on the lives of celebrities, on murders, imaginary worlds, local scandals, manufactured controversies and so on.

8) Dominant groups can actively blame the relatively powerless (refugees from wars and climate change, illegal immigrants, Muslims and ‘liberals/greenies’) for almost all problems. The Coalition and the Murdoch media blamed Greens for the bush fires, when the Greens do not have the policies claimed, do not have the power to implement them anyway, and fire clearances exceeded the targets set by the Coalition government. The suggestion is that without these people, we would have fewer problems. So they should be removed.

9) If the people protesting against refusal to face the problems can be defined as evil outsiders, then it is easy to increase penalties for protest and political action. Australian governments are criminalizing protests, increasing jail sentences and fines, trying to prohibit people who are charged from associating with other protestors, prohibiting people from boycotting companies who participate in climate change and so on. This can be seen as an attempt to force the issue into silence, where it can be left alone, and the old order proceed unchallenged and undisturbed to continue its past successes – until everything collapses.

All of these moves are attempts to keep the disordering order functional, remove challengers to it, and remove challenges to the behaviour of its supporters from consideration, while making solving the problems, or drawing attention to them, unpleasant.

Mess of information

This kind of situation encourages what I call the ‘mess of information’, because the dominant cultural trend involves an attempt to avoid reality. Official maps of reality do not work in the new situation and this cannot be admitted. Information becomes seen primarily in terms of its ability to persuade others, or force them to act. Information becomes politicised, and simultaneously, truthful but critical information can be dismissed as politics. The mess of information supports ignorant politics, which reinforces the problems, and makes them harder to deal with.

I will write about that mess later, but this is long enough for today…

Conclusion

Recognising the ‘Toynbee cycle’ helps us to draw attention to the importance of problems in social dynamics, and to the ways that dominant groups may attempt to sabotage those who would like to solve potentially society ending problems, because those solutions may threaten established power relations and ways of life.

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Economics, Reality and Renewable Energy

November 22, 2016

I keep reading things like: “In a showdown between political ideology and economic reality … you want to be betting on economic reality,” or other statements implying that capitalism and business will save us.

That makes it seem that people do think that pro-corporate organisations like the Republicans in the US, really do believe in ‘small government’ and ‘free markets’, rather than in using those words as slogans to support action in favour of established corporate power. Republicans have already changed ‘economic reality’ to reflect their position and probably will keep doing so. This is not about respecting reality, rationality or getting the best results for ‘working people’.

The new US government can, for example, encourage companies who provide grid power to charge more for connecting to places/homes with renewable power to prevent ‘freeloading’ on profits. They can tax renewable usage, or put import tariffs on essential materials or parts for renewables. They can decide renewables are dangerous to workers, hazardous to public health (wind farm syndrome, why not a solar power syndrome?), or bad for ‘baseload’, and slap difficult regulations on them. They can put taxes on the use of land for renewables. They can use infrastructure development to subsidise coal mines, fracking and gas leaks. They can use the same monies to build, or sudsidise, new coal power stations as vital to the economy. They can pretend that they already have clean coal, or give billions to research clean coal without checking that money gets spent on research (other than market research). They can remove all anti-pollution enforcement as that hinders the economy. They can decide that protestors against these moves, are more vulnerable to jail, or police beatings, or face increased and bankrupting fines; or they can legislate that protestors are terrorists. They can decide that protest should not occur on private property as that is trespassing, and that all space is private property. I’m sure they are more ingenious than me, so they can find even more reasons to hinder and halt renewables and their supporters.

If they can ignore the reality of climate change, they can skew the economy towards fossil fuels.

In terms of Ken Mcleod’s ‘fourfold’ the mythos of capitalist economics is misleading at best, and this produces misleading understanding and action and a restricted psyche.

Not only does our economics depend on the idea of individuals primarily competing with each other, it tends to make profit the only good, and usually the profit of those who are already profiting. It therefore tends to generate a plutocracy and a ‘selfish personality’ repressing human cooperativeness, or long term interest. It pretends that economic activity is not tied in with State activity and control of the State; however, in reality economics is always a political as well as a business struggle. Hence the likely possibility of Republicans acting against renewable energy, which largely involves newer companies, to support those who have already invested in their party and who already hold power in the State.

The ideology of the free market is not interested in recognizing power differentials in the market, or everyone’s survival and cannot be, because that would be to recognize that the ideology does not work in the way it claims to work – which is not to say that reasonably free markets cannot be useful, but that they get corrupted, and that they are not the only good.

If you want renewables you may need to organize, and think about new more constructive  myths and economics.

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Trump and the Magic of Information

November 12, 2016

President Trump’s victory will have massive consequences in the Anthropocene age, and I’ve been suffering a lot of criticism, and dismissal, from friends over the last year or so for predicting a Trump victory. Now it’s all over, I guess it’s time to explain the logic of the prediction, when people might even listen. My basic point is that to understand Trump’s victory, you have to understand how information and knowledge works in contemporary Information Society.

Most of the theory is argued at greater length in Disorder and the Disinformation Society: The social dynamics of information, networks and software. Routledge 2015.

1) The first point is simple. Information is primarily about power and persuasion. It is about shaping the world another person perceives and getting them to see themselves in a particular way, so as to act in a particular way. Information is not primarily about truth, but about magic. Repeated items, from respected sources, become taken as truth and create perceived reality.

More subtly we can conceive communication as operating on a continuum between: a) an attempt to use accuracy as a tool of persuasion and b) an attempt to persuade through deception. Even the most abstract science aims to persuade people of its truth and to change their behaviour accordingly. Persuasion is part of communication. Whether it is relatively accurate or relatively deceptive is not always easy to tell, and depends upon the contest involved. People may be more prone to deception in some circumstances than others. If they think the persuasion is a matter of life and death, or the people they are persuading are beneath them or potentially dangerous, then it probably becomes easier to persuade by deception.

I shall later on in this blog piece, suggest that information is about self-identity and magic. If you can persuade someone of the truth of the matter, then you change their sense of self and change their behaviour. A good persuader is a kind of magician.

2) There is too much information to uncover it all. Consequently need “truth filters”. People filter information by general knowledge (other already accepted information), and by group identity and processes of belonging. Group identity means that people who are perceived as being part of the group, or exemplary in the group are trustworthy. What they say, or information they pass is considered likely to be true – especially if it reinforces group identity. In the Information Age good information is often drowned by easy to process information that meets the requirements of group identity.

3) When Trump got involved the election was never going to be about accuracy, but about magic and his puissance, or his status as a ‘man of power’ able to carry people along with him.

4) Both candidates have a long term media history, which shapes the general knowledge people have to filter (or ‘frame’) information about them, and hence whether they are likely to listen to them or not, and how they evaluate them.

Clinton has been smeared for over 30 years by the mainstream media. Unfounded accusations have been reported and discussed repeatedly. The Republicans have spent millions trying to convict her of anything. In this cause they have made the accusations a public and repeated (and therefore ‘verified’) part of public discourse. She is their number one villain, and the media has played along – in general giving small coverage to her victories, or any of her achievements. You may have to be a fanatical Hilary fan to know anything good about her. Everyone else ‘knows’ she is suspicious, and criminal. At certain levels, the lack of criminal convictions proves that she is a form of superpowered evil, who escapes repeatedly (like Batman’s Joker or Poison Ivy). She is a strong evil woman; she is a witch.

Trump on the other hand has a long-time mainstream media coverage depicting him as a powerful, successful all-American businessman. His very name is promoted as an icon of luxury and success. He can sometimes seem a bit of a buffoon, but that humanises him and makes him a regular guy. In the US, business is generally conceived of as good, with successful business people almost always portrayed as having massive special and inherent talents which set them apart and make them a success – even the ruthless ones are ‘colourful’. In this filtering Trump become superhuman. A veritable god. Everyone who knows a little about Trump will know he is a great success, a triumph of the American Dream. You have to work much harder if you want to uncover the trail of failures, dark deals and privilege – this is usually hidden in the boring business pages, where some form of accuracy actually counts.

At a mythic level, or the level of ‘general knowledge’, the campaign was being fought between crooked Hilary and hero Donald or, if you prefer, an evil woman and an exemplary man. Gender was important.

5) Information is political and forms selves. As said previously, information is filtered by group identity and makes group identity. How people classify themselves, is part of the way people construct their self identity with others and in opposition to others.

In Information Society people tend to form ‘information groups’, which are based upon their identities and general knowledge. The purpose of the information group is to filter and gather information together; this reinforces group cohesion, and group and personal identity. It is a necessary artefact of information society with huge consequences.

The group can, and often does, ‘protect’ people from the information possessed by other groups – it helps shield members and provide arguments to show how evil the outgroups are; to block flow and attempts at communication. These groups may overlap, but they tend to fall into exclusive categories.

The strategy of getting people worked up about how evil the outgroups are, and not letting them hear the views of real outsiders, is a good marketing strategy and is employed by some media outlets to keep and capture their audiences (aiming for profit reinforces lack of accuracy). It makes disloyalty hard. It reinforces group identity, and keeps people fixated on hearing what they want to hear to make sense of the world. Again, it keeps people ‘engaged’ and inhibits them from questioning the reality of what they read or watch.

6) This occurs for both left and right groups. However, the right is much better at manipulating it – and this is the source of their magic.

They rigorously police speech, and make sure people are on target and repeating talking points. It is amazing how quickly the same meme will be everywhere on the right, giving it the appearance of inevitability and truth. They are not frightened of encouraging rage, because that keeps people engaged and unlikely to actually converse with outsiders. They drive out outsiders, or make them scapegoats.

Repetition and reinforcement creates perceived reality. Eventually everyone just knows Clinton is a criminal and should be jailed, even if they are not sure what for, or reiterate that she was responsible for things that she has been cleared of or was never involved in. Her innocence in any one particular disconnected case does not prove she was innocent of all the charges (there are so many). General knowledge becomes personal knowledge.

The Republican party also could run memes in their groups to see which were likely to take off, and they did nothing to correct memes they knew where untrue if that brought them party loyalty, anger against Democrats and votes. They manipulated the system successfully, at the cost of not having policies based on reality – but fantasy has a greater pull (as it often does with sex, for example). The Democrats seemed constrained by an ideal of truth, and ideal of politeness (although this was the rudest election I’ve seen from the left- the relatively closed information group was having an effect, and groups are polarizing or defining themselves by opposition.)

People on the Democrat side, don’t find it easy to be as isolate. They generally, have to have to be involved with at least mildly right wing media, as the corporate sector controls the media, and pays for the media through advertising. Supposedly Left wing media does not have such a ‘closed box effect’  in the same way; it gives light right views, seeks balance etc. This media emitts plenty of pro-corporate right wing material – it seems ‘left’ because, in comparison with the mainstream right media, it’s not completely without a moderate perspective. However, this has also meant that the left have tended to accept the comfortable idea that neoliberalism was ok in principle, and that fighting it was problematic or extreme. The Right, in its more isolated media, managed to both promote corporate dominance and denounce its consequences.

7) Information groups tend to manufacture scapegoats to help form unity

These scapegoats can be blamed for all the ills of the world, and attacked/sacrificed, while keeping group members pure and unified. The scapegoats of a group, exemplify what its members must not be, if they wish to stay members. Treatment of scapegoats often functions as a threat to would be dissenters. You know what happens if you behave like them, or show sympathy to them. Scapegoats are often said to be from information outgroups.

On the right you have a range of choices to suit your placing; blacks, latinos, migrants, commies, liberals, godless liberals, wicked liberal business people, educated liberals, liberal women, femininazis, Hillary Clinton, or the interfering State.

Pro-democrat information groups tend to scapegoat the uneducated, or the really wealthy. In the US, few really believe that wealth is bad, so that position has little appeal, and the first simply proves the right’s point about educated elites. The left has no effective scapegoats to blame or sacrifice, so their groups are less tight, less bonded, less passionate and less integrated.

8) The faults of exemplars appear small

If a person is defined as exemplary of an ingroup, then their faults tend to be ignored or diminished in respect for their apparent virtues. Indeed faults may be seen as ‘things-everyone-does’ even if you don’t know anyone as bad as the exemplar. By becoming presidential candidate Trump, with his supposed business ability, was able to become an exemplar of the ingroup, and his faults excused – even if most Republican men and women would be horrified to meet an ordinary person who contemplated grabbing their daughters, or who appeared unable to tell the truth or make a consistent story. If a person becomes an exemplar of an outgroup (as Clinton did for Republicans, and Trump does for Democrats) then their faults become exaggerated and obscure their virtues – having anything openly to do with them shows massive disloyalty.

Clinton could never get herself defined as an exemplary Democrat, because of the mainstream media’s promoted general knowledge about her, and because many Democrats wanted a more obviously radical candidate – as said previously, you had to work to find Clinton’s positive record. This helped make her faults more visible to everyone, and lowered enthusiasm for her amongst nominal supporters, and this feeds into point 13 below.

9) Falsehood is expected

People in information groups are also not frightened of making up fiction, which sounds plausible or persuasive. If caught out, the groups will either ignore the failure, reiterate their falsehood more strongly, forget it for a while and repeat it later, accuse the revealer of unspeakable crimes, or say that everyone lies and the outgroup members are much worse. Once issued, a pleasing falsehood can separate from its refutation and easily be re-accepted.

People play the game that they know information is likely false. Everyone can say they are suspicious and smart, while accepting ingroup crap. This move effectively reinforces the idea that their opponents lie constantly, but they are clever and can see through this, as well as see through the few lies in their group. This keeps people loyal and on topic.

That Donald Trump made unreliable statements, was secondary to him making pleasing statements for his followers. He was also vague enough for his lies to be justified or ignored, should they ever become a problem. It also appears likely that because his followers did not expect him to tell the truth, they could select out the statements which were pleasing to them as being true and dismiss displeasing ones as strategic lies. Given Trump’s insistence on success, and the media’s promotion of his success, this made Trump an almost blank canvas for fantasies of success whatever the differences in how success might appear to his various audiences.

Being wrong involves a loss of status in this information world. So not admitting being wrong or failure is a mark of strength – of puissance if you like

10) The right pulls together. The left factionalises

The right have been pulling together for years. There should be nothing in common between libertarians and Christian fundamentalists, but they get on to keep power. The Christians have been taught to accept capitalism as part of Christianity. White supremacists can also get on with libertarians and non-racist Christians for the sake of power. There has been an effort to promote solidarity (often through scapegoating marked outgroup members), which is missing on the left. Partly there is no need for consistency in a political ideology. Different points can be wheeled out for different audiences. A party can argue for liberty one day, and authority the next.

Because Trump was centred in right wing media, the general informational and identity group pull would be for those who felt Republican to move towards cementing their loyalty towards the Republican party. Very few Republicans who had anything to lose really disowned Trump, when it came down to it; they joined in with their own side. Despite his lack of religion, Evangelicals supported him because the Republican party is their sole power base, he was not the evil witch and was a man who held the right opinion on abortion. No other issue was allowed to matter. They have a long history on this as well.

Followers of Bernie Sanders appear not to have done the same (I suspect Republican provocateurs stirred up dissension between Clinton and Sanders supporters; certainly there was a lot of rather peculiar fighting going on). Many people on the left could not bring themselves to say “I don’t like Clinton but Trump is so bad I have to vote for her”. Whereas, on the right, “I don’t like Trump but I won’t let Clinton get in”, seems to have been common.

11) Trump’s communication style fits in with this basic paradigm of communication

Trump stays on topic: “Make America Great Again”, “I’m a success. I can solve these problems”, “Things are bad and I’ll fix it”, but he is rarely specific. People can agree with him or think that what he says is good, but he produces few splits amongst his audience by elucidating matters of detail. He does not say what a “Great America” involves, which could cause disputes. He does not say how he will solve problems. He repeats himself frequently, as with “Crooked Hillary”, where he makes the unfounded charge part of her name, part of her out-group identity. This reinforces the ‘general knowledge’ people have, and creates the ‘crookedness’. Similarly dwelling on “success”, as an undefined category when attached to himself, appeals to all audiences who want to absorb their own success from him. He makes himself a ‘man of power’. People talk of his ‘genius,’ – another suitably vague term loaded with meaning.

He, and his audience by proxy, engage in magical evocation. He makes his audience passionate, angry, involved, entranced. He attacks the scapegoats he borrows from their information groups. He is the strong man who will protect his audience from the nightmares he evokes. He motivates anyone prepared to respond to his key trigger words. He creates his temporary reality, and carries an audience to their reality in which he becomes central.

His campaign speeches are dislocated, rambling and hypnotic messes. They quite possibly derail any attempt at rational, evaluative or critical thought. They repeat his memes endlessly and vaguely.

On the other hand, Clinton goes on and on, believing in truth, planning and inclusion. Consequently, people in her audience argue about little things with her. They may get the impression they disagree with her a lot, she seems to have no sense of who to blame, or of who her ingroup is, so they don’t know what they are fighting against. So while you can’t altogether trust her, Trump says “a lot that makes sense”.

12) Fictional Demographics generated by information groups

Pro-Democrat people frequently told me that nobody could vote for Trump because he was clearly a manipulative braggart who knew nothing, despite similar facts not stopping people from voting for Bush Jr. twice. However, they could say this because they were in their own information world in which this was impossible. Not in reality. People would say women would not vote for Trump, but pictures from his rallies were full of women. People said that educated people would not vote for Trump, when a few minutes on facebook in right wing groups would have shown them otherwise. Trump’s potential demographic was always bigger than Democrats seemed to suspect, because the people they knew who were not going to vote for Trump anyway, were not going to vote for Trump.

13) Non compulsory voting

If people generally disliked Clinton, for no particular reason, they would not feel compelled to vote for her. However, Trump voters were passionate. They would go out and vote, and organise others to vote. There might be a whole body of people who had never voted who would vote for Trump. This discovery of previous non-voters was incredibly unlikely for Clinton, because of the general knowledge about her. That Clinton had a machine, simply reinforces the idea that she was compelling people to vote, not allowing spontaneity. Without voter enthusiasm, and with the general doubt about Clinton, she risked being lost beneath passion of Trump’s magic.

14) Surveys were undecided

Pro-Democrats would repeatedly point to surveys. However they nearly always forgot to report that sometimes these surveys showed huge levels undecided voters – say in the region of 25%. Unless one candidate is more than 25% ahead of the other, such a survey tells you nothing. If surveys two months out from the election still have huge numbers of undecided voters then that should worry people, but it didn’t – they took their reinforcement from their information group, not the data. People decided not to accept the uncertainty, or work with it, but to resolve that the uncertainty did not matter.

15) Surveys are not accurate anyhow

Old Anthropological issue. Particularly, if people think you are official, they will tell you what they think you want to hear. In general they will not tell you the truth if there is much of a chance they will be blamed or ridiculed for it.

When Clinton had been portrayed as the face of the system, then the likelihood people would lie or misdirect about their intentions towards her is huge. There was a large possibility that most of the undecided people had already decided to vote Trump, or were inclining that way.

16) Conclusion

Trump was a master of informational magic. He may not understand how it works, but it uses it to persuade and involve people, to shape their view of the world, through vague impressive terms, without giving them handholds to criticise him. The effectiveness of this technique is is reinforced by the dynamics of information in Information Society.

Information is primarily about persuasion, making groups, reinforcing views of the world and persuading people to act. It is only about ‘truth’ or accuracy in specific, and often hard to maintain, circumstances. Eventually, false information will cause upset and unintended consequences, but that may well be less important to those using it, than its socially more pleasing and empowering aspects.

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Fragility of knowledge

November 8, 2016

Some weeks ago I attended a lecture organised by Kenneth McLeod and the Anthropocene Project, and this raised some thoughts about the role of knowledge in society.

Despite their differences the two speakers both seemed to assume knowledge was true, cumulative, not lost and relatively easily distributed. This may arise from the shortness of presentations but, whatever the case, I’m not sure about this position. I particularly want to focus on the first speaker and suggest:

1) Knowledge is inherently limited and inaccurate.

2) As knowledge is learnt behaviour, it can be forgotten, lost, or hidden.

3) The spread, distribution and innovation of knowledge, depends on its social, political and group identity base. It is not independent of social patterns. Social survival trumps accuracy.

4) Attempts to impose socially driven orders upon the world often require a social unconsciousness about that world, and often further disorganise that world.

David Christian, who has a well known TED talk, is a professor of ‘big history’ gave the first talk. His idea seems to be that the anthropocene is the result of human evolution and that the last five hundred years have changed the world, in a ‘hockey stick’ fashion, of increasing human impacts.

This approach seems to lead to ignoring anything other than crude differences between societies. He seemed to reduce varieties of societies to a) hunting and gathering, b) agricultural, and c) industrial. This diminishes the vast differences between societies with those kinds of technologies. This of course may be an artefact of the time available for the lecture, but it may not be as he has published a book giving a history of humanity in less than 100 pages.

He also argued that knowledge accumulates. That ‘later generations’ of humans had more information and understanding of their environment. As humans moved across the globe into new niches in the early migrations, they had to learn new things. This is obviously optimistic.

However, this increase is only partially true. Knowledge is also forgotten as people move into new niches. He more or less acknowledged this by saying that indigenous people may have knowledges about ecological living that ‘we’ don’t have, but this seemed a kind of footnote/addenda not strongly incorporated into his schema.

In reality, knowledge is not a fixed thing. What counts as ‘knowledge’ is also influenced by living in a particular society. Society, and your place in it, is an ecological niche in which you have to live. Surviving in that social niche is vital; belonging is important to humans, as it is hard to live without others. This surviving is more important than any accuracy of knowing. We are given knowledge by those around us; we judge knowledge by the opinions of those around us, or those we hear of, and the opinions of those to whom we give high status. People we give high status to seem more reliable. What we call ‘knowledge’ primarily acts as justification for action and identification.

Identification is influenced by the boundaries between groups – your social sense of ingroup and outgroup, and of people’s status within a group. Even your sense of being a passionately, independent individual can come through identification with another group of people who identify as passionate and independent individuals.

The relationship between social groups is inherently political, and consequently knowledge is always caught in political disputes and dynamics. Societies, as a whole, can abandon some kinds of knowledge because it appears incompatible with power structures, group identities, morality, or other forms of ‘more important’ knowledge. This should be obvious; different political factions often have different ideas about relevant knowledge.

This seems relatively well documented as well. It is often stated, that both China and the Islamic world, were centres of knowledge, innovation and exploration, but retreated from this into a kind of social fossilisation and stagnation that benefitted certain groups and group based patterns of power. Difficult knowledge became suspect.

The same is probably happening in the capitalist world, when faced with the failure of ‘free markets’ to deliver on their official promises or to handle the challenge of climate change.

The value of free markets, the overriding capacity of business to solve all problems, and the falsity of climate change become heavily promoted by people allied with the current patterns of power and activity. These knowledges (or perhaps anti-knowledges) become parts of group belonging, acceptance and survival, irrespective of their destructiveness. Accurate knowledge (and acting on that knowledge), becomes undesirable, and partially impossible (as is discussion) given the dynamics of group belonging.

Education cannot solve this issue, because education intending greater accuracy can easily become seen as political and defunded, banned or cut back, when it challenges power relations.

What counts as ‘knowledge’ adapts to satisfy the victors of social power struggles.

Consequently, what is required to deal with the anthropocene is to recognise that knowledge does not inevitably increase, to investigate understanding of how knowledge works in society, and the nature of the ‘class based’ politics that promote more, or less, accurate knowledge. It also requires knowledge of particular societies and their social functioning, not vague general knowledge which seems to render human impact in inevitabilist evolutionary terms.

We could ask ‘What kind of social patterns can be encouraged so that knowledge and action can work?’

It is in eveyone’s interest not to pollute beyond the capacity of the Earth’s ecologies to absorb, just as it is sensible not to keep shitting in your bedroom, or blame people in general for the problem of your shit.

Making it socially possible for the fragility of knowledge to be clear is a good first step.

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