It is often said that President Trump recommended that people drink or inject bleach. This is simply not True. The President suggested that research into the therapeutic effects of light, heat and disinfectant, be carried out. Faced with people pointing out that disinfectant taken internally could cause harm, he later suggested that he was being sarcastic. There is no evidence in his phrasing or intonation to suggest that this later statement is true either. He was more likely to be trying to avoid responsibility what he had said.
To me, the whole event resembles the pointy headed boss making an ignorant suggestion, confident in the experience that everyone will go along with him and praise him, because that is what happens in business – everyone knows their place. It’s private, its ‘brainstorming’, and staff may look at each other wonderingly, and say something like “sure boss, we’ll put that brilliant idea out there and see what happens”. They hope he will forget it in a couple of weeks, because he almost always moves on, but if he doesn’t they will either say that its being worked on, or that its a great idea, but its dangerous, or the doctors don’t like it or something – anything to move on…. Business exists to protect the employer, because people’s livelihoods depend on it. You never push the boss into a corner – you just let stupidity be – that is the safest way to go.
Capitalism and hierarchy tend to block sensible decisions. This seems to be a story about a person who shoots off their mouth, no problem there, but can’t admit they might have been wrong, which probably is a problem.
So pardon me while we get some context to try and see what might have been happening.
Injecting what? A suggestion for research
First off, we have the triggering event.
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus, specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids. And I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes; isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds, and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing — just spraying it on and letting it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster. We’re also looking at other disinfectants, specifically looking at the COVID-19 virus in saliva…..
Bryan has previously mentioned the effects of light on the virus on surfaces… but that is not the problem. Here, Bryan is clearly talking about disinfectants outside the body, but he mentions saliva – which can be a boundary breaking substance.
The President’s response is to improvise ‘ideas’ around this….
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much. So I asked Bill a question that probably some of you are thinking of, if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light — and I think you said that that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it.
The employee has played along as expected – saying ‘great idea we’ll follow that up…’
[THE PRESIDENT:] And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you’re going to test that too. It sounds interesting.
ACTING UNDER SECRETARY BRYAN: We’ll get to the right folks who could.
Employee realises that the boss is more serious with crazy idea than he thought, but he deflects to make it someone else’s problem. But the boss is on a roll.
THE PRESIDENT: Right. And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you’re going to have to use medical doctors with. But it sounds — it sounds interesting to me.
The boss lets his innate skill and intelligence run away with him. If stuff works outside the body, then it should work equally well inside the body. Pure logic
[THE PRESIDENT:] So we’ll see. But the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute, that’s — that’s pretty powerful….
Maybe the President realises that not everyone here is an employee paid to praise him and he backs off a little
[THE PRESIDENT:] We’ve — I once mentioned that maybe it does go away with heat and light. And people didn’t like that statement very much. The — the fake news didn’t like it at all. And I just threw it out as a suggestion, but it seems like that’s the case, because when it’s on a surface that would last for a long time, when that surface is outside, it goes away very quickly. It dies very quickly with the sun.
He is just acting like a boss, making a vague “brilliant suggestion”. He has forgotten he is President of the US, with followers who believe everything he says, and that this is a health briefing. Careless words cost lives. So he has landed himself into a problem… which is revealed shortly when…..
Doctors emphasise that it is not safe to inject bleach and disinfectant, as they are toxic [that is why they work to kill bacteria and viruses] and so please do not do it. For example:
FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, who is an employee found it harder to comment, and appeared to prevaricate on an interview….
DR. STEPHEN HAHN, COMMISSIONER, FDA: So, I think the data that were presented at the press conference today were really important in terms of what kills the virus. And I believe the president was asking a question that many Americans are asking, which is, okay, this is what kills the virus, it’s a physical agent, in this case UV light. How could that be applied to kill the virus in, for example, a human being?
We have plenty of examples in medicine where light therapy has been used for treatment of certain diseases. So, it’s a natural question that I as a doctor would have expected to hear from someone as a natural extension of the data that were presented.
ANDERSON COOPER: But — but just from a medical standpoint, I mean, you wouldn’t — would you — I mean, there are — there’s people who are listening, obviously, to the president of the United States and — and take what he says very seriously.
Are you concerned at all, from a medical standpoint, of somebody, you know, injecting themselves with a disinfectant or, you know, hearing what the president said and — and trying to experiment on themselves, thinking that might be something worth looking at? There’s — is there any evidence about taking a disinfectant that’s used, you know, on the table where I’m sitting and using it internally? That doesn’t seem like a good idea from my — I mean, am I wrong?
HAHN: Yes, I think it’s an excellent point you’re making. You — you — we certainly wouldn’t want, as a physician, someone to take matters in their own hands. I think this is something that a patient would want to talk to their physician about. And — and no, I certainly wouldn’t recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant.
No condemnation, no explicit statement the President’s suggestion could be dangerous – just he would not recommend it
[HAHN:] Again, this is a conversation that occurs every day in America between a patient and a doctor. I’ve been in that position. I’m sure Dr. Gupta has as well. And it’s really important we address them because people will ask those questions of us.
Really? Every day, patients are asking you if they should be injecting disinfectant to fight their disease?
GUPTA:… I mean, there’s no — those questions may be getting asked, but there’s absolutely no merit to that. That doesn’t need to be studied. You can already say that that doesn’t work, right?
HAHN: And I — and I think, Sanjay, that — that that is exactly what a patient would say to a doctor, and that would be the answer of the medical experts to anybody who answered that question.
COOPER: It does not work.
But it can’t apparently be said by the FDA Commissioner, that the President’s suggestion was not one that doctors would think plausible.
We also might need to point out that the President was also supporting the use of hydroxychloroquine at the time. An official announcement said:
28 million tablets of Hydroxychloroquine have been shipped across the country from the Strategic National Stockpile.
There was some dispute as to whether the substance was of use for Covid. When asked one time, the President said.
[THE PRESIDENT:] I never spoke to a scientist. But I will tell you this: I did speak with the President of Honduras just a little while ago, and I didn’t bring it up; he brought it up. He said they use the hydroxychloroquine. And he said the results were so incredible with hydroxychloroquine. This happened an hour ago.
I just spoke to him, President of Honduras, and he said — and I guess we made some available to them or whatever. He was thanking me. And I said, “How has the result been?” And he said it’s been incredible.
So let’s move on to Trump’s defense of his statements.
Can he simply say “I was making a suggestion for research, for research, and I was wrong not to think that people might take my words more seriously than I’d intended. So let’s be clear no one should inject disinfectant at home.” Or something else simple and to the point, which accepts his responsibility for clearing things up.
The answer seems to be ‘no’. He has lived as a boss who is never wrong, and who fires people for disagreeing with him. Face is far more important than truth.
Q Mr. President, can you clarify your comments about injections of disinfectant? They’re quite provocative.
THE PRESIDENT: No, I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you, just to see what would happen.
The fault is clearly in the unperceptive reporters who don’t understand his wonderful sense of humour. Nothing to do with him. He has no responsibility for their stupidity.
[THE PRESIDENT:] Now, disinfectant, for doing this maybe on the hands, would work. And I was asking the question of the gentleman who was there yesterday — Bill — because when they say that something will last three or four hours or six hours, but if the sun is out or if they use disinfectant, it goes away in less than a minute. Did you hear about this yesterday?
But I was asking a sarcastic — and a very sarcastic question to the reporters in the room about disinfectant on the inside. But it does kill it, and it would kill it on the hands, and that would make things much better. That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters.
Okay.
‘Ok?’ indeed. Let’s make this clear. This is Not My Fault. Not my fault. It’s you who are the idiots who don’t get my sophisticated wit.
Q But you were asking your medical experts to look into it. Were you being sarcastic with them?
The response is “Let’s change the subject from disinfectant.”
THE PRESIDENT: No. No, no, no, no. To look into whether or not sun and disinfectant on the hands — but whether or not sun can help us. Because, I mean, he came in yesterday and he said they’ve done a big study. This is a study. This isn’t where he hasn’t done it. This is where they’ve come in with a final report that sun has a massive impact, negatively, on this virus. In other words, it does not live well with humidity, and it doesn’t live well with sun, sunlight, heat. It doesn’t live well with heat and sun and disinfectant. And that’s what I brought out. And I thought it was clear.
Okay? Anything else?….
Later in the same interview he is faced with another set of questions from a few reporters, which seem to reveal the enormous trouble the President has with the suggestion he was possibly wrong. It is just totally unnerving for him.
Q Mr. President, just to follow up on the comments from yesterday, you said you were being sarcastic, but some people may have misunderstood you. Do you want to just clarify to America?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I wish they wouldn’t — I wish they wouldn’t —
No he really can’t bring himself to even clarify.
Q Do you want to —
THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think I did.
This is a boss or an immature teenager. “I’ve already done it” when they haven’t.
Q Can you just clarify to Americans —
THE PRESIDENT: But I do think this —
Q — that you don’t want people to ingest that?
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. I do think that disinfectant on the hands could have a very good effect.
He shifts back to a different defensible position, because he can’t say, “please don’t inject it, or ingest it”.
[THE PRESIDENT:] Now, Bill is going back to check that in the laboratory. You know, it’s an amazing laboratory, by the way. It’s amazing the work they do. So he’s going to check.
The doctors are going to do the experiments with disinfectant internally? Perhaps he is implying that they are going to check the effect of disinfectant on the skin – which they have already done?
He made a great, sarcastic suggestion, which will be followed up. This seems to be typical spoilt boss behaviour. Again, even though he is defending himself by saying he didn’t mean it and it was a trap to trap dumb reporters, he still can’t let his brilliant idea go.
[THE PRESIDENT:] Because a hard surface — this is a hard surface, I guess, maybe depending on whose hands you’re talking about, right?
People’s hands are like formica? or steel? He still can’t admit that the ingestion idea was not sensible for normal people to try out.
[THE PRESIDENT:] But this is a hard surface. And disinfectant — the disinfectant has an unbelievable — it wipes it out. You know, you saw it: Sun and heat and humidity wipe it out.
And this is from tests. They’ve been doing these tests for, you know, a number of months. And the result — so then I said, “Well, how do we do it inside the body or even outside the body, with the hands?” And disinfectant, I think, would work. He thinks would work. But you use it when you’re — when you’re doing your hands. I guess that’s one of the reasons they say wash your hands. But whether it’s washing your hands or disinfectant on your hands, it’s very good.
So he flips from inside to outside, because despite him being sarcastic, of which there is no evidence, he still made a good suggestion. Anything to avoid being wrong.
[THE PRESIDENT:] So they’re going to start looking at that. And there is a way of, you know, if light — if sun — sun itself — that sun has a tremendous impact on it. It kills it like in one minute. It goes from what was it? Hours to, like, one minute. It’s dead.
So I said, “You got to go back and look.” But I’d like them now to look as it pertains to the human body, not just sitting on a railing or sitting on a wall. I’d like them to look as it pertains — because maybe there’s something there. They have to work with the doc — I’m not a doctor. They have to work with the doctors. But maybe there is something to light and the human body and helping people that are dying. Okay?
Q But just to clarify — just to clarify that, sir: Are you — are you encouraging Amer- — you’re not encouraging Americans to ingest —
THE PRESIDENT: No, of course — no. Of course.
Q — disinfectant?
THE PRESIDENT: That was — interior wise, it’s said sarcastically. It was — it was put in the form of a question to a group of extraordinarily hostile people, namely the fake news media.
Okay. So —
Lets come back to this being some one else’s fault for not understanding me.
Q Some doctors felt they needed to clarify that after your comments.
THE PRESIDENT: Well, of course. All they had to do was see it was — just, you know, the way it was asked. I was — I was looking at you.
He breaks into confusion. And starts attacking the reporter.
Q No, you weren’t, sir. I wasn’t there yesterday. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: I know. I know.
He can’t even be wrong about that – he knew he was mistaken, a sentence ago?
Q [different reporter] You were looking at Dr. Birx.
THE PRESIDENT: What’s that?
Q You were looking at Dr. Birx.
THE PRESIDENT: I was looking at Bill. I was looking at the doctor. I was looking at some of the reporters. I don’t know if you were there. Were you there? I don’t think you were there.
Q I was there, and I watched you ask her.
THE PRESIDENT: No, not you. Not you. Not you. You were there. You — if you’re there, I never forget. You were —
Breaks down into confusion when challenged again
Q I wasn’t there yesterday, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: You were not?
Q No, sir.
THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, I didn’t think you were there.
Yes he was right all along. Of course.
Q Just, Mr. President — Mr. President, I know that you continue to say — you’re obviously —
THE PRESIDENT: Okay, hold it one second.
Q Yeah.
THE PRESIDENT: Any other questions from any other people?
Okay, thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.
Breaks it off. Its too confusing when people listen to him, and don’t give him the breaks a boss is entitled to.
This is probably just what you don’t want in a President, but apparently common in business.
This will obviously repeat what I have said before, in various places, but it comes out of a circling process and hopefully is more precise than previously. This repetition is also relevant to this blog as neoliberalism appears to form the main institutional block to climate action, energy transition, degrowth and repair of the world ecology. It may also be the main danger to democracy and liberty, as it protects corporate power at the cost of human life.
Introduction
First of all, like fascism, neoliberalism is not primarily a body of theories, although it does point to landmark theorists in neoclassical, monetary and ‘Austrian’ economics. It is primarily a set of techniques for increasing and entrenching the power of the corporate sector, which organises the economy so that most of the wealth goes to the already hyper-wealthy. It is quite happy to ignore its pet theorists, and official principles, if they are inconvenient for these aims.
Origins
Neoliberalism seems to have arisen in the context of a series of challenges to corporate power by governments acting to regulate corporations for the public good.
It seems to have begun in the 30s, with corporate sponsorship, during the great depression. It went to sleep during the second world war, when governmental organisation seemed necessary for corporate survival. It survived primarily as corporately sponsored anti-socialism after the second world war when socialism, or a mixed economy, was boosting the standards of living of the general populace to an extent never before seen. This was the era of the founding of the Mont Pelerin Society, home of Friedrich August von Hayek and Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises among other anti-socialists. However, they had relatively little influence as the elite also feared the possibility of worker revolution, which could be stopped by a little wealth and power sharing.
Neoliberalism returned, with the usual sponsorship, in the early 1970s as a response to the fear that democracy and activism (of all kinds, including environmental) was taking power away from the corporate elites to do what they wanted, and that confusion would result. It also proposed a simple ‘solution’ to the problems of stagflation, and the oil shock – which effectively increased levels of unemployment and reduced wages for most people. It came into its true ascendency after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when there seemed no longer to be any fear of a workers’ revolution, and we were faced with what some called the end of history, namely the triumph of capitalism and its then neoliberal ideas.
Neoliberalism was also helped by the Left arguing that the welfare state was a mode of control over the working class. This was partially correct, but the welfare state was clearly better than the previous alternatives. The solution would have been not to attack welfare but to improve it and liberate it.
The left had little defense against neoliberal ‘liberty’ but naïve anti-capitalism or accommodation. Accommodation won out, as it often does, and we got market based Labour parties in the UK and Australia, who followed the neoliberal lead and treated the corporately dominated ‘market’ as the most important social institution and thus the corporate sector as the most important and privileged part of society. The Democrats likewise largely followed the Republicans in the US, as with Bill Clinton’s slogan “Its the economy, stupid.” Socialism was dead.
Neoliberal “Free Markets”
The language that neoliberalism uses tends to resemble the language of libertarians, but it is not the same, even if libertarians can themselves be confused by it, and used by it.
To explain the confusion, we can return to the primary function of neoliberalism which is to extend the power of the corporate sector and prevent it from being “interfered with”, made to act responsibly, “civilised” or encouraged to share wealth, on behalf of the people. Neoliberalism tends towards corporate authoritarianism not libertarianism. Once we understand these are the aims, then many otherwise puzzling features of neoliberalism become clear.
Thus neoliberals talk a lot about the “free market” but they do not mean a market open to all without regulation within which people can live freely, they mean a market that is regulated in favour of the corporate class. This is a market which allows tax evasion, suppresses unions, lowers wages, transfers wealth upwards, hinders organisation against corporations, lowers corporate responsibility towards anyone other than their shareholders, makes it harder for corporations to be sued for harm, lowers environmental regulation or other forms of prevention of damage, and otherwise distorts markets to favour the wealthy and what they do to get wealthy.
By focusing on the market, they also tend to undermine any realisation than societies are more than markets, or more than obedience to markets and the corporate sector.
Neoliberals also try to “externalise” the costs of the markets. That is, in more normal English, put the costs of market operation upon the non-corporate sector. For neoliberals it is the people who ideally, should bear the costs of pollution, poisoning, ecological destruction and worker injury, and not the corporate sector. They make it harder to hold corporations legally responsible for damage, or for people to protest against that damage. Although they have not yet suppressed public opinion, they can suppress public information.
Likewise, in neoliberal thought, the corporate sector should own anything valuable, and the people should own everything that costs, or ‘anything which costs’ should be abandoned. This is what privatisation is about. The idea is to make the state, simply an arm of the corporate class, so it can exert maximal control over your lives.
Public or common property, like tax payers money, should be gifted to the corporate sector, or provided as a service at minimum charge. This, of course, encourages governmental corruption, as it becomes normal to sell public property off to the wealthy. It also becomes normal to have corporate lobbyists embedded in government.
In this framework, mining companies who take the public’s resources, should pay minimum cost for that privilege and the public should get as little as possible. If the mining destroys villages, towns and countryside and uses or poisons water supplies, that is a problem for the people not the company.
If gas pipes and drilling sites leak, helping to increase global warming, that is not the company’s problem, and so on. Again this is a major aim of neoliberal activism.
Neoliberalism can also support monopolies as an efficient and competitive form of trade, as long as they are private corporate monopolies. Partly this was to challenge anti-trust laws, partly to keep the new monopolies safe, and partly to justify privatisation of governmental monopolies. This, of course, violates the normal standards of an open and competitive market, but it does justify and protect corporate power. It is done by pretending that competition could enter the market if the monopoly was abusing its privilege. This idea ‘forgets’ that market occupiers have power and resilience, that consumers have to have a no-risk transfer of allegiance, that new competitors do not face a deficit of experience or have to sink lots of losable capital to get going in the market, that they cannot be undercut until they leave the market, or regulated out of the market by politicians indebted to the monopoly. The reality of actual capitalist economic behaviour is not the same as in the fantasy markets promoted by neoliberals.
One of the main neoliberal fantasies is that the wealthy and powerful will not team up to gain benefits for themselves, and that it is only the envious workers who will exert political force on markets. In a capitalist economy, everything is up for sale, virtue, integrity, and power, and it is much easier for team-ups of the wealthy to have an effect. This is rarely to never considered, or it is thought that these people will always be in competition and so never team up – this simply shows probably deliberate, selective ignorance of human nature, which just benefits the wealthy.
It is correct that, just occasionally, neoliberals do acknowledge this problem and call it ‘crony capitalism’ which aims to imply this is an aberration, which can be blamed on State action, and normal capitalism does not work this way normally, but this is unreal. This is how capitalism generates the State it can buy, and how neoliberalism itself manages to gain influence.
In practice “free markets” in neoliberalism can be defined not as voluntary trade or exchange, but as allowing powerful corporations to behave as they will with any deleterious consequences to the public being ignored, or being claimed to be good. Whatever corporations do, is the neoliberal ‘free market’ in action. The idea of the free market exists to prevent people exerting power over their corporate masters.
The State
Neoliberals need the State to protect: what they define as private property; the organisation of labour; military defense and expansion; contract; investment and; the power of the corporate sector.
While neoliberals make a great deal of fuss about shrinking the State, they wish the State to be shrunk, not to provide people with liberty or to encourage an active local politics, but to provide the powerful with more wealth and the liberty to stand over and exploit everyone else. What neoliberals mean to end forever, is the idea that the State might be useful to the general populace, as opposed to the wealthy. In this they have been extremely successful; people nowadays generally have little faith in the State, in political action or in the power of non-neoliberal political parties to change anything (“both sides are equally bad”).
Thus despite neoliberals having power since the 1980s, there has been no diminution of the State or decline in State regulation. What has declined is the ability of ordinary people to affect the State, or the ability of the State to help people. The State has made the welfare it provides interfering and dominating. The point of neoliberal welfare is to penalise people and encourage people to get off it, not to support them through difficulty as a humanitarian right, and certainly not to support them while they start a new venture.
However, despite this neoliberal hostility to the State possibly helping people and the amount of effort they put into discouraging small frauds by ordinary people, neoliberals think it quite acceptable for financial corporations to be bailed out at taxpayer expense, even if (particularly if?) the corporation has behaved stupidly and and dangerously, and the bailout money is used fund executive bonuses, or share buybacks, rather than to support the workers, or stop them being thrown out of their homes (even if workers loosing their homes is bad for the economy as a whole – maintaining power is more important). A non-neoliberal state might think that the best way to help everyone in a financial or loan crisis, is to subsidise ordinary people’s mortgage payments, so they can keep their homes, eat and keep spending so small local businesses survive. But that is not the aim of free market talk.
Again if a powerful corporate group is affected by neoliberal policies, for example agribusiness, then it can be said farmers are being helped out, when all the money goes to the wealthy parts of the sector, not to the more precarious smaller famers.
This strategy helps make the State more unpopular, and thus justifies rollback of the State’s democratic helpfulness, while keeping the State as the support for the elite. The State becomes more traditional, a thing which protects hierarchy, wealth and property alone.
Neoliberalism also encourages an unrealistic individualism which denies human sociability, interdependence and collaboration for ordinary people. This functions to discourage collaboration against the neoliberal state and corporate sector, while allowing people to seek individuality through supporting neoliberal propaganda.
Deliverables
Neoliberalism has delivered what you would expect, given its inclinations.
Inequality of wealth and power has increased. Vast amounts of wealth have been concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Social mobility has lessened – it is now much harder for most people’s children to be wealthier than their parents were, or for a person to crawl out of the working class into the middle class, than it was in the 20-30 years after World War 2. Political alienation has increased. Corporations rule the Western world. The rise and success of neo-fascism seems probable. The World is on the brink, possibly over the brink, of ecological crisis. Nothing is likely to be done to prevent, or even accommodate to, this crisis, if it causes problems for the corporate establishment.
Positive psychology and ‘information mess’
As I have suggested elsewhere positive thinking is a hallmark of neoliberalism, and this leads to distortion and suppression of information.
The neoliberal “free market” is dogmatically thought to always deliver the best result possible. The only thing that can ever officially go wrong with the market is government intervention.
Unfortunately markets often go wrong and have unintended and sometimes harmful consequences – this is life – this is what happens in complex systems, and anyone who denies this is a property of all such systems is engaging in selective truth.
However, because the neoliberal State and neoliberal policy exists solely to protect the market and its big players, and it is impossible to separate the market from politics, or from attempts at control, it is always possible to say that something a government has done is the cause of the problem. Even when that action was a result of neoliberal protections for the corporate sector.
Neoliberals are positive the market delivers good things, and that paradise will emerge in the future (even when the market appears to be delivering global destruction), in order to defend corporate power and action.
To keep this positivity, neoliberals have to ignore all the counter evidence, or define that evidence as political bias, again because the purpose of neoliberalism is not to deliver a good economy, but to deliver an economy in which established power is preserved. Counter-evidence is defined as political as it shows the politics of neoliberalism does not deliver quality results for the majority of the population.
Neoliberalism can only flourish an environment of ‘positive’ or cheerful lies, that hide difficulties. Truth would demand the system be changed as it is not working.
Neoliberalism needs misinformation, just as President Trump does, because it is unlikely to be successful campaigning on its real aims of increasing corporate power and wealth, and decreasing the power, wealth and security of everyone else. This need for misinformation is magnified when society as a whole faces great challenges, which may not be able to be solved by maintaining the old ways of life and power.
Neoliberals act to impoverish information and education, to preserve ignorance, so as to increase support.
It is also standard for corporations to use misinformation to boost sales, halt competition, misdirect competition, claim they have working products when they don’t, shift away responsibility for disaster, promote false financial statements and so on. This is the normal behaviour demanded of business people. Support of corporate power without responsibility, is simply to support this already existing flood of misinformation. Misinformation is part of capitalist power, just as much as it is part of other non-democratic sources of power. Capitalist Advertising and PR are big businesses, and it is naïve to think they do not know how to manipulate people with fiction.
Corporations control almost all the media and promote neoliberalism, a good example being the Murdoch Empire. Corporations control and fund large numbers of think tanks, while neoliberal policy aims to make sure that universities are servants of the corporate sector and only do research useful to consolidate the profitability of that sector.
Some extremely neoliberal pro-corporate media has developed the strategy of arguing that other media is left wing and socialist. This is simply not true, as they are nearly all corporately owned, and dependent on corporate advertising for survival. However, it does help to smear any possible alternative to hardline neoliberal corporate domination, and keep its audience loyal and thinking they are being radical, rather than supporting their own submission.
As suggested elsewhere in this blog, neoliberals will embrace fascism to keep power in a crisis. They will attack socialism and communism, because however defective those movements are, they are intended to end the domination of people by corporate wealth, and that cannot be thought.
For neoliberals the lives of ordinary citizens are unimportant when compared to retaining corporate profit – hence they have no difficulty pretending there are no problems with climate change or pandemics.
Neoliberal Conspiracy
In the series of posts on this blog called “Neoliberal Conspiracy” I have suggested that because Neoliberals cannot campaign easily on the grounds of their real policies, they conspire together to try and manipulate people into thinking that hardline neoliberal politicians have another, more populist and libertarian, agenda. In practice, by liberty they mean the equal liberty of all to crush those weaker or less wealthy than themselves. The Murdoch Empire has been an important part of this propaganda war for a long while.
The main aim of the conspiracy is to maintain corporate dominance amidst ecological and other forms of collapse.
However it is important to remember, that due to this conspiracy, most people who end up supporting neoliberal politicians are not neoliberals themselves.
Neoliberalism as capitalism?
I would argue that while neoliberalism is a ‘happy’ form of capitalist ideology, it is not an inevitable part of capitalism itself. It is common, because capitalism is not just about trade, but about forms of power, organisation, and exclusion of others from property. Neoliberalism is simply a tool used to protect and intensify those forms.
I personally feel that 1960s capitalism was much more realistic. It would probably have been less suicidal and able to deal with the pressures of climate change, even without the alternate energy sources we have now. There would have been big research projects, massive amounts of investment and so on. People would have accepted rules to lower emissions, just as they accepted the rules to lower deaths from smog, even if it cost profit.
There is, of course, no evidence for this because they did not face the same problems with the same intensity. Perhaps if they had, then they would have locked down into protecting wealth and ending democracy so as to preserve the inequalities of the system as a whole, but they may not. We cannot know what would have happened, but we can expect that neoliberalism will continue to prefer to kill us, before it does anything to solve the problems.
However, it might be possible to change the forms and ideology of Anglo-capitalism, and help people to become aware that neoliberalism is a useless, deceiving and harmful, ideology.
I have previously discussed “positive thinking” as a way that Neoliberalism engages in information distortion and suppression. Let’s look at this in more detail with the case of Covid-19.
There is a lot of use for some kinds of positive thinking. Realising that life presents problems, that solving problems can generate more problems, and that persistence and a willingness to learn from failure and mistakes, by changing tack rather than giving up, is useful. Life is complex, and enmeshed in complex systems – it is not easy for most people to do much of anything. If I can quote a relatively famous musical philosopher – John Lydon…
“Every problem at first seemed insurmountable,” he says. “Until one worked harder and harder at solving it. It’s a process I enjoy.”…
“I try to say that in the book,” he says. “Everything is a test. You’ve got to solve these problems. You can’t just run away and hide, shirk your responsibility. You’ve got to meet it head-on, get on with it. Sorry, there it is. These are the cards handed to you and you’d better play the game.”
This seems to be relatively realistic, if you assume Lydon also learns from mistakes. Gratitude and thanks for life and for what you have is probably good for you as well.
However, neoliberal positive thinking seems to insist that one should focus on imagined success and not focus on the problems. In the version of life it promotes, it seems you only get what you attract by your thoughts. If you think positively you attract good things, if you think negatively you attract bad things. Therefore, if you are miserable, poor or sick, it is your fault for choosing bad thoughts, and the successful are always virtuous and strong. They control their thinking so it is always positive, always envisioning what they truly desire.
This is far more problematic, especially with the implied addendum, that given a free market if you are virtuous and hardworking then only good will happen to you, if you think good things and are good. This acts as a way of reinforcing inequality and plutocracy – bad things only happen to bad, uncontrolled, or weak people.
This post is rather long, so in summary:
Neoliberal positive thinking
ignores experience,
plays down a whole range of problems,
blocks information flow,
denounces those with different views, no matter how knowledgeable they might be, and
leads to lying, shadow politics and scapegoating.
It also leads to unjustified optimism about:
‘solutions’ which have not been properly tested but which feel good, and of
the ruler’s better understanding of the problems than people who have studied the areas involved.
By helping people to turn away from real problems, it makes the situation worse.
Trump privately recognises the Danger
We now know that Donald Trump confessed on tape to Bob Woodward on 7th February 2020, that he knew the Corona virus was a problem:
You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. The touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus. People don’t realize, we lose 25,000, 30,000 people a year here. Who would ever think that, right?…
This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1%, and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff….
Young people too. Plenty of young people…..
I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.
A standard defense of the President’s reaction to Covid-19 is that he was distracted in early February by an Impeachment in the Senate, which the Republicans were never going to agree to proceeding, that no one could possibly be aware of what would happen in the future, and that he stopped travel from China when other people warned against it. However, in this interview, he clearly shows that he understood the danger of the problem, but he presented a completely different view of its magnitude to the public.
Publicly Trump plays down the Danger
About three days later, on the 10th February, at a public session at the White House, he showed his strategy of playing down the danger. He said:
Now, the virus that we’re talking about having to do — you know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat — as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April. We’re in great shape though. We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.
I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.
There is no evidence to assume that the President received further information in this period which could justify modifying his position, (certainly he has not claimed this, that I have seen) so we can assume that his downplaying of the danger was based entirely on wanting to be positive.
This neoliberal positivity went into the policy. It was reported, and confirmed, by Dr Fauci that he and other Trump administration officials had recommended physical distancing to combat the spread of coronavirus in February, but were rebuffed for almost a month – and this despite Trump’s apparent awareness of it seriousness, as revealed by the Woodward tapes. However, Trump seems to have been seduced by wanting to play it down. In neoliberal positive thinking, if you do not focus on the problem, but on how the problem is diminishing or the dawning light, then you will succeed.
what goes into those kinds of decisions is complicated. But you’re right. I mean, obviously, if we had, right from the very beginning, shut everything down, it may have been a little bit different. But there was a lot of pushback about shutting things down back then.
The President did not make public social distancing recommendations until 16 March. [Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing]. He can be said to have consistently undermined these recommendations, by a refusal to wear masks or be physically distant, except on occasions. He also seems to have attacked State Governors who tried to enforce, or recommend, distancing. I suspect that the worse the pandemic became the more he rejected caution as a mode of showing he was in charge.
An interview on Fox got to the point about optimism, but illustrated how it is tied up with flattery and boosterism:
Bill Hemmer: Mr. President. Thank you. Did we get out here in the light? Right about now – a big part of your job is to be an optimist. Donald Trump: Right. BH: You say that yourself. DT: My life…. We have to do what’s right for our country. And, you know, we have a very optimistic country, but this was a very sad thing that happened…. our people are incredible. And the way they’ve handled it and what they’ve done and what they’ve gone through is to me, it’s it’s really sort of shocking because as we discussed, they want to go back.
They want to go back to their restaurants and they want to go back to their places where they work. They want it. This is our country was built on that whole concept. I never realized how much. But they want to get it back. But we have a great country and our people are just truly amazing people.
Much later at a press meeting at the White House, 7 to 8 months after the Woodward tapes were recorded, and just after they were published, President Trump explained:
The fact is, I’m a cheerleader for this country, I love our country, and I don’t want people to be frightened. I don’t want to create panic, as you say. And certainly, I’m not going to drive this country or the world into a frenzy.
We want to show confidence. We want to show strength. We want to show strength as a nation. And that’s what I’ve done. And we’ve done very well. We’ve done well from any standard. You look at our numbers, compared to other countries, other parts of the world. It’s been an amazing job that we’ve done….
you cannot show a sense of panic or you’re going to have bigger problems than you ever had before.
Looking at the numbers, shows us that the US has done amongst the worst of all nations, in terms of deaths per head of population, but recognising that would not be positive or amazing (in a good sense).
As Dr. Fauci said:
There were times when I was out there telling the American public how difficult this is, how we’re having a really serious problem, you know, when the president was saying it’s something that’s going to disappear, which obviously, is not the case. When you downplay something that is really a threat, that’s not a good thing.
Another relatively positive technique is to emphasise how bad it could be so by comparison everything looks good. And then decide on the lower figures as reasonable.
we did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead. Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people. That’s at the lower — as you know, the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people.
We now know 50-60,000 was an a considerable underestimate (at time of writing it is 217,000), and the US deaths and serious illness are likely to increase. The more people get sick, the wider the transmission and the harder it is likely to be to halt. We now don’t know how badly the country will do from now on, even if people do start facing the problem. Trump’s remarks about over a million people could be more to the point now, almost whatever is done.
Addenda:
We are now in the last days of the election campaign. The president is continuing the optimism, and saying how bad not being hyper-positive is.
Joe Biden is promising a long, dark, painful winter. Did you see him at the debate? Did anybody see the debate by any chance? No, he said, “A long, dark winter.” Oh, that’s great. That’s wonderful. That’s just what our country needs is a long, dark winter and a leader that talks about it….
Just like he said on the debate, “You’re going to have a dark winter.” That was really depressing. It was even depressing even though he did so badly in the debate, I was depressed because I said, “It’s such a depressing thing he said.”
A few Republicans, such as Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, pushed the same public line as the President writing:
Thankfully, the United States today is better prepared than ever before to face emerging public health threats, like the coronavirus, in large part due to the work of the Senate Health Committee, Congress, and the Trump Administration.
On the 24th of February it is reported that senior members of the president’s economic team, privately told board members of the Hoover Institution, they could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy.
“What struck me,” [A consultant at the meeting] wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”…
traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.
“Short everything,” was the reaction of [one] investor, using the Wall Street term for betting on the idea that the stock prices of companies would soon fall.
It is possible that anyone with a sense of realism could have worked out the same advice, but the formal information was only directed at particular people.
Panic elsewhere
Despite his proclaimed desire to avoid panic at all costs, Trump does seem to manage to promote panic when it serves his political purposes – panic at ‘rioters,’ ‘liberal communists’, Anti-fascists etc., just not when it could lead to over 200,000 dead Americans, and no one yet know how many mutilated and long term sick.
Suburban voters are pouring into the Republican Party because of the violence in Democrat run cities and states. If Biden gets in, this violence is “coming to the Suburbs”, and FAST. You could say goodbye to your American Dream!
The Democrats never even mentioned the words LAW & ORDER at their National Convention. That’s where they are coming from. If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, “Friendly Protesters”.
There is apparently no positivity spare, to try and reduce racial discrepancies in deaths at the hands of police. Positivity helps boost fear of problems you don’t want to solve, and helps shadow projection
Positively control information
This kind of determination to be ‘positive’ about particular problems, leads to a position in which lying, ignoring or suppressing data, and hiding the reality is inevitable. Being positive in the neoliberal sense, creates a fear of real data and a desire to blame those who try to uncover the extent of the problem.
Suppression or hiding
As early as March an anonymous official told AP that
The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.
Dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room…
Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings… “We had some very critical people who did not have security clearances who could not go,” one official said. “These should not be classified meetings. It was unnecessary.”….
‘Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facilit[ies]’… are usually reserved for intelligence and military operations. Ordinary cell phones and computers can’t be brought into the chambers.
No one outside ‘the elite’ is to know what is discussed, even people who might know something about the problem. Information is suppressed.
‘Shoot the messenger’
Information which cannot be suppressed can be attacked and ignored. A report from the Inspector General of Health and Human Services, based on interviews between March 23-27 with administrators from 323 hospitals, gave its ‘key takeaway’ as:
Hospitals also reported substantial challenges maintaining or expanding their facilities’ capacity to treat patients with COVID-19. Hospitals described specific challenges, mitigation strategies, and needs for assistance related to personal protective equipment (PPE), testing, staffing, supplies and durable equipment; maintaining or expanding facility capacity; and financial concerns.
severe shortages of testing supplies and extended waits for test results limited hospitals’ ability to monitor the health of patients and staff. Hospitals reported that they were unable to keep up with COVID-19 testing demands because they lacked complete kits and/or the individual components and supplies needed to complete tests. Additionally, hospitals reported frequently waiting 7 days or longer for test results.
ibid: p.3
Trump responded, by politicising the report and dismissing the authors:
It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word “inspector general”? Really? It’s wrong. And they’ll talk to you about it. It’s wrong.….
we’ve done more testing and had more results than any country, anywhere in the world. They’re doing an incredible job. Now they’re all calling us. They want our testing. ‘What are we doing?’ ‘How do you do the five-minute test?’ ‘How do you do the 15-minute test?’
So, give me the name of the inspector general. Could politics be entered into that?…
Any information which presents problems, to the positive view, has (in that view) to be provided by people who are actively hostile, or politically motivated. There is therefore no need to pay attention to any information they might give. This reinforces information suppression.
The House Select Subcommittee on Coronavirus reported that the White House coronavirus task force privately warned state officials that they faced dire outbreaks over the summer, but top Trump administration officials publicly downplayed the threat:
“Fourteen states that have been in the ‘red zone’ since June 23 have refused to impose statewide mask mandates per Task Force’s recommendations — including states with severe case spikes like Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee,” the subcommittee says.
Regardless of how the reports line up with the administration’s messaging, public health specialists have repeatedly called for the reports and data contained in them to be made public. Such information can help local and state officials as well as individuals to better respond to the outbreak
“We’ve got a lot of Covid response-related data that’s all ready and prepped to be shared with the public and it just isn’t being shared,” Ryan Panchadsaram, who helps run a data-tracking site called Covid Exit Strategy, told CNBC in an interview in July.
According to the same news report, the White House condemned the committee for being partisan, with “the purpose of falsely distorting the President’s record.” Again we have the dismissal of problems. There was nothing to take on board here, everything was going well.
Politico reported that:
emails from communications aides to CDC Director Robert Redfield and other senior officials openly complained that the [CDC] agency’s reports would undermine President Donald Trump’s optimistic messages about the outbreak…
The communications aides’ efforts to change the language in the CDC’s reports have been constant across the summer…
since Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign official with no medical or scientific background, was installed in April as the Health and Human Services department’s new spokesperson, there have been substantial efforts to align the reports with Trump’s statements, including the president’s claims that fears about the outbreak are overstated, or stop the reports altogether.
CDC tried to report as if once kids get together, there will be spread and this will impact school re-opening… that was the aim and that’s how it reads and its disingeneous. Very misleading by the CDC and shame on them. Their aim is clear. This hurts any President or administration. This is designed to hurt this Presidnet for their reasons which I am not interested in. I am interested in this or any President being served fairly and that tax payers money not be used for political reasons. They CDC, work for him.
ibid. [spelling and grammar as reported]
A unreviewed study from the Department of Environmental Health Sciences Columbia University argued that:
Counterfactual simulations indicate that, had these same control measures been implemented just 1-2 weeks earlier, a substantial number of cases and deaths could have been averted.
As we have seen, Fauci and other advisors had recommended control measures in mid February while the President did not introduce them until mid-March. President Trump’s response was, again, to damn the report and its origin:
Columbia is a liberal, disgraceful institution to write that because all the people that they cater to were months after me, they said we shouldn’t close it. I took tremendous heat, you know this. When I ban China from coming in, first time anything like that ever happened, I took tremendous heat…..
And I saw that report. It’s a disgrace that Columbia University would do it, playing right to their little group of people that tell them what to do.
It was clearly unnecessary to say more than something like “There are always disputes about models,” or “they have the benefit of hindsight,” or “I acted on the best information available” or, assuming he had really seen it, “that this article is not yet reviewed – there could be considerable problems with their method or conclusions”, but instead he has to try and make them motivatedly bad and imply their research was subservient to an otherwise unknown “little group of people that tell them what to do”. An evil conspiracy is the only possible explanation for suggesting the Trump government could have done better.
Trump is not alone in the denunciation of people saying coronavirus is series. Dr. Fauci and other health officials, and their families have received death threats [2]. Even people appearing in anti-covid announcements can suffer similarly, presumably in an attempt to silence them, and stop the negativity about the virus. Fauci said:
I wouldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that people who object to things that are pure public health principles are so set against it and don’t like what you and I say, namely in the world of science, that they actually threaten you…
There’s one thing about that nonsense that I do object to, and that is the effect that it has on my family…. Because when you get death threats that require you having security protection all the time, and when they start hassling your children on the phone and at their job and interfering with their lives, that pisses me off, I must say.
On the other side, some people with Coronavirus have also received threats, but its not clear, from what I’ve seen, whether that was politically motivated or not – fear of people with a contagious disease is fairly normal if not the best behaviour.
As said in the previous post, shadow politics tends to be denunciatory, rather than curious or information gathering, and that is certainly the case here.
Dislike of Data Leads to Information Mess
The President does not seem to like data and has apparently blamed testing for a rise in cases. Right at the beginning, there were some Americans on a cruise ship, the Grand Princess, which was denied entry into San Francisco, because of the presence of Covid. While the President allowed other people to make the decision, he made his preferences clear.
I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them [the officials] to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.
That wasn’t our fault, and it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship, either. Okay? It wasn’t their fault either. And they’re mostly Americans, so I can live either way with it.
A few months later on Fox news he made a similar argument, that implies testing for disease increases knowledge of the numbers of those infected, and thus was not a positive thing.
[Chris] WALLACE: Then — then it [Covid] went down and now since June, it has gone up more than double. One day this week 75,000 new cases. More than double…
TRUMP: Chris, that’s because we have great testing, because we have the best testing in the world. If we didn’t test, you wouldn’t be able to show that chart. If we tested half as much, those numbers would be down.
Cases are up — many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases. Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing….
I’m glad we do [testing], but it really skews the numbers….
You know I said, “It’s going to disappear.” I’ll say it again…..
It’s going to disappear and I’ll be right….. Because I’ve been right probably more than anybody else.
When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please.
A review entitled Tracking Covid-19 in the United States, authored by a group led by led by Tom Frieden, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from 2009 to 2017, was released a few days after the interview above. It claimed that the US “does not have standard, national data on COVID-19. The US also lacks standards for state-, county- and city- level public reporting.” In the press release for the report, the group said:
The report found critical gaps in the availability of information necessary to track and control COVID-19: across the 50 states, only 40% of essential data points are being monitored and reported publicly. More than half the essential information—strategic intelligence that leaders need to turn the tide against COVID-19—is not reported at all….
because of the failure of national leadership, the United States is flying blind in our effort to curb the spread of COVID-19.
In other words, there is no pressure, or direction, to gain clear information about Covid, or to make that information generally available. Information is a mess, because in the world of positivity, we do not need that information and do not attend to ‘negative’ information. Accurate information may possibly make the Administration, and the situation, look worse, and that would make the problem worse.
As a footnote it may well be the case that because the reporting is of cases and deaths, we automatically ignore or play down those people who seemed injured by Covid, or who do not recover their full health. Thus the situation could be far worse than is suggested by focusing on death and assuming that if people don’t die they have fully recovered.
Imagined Optimism
The President also positively promoted treatments for the disease, based on early projections of success, rather than waiting for test confirmations – even against his medical advisors’ advice. He said things like:
Look, it may work and it may not work. And I agree with the doctor, what he said: It may work, it may not work.
I feel good about it. That’s all it is. Just a feeling. You know, I’m a smart guy. I feel good about it. And we’re going to see. You’re going to see soon enough….
You know the expression: What the hell do you have to lose? Okay?
There is no evidence I am aware of, that this harmed people who then insisted on receiving the unconfirmed drugs from their doctors, but it could have. It did boost pharmaceutical company profits through increased sales. The New York Times reported:
Prescriptions for two antimalarial drugs jumped by 46 times the average when the president promoted them on TV
His repeated declarations of support for the malaria drugs have resulted in shortages for people who need them.
U.S. hospital orders for chloroquine jumped by 3,000% from March 1 to 17, according to Premier Inc., a group-purchasing organization for hospital supplies. Hydroxychloroquine orders were up 260%.
Optimism must be everywhere – especially if it helps the corporate sector.
Positivity leads to suppression, or smearing, of dissent, as we have seen. Trump’s optimism about the medicines meant that people who insisted on better evidence for those medicines were clearly sabotaging his efforts to cheerlead and guide America.
The following report may possibly be based on false information, but it fits in with what we have observed so far:
Dr. Rick Bright was abruptly dismissed last week as the director of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and removed as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response. He said that he had been pressured to direct money toward hydroxychloroquine, one of several “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections.”
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines, and other technologies that lack scientific merit… I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way.”
It sometimes appears that the President positively assumes he knows more than specialists, can easily pick things up and is massively intelligent. Talking about medical knowledge, he said.
I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for President.
By the way, it’s a disease without question, has more names than any disease in history. I can name, “Kung flu.” I can name, 19 different versions of names. Many call it a virus, which it is. Many call it a flu, what difference?
There are plenty of YouTube videos showing Trump declaring he knows more about a particular subject than anybody…. This is not unique to the President, and can be seen in many positive thinkers. It is a way of positively discounting problems and empirical disruptions, while ignoring advice from people who have studied the problems.
However, this kind of behaviour means that it is less likely that people will report bad news to the President or his Cabinet, because it will, at best be ignored, most likely not be welcome, and possibly be greeted with punishment. This increases the likelihood that the leaders wander in a cloud of positive misinformation, and actually do not know how bad things are, and thus are likely to consider people who report bad things as being misleading. After all nobody they trust told them any other than that the situation was good.
A recent Cornel University Study has suggested “that President Trump was quite likely the largest driver of misinformation during the COVID pandemic to date.”
Positivity and Shadow Politics
As we have seen, positivity demands negativity towards others, who disagree or are more cautious – which easily turns into shadow politics, as it involves trying to shift all mistakes and evil onto others.
The Case of Travel Bans: Denunciation of select opposition
President Trump has continually insisted that people resisted his action to prevent travel from China.
I could say I’m fully responsible. But, you know, one day, we had a virus When I took early action in January to ban the travel and all travel to and from China, the Democrats and Biden, in particular, called it “xenophobic.” You remember that? Joe was willing to sacrifice American lives to placate the radical-left open-border extremists. And we saved tens of thousands of lives, probably hundreds of thousands of lives. And we saved millions of lives by doing the closing and now the opening the way we did it.
According to Paul Offit, chair of vaccinology at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, those kinds of [anti-restriction] opinions were in the minority at the time the president made his decision.
“I don’t know anyone who thought the travel restrictions were a bad idea early on,” Offit told us in a phone interview.
When a virus like that is restricted to one location, as it appeared to be early on, travel restrictions can lessen the odds of it spreading to this country, Offit said. Over time, however, and as cases began to be identified in the U.S., travel restrictions make much less of a difference, he said.
Epidemiologists and former U.S. health officials told Time that the initial travel restrictions were valid and “likely helped to slow the spread of the virus. The problem, they say, is that once it was clear that the virus was within our borders officials did not pivot quickly enough to changing circumstances.”
Although Democratic leaders and Democratic presidential candidates have been highly critical of Trump’s response to the coronavirus, we couldn’t find any examples of them directly and clearly criticizing the travel restrictions.
In a Feb. 4 letter to Trump, Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey, chair of the Appropriations Committee, and Rose DeLauro, chair of one of the subcommittees, wrote that they “strongly support” the president’s decision to declare a public health emergency in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, and they specifically cited the administration’s actions to impose “significant travel restrictions.”
For what it is worth, the New York Times reported:
From the beginning, the Trump administration’s attempts to forestall an outbreak of a virus now spreading rapidly across the globe was marked by a raging internal debate about how far to go in telling Americans the truth…. [health experts] faced resistance and doubt at the White House — especially from the president — about spooking financial markets and inciting panic…
By Thursday, Jan. 30, public health officials had come around. Mr. Azar, Dr. Redfield and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, agreed that a ban on travel from the epidemic’s center could buy some time to put into place prevention and testing measures….
The debate moved that afternoon to the Oval Office, where Mr. Azar and others urged the president to approve the ban. “The situation has changed radically,” Mr. Azar told Mr. Trump.
Others in the room urged being more cautious, arguing that a ban could have unforeseen consequences. “This is unprecedented,” warned Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor. Mr. Trump was skeptical, though he would later claim that everyone around him had been against the idea.
Let us be clear, we will probably never know the full story of these events, and the accounts are ambiguous, but it seems unlikely that the President initiated the stand for banning travel from China, against the advice of everyone, and with ‘everyone’ objecting to that that stand.
However, if people did oppose the travel restrictions it was not just the “radical left”, as the President asserts. For example, the Cato Institute has argued.
U.S. airports recorded nearly 10.7 million entries (mostly by travelers without U.S. citizenship) directly from countries with confirmed COVID-19 cases as of April 7….
Even if they [the bans] were much stricter toward other noncitizens and much earlier, it wouldn’t have mattered. Too much travel had already occurred, and too many U.S. citizens travel. … the evidence shows he [Trump] should have focused far more on domestic measures.
The problem isn’t that Trump acted too slow. It’s that he fixated on international travel almost exclusively and long after the U.S. became the world’s leader in COVID-19 cases….
America needed a leader who sought out novel tools to stop a novel virus, rather than returning to his favorite tool again and again.
Trump does not point out the opposition from his own side and, in fact, did not initially ban travel from China, he restricted it. Travel from Hong Kong and Macau was still allowed – which may not have seemed unreasonable at the time – and
more than 27,000 Americans returned from mainland China in the first month after the restrictions took effect. U.S. officials lost track of more than 1,600 of them who were supposed to be monitored for virus exposure.
Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak …. on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries….
Nineteen flights departed Wuhan in January for New York or San Francisco…[before the ban, but after the disease was known] For about 4,000 [of these] travelers, there was no enhanced screening….
In interviews, multiple travelers who arrived after the screening was expanded said they received only passing scrutiny, with minimal follow-up.
the United States had already accepted more than 436,000 passengers from China (mostly non-U.S. citizens) since the outbreak there was reported on December 31.
Among these Chinese passengers were more than 6,000 from Wuhan — the center of the outbreak. One of these Wuhan travelers entered the U.S. in Chicago on January 13, the first known entrance of a person with a COVID-19 infection. Even after the president restricted travel, another 43,000 passengers entered the country on direct flights from China
about 2.6 million entries (again mostly non-U.S. citizens) had occurred from countries with COVID-19 in Europe and the British Isles [before the ban on flights from Europe]….
Sealing borders is a standard way of trying to deal with pandemics. It is a form of “social distancing” in that the idea is to keep people separate and reduce possible transmission.
One of the reasons that a global pandemic has been feared for so long is the extreme difficulty of confining a highly contagious disease in one country any more. Air traffic and passenger movements are truly enormous, and more or less uncontrollable, in the small amount of time needed to stop disease spread. The World Air Transport Stats for 2019, for example states there were 1,811,324,000 international passengers in 2018 and 2,566,346,000 domestic passengers in the same period (p.17). They remark: “Almost 22,000 city pairs are now connected by airlines through regular services” (p14). These figures should give some idea of the difficulty of stopping disease spread in a highly interconnected world. However, we should not forget that cruise liners can also act as incubation factories as with the Ruby Princess in Sydney.
Cutting air traffic was a good idea, which few medical officials opposed, but it is not enough once the disease has breached those borders, or if tens of thousands of people are let in anyway, especially if they are let in without testing or quarantine. Trump seems to be distorting the reality to get a simple positive message and blacken the names of out-group members.
General Negativity Towards Critics
Likewise, in a rally speech on the 28th February, the President emphasised his negativity towards critics, to help justify himself, and his position, saying:
Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus, you know that right? Coronavirus, they’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, “How’s President Trump doing?” They go, “Oh, not good, not good.” They have no clue. They don’t have any clue…..
One of my people came up to me and said, “Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.” That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything. They tried it over and over. They’d been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning. They lost. It’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax
We went early, we could have had a lot more than that. We’re doing great. Our country is doing so great. We are so unified. We are so unified. The Republican party has never ever been unified like it is now. There has never been a movement in the history of our country like we have now. Never been a movement….
the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and wellbeing of all Americans. Now you see it with the coronavirus, you see it. You see it with the coronavirus. You see that. When you have this virus or any other virus or any other problem coming in, it’s not the only thing that comes in through the border. And we’re setting records now at the border. We’re setting records. And now just using this, so important, right? So important. I’m doing well in the polls despite the worst fake news and worst presidential harassment in the history of the United States. We’ve got phenomenal numbers. No, it’s true. The worst presidential harassment in history.
Anything that [Democrats] can use to try to hurt Trump, they will. Anything he does in a positive sense, like you heard from the reporter that was just suspended from ABC, they will not give him credit for. The playbook is old at this point.
But for them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here, and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning, is a new level of sickness. You know, I don’t know if this is coronavirus or Trump derangement syndrome, but these people are infected badly.
When questioned about this Vice President Mike Pence went along with allocation of blame to one side alone, despite obvious hesitations:
Well, I think what the president said earlier this week and his charge to me is to remind the American people that the risk is low, to assure the American people that we’re ready, but also to say, as the president said, this is no time for politics.
And, frankly, I — I think that was Don Jr.’s point, that there has been some very strong rhetoric directed at the president by some members of Congress and political commentators…
But what the president has charged us to do… is to set the politics aside on this and to work the problem.
that’s exactly what we’re doing. And with — with the exception of some barbs being thrown by some of the predictable voices in the public debate on — on the left, the usual shots the president will — takes, and that I have really heard… what I’m telling you is that this is really a time for us to come together…
Positivity was also present in the popular pro-Trump media. This is Rush Limbaugh showing his priorities:
Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump…. Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks….
The stock market’s down like 900 points right now. The survival rate of this is 98%! You have to read very deeply to find that number, that 2% of the people get the coronavirus die. That’s less than the flu, folks. That is a far lower death statistic than any form of influenza, which is an annual thing that everybody gets shots for. There’s nothing unusual about the coronavirus. In fact, coronavirus is not something new. There are all kinds of viruses that have that name. Now, do not misunderstand. I’m not trying to get you to let your guard down…
Nobody wants to get any of this stuff. I mean, you never… I hate getting the common cold. You don’t want to get the flu. It’s miserable. But we’re not talking about something here that’s gonna wipe out your town or your city if it finds its way there.
Trump developed the habit of dismissing or insulting reporters who asked awkward questions or who were not equally positive. To give just one early example:
Q: What do you say to Americans who are scared, though? I guess, nearly 200 dead; 14,000 who are sick; millions, as you witness, who are scared right now. What do you say to Americans who are watching you right now who are scared?
THE PRESIDENT: I say that you’re a terrible reporter. That’s what I say.
Go ahead.
Q Mr. President, the units that were just declared —
THE PRESIDENT: I think it’s a very nasty question, and I think it’s a very bad signal that you’re putting out to the American people. The American people are looking for answers and they’re looking for hope. And you’re doing sensationalism, and the same with NBC and “Con-cast.” I don’t call it — I don’t call it “Comcast,” I call it “Con-cast.”
Let me just — for who you work — let me just tell you something: That’s really bad reporting, and you ought to get back to reporting instead of sensationalism.
Let’s see if it works. It might and it might not. I happen to feel good about it, but who knows. I’ve been right a lot. Let’s see what happens. John?
Q Can I get back to science and the logistics here?
THE PRESIDENT: You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Again, all the President needed to have said to be positive, was something like “200 cases is not too bad, with good management, and people being careful, we can slow this down, and we should be fine”, but positivity demands more shadows than that.
Spreading positivity, with the apparently necessary projecting of shadows onto others, cannot be carried out by one person alone. It requires considerable collaboration and whether a deliberate attack on the American people to protect the neoliberal economy or not, is helped by the possibility that people are operating in a political and conspiratorial environment in which deceiving others “for their own good” is normal – and that is what I am suggesting – that neoliberalism promotes conspiracies and disinformation in order to keep power.
Tucker Carlson of Fox, who at one stage tried to get the President to believe the virus was a serious problem, explained how the politics of this was likely to work:
I understood what our viewers thought… “If [the mainstream media] is telling me Trump must lose because of some virus from China, [then that media] are probably overstating it because they hate Trump”. And I don’t think that it is an irrational thing to conclude.
Supporting the President more or less required people to be positive, or at least dismissive of bad news, because that bad news came from what they reguarded as hostile sources. A Trump voter quoted in the Guardian indirectly backs this take, saying:
I think that a lot of the news media, they don’t tell the whole story. They tell the piece that sounds the most damning and they don’t add the other piece,
The positivity also sets up a false binary – you either play the problem down or panic. Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Commission makes the binary as hard as possible:
What would it mean if the president came out and said, “The sky is falling and everybody should be panicked”? He presented calm and a steady hand and a plan. And that is what a president should do. You know, we just commemorated 9/11 this week. And I watched Andy Card walk over to George Bush and say, “The second tower has been hit. America is under attack.” And George Bush didn’t stand up and say, “America’s been attacked by terrorists. Everyone panic.”
Panic or playing down the problem are not the only options. Facing a complex problem realistically, and entertaining some uncertainty, was still possible. We might even wonder if the Bush Administration’s being so positive that Iraq was somehow involved in 9/11 and that the conquest of the country would be easy and quick, was a good thing? Perhaps they should have explored the issues further with less determination that there would a positive result from an otherwise unnecessary war?
Positivity as policy and behaviour
Positive from the Beginning. What could they teach us? What could we learn?
It appears that President Trump’s administration was positive before the pandemic, that they did not need to prepare for a pandemic, despite it being a common expectation that a pandemic would affect the world at some time.
In October 2019, the Trump Administration decided to discontinue a Republican program expanded under Obama, called “Predict”, that monitored the transmission of animal-born diseases to humans, the possible origin point of Covid-19. The program had helped discover more than 1,000 viruses. In its 2021 budget, the Trump administration wanted to reduce CDC funding by 16 percent and aimed to reduce contributions to global health programs by $3 billion [paragraph based on Mother Jones, 3 March 2020].
We might add that one explanation for the New Administrations’ refusal to attend briefings by their departments or prepare for transition, as detailed by Michael Lewis in his Fifth Risk, was because they were so positive they could deal with anything; they were smart and governing could not be that difficult – possibly as it was normally done by public servants. All that was needed was for the Departments to be obedient. The other reason was that Trump did not want to spend money on preparing for after the election. He reportedly said…
Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.
He was persuaded that a refusal to pay would be seen as lack of confidence in his victory, but was apparently resentful about the continued loss of money from his campaign.
As Lewis states, the government bureaucracy polices a huge portfolio of catastrophic risks such as nuclear accident, cyber-attack, catastrophic weather events, pandemics etc:
A bad transition took this entire portfolio of catastrophic risks – the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a single institution in the history of the world – and made all the bad things more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen…
On the morning after the election the hundreds of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up. The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty, and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where were these people who were meant to be running the place?
ibid.
This account by Lewis implies positivity in the New Administration about how easy everything should be for them. This is not surprising, as the dogma of neoliberalism primarily exists to protect corporations from government or public ‘interference’ and the holders of this dogma believe that the only times that anything ever goes wrong is if the government is involved.
If people in the Trump Administration subscribed to this neoliberal dogma, then it is perfectly believable that the incoming Trump neoliberal administration dismantled important offices and programmes. Given their positive view of the world, they probably had little idea of what was important, and little propensity to listen to advice because they believed everything would turn out for the best, if left to business.
With these attitudes, they might well have a tendency to prefer not use the State to do anything to stop the spread, and trust to the ‘normal’ processes of the corporate market – which seems to be largely what they have done.
Targets and Predictions
Returning to the period after the pandemic had begun. Just over a week after he agreed to recommend social restrictions, the President declared his simple priority:
we have to put the country to work.
Look, you’re going to lose a number of people to the flu, but you’re going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression. You’re going to lose people. You’re going to have suicides by the thousands. You’re going to have all sorts of things happen. You’re going to have instability. You can’t just come in and say, “Let’s close up the United States of America.” The biggest — the most successful country in the world by far…..
I would to have it open by Easter. I will — I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that — it’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter (Easter Sunday 12 April).
This is an overly positive target, but can be forgotten as soon as it has passed. Around April 23 the Vice President was saying:
If you look at the trends today, I think by Memorial Day Weekend [23-25 May] we will largely have this coronavirus epidemic behind us… State and local officials will begin to reopen activities, you’re going to see states ahead here begin to do that
There was no reason to believe the epidemic would have passed by then, this was pure positivity alone. Perhaps the neoliberal panic about ‘the economy’ overruled everything else? This is not to say economic collapse is not a problem, but it is not the only, or even the primary, problem. This problem and the other problems magnify each other in complicated ways – disease in itself can undermine economies.
Even now in October with a resurgence of Covid cases and the prospect of winter ahead, the President is still claiming the virus is on the way out, and praising an as yet undeveloped vaccine:
The vaccine will end the pandemic but it’s ending anyway. I mean, they go crazy when I say it. It’s going to peter out and it’s going to end, but we’re going to help the end and we’re going to make it a lot faster with the vaccine and with the therapeutics and frankly, with the cures.
…you know what, without the vaccine it’s ending too. We’re rounding the turn, it’s ending without the vaccine. But the vaccine is going to make it go quicker. Let’s get rid of it. We want to get it the hell out of here.
Although this may not be the the President’s fault on 27th October the White House issued a Press Release which claimed one of the Trump Administration’s achievements was
ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC: From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Administration has taken decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academia, industry, and government to understand, treat, and defeat the disease.
The White House later admitted this was badly phrased and that the actual report did not claim the disease was over, but it is in keeping with their positive philosophy.
Rushing a Vaccine; Trusting pharmaceutical companies
The President’s main strategy to save the economy has been to rush a vaccine, lessen safety checks, and to say how good American vaccine manufacturers are. He said:
Then, my administration cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest-ever, by far, launch of a vaccine trial for this new virus, this very vicious virus. And I want to thank all of the doctors and scientists and researchers involved because they’ve never moved like this, or never even close.
The Food and Drug Administration has swiftly approved more than 130 therapies for active trials; that’s what we have right now, 130. And another 450 are in the planning stages. And tremendous potential awaits. I think we’re going to have some very interesting things to report in the not-too-distant future. And thank you very much to Dr. Hahn.
It’s called Operation Warp Speed. That means big and it means fast. A massive scientific, industrial, and logistical endeavor unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project. You really could say that nobody has seen anything like we’re doing, whether it’s ventilators or testing. Nobody has seen anything like we’re doing now, within our country, since the Second World War. Incredible.
Its objective is to finish developing and then to manufacture and distribute a proven coronavirus vaccine as fast as possible. Again, we’d love to see if we could do it prior to the end of the year. We think we’re going to have some very good results coming out very quickly….
Typically, pharmaceutical companies wait to manufacture a vaccine — a vaccine until it has received all of the regulatory approvals necessary, and this can delay vaccines’ availability to the public as much as a year and even more than that. However, our task is so urgent that, under Operation Warp Speed, the federal government will invest in manufacturing all of the top vaccine candidates before they’re approved…
Everything is going faster and better than ever – at Warp Speed! However, even without the vaccine everything would be ok, because there was no real problem.
And I just want to make something clear. It’s very important: Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back. And we’re starting the process. And in many cases, they don’t have vaccines, and a virus or a flu comes, and you fight through it. We haven’t seen anything like this in 100-and-some-odd years — 1917….
you know, it’s not solely vaccine-based. Other things have never had a vaccine and they go away. So I don’t want people to think that this is all dependent on vaccine, but a vaccine would be a tremendous thing.
ibid.
Similar optimism was present in September:
We’re on track to deliver and distribute the vaccine in a very, very safe and effective manner. We think we can start sometime in October. So as soon as it is announced, we’ll be able to start. That’ll be from mid-October on. It may be a little bit later than that, but we’ll be all set.
This was probably never going to happen. At about the same time
CDC Director Robert Redfield said any vaccine is unlikely to be widely available to most Americans before the summer or early fall of 2021, given initial constraints on supplies if and when a vaccine wins approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). [Even if a] vaccine… will initially be available some time between November and December
Likewise, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the FDA and a member of Pfizer’s board of directors said:
for most people, they will not have access to a vaccine until 2021. I think maybe the first quarter of 2021, probably the first half of 2021. And that’s assuming that these vaccines are demonstrated to be safe and effective in these large trials.
ibid.
But the boosting continued.
Under Operation Warp Speed, my administration is on track to deliver a safe and effective vaccine in record time. We’re doing very well with the vaccines, as most of you know.
Four vaccines are now in the final stage of trials. The day the vaccine is approved by the FDA, we’ll begin distributing it within 24 hours, with hundreds of millions of doses to follow very quickly. We’re all set to go. We’re all ready….
Tremendous progress is being made. And I say, and I’ll say it all the time: We’re rounding the corner. And, very importantly, vaccines are coming, but we’re rounding the corner regardless. But vaccines are coming, and they’re coming fast. We have four great companies already, and it’s going to be added to very rapidly. They’re in final stages of testing. And from what we’re hearing, the results are going to be very extraordinary.
While it may be a good idea to speed and encourage vaccine production, it usually takes a long time for safe testing, and not all viruses can be successfully vaccinated against (AIDS for example), or they require continual innovation due to virus mutation, or revaccination because the antibodies do not last for a long time.
Only in neoliberal positive thinking, is having a fully tested and implemented working vaccine, which is widely accepted by the population, the same as having plans for one, so everyone can stop worrying and get on with socialising and work. Other strategies need to be pursued as well.
Dr Fauci also pointed out that the President has not seen the data on the testing.
These are blind placebo-controlled trials. The only ones who see the data intermittently is the safety data monitoring board…. a single unblinded statistician…. Those data are not public data, no one can know what those data show. That person looks at the data and says, ‘OK, let’s keep the trial going, we don’t have enough data to make a decision.’ Or that person can look at the data and say, ‘You know, there really is a very strong signal of efficacy, let’s make it known.’ We bring in the company, we tell the company, then the company can make up their mind, whether they want to use that data to go to the [Federal Drug Administration for approval].
So we can conclude the President is likely repeating, or creating, optimistic business hype:
In the First Presidential Debate, the President implied that he trusted Pharmaceutical companies more than scientists, saying….
I’ve spoken to the companies and we can have it a lot sooner. It’s a very political thing because people like this [Dr. Redfield and Dr. Slaoui, the head of ‘Operation Warp Speed’] would rather make it political than save lives….
It is a very political thing. I’ve spoken to Pfizer, I’ve spoken to all of the people that you have to speak to, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and others. They can go faster than that by a lot. It’s become very political because the left… Or I don’t know if I call them left, I don’t know what I call them.
His own CDC Director says we could lose as many as another 200,000 people between now and the end of the year. And he said, if we just wear a mask, we can save half those numbers. Just a mask. And by the way, in terms of the whole notion of a vaccine, we’re for a vaccine, but I don’t trust him at all. Nor do you. I know you don’t. What we trust is a scientist.
President Donald J. Trump: (24:25): You don’t trust Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer?
ibid.
Against Caution about Vaccines
Positive thinking also promotes shadow politics. The president’s optimism requires him to condemn those who wonder if vaccination is enough or if the results will be in quickly enough, as being “anti-vaccine”.
I’m calling on Biden to stop promoting his anti-vaccine theories because all they’re doing is hurting the importance of what we’re doing. And I know that if they were in this position, they’d be saying how wonderful it is. They’re recklessly endangering lives. You can’t do that.
And again, this is really a case that they’re only talking — just started talking a little bit negatively, and that’s only because they know we have it, or we will soon have it. And the answer to that is very soon.
…we may very well have the vaccine prior to a certain very important date, namely November 3rd. Once they heard that, the Democrats started — just to show you how bad the intention is, they started knocking the vaccine. Had nothing to do with a vaccine, it was totally made up. It’s all disinformation….
[Democrats] started knocking the vaccine as soon as they heard that this actually may come out prior to election. Now, it may or may not, but it’ll be within a matter of weeks. It will be within a matter of weeks from November. It’s ready to go and it’s ready to — for massive distribution to everybody — with a focus, again, on seniors.
ibid
Joe Biden’s anti-vaccine theories are putting a lot of lives at risk. And they’re only doing it for political reasons; it’s very foolish. It’s part of their war to try and discredit the vaccine, now that they know that we essentially have it. We’ll be announcing it fairly soon.
If people are interested, Biden’s official policies can be found here.
A Possible Future Solution Justifies Spreading the Problem?
Even after the disease had killed over 200,000 Americans – which is far more than any flu seems to have killed per year in the last 50 or so years – members of the Party seemed to be convinced that they could not get the virus, would not get it seriously, or were afraid of being seen as weak or negative. Pictures of Republican Party parties and events, show people crowded together without masking.
copyright Washington Post/Getty Images
Apparently knowing he had been in contact with Corona Virus, Trump attended a Republican fund raiser inside his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where no one was warned, masks were not worn, and buffet food was served in contravention of New Jersey anti-covid health regulations. This is another way of positively asserting that Coronavirus is never a problem – and which demonstrates the President’s victory over the disease.
Current leaked figures suggest that “34 White House staffers and other contacts” where infected from the one event.
After Trump was recognised as having Coronavirus, his main effort seemed to be to persuade people that he was healthy, possibly immune, and that the virus was nothing to worry about, tweeting positively:
Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!
He also suggests that Joe Biden, who is much more cautious, would be hiding in a cellar, apparently using doctored images to make his point – again falsehood is true if it shows how heroic and virtuous the neoliberal President is.
It may be that the President is immune, but that does not mean everyone is immune, or able to get free medical care and experimental drugs, and there would still be no reason to emphasise that mask wearing is unnecessary to protect the health of others, particularly those white house staff who cannot afford the kind of medicines given to Trump, which may not work for everyone anyway.
The point seems to be that in neoliberal individualism and positive thinking, the successful isolated wealthy individual overwhelms fears of death or prolonged illness in many unknown others. Trump is continuing to cheerlead the country, rather than face the complexities of the situation.
Positivity falters
There seems to have been a moment in mid to late March in which the President’s public positivity faltered. Tucker Carlson had warned him the virus was bad and Trump had had a reaction to what he had seen in New York
I grew up in Queens, New York, and right next to a place called Elmhurst, Queens. And they have a hospital that’s a very good hospital — Elmhurst Hospital. Right? I’ve known it. I’ve known where it is. I can tell you the color on the outside, the size of the windows. I mean, I know it very well, right? That was near my community where I lived.
And I’ve been watching that for the last week on television. Body bags all over in hallways. I’ve been watching them bring in trailer trucks — freezer trucks; they’re freezer trucks — because they can’t handle the bodies there’s so many of them. This is in my — essentially, in my community in Queens — Queens, New York.
I’ve seen things that I’ve never seen before. I mean, I’ve seen them, but I’ve seen them on television in faraway lands. I’ve never seen them in our country. Elmhurst Hospital — unbelievable people. I mean, I — when I see the trucks pull up to take out bodies — and these are trucks that are as long as the Rose Garden. And they’re pulling up to take out bodies, and you look inside and you see the black body bags. You say, “What’s in there?” It’s Elmhurst Hospital; must be supplies. It’s not supplies. It’s people. I’ve never seen anything like it.
But while mentioning the same scene he swiftly moved into positivity.
And you also see where you have friends that go into the hospital and you say, “How is he doing?” two days later. And they say, “Sir, he is unconscious” or “He’s in a coma.” So things are happening that we’ve never seen before in this country.
And with all of that being said, the country has come together like I’ve never seen it before. And we will prevail. We will win. And hopefully, it will be in a relatively short period of time.
Within two weeks he was critcising Democrat governors for following the regulations he had issued, and stating that he would open the economy irrespective of what they wanted. He also started to tweet that people should Liberate Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia The inference, is that positive thinking requires shadow politics for it to seem valid, and that it acts as a way of defusing distress.
Conclusion
Early on the President knew the Coronavirus was bad, but he says he decided to play it down, and say it was going to clear up, to avoid panic. He seems to have acted together, with others in the news media and his political party, to mislead people as to the seriousness of the disease, to reduce any Federal co-ordination of the Response and to blame, or scapegoat, Democrat politicians for the problem, including the past administration and State governors where possible. The President delayed, and undermined, recommendations of distancing and hoped that an imagined rapid and unproperly tested vaccine would solve the Country’s problems. This may have later led the President to play the disease down to hide how badly the administration had done – partly because they were so positive that things would go well.
Another possible reason for the positive thinking, is that it is often asserted that consumer and business confidence is the root of economic activity. It could be assumed that if people fear the disease they will both spend and produce less. For example:
Because consumer sentiments are what really drive economies, a return to any kind of “normal” will only happen when and not before confidence returns.
Schwab, K. & Malleret, T. COVID-19: The Great Reset (pp. 43-44). Forum Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Severe slowdown is likely to lead to companies sacking staff (especially without taxpayer support particularly geared at keeping staff employed or paid), and that will lead to a further fall in demand (as people lose income, and increase saving – where possible), and hence to more unemployment.
This realisation could easily slip into a position in which optimism and downplaying the seriousness of the disease, together with attacks on those who thought otherwise could become almost compulsory, if the authorities wanted to keep profit turning and avoid an otherwise inevitable collapse in an election year.
Whatever the case, it seems it was more important to win the election, keep the neoliberal economy going and get people back to work, than it was to protect the American people from the disease. Indeed, it seems likely that the positivity made the situation far worse than it could have been.
The main policies the President seemed to have, were to downplay the disease, keep the share market high by positive spin, attack his political opponents, blame China and hope for a vaccine to be developed quickly – and apparently hope that it did not have bad effects because it was being rushed, as Pharmaceutical companies are trustworthy. Everything else went up and down. He does not even seem to consider the possibility that the disease effects could become worse as the country moves into winter.
A Realist and positive approach does not avoid problems
A real positive approach would have recognised there was a problem, and a problem which was barbed. If people did not self-isolate or practice physical distancing then many people would die or, as it turned out, suffer prolonged illness. However, it is difficult to run a modern country if everyone had to self isolate. It is also possible that if hospitals are shut down, or people are scared to attend them, then people will die unnecessarily from other diseases. There are also likely to be significant mental problems, because humans are not the isolated independent individuals of neoliberal fantasy. These are problems which all have to be recognised, and no doubt there are still more problems needing to be dealt with.
The President could have admitted these problems, could have discussed it with many people, could have encouraged people to be cautious and not to spread the disease, but to keep up socialising, rather than insist on them working in harmful conditions. However, work seems to be the only legitimate social activity for strict neoliberals. He could have helped cities in difficulty rather than try to attack Democrat States and praise Republican States. He could have accepted there might be many approaches which would need to be tried out. He could have accepted hard work and constantly corrected science was necessary. But he didn’t, he floundered in positivity that refused to recognise a set of serious and complex problems, and which continually engaged in shadow politics to try and boost the positive vision that there was no problem.
Positivity creates an unconscious
It is based on panic for the really important thing – the economy, and fear of learning the true extent of the problem. It allows the magnification of fear of lesser problems – such as riots. Positivity creates a negativity towards possible reality, obscures and punishes attempts at understanding, and proposes false dichotomies in order to make the behaviour seem reasonable. It also leads to behaviour which may intensify the problem – particularly as no attention is given to unintended consequences, or unpleasant results.
Neoliberal thinking on Climate change
There is a fair chance this kind of positivity explains some of the neoliberal approach to climate change. If they look after and protect the important things – ie corporate wealth, power and liberty, then (by not focusing on the problems this generates), those problems of climate will disappear in boundless wealth and opportunity. The only real problem comes from those who refuse to be positive, and who do focus on the problems of the world’s slowly disintegrating ecology. These negative people affect the positivity of everyone else, and by pointing to the problems, actually create those problems. Therefore negative people have to be silenced, as they are destroying the capitalist paradise which would otherwise be present.
This hypothesis is a slight refinement of the hypothesis that neoliberals would prefer that large numbers of people should die, rather than that the people are enabled have any liberty to constrain corporate action, or any independence from the corporate system, but it adds force to the idea that this position may often come from a positive cultivation of ignorance rather than malevolence.
The point of this particular series is to argue that the English speaking world is subject to an attempted ‘team up’, organised activity, or conspiracy to maintain the power of the already wealthy and powerful. This conspiracy seems quite capable of preferring the deaths of millions to the loss of established corporate profit. It primarily works through deliberately corrupting information flows, buying politicians and political parties, and by identifying scapegoats, and pursing a ‘shadow politics.’ This movement has the potential to lead towards a fascism, or authoritarianism, that is meant to protect the current social hierarchies of power and wealth, during the planetary ecological crisis.
The wealthy and powerful are here considered to be largely located within the upper echelons of the corporate or shareholding sector. We might call these people the neoliberal plutocracy – while recognising the possible over-simplification in that label.
For example, we can recognise, that people in the upper echelons of the corporate sector do not have to be united in everything.
Firstly, for example, they may not be totally united in support of Donald Trump, even though he appears to aims in common with many of them, such as tax cuts for the already wealthy, demolition of the vaguely helpful participatory State, militarisation of the police, intensification of culture wars, destruction of representative democracy, attacking or misdirecting anti-capitalist, anti-establishment protestors and helping to remove any restraints on the corporate destruction of ecologies.
Secondly, some of this corporate wealth elite may have remnants of a sense of obligation to ordinary people, or feel that wealth should be used charitably, while others may think this is a betrayal of the status quo. There can be all kinds of complexities that may need to be recognised as people are complicated and rarely harmonious as a class. These differences are where cross class support might happen, and a potential for some kind of helpful action might take root.
The purpose of this post is to investigate the propaganda use of what I will call ‘Shadow Politics’. This is not only shady politics, but deliberately stirs up what Carl Jung called “The Shadow”; that is the projection of our own disliked ‘evil’ onto others and then using them as scapegoats for the failure of one’s own politics and social actions.
Shadow politics is rooted in a real cause – the fact that neoliberalism disempowers, isolates, and takes hope away from large sections of the population through its support of corporately controlled “free markets”, reduction of virtue to both wealth and support of neoliberalism, privatisation of previously public goods and services, shoveling wealth to a limited group of people, destruction of general social mobility (other than downwards), and pretending that conservatism is equivalent to destruction. Most people can probably sense that their lives are being stripped away, and they know, even if only subliminally, that the world around them is being destroyed, as is their personal identity and sense of purpose. People are rightly resentful.
In the previous post in this series, on neoliberal individualism, I argued that our self-identity emerges within our interaction with others and with the world. It necessarily is situated within collective traditions, interactions and politics. Our identity is a process, which involves participation in collective systems and of building ourselves from those collective systems.
This individuation process is particularly difficult when there is a collective individualism which suggests that we are already individualised, and just have to do more of the same, or lessen our responsibilities further.
We may even be highly resistant to the idea that our individuality is social in the first place, and think we can proceed by strengthening our both socialised ego and the collective idea of individualism without tackling what we, as a collective, are unconscious of, or refrain from being conscious of. This kind of individualism helps reinforce a collective “shadow process” which lumps other other people together in (usually despised) categories, and overrides the possibility of collaboration between people on different sides, or with different views, and which distracts us from the way we are being manipulated against our better interests.
Shadow
The shadow is what we deny in ourselves, or attempt to discipline in ourselves, but can see in an exaggerated form in others, especially in others that we have defined as outsiders or as ‘bad’. As Jung says:
The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself [or herself], and yet is always thrusting itself upon him directly or indirectly
Jung CW9-1: #513
It is:
those qualities and impulses [a person] denies in himself but can plainly see in others—such things as egotism, mental laziness, and sloppiness; unreal fantasies, schemes, and plots; carelessness and cowardice; inordinate love of money and possessions…
Marie Louise Von Franz – Meeting the Shadow in Dreams in Man and his Symbols
This set of identifications with particular others usually depends upon social ideologies, conditioning, and information availability and acceptance. It stems from denial, or lack of acceptance, of the complex nature of the world, and is the consequence of multiple repressions, which can include repressions of that part of the psyche that we call ‘the body’. Shadow can involve suppression of what our more individuated self might see as good or useful, not just things which are socially defined as bad.
As Jung says:
The shadow [can be] merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but – convention forbids!
Jung CW 11: #134
Jung’s point is that the shadow content is within us, it is cast by us (or ‘projected‘) onto others, in a mistaken attempt to make ourselves feel whole, moral, or pleasing to a God.
As it is an attempt to distract ourselves from perceiving or dealing with our own failings, where and when they occur, it is necessarily a process which makes ‘darkness’ and obscurity.
The consequences of the shadow can be socially magnified. If, for example, society worships a dangerous God, who condemns people to hell for eternity, then being truly viscous towards those socially defined as evil, becomes a way of fiercely indicating to God, and the rest of society, that we are on God’s side. Obviously, the greater the penalties for deviance, then the greater the temptation to attack others first to indicate you are one of the righteous.
We most clearly see our own shadow active in our interpretation of the behaviour of others. Shadow processes lead us to denounce criminality and weakness in others but accept it, hide it, or ignore it, in ourselves. Again, recognising this projected ‘deviance’ and engaging with it, might be where our true individuation can begin.
Individuation often involves a moral struggle – often because in our current socialised state of understanding we are caught in an apparently unsolvable moral dilemma which we refuse to acknowledge, or suppress by declaring one side of the dilemma a full solution.
For example, with Covid, we can decide that getting the economy going is worth any number of deaths, or that the deaths will be solved by an as yet unavailable piece of technology (such as a vaccine), or we can decide to wall people up – allowing them no social contact or possibly no income, and let them face death from other causes. To support our one-sided decision, we then project all our shadow evil onto those who make the other choice.
The important thing is that as well as giving us a sense of righteousness, the shadow projection can shut down further exploration of possible paths, and intensify our problems.
Shadow as process and social process
To be clearer, the shadow is not a ‘thing’ but a ‘process’. It often involves socially organised activity and culture which leads us to seek out the evil in others (usually a socially defined out-group), or seek out information about the evil in these others, and blame them for personal and social wrongs or mishaps, while making ourselves (and our ‘identity group’ or ingroup) innocent or largely innocent – and fighting evil which is located elsewhere. There is, by this process, nothing we need to change in ourselves or our group.
In shadow politics, it is always other people, other groups and othered ‘things’, and not ourselves, who are to blame, and they must be named and blamed publicly, and perhaps expelled or even killed. This process is what we call ‘scapegoating’. The most likely areas of blame depend on the information, or propaganda, you are most likely to chose to receive favourably – which is almost certainly influenced by what kind of social category you give to yourself or, perhaps, have been given by others.
Another way of putting this, is that some, if not most, parts of the shadow process are socially defined, enabled and encouraged. They arise because we attempt to fit in with our social expectations and social categories, by showing we are different from socially hated others. This blame and refusal to alter our behaviour, or consider what we are doing, helps keep the established system going (even if it is destructive), and appears to make it easier for us to survive. For example we don’t have to deal with the problems generated by the system which produces the ruling wealth elites, and their behaviours, we can just blame Bill Gates or Donald Trump.
These social expectations can come from dead authors as much as from live others.
As a brief example, in a shadow process, if we feel sexual attraction or affection to others of our own gender, and we (and our wider society) classify this as bad or weak, we might say to ourselves, that we feel those desires because of the machinations of gay people; the media which puts the idea before us; or because of some devil – not because those desires could be a humanly normal part of us. This blaming others is a way of denying the socially defined ‘evil’ in us, so that we can fit in with our group, by ‘projecting’ it on to another person or social category, usually one we condemn anyway. We may then begin to persecute those others, or guard against imaginary devils, rather than the real ones of our own (perhaps manipulated) prejudices and hatreds. The denial may also make the forbidden feelings more intense and insistent, making denial and the shadow process, even more rigid, violent or eventually hypocritical.
Ruling groups can use this process to distract the people from their failings as a ruling group. If you are encouraged, for example, to blame ‘the Jews’ then you are less likely to blame the Christian lords or the Christian capitalists, or the Christian Church for what is going wrong, and you are showing how Christian and non-Jewish you are.
It may not just be other people that we make evil. If we consider that human perfection consists of being constantly ‘rational’ or ‘spiritual’ and society has defined these virtues in opposition to, or separate from, ‘the body’ or ‘the world’ then, ‘materiality,’ our own physical forms, or even nature itself, may become subject to shadow processes and seem evil or repugnant. The body or the world may be held responsible for dragging down our over-zealous aspirations, and need to be treated harshly or suppressed.
This latter kind of shadow projection and hostility to the body and world has the potential to undermine our ability to live in this world, and we may even not care whether we destroy it or not. We certainly will not listen to it, or individuate with it.
In the shadow process, we break both the interactive connection between ourselves and the shadowy others, and obscure our role in participating in, possessing, or benefitting from, the ‘evil’ we denounce. We propose that we, and our group, are pure, and our discomfort comes from badness of others. We can then ignore our own faults by comparison with those evil others. For example we may claim that black people are more racist than white, or protesting women are more sexist than men. We can denounce the violence of rioters without seeing the violent activities of police or the actions of people ‘on our side.’ We are then free to engage in even more victimisation of those we blame for the problem, and make the situation worse.
There can also be an opposite movement which may be part of shadow process as it helps reinforce the legitimacy of our projections, in that we may also think that people we identify with, and see as good, are enthusiastically opposed to those things we see as evil, when there is no evidence that those supposedly ‘good people’ are even interested, and some evidence may even suggest they are more likely to be causing evil. As an example, we can see Trump supporters passionately believing that the President is opposed to the horrors of child rape, when there is no evidence from his twitter feed or rallies, that the President worries about it at all, and he was friends with a notorious rapist of young teens, and never bothered to denounce or help prevent that from happening, even after they broke up.
Another way of putting this process, is that we are aware of things going wrong, of the situation being bad, and of our inability to do much about it. We may not know what to do, because all of our social theories and allies do not have a real solution either. We are plagued with unease, discomfort and, probably, fear at the situation we are in. Certain groups of people become, or are made to be, ‘symbolic’ of this unease and discomfort and we project all our moral discomfort fear and unease on this group. They become symbolic of a problem which we cannot solve within our worldview and current collective psychology. But by making them the cause of all the problems, we can feel better about ourselves and the people we identify with , and feel that by attacking them we are solving the problems we face. We do not really need to change ourselves or examine our views of the world, or investigate the behaviour of the groups we like.
We can continue life as normal by attacking or getting rid of the groups that we have collectively made to symbolise the problem.
Shadow and Scapegoating
Collective shadow processes are often connected to what we can call collective ‘scapegoating processes’, as should become clear.
In the scapegoating process, all evils are placed upon, or seen as active in, a generally relatively weak creature, person, or group of people. As a result, this ‘entity’ becomes seen as the bearer and cause of most of the evils we face. By expelling, or killing this being, we expel the evil from both ourselves and society, and build unity, and hope for the future, between all those who participate in driving the expulsion or murder.
In the Bible it is said:
Then Aaron shall lay both his hands on the head of the live goat, and confess over it all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins, putting them on the head of the goat, and sending it away into the wilderness by means of someone designated for the task. The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness.
In medieval times people identified as Jews, heretics or witches were made easy scapegoats for social and ecological failures. Disease occurred because of such people. Cows died because of these people. Children became deformed, sick or disappeared because of these people. The travails of the community were laid on their heads, but not consciously as in the ritual. The scapegoaging process involves the idea that life would move smoothly without certain evil people, and all that need be done is blame them and ‘remove’ them.
It is usual for relatively powerless people to be the one’s that the shadow is projected on to and who are blamed for disruption, as they are easier to expel or kill, and they have little political importance or influence. If a starving person steals food, it is they who are bad, not the system which deprives them of food, or allows others (such as myself) to eat too much for their own health or virtue. Attacks by force of law, justifies the attack by the presence of attack: “if we attacked them, they must deserve it.”
Working together to denounce, locate and purge the scapegoat builds group loyalties and satisfactions, so it appears to make people feel good and feel they have solved the problem. They can relax for a moment.
If you are interested in this theory of scapegoating, I suggest reading books by Rene Girard and his followers.
Denunciatory politics.
Shadow politics are denunciatory. A major clue to the probability that shadow politics are involved is the presence of denunciation without constructive policies. It is assumed that just following ‘our way,’ or ‘our leader’, and removing opposition, will solve all problems.
In shadow politics the main aim is not even self-interest, it is tearing down others that you are directed to hate, or feel normal to hate. This does us no real good, but it gets us a great deal of unity, and pleasure in the discomfiture of the others. That the hated-others can appear to suffer is enough. Eventually this can become self-destructive – if, for example, you decide garbage disposers are to be punished for being dirty, you may end up knee deep in garbage.
While it is perhaps dangerous to accuse others of shadow politics (as this could easily become shadow politics itself), it is probable people are engaged in Shadow politics if they blame others, and make victims of people (especially less powerful people), in order to explain away these unintended consequences.
Let us look at some examples. People of a more leftish political persuasion may be very upset by people like Donald Trump. He becomes a symbol for everything that is wrong with the system. This makes Trump way too important, and may even feed his ego (I don’t know of course).
However, it is likely that there is some shadow projection going on. Very few people who are concerned with climate change, probably feel they are doing enough to combat it. They are still working within the system, they possibly engage in consumerism, buy goods from overseas, drive cars, have jobs with companies or governments which are not doing much to reduce their ecological impact, or may even have to make destructive ecological impact themselves. They may also be unhelpful to the working class, increase pollution, be rude to opponents, suppress their awareness of counter-information, refuse to listen to opponents and so on. All things it is easy to see in Trump.
No matter how much they wish to act, the system they are attempting to live in requires them to be destructive, or interdependent with destruction, to survive. Trump, by his apparent indifference, cultivated ignorance, and encouragement of violence, provides a good symbolic focus for this discomfort and encourages shadow projection rather than a productive engagement with consciousness, moral dilemmas, the destructiveness of the social system as a whole, and so on. Without Trump things might be much better, although most people would know that things would still be bad, even if not quite as bad. Trump provides a symbolic resolution for recognition of the problems, but not a practical or constructive one. The reality is that Trump is not responsible for everything that is going wrong. He cannot work alone. That does not mean he should not be removed from office, but that alone will not be enough – there is more work to be done.
I recently read an article on Facebook, which I can no longer find (so please excuse the lack of acknowledgement) which alleged that Trump supporters did not care what Trump actually did, all they wanted was to upset and attack “liberals.” Seeing liberals upset, the idea of “liberal tears,” and plotting vengeance was enough for them. Now there may be some truth here – I would suspect most people on the left have encountered something like this on the Internet. However, I would doubt it was true of all Republicans or even all people who might support or vote for Trump. It creates a shadow projection by saying that a whole class of people are all the same as the supposed ‘worst’ of them. It therefore participates in the shadow dynamics by creating an enemy and effectively refusing to engage with them, other than hostilely – such people are apparently not worth engaging with, or even living with. This kind of reaction then justifies the Trump supporters’ hostility to “liberals”. These liberals really are stuck up jerks, who are out to get us, and deserve our mutual hostility.
If the statement was true in many (but not all) cases, then it would be more useful to ask “how did this arise?” This might lead away from the shadow politics. As a hypothesis, it would seem likely that people in many parts of the US and the English speaking ‘West’, do feel abandoned by the establishment, and have been abandoned by the establishment. They see themselves as ignored. They see themselves as subject to contempt. They see that their work is insecure, that their children are going to have even less chance of improvement than they do. They feel they have failed, and society has failed. Their hard work has not delivered as it is supposed to have done. They are marginalised in their own country, and in politics in general.
They likely feel this, irrespective of whether they can be categorised as working class or middle class. If these people can be categorised as middle class, they no doubt feel the threat that they could easily face poverty again, and lose all they have achieved. They have nothing to rely on other than their own strength and hard work. They have little social vocabulary to analyse their own problems other than what is provided by people like those on Fox. They blame the establishment, but not the neoliberal Republican establishment, which seems to share some of their views about hard work and independence. So they blame the “liberal establishment”; the not-always Republican media, those liberals who would apparently support and give money to people other than them – why are they missing out? Why are they the people who apparently have to pay for tackling climate change by losing the only good jobs that there are? Liberals often appear to take money from the government for doing nothing that has any resonance with them, why the hell should they listen to those people?
It should be noted that nearly all of these factors are the case for most people in the US, whatever politics they agree with.
These are real and common problems which do need to be faced, but shadow politics makes sure they are not faced, or the facing can be ignored, or displaced into hatred of a particular group (‘liberals’ or ‘Trumpites’). The resulting discontent, and possibly neurosis, serves to maintain the established system which causes the problem. It is less painful to denounce already disliked outsiders than to face up to the real problems, or the problems on one’s own side.
Neoliberal Shadows
In neoliberalism, the praise of individualism is joined with a denunciation of not only those who are ‘weak’ or ‘unfortunate’, but of those who recognise interdependence and a sense of responsibility towards others. However, we are all necessarily interdependent and part of the system that may depend on, and repress others. This is the guilt, the moral dilemma, that we are largely avoiding socially through shadow politics.
Neoliberalism encourages us to denounce, outgroups (such as the poor, the sick, the unfortunate, especially those of the wrong religion or race), as evil, dependent or criminal, whatever they do – unless, perhaps, they manage to become wealthy and neoliberal. The parasitism of the poor is condemned, the parasitism of the wealthy is ignored as it seems entirely natural. Neoliberal dependence on the government for subsidy, support, implementation of their policies, or protection is normal, any support directed at shadowy others is evil.
But “They are harmful”, you may assert, “I do not do X or desire to do X.” Or as Jung puts it “the cause of [your] emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person” (CW 9, 2: # 16).
The people that you accuse may also not do X or desire to do X, even if you find socially acceptable evidence that they do, or your projection tells you they do. Evidence can be faked, and in this world often is. We can easily accept evidence that confirms our projections. The despised others could possibly be harmful, but so may you or those you agree with. The fact that we live in a maladaptive system, this is the case. It also implies that we are likely to be harmful to ourselves in some ways as well as being likely to participate in harm to others, directly or indirectly.
The supposedly evil ones, may not be evil. They may simply misunderstand the nature of the world, be mistaken, be being deceived by psycho-socially knowledgably people, and their policies may make matters worse.
It is as likely, given we live in complex systems, that the other side and ourselves are simply behaving in ways which make sense for them, are well-intended but mistaken, have ways of obscuring or dismissing information which disturbs them and are being mislead by their shadows, than that they are evil as such. In a way this is a far more disturbing view as it suggests that, without extreme care, the same kinds of problem is likely to affect everyone.
Shadow politics and information
In shadow politics, information is about loyalty and denunciation, not about evidence or accuracy. If information denounces the right people then it is taken as likely to be correct.
Knowledge is rarely a lone event gained through your own independent research. It involves sources who you trust and sources you do not trust as much. It also can involve giving comfort to both your ego and shadow. Yes, your research demonstrates that people like yourself (your ingroup) are good and virtuous, and the shadowy others (your outgroups) are really evil and even perhaps worse than you thought.
Without much difficulty, given the huge mass of information available, somewhere you will be able to find knowledge to support your shadow, because you already think that is the case, or because you identify with or have sympathies with those who are telling you. The suppression of awareness of the shadow, can also make these projections compulsive. Those we put the shadow upon, may also be unconscious, and be reacting against your accusations, and so the accusations just both sides together in a self-reinforcing shadow and scapegoating process, and make relationships and change harder.
One further aspect of this is the common allegation that those people who disagree with us are ‘sheeple’ who blindly follow mainstream programming. This form of shadow abuse, allows us to believe anything. The less acceptance an idea has, the more absurd it is, the more we can see ourselves as individual, independent thinkers, and the more that those who disagree with us are sheeple and the less we need to even think about the objections they may put forward. The idea can help shut down discourse, and make our thought even more “black and white”. We don’t have to think about whether we are being deliberately mislead, selecting the information we accept to make ourselves virtuous, or going along with our own social programming.
Overcoming shadow politics
Recognising this process makes normal politics difficult. How much of what we see as bad, or troubling, in the world reflects something within ourselves that we are projecting on to others, and trying to avoid in ourselves? How do we argue about the uncomfortable or bad things in a group in which we participate, without blaming others for our own guilt? This realisation is not easy, but we need to bear it in mind for any politics aiming to be real, and if we wish to do more than purge society of those shadow people who we have chosen to blame.
This is particularly difficult, if we ourselves feel challenged by others. “We know we are virtuous and do our best – how dare they? They must be full of rage themselves, to make these acusations. It is their fault there is a problem, not mine. I have never hurt a member of their group, how can they challenge me, or say I benefit from their pain?”
To carry out a constructive politics, it seems necessary to integrate one’s own shadow, rather than pursue the individualistic and collective assertion that the evil is elsewhere in a collectively approved target. This involves recognising that “we have met the enemy and he is us”…
Then we might need to observe and deal with the social shadow of the group’s we identify with (and if we don’t think we identify with some groups against others, then we probably need to look at ourselves and our behaviour more closely).
Without this moral effort, then there is no political morality at all – there is just a process of finding suitable enemies to blame and scapegoat.
For many, recognising their shadow process in their politics may be denied, because disorientation, chaos, inaction, and moral uncertainty seem inevitable results of such an action, not to mention the potential pain of recognising that the darkness one sees in others is one’s own, or getting a sense that one’s own identity and allegiances are ‘fake’, or a way of avoiding the pain of dealing with real problems.
Conclusion
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.
Jung CW 9-2: #14
What this suggests is that, for society to be functional, we should somehow try and normalise integration of the shadow together with an engagement with individuation as opposed to accepting neoliberal individualism.
We need to somehow get ourselves first, and others later, to recognise that the main dangers do not always lie with people we already don’t like or suspect. We need to recognise systemic interdependence, the ways we distort information to back our existing cultural biases, and we need to institutionalise recognition that, in complex systems, our understanding of any specific event is likely to be a simplification at best, and probably wrong.
If we have policies, we should try them out, but not be afraid to ‘backflip’ if subsequent events show that these policies do not work, or are likely to be generating unintended and unexpected harmful consequences, that maybe almost the exact opposite to what we claimed would happen.
If we are primarily dedicated to being thought correct, righteous, or individually smart, then this stops correction of mistakes, and helps us to blame consequences on those shadowy, dark or stupid others.
The more we want to be right, the more we want to be moral, the more we want to be ‘individual’, or the more we are threatened by expulsion from our group if we are seen as bad, then the more easily we may be deceived by our shadow, and produce destruction or participate in social shadow events.
The next post considers ‘positive thinking’ as a generator of mistakes and shadow politics.
No. Nothing can defeat Trump. Well I will talk about a few strategies towards the end of this piece, which might make a difference, but I doubt Democrats will use them.
Trump followers absolutely know that any information which contradicts Trump’s greatness is fake. The only true news is news that tells people how wonderful the President is, and how he is the only person that can save America. If the information does not say that, it is simply wrong and malicious and to be ignored.
Indeed if their opinion that Trump is wonderful is contradicted, it simply proves to themselves that they are people who think for themselves. They don’t believe the ‘mainstream lies’ that ‘sheeple’ believe. So the more evidence against Trump, the more strongly they believe they are correct about how good he is, and the more they can praise themselves for independent thinking and agreement with other Trump supporters.
For example:
Covid is either not real, or it is a “summer flu”, boosted by a communist conspiracy of disinformation and fear headed by the mainstream media (who are all corporately owned) and the Pharmaceutical companies, who want to genetically engineer obedience through vaccines. People who are scared of Covid are sissies. [This is not to deny there are problems with complete lock-downs – especially if other medical services are made to shut down as well, which is unnecessary. The problem is, however, that Trump supporters tend to deny covid is a serious problem at all.]
Climate change is not real. It really is a plot plugged by the Chinese and communist scientists all working together to cripple the US. Fake ideas of climate change are being bravely opposed by networks of fossil fuel businesses, their think tanks and Fox News. These think tanks, which are not heavily promoted (unlike climate change lies), give you the real information you need.
If Climate change was real then capitalism and technology could handle it and we don’t need to do anything else.
Climate change, just like Covid, is a lie whose purpose is to produce global poverty, and set up a dictatorship over demoralised people. But we will stand firm – being confident scientists and doctors are lying.
People like Greta Thunberg are automatised zombies, following the elites mind programming instructions, or they are hysterical screaming teenagers who need to go and get a job.
The President is a paragon of virtue, sent into the Whitehouse by God to protect America, and those who vote against him are ungodly and doomed to hell for all eternity.
The Republicans do not need a policy document, because their policy is to follow the greatest President ever and the Bible. Without doubt, these two pillars will lead them to wisdom.
The President is fighting the satanic deep state who want to enslave all Americans. The deep state is naturally Democrat and is best fought by introducing hyper-competent and wealthy people from big-business who support Donald Trump. Again you can tell a person’s competence by their loyalty to the President, but a lot of people get corrupted and leave.
Donald Trump is a martyr for the Truth. He has been persecuted more than any other American in History, because of his virtues and his strong and dedicated fight against evil.
The President has built a wall which keeps out Mexican criminals, rapists and human traffickers. We are now all safe!
The President LOVES minorities and Black Lives Matter is another ungrateful communist conspiracy fostered by the Democrats and the lamestream media who are encouraging riots in order to ferment civil war and take away our guns. However, the President’s strong reaction has defeated this plot for the moment.
Likewise the President LOVES and supports women, especially good looking, young and well-bodied blondes, and no President has done more for non-feminist women than he has.
Antifa are the absolute evil; a truly horrendous and immoral group who will stop at nothing to destroy democracy, loot our property, rape our women and create anarchy. Antifa are lighting forest fires in Oregon and California, to try and use climate change against the President and loot peoples’ property. And they like Joe Biden!!!
White supremacists are really just patriots, and so they naturally like Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is the first American President to have nothing to do with organised pedophilia. It is because of him that Epstein was arrested, and hordes of Democrats are being secretly tried for their roles in human trafficking, and the results will be out soon – probably after the election as the President would not want to take unfair advantage of the anti-democrat publicity. By not reporting all this, the mainstream media is supporting the pedophiles, and this shows they really cannot be trusted.
Joe Biden is totally evil. He is a pedophile, he is a fascist, he is a communist, he is neoliberal, he is a devil worshipper, he is a rapist, he is senile, he is a weak war-monger, he is a drug user, he is totally incompetent and bound to take the US from the productive order we now have into total chaos. He must be resisted even at the cost of our lives.
Donald Trump has single handedly ended America’s participation in wars all over the globe. He is the first American Peace President. Even though troops still seem to be in the countries they have been in for 20 years, and there are no welcome home parades.
Donald Trump has invested more in the military than any other President, carried out more bombing raids than anyone else, and vetoed a bill passed by both houses of Congress asking for the US to withdraw from the war in Yeman, so he is protecting the US and its interests unlike the Democrats.
Donald Trump has single handedly (again) defused the tension between the US deep state and Russia and North Korea. We now face peace. A vote for Biden risks that peace.
Donald Trump has solved the Middle East Peace Problem through the treaty between Israel and UAE, even if neither of them were at war and the Palestinians have to face losing more of their land.
Donald Trump is a man of the people, who understands the pressures of life that ordinary Americans face. He is an exemplar of purity and self-help. He made his fortune by his own brilliance. He is truly an extraordinary President and deserves our loyalty, and that means ignoring anyone who says otherwise as they are clearly an envious fool.
**************
From my experience with Trump supporters, I am not exaggerating. It was similar last time.
Democrats just were not aware of how weird or strong the opposition to Clinton was. After four yeas of Trump, it is even stronger than it was then. If Democrats are not aware of what many Trump followers seem to believe then they will not win, because their arguments will not make sense to, or be heard by, the people they are trying to win over.
If the Democrats do not realise what they are fighting, then Trump will win. And if he does not win, his supporters will rise in defense of him.
This is the Republican dream.
So what can Democrats do?
First off, the most recurrent theme is the idea that Donald Trump is a peace President and the Democrats are war-mongers. Talk about Trump’s wars, however hidden they have been. Talk about his bombings etc. Talk about how he does not remove troops. Give people facts. Point out the problems with the Israle UAE treaty, and how it sacrifices the Palestinians.
Second, Republicans are not scared of Covid, but they are scared of Vaccines. Point out that rushing a vaccine is the only strategy the President has for dealing with the problem. Explain that an untested vaccine is dangerous. Emphasise that Trump is putting them in danger. Promise that any vaccine developed under the Democrats will be safe and not compulsory.
Trump was completely unaware of him supposedly being against pedophilia, so he is unprepared. He has recently decided he can gain kudos by accusing Biden of pedophilia. Take the gloves off. Point out he was about to face trial for child rape, and the case was stopped when he became President, and the woman received death threats she took seriously. Point out the events were witnessed. Point out Trump has never tweeted about human trafficking. Point out how he is failing in this. Point out his friendship with Epstein and Maxwell. Point to the others in his admin….
People don’t like corporations getting richer at their expense. Point out how Trump has helped this, that his only economic policy is taxcuts for the wealthy, Truly abandon neoliberalism, and make it clear Trump is one of the wealth elite and is governing for the wealth elites and is getting rich on taxpayers’s money. Celebrate his excess consumption, his pride and contempt for ordinary people.
Will this work? It may not. But the kind of approach the Democrats are taking now will lead to them coming second again. You can’t fight irrationality with reason, but you can fight it with drama and facts…
This blog post continues the series on the conspiracies of the powerful, by suggesting that the form of ‘individualism’ encouraged by neoliberalism functions to support corporate dominance, helps to create eco-catastrophy and hinders real and creative ‘individuation’.
The ideal neoliberal individual identifies with their ego. They are lone and autonomous. They have no responsibility towards others, or dependence on others. If they recognise such connection then they work to sever it.
This is clearly difficult for normal humans, so the individual is often allowed to be responsible for their family or towards those who please them, and obey them.
However the individual is still opposed to those who do not please them; ‘sheeple’ who disagree with them, or people of other ‘races’, other political parties, or other genders. These people are seen as non-virtuous in the neoliberal sense; they are protesting the natural hierarchical order, not hard working, not true and independent individuals.
The dependence of neoliberal individuals on being different from these displeasing others, leads to what in the next blog I will call “shadow politics,” in which neoliberal individuals project their denied dependencies and faults on others, and work to expel or obliterate those others. ,
Neoliberal individualism encourages this “shadow politics” by hindering the development of real individuation, and promoting an unreal view of life. It encourages a socialised and homogenous individuality that, directly and indirectly, functions to support neoliberal policy and power by giving the neoliberal class an angry political base. It further helps reinforce the politicisation of knowledge, and hence promotes ignorance. This ignorance can lead to catastrophic social failure.
The reality is that we are mutually interactive and dependent individuals, needing other people and supportive ecologies to exist and flourish. This recognition is the basis of real individuation.
Neoliberal individualism as ideology
The promotion of a particular form of anti, or asocial capitalist “individualism” is part of the information and power structures neoliberalism spreads, even if it is not deliberately engineered.
This should not be too surprising as individualism, of some form or other, has been the ideology of protestant captalism for at least 500 years.
Neoliberal individuality is often said to be under attack from mysterious displeasing others. This is partly because it depends on a contrast between the person expounding it, with those displeasing others. It is a relatively common propaganda strategy to claim something that is largely dominant and popular is under attack. That way the propaganda gets reinforced, and remains unthought about, as people seek to defend it.
Capitalist individualism may have been briefly under threat between 120 to 50 years ago with the rise of communism, but it has come back to dominance with the triumph of the neoliberal elite, functioning as both one of its core persuasive propositions, and as a disciplinary motif which keeps neoliberal power functioning – before eco-collapse.
The political functions of capitalist individualism
Individualism, as it has developed in capitalism, has several political functions. It allows the breaking of community responsibilities and obligations which, in turn, enables:
the accumulation of capital – rather than having to give capital back to the community in gifts or funeral rituals;
finding meaning in possessions;
the breaking of community charity;
the seeing of salvation in purely individual or egoic terms; and
the reduction of all relationship to cash and contract.
More recently it argues that anything that is not individualistic is communist and dangerous, when society essentially depends on willing collaborations and interdependencies of various types: human to human, group to group, creature to ecology etc.
Promotion of individualism helps to break up collective collaboration against the dominant regime, and allows such collaboration to be dismissed as juvenile. It makes liberty and advancement an individual, rather than collective, or collaborative, issue. It encourages workers to be individually submissive and dependent upon heroic employers, rather than to take a collective stand which could benefit everyone. It drives consumerism and the idea of reward coming from the accumulation of personal, or individual, property which is not to be shared outside the family. It may even help define the individual by their ownership and consumption. It allows those who are unemployed, unfortunate, sick, or damaged by the neoliberal State, or neoliberal economic policy, to be blamed for individual fault, and dismissed as worthy of any consideration. It allows the removal of the individual person from the context on which they depend, and thus works to encourage, and legitimate, the destruction of land and ecology for personal profit. Land or ecologies held in common are worthless, and should be handed over to those who can afford them, or they are easy to destroy without qualm.
Recognition of necessary and functional, systemic interdependence is severed, unless seen in purely competitive terms (“nature red in tooth and claw”), or in terms of competitive markets regulated in ways neoliberals like, which are then magically supposed to deliver the best possible results irrespective of any player’s intention.
Individualism, as it has arisen and is encouraged in neoliberalism, cultivates no responsibility towards other beings in general, and breaks the sense of working with others and the world. Victory and autonomy are what count.
Neoliberal individualism encourages weakness and ineffectiveness, when people act outside of, or challenge, the neoliberal system.
Neoliberal individualism is collective
The irony of this individualism is that it gains this power as an ideology because it is collective, enforced, felt to be obviously good because it fits in with capitalist lives and power relations, and is shared by many people. It takes as normal the idea that everyone is alone (perhaps apart from a neoliberal God, who rewards capitalist virtues and punishes capitalist sins), and that everything that people suffer depends on completely on themselves. The poor or unfortunate brought their suffering on themselves, and so need to be condemned or told to get on with making themselves better and stop troubling others. On the opposite side, every approved wealthy person, no matter how much they inherited, how much support they received from others of their group, or from government subsidy or from social organisation, gained their wealth through individual talent and effort, and they owe nobody else, or anything else, anything.
Complexity and interconnection
Reality, as usual, is complicated. As suggested earlier, the reality is that we are embedded in systems upon which we depend, and which we help maintain or destroy.
We cannot self-create, or gain independence, to the extent that individualist thinkers often appear to assume. We did not invent the world, and the societies, we live in – although we can shape them. We did not invent the languages with which we think, interpret and explain our experience, although our language use has personal idiosyncracies and sometimes we shape the language of others. We think with sensory images of the world we experience and move around in; we did not create this. We did not originate all our ideas; we borrowed them from our culture, from other people (sometimes without thinking) and from books, just as we gained the language we borrowed and learnt without thinking. We took on, transformed and reacted against the ideas of others. Those borrowed and shifted ideas shape who we are, how we think, and how we live and relate to others – and many of those ideas may be unconscious, unexamined, or promoted by established forces.
Similarly, we depend upon the work, and sacrifice, of many people for our life and existence; farmers, truckers, sewage workers, electricity workers, street cleaners, shop assistants and so on – the list is huge. We all would have died as children without interconnection with others, no matter how cruel or incompetent those others turned out to be. We likewise depend upon the vast interacting webs of nature to survive; from plants and trees, to ants and bees, to the bacteria that help break down our food, to the relative stability of climate, and to the Sun and stars, however indifferent these beings may be to our fate.
Even our bodies seem to be colonies rather than whole individuals. Most of our mass is held in non-genetically related bacteria. Our cells themselves seem to be colonies of small creatures. If this inter-cellular and infra-cellular collaboration stopped, then our ‘I’ (whatever that is) could not function. There is likewise the possibility that our minds are not single factors but organisations which shift in and out of use, and consciousness, depending on the context.
With different formations and patterns around us, and interacting with us and in response to us, we would almost certainly be different, or not exist.
We are not individuals in the neoliberal sense at all. We are dependent upon systems, constituted by systems and have the possibility of influencing systems. Our ‘individual’ psyche spills out into the social and world systems, and the world and social systems spill into us. Boundaries are not clear. We live with, and sometimes against, other beings – but even those beings who appear to threaten us are indelibly part of the same systems to which we belong.
Our sense of our self as an individual is born in and with a collective tradition which it inherits. The individual is born in interaction with others and with the world; we are a process.
In that very real sense, non of us (who can speak) have never been totally lone individuals, separate from others and independent of others. We cannot survive as lone individuals. In the vast empty realms of space we could not live. If we did have a chance of surviving then it would be because of the work and knowledge of others, or the work of nature, as well as ourselves. Our ‘I’ is a ‘we’ as well as an ‘I’. Autonomy is always limited by contexts. Its expression requires us to work with, and alongside, the dynamics of interdependent reality.
Variation is real
Yet, despite all the collectivity that is part of real life no person is completely shaped by the collective. No person is the same as any other. Everyone has their own unique variations of body, history, and context that makes them different. Natural variation is the basis of evolution, and adaptation. There is probably no assumed path, however supposedly superior, that will fit everyone.
Trying to forget, or suppress, these variations, can be a basis of oppression and delusion; as with insisting everyone should be a lone individual, or that everyone is part of an identical collective (if the latter has ever happened outside of individualist fantasy).
Addendum: Solnit on neoliberal individualism and preserving hierarchy
Since the initial version of this blog. Rebecca Solnit has written a short article on the Right’s response to Covid, which makes similar points, much better than I did. So I will quote some of it, before moving on to the topic of “individuation”. My slight modifications are in square brackets.
She writes:
The pandemic [and the ecological crisis, have] focused and intensified the need to recognize the interconnectedness of all things—in this case the way that viruses spread and the responsibility of those in power and each of us to do what we can to limit that spread, and to recognize the consequences that could break our educational system, our economy, and our daily lives… if we did not take care, of ourselves, each other, and the whole…. [I]nseparability is a basis for making decisions on behalf of the common good. But Republicans have long denied this reality.
The contemporary right has one central principle: nothing is really connected to anything else, so no one has any responsibility for anything else, and any attempt to, say, prevent a factory from poisoning a river is an infringement on freedom… Freedom as they uphold it is the right [for the already privileged] to do anything [they] want with utter disregard for others…
Despite the rhetoric of freedom and equality of opportunity, [neoliberal individualism has] always been about preserving… a hierarchy
This problem of immersion and variation, and the reality that it represents, is what, it seems to me, Jung points to through the term ‘individuation.’
As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation (CW 6: #758).
Individuation is a:
separation and differentiation from the general and a building up of the particular – not a particular that is sought out, but one that is already ingrained in the psychic constitution (CW 6: #761).
It involves a transcendence of capitalist ideas of individualism and of overcoming the real but denied attachment to, or identification with, a group and group ideology. Becoming a real individual is not a pre-existent state, it is difficult and built.
If the individuality is unconscious, there is no psychological individual, but merely a collective psychology of consciousness (CW 6: #755).
Individuation is a relational movement, a paradoxical movement aimed both towards what seems most internal and what seems most external. It involves becoming aware of unconscious dynamics and attachments, both creative and destructive.
In Jungian work becoming aware of personal and collective unconscious forces, and coming to a relationship with them, can involve: suspending certainty of knowledge, dialogue, listening, attention to dreams, active imagination, art work, spiritual experience, and even free association.
This path of coming to oneself, within the collective, has patterns. It is not uniquely individual, but it depends upon being human, the person and the context they live within.
The relations between person and context is not always a relationship of harmony. In becoming a person, we may have to break with families and with social ideologies – but the paradox is always that we often break with our social ideologies, myths and symbols, through other ideologies, myths and symbols, hoping that our internal creativity can use the devices and people around us, to further that process of coming into our variant being, and adapting to, and with, reality – perhaps partly changing that reality if necessary.
One danger is that these ‘new’ collective ideologies we can use to attempt to break free, may simply be social tools for pathology or mere restatements of ‘individualism’, rather than wisdom welling up from unconscious processes.
Individuation is not simply a breaking of ties to everything but our ego, or our conscious self, as with neoliberal individuality.
Indeed the ego is found not to be the central part of the self around which everything orbits. The individuated person, learns to consult with the unconscious world of which they are a part, to gain wisdom from the hidden, and from the perception of useful pattern – some of which may be preserved in neglected traditions. (This is why Jungians like fairy tales). Certainly the ego has the function of evaluating the patterns, but if the ego is not humble, or does not recognise its limits, it can be captured by the perceived patterns – such as shadow projection. Individuation is a reassertion of our real ties to the world, while taking our individual and creative place within that world.
Individuation also involves a cultivation of ethical responsibility. Almost the first step in individuation is becoming aware that most of what we call the evil we see in the world is present in ourselves and largely projected onto the world in an attempt to avoid or suppress recognition of that ‘evil’ in our selves and become ‘virtuous’.
Recognition of our own ‘evil’ is difficult. Our un-individuated ‘collective ego’ is largely built upon suppressing and denying our evil and projecting it on to others, in an attempt to become a good socially, or personally, approved individual.
The socialised individual casts a shadow, and some of what it can perceive as bad are actually:
good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses etc.
For example religions have, in some forms, denied our bodies and natural desires completely.
If the role of the shadow is not recognised in our personal and social lives then the individual is not only impoverished in the potentials of their true self, and their connections with others, but they become more easily manipulated by proponents of their form of individuality, into hatred of those on whom they are encouraged to project their shadow. Individuality becomes simply a compliant social role, or an attempt to dominate others and keep up shadow projection on ‘the inferior’. Overcoming this shadow projection, not only requires self-knowledge, but some level of ethical refinement and experimentation.
Consequently, individuation should not be taken to mean that we become ‘supermen’ or that we should embrace ego inflation – that is becoming what the ego already thinks it should be, or is, or coming to think that we are somehow above the rest of humanity. These are dangers on the path of individuation leading to delusion and possibly psychosis. This is why a guide who has started on the process, and dialogue with them , can be useful on the path.
Figuratively we can think of individuation as involving a descent into ‘the unconscious’, or ‘the depths’ and a surfacing with new wisdoms. However, there is always the risk that we can ascend with new pathologies, hence the need for ethical growth at the same time, to evaluate the actions we now engage with.
The main message is that, wherever we should be on the path of individuation, we are still humans and still interdependent with others and still working with the world. Hopefully we can reach some level of freedom and satisfaction amongst those others, perceive ourselves more accurately and contribute to to the lives of others. Even if we end up residing in a mountain cave by ourselves we got there through living with others, and this may need to be acknowledged.
If the individuation is constructive, and the context of that individuation is right for development, then individual persons can change the world – even if they do not wish to. Some of those people are visible, like Confucius, Laotzu, Plato, Aristotle, Paul of Tarsus, Mohammed, Aquinas, Shakespeare, Newton etc. Sometimes it is just ordinary people whose names are lost to history, who by a simple action encouraged something momentous to happen, that may not have happened without them.
Sometimes the change that the context allows seems clearly for the worse, as when the person does not emerge cleanly from the depths and encourages attacks on their shadow, as with Hitler and Stalin, or Pol Pot etc.
A different politics?
We all face a number of problems which probably cannot be solved by neoliberal individualism.
Immediately there is the issue of Covid. At the moment we have two solutions, the Trump solution and Lock Down.
The Trump solution seems to be: Get back to work, be positive and pretend there is no problem and hope that a vaccine arrives quickly. The secondary parts of this seem to be – do not encourage the vaccine manufacturers to do the proper testing to make sure the vaccine has no dangers, and indemnify the manufacturers should it prove to have dangers.
Apart from ignoring the problems of a vaccine, the Trump solution seems to have no thought that we could work together on solving, or diminishing, this problem, and indeed Trump attacks people for wearing masks, and encourages people to be neoliberal individuals with no care about their effects on others -running meetings without distancing and so on. He also cheers armed protests against lock-downs and against people protesting in the Streets. The Trump Solution also downplays any information that suggests Covid is more harmful than we might think, with long term effects on people who have caught it, frequent need for massive medical care, high levels of contagion, and low levels of anti-body preservation. This form of individualism only seems to seek the information which confirms it.
The Lock-down solution similarly does not really see the possibilities of people collaborating, or the problems that lock-downs only work for a short while. People have to know that other actions are people taken. Neoliberal individualists are also likely to resist lock downs as them see them as an imposition on their individual right to do whatever they want, whenever they want, and so Lockdowns are inherently vulnerable to neoliberal attacks, from those who don’t ‘want’ to support others in times of danger, or only see the issue in terms of competition.
Neoliberal individualism, does not encourage the idea that sometimes we have to suffer some loss in order for the system to survive or prosper. Given we are not connected, other than in competition, why should we risk any loss for an uncertain advantage for others? Without empathy there is no connection to others. They are just things that attack us.
Likewise with climate change. We cannot solve this individually. Neoliberal individualism separates us from nature, it makes nature an object to be exploited, and ultimately leads to social death.
Individuation on the other hand can lead to an awareness of connection, because you don’t have to engage in separation in order to find yourself. You do have to find your connection to the greater you, the fields of unconscious process, the place you occupy in the system that sustains you.
An individuated person can also realise that solutions may be as complex as the problems, and pay attention to material that others ignore. Even if it is only by withdrawing their shadow projections.
Conclusion
That the ideology of individualism is unreal and possibly destructive, does not mean individuals are not important, or that the collective is necessarily good. The process of emerging from the collective, and listening to the wider self and the wider world is a process we can call individuation.
Individuation is difficult. There is almost never a resting place of certainty, or of perfect autonomy.
Any vision which sees the future in terms of individuals alone, or families alone in secure buildings, or people as an always harmonious single willed collective, is doomed to failure in the long term as it does not recognise reality.
Individuation is particularly difficult when there is a collective individualism which suggests that we are already there, and can proceed by strengthening the ego and accepting the collective idea of individualism without tackling what we, as a collective, are unconscious of, or refrain from being conscious of.
In neoliberalism, individualism tends to enable what we might call shadow politics, and this is the subject of the next post in this series….
The Neoliberal Conspiracy 01 discussed the nature of conspiracy and the value of being aware of the possibilities of conspiracies of the already powerful. In our societies, these already powerful people tend to belong to the hyper-wealthy corporate class. I put forward the idea of a neoliberal conspiracy which supports ideas of:
“free markets” which translates into the prevention of democratic attempts to reduce the power of corporations;
wealth as virtue;
the effectiveness of privatisation of common property and services with the aim of transferring wealth from ordinary people to the dominant classes;
the denial of any public good without corporate profit, and;
the radical destruction of tradition while pretending to be conservative.
I suggested that neoliberalism was a deliberate movement to counter to the elite crisis of “too much democracy” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a way of defusing the rapidly rising environmental movement, which threatened to prevent corporate exploitation of the material world.
In the second installment, The Neoliberal Conspiracy 02: Education, I described some of the ways that education was being bent in favour of wealthy people, and put under their control, with the consequence that people would be less able and knowledgeable to challenge them.
Education involves control of the information and quality of information given to various classes in society. Often the dominant groups are taught thinking and use of power and given useful connections, whereas the lower classes are taught the virtues of obedience and adapting to the desires and requirements of the powerful. Skills and knowledge are only relevant to the extent they allow students to fit in with the patterns of power. In Australia we subsidise already wealthy private schools (who put their fees up in response), and cutback funding to ordinary schools. This helps restrict access and cement the power and knowledge of the wealthy.
This blog now moves into questions of information provision and conveyance in more general terms. Information always forms part of power struggles, but in neoliberalism information is nearly all only part of a power and persuasion struggle; this pattern is intensified by the problems of information in a supposed information society.
Problems of information
One fundamental problem is that the world is a complex system, beyond the conscious understanding of any particular individual.
This seems magnified in so called ‘information society, in that there is so much information that we can always choose information which pleases us, and which states that those who disagree with us are simply wrong, or that their disagreement comes from intent or malice. People who disagree, are evil. This may help reassure us of our ability to navigate this complexity; even as it almost certainly leads to misunderstanding and folly.
Another problem seems to be that we always filter information by other information that we consider correct or probable. This information may be wrong to begin with; therefore inaccuracy runs the risk of accumulating, and making more recent “information acquisitions” even more precariously accurate.
The third problem is that neoliberalism, (or the support of corporate power and wealthy people through talk about free markets), cannot deliver what it promises; liberty and a functional high prosperity economy. It only delivers ongoing support for ecological destruction, suppression of dissent, destruction of government services, stagnant wages, economic crisis and plutocracy. The only techniques available to neoliberal governance is taxpayer support for big business (often through military spending), increasing the right of the wealthy to destroy ecologies, suppression of organised labour, government service cutbacks which largely affect the poor and lower middle classes, and taxcuts for the wealthy.
Therefore, in any kind of democracy, supporters of neoliberal corporate dominance and its lack of responsibility, have to have to stir up passions and misrepresent reality to gain support. There is no alternative.
Information and Behaviour
Information is important not just because it guides us through the world, but because it contributes to who we think we are. People with different theories of what it is to be a person, or category of person, or to be in the world, will likely have differing interpretations of events in the world, and hence different interactions with that world. A person who thinks that humans are competitive individualists, will behave differently and suffer differently to a person who thinks people are lovingly co-operative. They can both be wrong, but it changes behaviour and expectations.
By giving us modes of interpretation and setting problems, information is constitutive of our modes of being in the world, and our experience.
If you control, or heavily influence, a person’s information then you are likely to influence their understandings, behaviour and interactions. Most acts of communication exist to persuade other people to do things such as: collaborate with you, honour you, fear you, agree with you, help you, work for you, support you, fight against your enemies, behave in particular expected ways etc.
All of these attempts may have unintended consequences, partly because they are of limited accuracy and we live in complex systems, and people then have to deal with those consequences. That communication may not always have the intended effect is to be expected, but persuasion is still one of its primary aims. Rhetoric is fundamental, not incidental, to language.
In information society, information problems are intensified, because a great deal of self image and status (as a independent thinker, or not being a ‘sheeple’) appears to come from being ‘right’ or ‘correctly informed.’ This renders self correction even more difficult than usual. Many people engage in ‘virtue signalling’ about this: they are sane, righteous and calm thinkers while everyone else is unbalanced, or swayed by hysterical propaganda, or the orthodoxy. This does not lead to calm discussion. Despite the complexity, there seems little humility about our capacity to understand what is going on.
Distribution and distortion of information
Irrespective of the possibility of using information for deliberate control, whenever free production of information exists, then information tends to get widely distributed for the following reasons, non of which contribute to accuracy:
1) We select information because it confirms what we already think, and confirms or fits in with our existing biases or the information we have already accepted. This is a form of information filtering, that means we do not have to change our minds every time we encounter contrary ideas.
1a) Much important information will be filtered out, by this process.
1b) One of the first things we filter out, is this process, as it implies we are not good processors of information. We can see it in others, but less easily in ourselves.
2) Information is spread because of its propaganda function, which those distributing it think benefits them or their allies – or at the least confirms what they already think. In this set-up, accuracy is a minor concern because lies and misdirections which support the supposed ‘underlying truth’ are acceptable. This seems to be the default neoliberal position.
2a) Propaganda is often designed to appeal to an audience’s existing biases, and shift that audience in the direction of the emitter. It is a form of crafted manipulation.
2b) It has long been known that a convincing lie will travel much faster than the correcting truth, and with the internet the lie will hang around and be rediscovered, repeatedly. Climate deniers can reuse the same false facts repeatedly, despite the number of rebuttals. Rebuttals tend to get forgotten.
2c) Propaganda can also use distractions. If people are worried about the wealthy, get them worried about wealthy people who don’t push the neoliberal line like George Soros, and Bill Gates. Then ignore the behaviour of all the other billionaires who may be more of a social threat, like Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, or Donald Trump. This also helps keep the wealthy in line, as they can fear what will happen to them if they transgress in what they say.
2d) While most neoliberal propaganda is internal to the country and comes from deniable sources, there is also external propaganda from other countries which tries to undermine social functioning, as a form of non-violent warfare. Thus the Russians supported Trump to help destroy the US (although the tendencies of the pro-Trump audience to distribute anything that supported them, also led to the making of fake news to ‘attract eyeballs’ and get advertisement money). It is possible that some of the ‘covid is not serious in any way’ material is being distributed for the same reasons. Likewise US government and corporate propaganda to encourage capitalism is well documented. At the same time it is possible that relatively accurate information can be denounced as foreign propaganda.
3) Information is spread when it is issued by people we identify with, and therefore consider trustworthy. This seems to be one of the standard ways of filtering large amounts of information. The filter is quick and allows us to move on, or act.
3a) We also tend to think, that information issued by those we don’t identify with, or identify as being opposed to us, is necessarily false. This easily becomes the basis of ‘polarisation’, or what I am calling ‘shadow politics,’ in which we project our own denied failings onto others and blame them for all our problems. This again is a standard neoliberal trope to build support, although it is not only used by neoliberals. Once it becomes established, it influences most communication.
3b) Hence Trump attempts to threaten any media or reporter who dares to disagree with him, and accuses them of lying – even if the media organisation they are working for is 95% in favour of flattering him. In neoliberalism, loyalty to the underlying cause should be 100%. Any organisation which does try and be impartial and only report the truth is suspect – perhaps because neoliberalism cannot be supported by the truth.
3c) This category-effect means that some people argue they must be right precisely because other disliked people disagree with them. Disagreement does not lead to discussion but to confirmation.
4) Information which is highly emotionally charged can appeal directly to our feeling self. Emotionality, often generates a sense of truth or reality (“If I am angry with that person, there must be a reason, and the anger must be justified”). It also functions to prevent reflective thinking, and to confirm people’s allegiance to the information source and increase their hostility to counter-sources. If a tightly controlled company or person uses this strategy (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Fox News), then they may be getting an audience for the advertisement space they sell, ‘telling the truth’ according to their biases, and influencing people not to trust other sources and stay with them. The standards of evidence are lowered. Sometimes scathing humour can serve this function.
4a) Confident certainty is also persuasive to people in the in-group, irrespective of whether it is deserved or no, and this helps shut down discussion, or reflection. It is another hallmark of neoliberal communication, along with condemnation.
5) Some information may spread because it makes life easier, and helps collaboration, builds friendships and so on. It may have deleterious effects as well, but these are not as clear and tend to be ignored.
5a) Sometimes information which makes life easier, like delaying action on climate crisis, may hinder people from seeing needed information, which could keep them alive.
6) Some information issued by companies is simply hype, to sell products, or confirm their power in the markets. Such hype is likely to be designed to be memorable, and spreadable, so it affects markets, profitability, actions and general knowledge. Rather than going with existing technology to solve a problem, people may postpone action for the supposedly better hyper-innovative technology that is “just about to be released”.
6a) Markets, particularly financial markets, seem to be largely based on such hype, which is possibly one reason for financial bubbles, and people remaining loyal to businesses when they are near breaking, or hoping for the breakthrough that will keep markets stable and growing.
7) ‘Science’, or other modes of attempting to find accuracy, will be attacked when they disagree with neoliberalism. Scientists can recognise that while they have informed people according to the best of their knowledge, they can be wrong. Neoliberals are right before any evidence comes in, and are right whatever the evidence. Hence, science is automatically described as wrong whenever it disagrees with established bias, or interest.
7a) There is no role for recognition of limited, or temporary, certainty, or ongoing uncertainty. We can keep producing greenhouse gases and we know it will be ok if we don’t cut back just yet.
7b) Building real knowledge takes effort, time and correction. As said above, building or finding an appealing lie, can be much much quicker. The time and refinement process makes real knowledge look as if it is constantly changing, because it is responding to new data. People in this society think truth should be unchanging.
8) I suspect some people also enjoy producing confusion. Information confusion, means that we will be more likely to choose our information by its relationship to our existing biases, so it opens us further up to manipulation.
8a) The point here is that the information which gets taken up by others and spread by others (in the Richard Dawkins sense ‘memes’), obviously has some pull, and emitting lots of conflicting information with the same general push, may help some version of the information be selected and promoted naturally by other people.
9) US culture, in particular, is sunk in optimism and positive thinking. Problems can and will be solved. Recognising the problems can be defined as negative thinking, and is thought to bring on the destruction being recognised. In this framing, problems are easily forgotten, especially if there are too many of them. Supporters of President Trump, for example, frequently seem to forget his checkered business and political history, and always assume the best. Memories are removed by media not building histories and contexts for what is happening.
9a) Sometimes this optimism functions as denial – as, for instance, when the underground right (the real deep state) insists that Trump is fighting child abuse against evil Democrats, despite his dubious sexual past, and his apparent lack of interest in this pursuit (judging by his twitter feed). Trump also lowers environmental standards and tries to make climate change worse. This will abuse the lives of everyone’s children, but that cannot be dealt with, so we will assume Trump is doing something good to save us. Neoliberalism has to pretend to goodness at the mythical level, because it does seem harmful to most people, even if it does not intend to be.
9b) For some discussion of positivity and the response to the corona virus go to part 6 of this chain.
10) In neoliberal ‘misinformation society’ information does not exist to promote discussion between opposing groups, or accuracy testing. It exists to cause fracture and dislocation, and leave the wealth establishment in charge.
Information and Organisation
This is not an important part of this argument, but it may be helpful to remind people that organisations mis-transmit information, because of their structures. ‘Punitive Hierarchies’ in which the higher-ups have the right to punish or dismiss lower-downs, tend to set up systems whereby the lower-downs tend to give the higher-ups the information they think those higher-ups want to hear, as it is not worth facing punishment. The higher-ups also refuse to let those below know what is going on, to avoid challenge or to look ignorant. Eventually the whole organisation comes to live in fantasy, with decisions made on inaccurate data, and the expectations of what those people are reporting to, want to hear.
Siloing, which is a kind of sideways hierarchy adds to these effects, as parallel groups consider themselves rivalrous, or cannot communicate.
Authoritarian organisational structures distort information. The more punitive those organisations, the more information distortion occurs.
Information and Ownership of Media
In neoliberal societies, the main sources of information about what is happening tend to be owned by wealthy people or corporations. These main sources tend to rely on other corporations for advertising revenue. This reinforces the tendency of these sources to primarily express the views of their owners and controllers, and the corporate class in general.
Inside recognisably strongly ideological media, such as the Murdoch Empire, people tend to give the news the spin they think the hierarchy requires – especially when the culture asserts that journalists get sacked for going against the wishes of the hierarchy. Even if a journalist writes the ‘truth’ this can be altered by a sub-editor who wants to please their boss. Given that people in the organisation tend to read the organisation’s news, this increases the news bubble they live within, and the ideological basis of that news.
Information corporations can also sponsor supposedly independent information sources, which reinforce their message, or make the message seem truer because it comes from many apparent sources. Sources are not independent or unbiased because they agree with you and are on youtube or in a podcast. Indeed podcasts should be suspect, because the people making them are rarely expected to give sources, and there is less time for listener reflection.
We can, in general, classify media as neoliberal or extreme neoliberal. Some neoliberal media organisations may appear to support human rights, minorities and so on (the so called ‘liberal media’), and others will be more or less open in their contempt for ‘difference’ (the so called ‘conservative media’). All of them will support some version of the corporate establishment, or some faction within that establishment.
Now there may be more principled sources of information than others, but even these are subject to the forces listed above, and there is little countervailing force in current distributions of information which leads to correction, and so news is likely to reinforce neoliberal dominance in general. Fox and the New York Times both support the corporate establishment in general, Fox probably even more so.
People informed by mainstream sources will be told that other sources which have different opinions and different news should be dismissed as biased, and people are unlikely to read or view it. Neoliberal media often campaigns fiercely against non-corporately controlled media, as for example when the Murdoch Empire and the Australian Government campaign against the publicly owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation, for daring not to always support neoliberal truth.
The more the media can inculcate a neoliberal bias the less likely we are to have any kind of democratic counter-revolution, and the more likely we are to have an authoritarian result – as there is no necessary connection between capitalism and liberty for most people.
Information ‘Markets’
We could consider information as existing in an information market. In this market people may well tend to choose what pleases them, or is useful to them, as they do for other items. We cannot know the value of information in market terms in advance – effort put into gathering accurate information, may not be appreciated, or valued, by the market. Amounts of labour applied to checking has little to do with ‘value’ on the market, in terms of sales or power.
Eventually the market, as an information processing device, will encounter reality and feedback effects will be generated; inaccurate, or even partially accurate, information will cause problems – perhaps even begin collapse, or start off the normal processes of ‘creative destruction’. Possibly this collapse can be delayed as when taxpayers bailout large companies due to the effects of what seems to be normal neoliberal crony capitalism, or when corrupt political systems get bailed out by increasing misinformation or militarisation of ‘law enforcement’, or by distraction techniques such as pretending the President is doing something constructive.
Conclusion
The conveyance of relatively accurate ‘conscious’ information seems a difficult problem. Part of the problem is the structure and patterning of information collection and distribution. For the reasons we have discussed, even if some organisations where not trying to manipulate us to support their power and dominance, then the distribution of relatively accurate information would still face problems.
There is no need of a deliberate conspiracy for media to attempt to support the dominant groups who own them, but some media probably is conspiring to support those groups, and to discredit any information which would suggest that information issued by people opposing them has any value.
Factoring in the likely presence of neoliberals needing to deceive the people in order to retain power, and the normal distortion effects of media transmission that we have discussed above, the chance of our societies surviving (or even admitting) any major challenge is greatly diminished, largely because we won’t be informed enough to make reasonable decisions, and information will simply become a political tool.
The Neoliberal conspiracy on education, as with all their projects, has fairly straightforward aims. It intends to increase the power of wealth and destroy people’s ability to be independent of the control of the wealthy or wealthy organisations.
Control of information, or the embedding of information in people is vital for the control of people and the possibilities of what they can imagine. Hence any dictatorship, or authoritarian structures, will aim at control of education. In particular Neoliberalism does not wish to allow any competition with ‘the market’ in terms of how people’s lives are regulated. They must be regulated by the market, and the sum of corporate desire.
Neoliberal Educational Theory
In neoliberal educational theory:
1) Education should be privatised and corporatised as much as possible. People should get the education they can afford, or risk being indebted for life. This helps make sure that wealthy people will have better educated children than those of poorer people. Education is a privilege not a right. Knowledge is power, and neoliberals don’t want the wrong people with knowledge.
1a) Providing your own education for your children is fine. Your children do not come into contact with other classes of children for any sustained time, so they will think of themselves as an elite, or as isolated individuals. If you can afford good private teachers that is great – wealthy children deserve good education – if you wish to teach them your authority that is fine as well – it helps make the children uncritical and obedient.
2) If education for most people is wound down, then they are less likely to protest successfully, or understand writings critical of the establishment successfully, and they can more easily be led by propaganda to vote for the established powers and to fall for scapegoating. So this is a good thing.
3) Modern society seems to be requiring less labour, so it may be that there is no need to educate most people. They could be educated to produce their own enjoyment, food and art, but that is clearly a waste of money.
4) To help privatisation of education, taxpayers should increase support for wealthy private schools. Every extra discrimination helps – and the education of the privileged is clearly a good thing for everyone.
5) The best private schools will always be exclusionary, as their purpose is to confine good social contacts to the right class of people. No matter how subsidised they are, they will charge fees that keep most people out. The presence of a few charity students who know their place, just shows how good the system is, and does not invalidate the general proposition.
6) As students pay, students are customers and student satisfaction with courses and with not failing is paramount. Who cares if engineers cannot do mathematics? Or if students of politics cannot write or think coherently or clearly? Especially if the qualifications help them get a job? (Actually who they know will be of more use to getting a job than any qualifications, hence the importance of quality private schools keeping the scum out).
7) Defunding universities means that universities become more dependent on high paying students and thus devote more energy to getting them than on low paying students. This brings in money to the country from foreign students, which gets spent here and helps the economy, but is generally unpopular. It also means that universities are particularly vulnerable to tensions between countries and to pandemics. But no pandemic assistance will be received – indeed, as we know in Australia, regulations will be changed many times to make sure that university workers don’t get funded by accident – unless they work for private universities.
8) As students are customers, they get to evaluate teaching staff, to keep the staff in line. The idea that staff should be able to evaluate managers is given lip service, but it amounts to nothing if there is dissatisfaction.
9) As universities are now businesses, they get to be run by business figures who know, or care, nothing for education.
10) However, these business people do have a strong belief that high level managers of schools and universities should have massively increased salaries to match those in the private sector, even while salaries are cut back for most staff, especially in public education which has its public funding cut. This helps reinforce neoliberal policy. The income of high level managers depends on the acceptance of that policy.
11) The public education workforce is to be casualised in line with general neoliberal policies. This helps keep the educational staff overworked, exhausted and terrified of dismissal for controversy. Most of university teaching staff in Australia, is casualised.
12) Education should be oriented to provide what the corporate sector thinks it needs or wants. Non of this ‘education for life’ business, or pointless ‘critical thinking’.
13) Social sciences should be defunded as much as possible, because these people tend to disagree with neoliberal policies and also point out these policies do not deliver what is promised. These people have to be cancelled. Perhaps we should make these degrees so expensive that fewer people take them, that should help lower the importance and distribution of the teaching.
14) Star researchers should be privileged. The university only needs a few star researchers for publicity reasons…
15) Research is evaluated by the profit it brings, or is likely to bring.
16) Star researchers are those who attract money and good publicity.
17) Research should be sponsored by the corporate sector, and belong to that sector, so it is obviously of value to private enterprise and unchallenging to private enterprise
18) However, corporations prefer private think tanks in which they can pay their money and get the results (propaganda) they want. So university research outside the sciences will remain unfunded. Neoliberals tend to only want to hear information that reinforces their inclinations and biases (as, for example, the Australian governments on fossil fuels). This refusal to hear counter-evidence is one reason why the neoliberal system will collapse – but it will likely take everyone with it.
19) Universities could begin this think tank route to get income. It is probably the ideal solution for neoliberal research – research that gives the wealth and powerful the results they want.
20) Privately funded and controlled education centres or research centres, help give people the education the wealthy think they should have.
21) Sometimes, as the Australian government’s ideal Vocational Education and Training scheme saw, we have students weighed with debt and not learning much at all, despite the government money the suppliers took. This scheme helped weaken the long standing and publicly funded Technical and Further Education organisation. This destruction probably means the scheme counted as a success. The word ‘corrupt’ has been used in this context.
22) While privatised research centres funded by foreign governments are suspect, universities are after the money and potential profit, because they are underfunded, and the managers are business people. However, these centres may not give the neoliberal message, and so often have to be attacked.
23) In any case, neoliberalism appears to demand that research should produce private intellectual property which needs to be owned by the right people – who have the right to keep it secret, patented or suppressed.
24) Ultimately education and research are simply businesses, to be controlled by bigger business and provide the right thinking for continuation of the system, or they exist to extract money from students who do not have the right contacts.
In neoliberalism, nothing at all, is to exist outside of the market, or to resist market control.
Conspiracy can be defined as a collaboration of people working towards a goal that those conspired against would not welcome. Sometimes the conspiracy can be visible but is pretending to aim for something different to what it really intends. Sometimes the conspiracy can be effective enough at presenting this false front that people do, in fact, welcome it.
Conspiracies often eventuate because those participating do not think their real but ‘good’ aims are realisable because other people might forcibly object to them, if they knew what they were. Conspiracies do not have to be evilly intended; the people involved can think that they are working for the greater good.
“Conspiracy theory” is usually a dismissive term, but conspiracies do happen and do succeed. People, who are not that powerful or competent, such as Lenin and the Bolsheviks or Castro in Cuba, can succeed with conspiracies (although it helps their cause if the establishment is crumbling and incoherent), so why can’t conspiracies of the powerful exist and work equally well or even better?
Conspiracies of the already powerful
It is normal for people, who identify with each other, to “team up” to protect their interests, so it is not unreasonable to assume powerful people will team up for this purpose, in the same way that less powerful people do. Again they do not have to have evil intentions to be conspirators, they may well believe that the system, or people, they represent, are good for everyone – however, they still might feel deception is appropriate.
Powerful people also have advantages, so we can expect them to succeed in their conspiring more often than less powerful people.
For example, they may be friendly with those running the police or law enforcement, or they may be ‘above suspicion’. They know other powerful people, and get attention. Being wealthy they have the money to ‘bribe’ politicians, or reward them for cooperating, consequently they may have access to governmental agencies (even including intelligence and ‘dark ops’). They may get asked to write policy and legislation, while other more expert, or neutral, people are not. They have the money to set up ‘think tanks’ and can pay people to promote their aspirations and to spread ideas which appear beneficial to them. They can own, fund and control media. They can significantly determine the information present in society. They can even afford to buy their own mercenaries if needed.
These dominant groups can, by their position, already influence public discourse significantly without especially trying to do so. They have a massive advantage, even if they are not completely unified as a class.
In the modern world, the main source of power is wealth and business. Not all business of course, but the large scale transnational corporate business which accumulates wealth massively. Hence corporate owners and bosses may well be the people most likely to be involved in casual conspiracy to protect their already dominant interests and their wealth and power.
As an example, it seems reasonably well documented that Exxon’s own scientists demonstrated the dangers of climate change, and yet the company continued to promoted denial and delay, so as to keep its profit up and avoid change [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. Promoters of ‘pro-corporate free-market’ ideology and neoliberal ‘individualism’, also were heavily involved in promoting denial of climate change, particularly in the early days before self publishing took off [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. They were involved in this conspiracy to keep up both profits and established modes of action, while preventing any ‘interference’ with corporate power or corporate liberty to harm people and planet for profit, by either the people, or the State.
[I would suggest that it may be particularly worthwhile looking at the financial industry, the arms industry, mining and fossil fuels as being sectors which are prone to engage in conspiracy as they are so ingrained in contemporary society.]
What I call the Neoliberal Conspiracy, is a conspiracy of the corporate wealth elites, to convince ordinary people that they are working on their behalf, and to conceal what they actually do to cement and increase the power of the ultra-wealthy.
In a democracy this deceit helps maintain political power. ‘Both’ parties are neoliberal. In the US the Democrats are largely humanitarian neoliberals who think there may be survival limits on corporate power, while Republicans tend to be hard-line neoliberals who think there should be no limits on corporate power and privilege. Trumpism is hardline rather than humanitarian.
Conspiracy and Scapegoating
The truly powerful attempt to distract people by pretending that other, much more marginal groups, really have all the power and are to blame for society’s problems…. perhaps university professors, socialists, enemy spies, people of another ethnic group, heretics, witches, feminists, people protesting against police brutality (while making those who shoot or assault protestors, good natured heroes standing up for order), people protesting against capitalism or climate change, or even occasional business people who seem odd or who support a politics which might promote different ideas to what the powerful see as their class interests.
It seems to be a normal human procedure to attempt to gain group unity by passing on sins and failures to a scapegoat, and then trying to expel that scapegoat, or blacken their name further. So, if you are blaming one or two people (even hyper-wealthy people), or a group of people who probably don’t have that much overt influence, or who repeatedly fail to achieve their goals (for example university professors rarely get decent funding for their own work, never mind agreement with their theories, or influence in government, unless the government already agrees with what they are saying), then you are probably falling for a scapegoat strategy.
Neoliberal Conspiracy
The most established contemporary conspiracy, which is so overt it might not be called conspiracy, is the plan to promote and establish the ideology of neoliberalism to justify and extend corporate domination, or to promote a kind of corporate feudalism, in which everything exists in service to the corporate sector [See the works of Philip Mirowski to begin with, but there are plenty of others on the corporate funding and promotion of neoclassical and Austrian Economics].
Neoliberalism does not explain its actions in these terms of protecting corporate power, of course, as otherwise it would be hard for its supporters to get voted in [13]. This is why I am labeling it a conspiracy – it is inherently deceptive and is aimed at benefitting a particular group of people. President Trump (who is part of the wealth elite by inheritance) is connected to this movement, while also being slightly disruptive of it.
Let us be clear that Donald Trump by himself, or through his cabinet choices, does not explain the decline in the USA, or its fragmentation. President Trump should not be made a scapegoat to excuse, or bypass, the neoliberal movement as a whole. It is a far bigger group than just him that promotes neoliberalism, and some of the destruction we observe undoubtedly results from the unintended consequences of their acts. Trump is just a useful, if slightly chaotic, figurehead, or ‘symptom’, of what is happening. While he does help further destruction, profiteering and wealth transfer to established people, he is unstable enough to be something of a liability for everyone, which is probably why he is openly challenged to the extent he is. This open challenge does not have to mean he really is engaged in looking after ‘the people’, as is often said by those supporting him. That fact that some elites tell us he is corrupt and incompetent does not mean he is honest and incredibly competent. He is not a force for good whatever the other elites in the Republican party, and the really Righteous media tell us – he is part of the conspiracy.
But first it is necessary to understand what ‘neoliberalism’ promotes and why.
Neoliberal “Free Markets”
Neoliberalism is a movement which officially praises the free market, and promotes this idea as a source of liberty. However, the function of the doctrine of the free market, is to defend the corporate sector, from any control, regulation, or hindering, by public action. That is it. Not to prevent taxpayer subsidy of, or protection for, established industry, but to prevent people interfering with corporate privilege. Corporate privilege and liberty to make money by almost any means possible is, in practice, defined by them as the free market. Stopping corporations from, say, poisoning people, or exploiting them, is interference with that market and with the freedom of people to agree to be exploited or poisoned. Neoliberalism’s support for the corporate sector can be authoritarian, as it is corporate liberty, rather than the people’s liberty, which counts.
Neobliberalism promotes the ideology that the free market is the most important of all institutions. In neoliberalism the official synonym for the ‘free market’ is ‘individual liberty’. However, in practice, the term ‘free market’ is used to justify untrammeled corporate domination and the undermining of any liberty that could possibly oppose that power.
In neoliberalism any restriction on corporate power can be portrayed as a restriction on the market, and therefore it must be stopped. Possible restrictions include: consumer protection, environmental protection, care for the planet, taxation of wealthy people and organisations, and any support for the general population that lessens people’s dependency on, or subservience to, the corporate sector.
As the free market is the most important institution of all, then the State’s only reason for existence is to protect that market and those big players who make up the market. All big-enough and established corporations should be eligible for protection and taxpayer bailout, because of their virtues and the necessity of preserving them. Otherwise the market might collapse, or people might argue that the market does not work and needs ‘inhibiting’ regulations – which would be ‘bad’.
Because ‘the market’, as controlled for the benefit of the established corporate sector, is the ultimate good, then government should not do anything other than support and protect the market. This is why neoliberal governments cheerfully bail out wealthy corporations, while increasing the penalties for lack of success, or bad fortune, for ordinary people. This is the reality of the ‘free market’ in action.
In neoliberalism, no organisation, activity or relationship, is allowed to exist outside of the market. Consequently nothing is free of profit seeking, or corporate control. Corporate control and corporate ideologies start to look natural as they are applied everywhere, and hence the corporation becomes the dominant institution of the modern world, as neoliberals intend.
In neoliberalism, there can be no public good without corporate profit.
Neoliberal Virtue
Wealth, plus adherence to neoliberal talking points, demonstrates virtue. There are no other virtues of any consequence. Everybody who is wealthy and praises the market, has made it, because of their virtues and positivity. With the right thinking you can do anything.
The only aspirations to be praised are wealth or maximal consumption – anything that hinders the activities of the wealthy, or of consumption, is bad, anything that supports wealthy people and consumption is good. All social security should be slowly broken down, as poor, or unfortunate, people should not really be supported as they are clearly not virtuous, and they are not ‘positive’. They are, at best, slack as they are not wealthy. If ‘given’ support (even if they they have paid for it via taxes), they may not work and thus may not show proper submission to, and dependence on, an employer. Ordinary people, even those who support neoliberalism, are not worthy of support. Opportunity should only exist for the children of the wealthy, as they have demonstrated their virtue by being wealthy. General social mobility is of little importance, although a few people who have come up from nothing, may be used as exemplars showing that everyone could do it.
Wealthy people who do not support the wealth collective, and their neoliberal talking points are to be attacked, to show people that you cannot disagree with the ideology without being slurred and attacked – which helps keep the others, who might have doubts, in line.
These disagreeing wealthy people become scapegoats for the workings of capitalism in general, while other significantly wealthy people who have even more socially dangerous and deleterious effects are ignored.
Hence the anger directed at Bill Gates, George Soros, or Warren Buffet (until he learned to shut up), and the relative silence about Rupert Murdoch, Gautam Adani, or the Walton Family or many other nearly anonymous billionaires.
There is a sense in which neoliberalism presents a continuation of 19th Century Social Darwinism, in which it is assumed that in the struggle for existence the wealthy have demonstrated their superiority over the poor. In neoliberal theory, when compared to the poor, the rich are as superior and better fitted to survive, as humans are to baboons. They are not open about this point, but it does make sense of many of their policies. Inferior people should be left to die out, if not killed off. Climate change, for example, can be solved by population culls. This ‘hidden idea’ can easily be made to plug into racism, which gives neoliberals even more popular support.
Neoliberal Privatisation
This support for what neoliberals call the free market justifies all collective, public or common property and services being privatised. This is supposed to improve them, while ‘incidentally’ transferring public wealth and income to the private sector, usually increasing public debt – as services now have to be paid for at commercial rates to guarantee profit. This procedure has the following advantages for the established wealth which can buy the property or service being privatised.
High level management incomes in the service will increase, because they are now competing with the private sector, and have to pay more to get talent.
Costly operations which are beneficial to only a few ordinary, or inconvenient people, will be shut down as the operation has to make a profit.
Service staff will be cut back, and workers’ wages lowered by casualisation, as the operation has to make a profit. If the system is no longer quite as useful, or resilient, that is no problem for the business as long as it makes a profit. If it fails, it can always declare bankruptcy, or be sold off while the managers move elsewhere.
The service can asset strip, or sell parts of the business to other businesses, and this sell-off is usually arranged to boost the incomes of the high level executives.
Many such public services were monopolies, thus the privatised service faces little competition and can put prices up to help profits.
Even when the services are not monopolies then they are often services which many people have to receive at some time – like unemployment relief, aged care, water, sewage, etc. So quality is largely irrelevant. If you can reduce the costs of the service, say by reducing injury payouts, then you increase profits again. So the trend of privatisation is nearly always downhill.
The government loses knowledge and skills relevant to the privatised sector, as well as losing power over the operation. The corporate sector gains more power and wealth.
If the privatised operation was previously profitable, then the government loses income and has to weaken other services to make up the shortfall of income, which weakens people’s control over the services they have to receive.
The government becomes less capable of being useful to ordinary people, and therefore there is more excuse to cut back the remaining services it provides, further boosting the power of wealth.
Neoliberal appropriation for high level managers
On a milder note, organisations influenced by neoliberalism, and perhaps by other ideologies, tend to make sure the people at the top receive most of the organisation’s income. Lower level workers are simply costs. So the incomes of lower level workers must be cut, even while spending on incomes at the top increases. There is no real ‘mutual obligation’ at all.
Huge wage discrepancies between upper and lower workers, result from political acts, power struggles, and decisions, but they can be usefully blamed on the market, not on conspiracy conducted by those receiving high incomes. The market provides an excuse for any kind of action which reinforces inequality.
Let me update this by a reference to something said by Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, to show that recognition of the basic fact is not necessarily a left/right division. [At the moment the broadcast does not seem to be on Fox’s Carlson transcript page] Carlson begins supporting President Trump’s tax evasion by saying it is normal. “What the president did was legal — in fact it’s all but universal among the affluent who earn their money from investments rather than from salaries… ” He refuses to state this behaviour is wrong, but asks:
Why does our tax code remain so obviously, so grotesquely unfair?…
Billionaires should not be paying a lower rate than you are paying, no matter who they are, no matter who the president is. The main problem with America right now is that a shrinking group of people controls a growing share of our nation’s wealth and power. America is lopsided, and it’s getting more lopsided every year. That makes our country unstable.
Lopsidedness…. is why young people seem so hopeless and nihilistic, why so many of them are not starting families. It’s why some of them are breaking things in the streets. It’s why your grandchildren will almost certainly earn less than you do. And by the way, it’s also why Donald Trump got elected four years ago. Americans could feel that something was profoundly wrong with the way our country was structured…. It seemed clear that the people in charge were in it for themselves.
Carlson then fell back into his role as a Fox News person, saying:
Four years later, some good things have happened, [really?] But the core drivers of the crisis that we faced, a dying middle class and the growing hegemony of billionaires, remain unresolved. This is not a small problem. If we don’t fix it soon, it’s a guaranteed disaster. No nation can live for long under the tyranny of selfish oligarchs.
If we don’t flatten our economy and make it possible once again, for normal people to live happy, productive lives, America will become a very radical place and quickly.
However, despite blaming the left for this reality, and the unspecified “good things” Carlson alludes to, President Trump, with support from neoliberal Republicans, seems to be continuing this war against fair income distribution, and against the people, through his massive corporate and upper income tax cuts. He has done nothing to help stop the middle, or working, classes from become more precarious, and nothing to halt the “growing hegemony of billionaires”.
Neoliberalism is not conservative
Neoliberalism conserves nothing, and reinforces plutocracy. It does not support traditional virtues if they conflict with profit. It happily disrupts traditional forms of organisation, replacing them with profit driven modes of elite appropriation (for example, the elite managers get more and more of the income). It does not recognise traditional modes of free collaboration. It does not care about preserving land. It does not recognise the traditional responsibility of the elites to ordinary people. It victimises poorer people.
50 years ago, these positions would have seemed crazy. People were able to recognise that wealth was not the equivalent of virtue, that selfishness did not automatically produce social harmony or functionality, that competing corporations did not always produce the best possible results, and that people had the both right to wages upon which they could live comfortably and the right to some control over the corporate sector. Taxation was seen as a way of providing services for people, that had never been provided satisfactorily by the market to most people. There was a sense in which society was thought to exist for the benefit of everyone. Nowadays, neoliberalism is what we are told is common sense. In Margaret Thatcher’s famous words “there is no alternative” – even in the face of the end of civilization as we know it.
Neoliberalism vs Ecology
Let us be really clear here. to neoliberals, the neoliberal corporately dominated economy is not only the most important social institution, it is more important than human life.
In neoliberalism, ordinary people and other creatures live to serve the economy, not the economy to serve the people or restore the ecology. If people have to die to maintain the neoliberal economy, then they will have to die. If the world must be destroyed to temporarily save the neoliberal economy, then it will be destroyed.
We can see this in the neoliberal solutions to Covid and climate change. For Covid, the neoliberal solution is that people must get back to work irrespective of the potential death figures and people must be convinced that Covid is innocuous. President Trump has no solutions for Covid other than being positive, bailing out favoured corporations with taxpayer money, demanding a return to normality, and rushing a vaccine through without proper safety testing. For climate change the solution is similar – protect the wealthy as much as possible, and convince ordinary people that being sacrificed to maintain the power and comfort of established wealth and profit, is true liberty.
One of the problems neoliberalism faces with ecology, is that ecology suggests that ecosystems are fundamental to everything. If you destroy ecosystems then you do not have any economy, or anywhere to live. Humans depend on ecologies and hence economies depend on ecologies, and have to be regulated so as not to destroy those ecologies.
Planetary boundaries and systems cannot be broken with impunity, and yet there is currently nothing to stop corporations from making a profit by destroying those planetary systems. Indeed it is obvious, that it can be profitable in the short term to destroy such systems, and in neoliberalism there is nothing wrong with this.
In order to survive, or to keep current civilisations going, people need to be able to interfere with corporate activities, and this is precisely the situation that neoliberalism attempts to combat and cannot allow to happen.
It is either ecology or neoliberalism; and neoliberalism would rather you die than be able to curtail corporate activity and power.
Neoliberalism as a ‘solution’ to the ‘Crisis of (too much) Democracy’
Why suggest this change from a milder form of capitalism to neoliberalism is a conspiracy, or the result of a conspiracy? Partly because it seems that in the late 1960s and early 70s the political Right was worried about the so-called ‘Crisis of Democracy‘.
The Crisis of Democracy is the idea that too much democracy is a bad thing.
In the late 1960s, people from all walks of life were getting involved in political processes. Women were gaining rights, workers were gaining more rights, there was a huge anti-war movement wondering why so much money was going to the military and its corporate suppliers. There was the beginning of what looked like a massive environmental movement which suggested that that natural world should not be destroyed heedlessly, and that corporations should not be able to pollute or poison people without restriction. It has been estimated that on April 22, 1970, about 10% of the U.S. population came out onto the streets for the first Earth Day – a truly amazing figure. The ‘Club of Rome’ was persuasively arguing that a program of endless economic growth and consumption would lead to an ecological and economic disaster in the first half of the 21st Century. On top of this there was the economic effect of the oil shock, and the birth of post-colonial movements and growing independence in resource rich, but previously colonised, countries.
The prospects of all this extra democracy and chaos was scary for those who had been dominant, and who could see themselves as only just clinging to power.
In short, the capitalist wealth elites feared further loss of their power, and possible loss of their wealth, from public activism and popular political participation. Something had to be changed.
They took advantage of disillusionment with Richard Nixon in the USA to promote distrust in government and attack the value of people participating in formal self-governance, and they promoted the idea of a free market as the basis of all liberty. Liberty was defined as individual and ‘selfish’, not collective or collaborative. Unions were attacked as infringements on workers’ liberty and prosperity, while business associations were encouraged to attack people’s freedoms in the name of prosperity and the market. Political talk became more focused on the economy, and moved away from other aspects of life. Prosperity was more important than becoming ecologically conscious. People who wished to constrain corporate power, or prevent it damaging ecologies, where said to be interfering with the lives of ordinary people. Intellectuals were snobs unless they promoted free markets and so on. Hayek was ‘rediscovered’ and said to be more useful than Keynes, due to the problems of stagflation – which it was true that governments did not know how to deal with. We were told that free markets would solve everything, but after 40 years we can see they clearly have not. They have brought us to our current crisis.
During the Reagan years the Neoliberal Right discovered that they could build support by starting culture wars which would fragment opposition and build loyalties to them. They could start openly partisan and aggressively rude ‘news’ and current affairs services. They could also recruit authoritarian religious people to support Mammon, because those people were likewise frightened of the prospects of the sinful masses coming into power, or of secularists taking over.
Even nowadays we still have Republicans insisting that the US is not a democracy, whenever they worry the people may not support them – although if the Electoral College had served its designed function and ruled that Donald Trump did not have the character to be President and that Clinton should have won, we probably would have them screaming about the importance of the voting allocation.
Some Marxists predicted that the result of this ‘return’ to free markets (as defined above) would be destruction of the welfare state, higher unemployment, stagnation of wages, growing impoverishment, recurrent economic crises, the takeover of the state by the wealth elite and the alienation of people from each other, and from most kinds of real satisfaction. These predictions were certainly more accurate than the official neoliberal predictions of a free market paradise for all. No Marxist, that I’m aware of, was clever enough in the late 1970s or early 80s to predict that ‘free market’ capitalism would destroy the stability of the world’s ecology and climate, as they foolishly expected that intelligent capitalists would avoid such collapse, or that the workers would rebel against the prospects of disaster. They saw capitalism and science as intertwined. This was clearly over-optimistic.
Conclusion
Judging by its results, neoliberalism seems to be a conspiracy promoted by the already powerful to consolidate and extend their power and wealth, Unfortunately, it has unintended consequences which result, firstly, in social stagnation and decline for the vast majority of people, and secondly in a collection of extreme ecological crises which it cannot solve.
In summary: the Right are willing to sacrifice your lives for their power. They will promote fascism if they see it as helping them.
Part of the Republican, or righteous movement, seem to be getting ready for civil war. They are declaring Democrats evil, and suggesting that Biden will not only attempt to deprive them of weaponry, but try and kill them….
Generating Civil War
Some evidence from an ‘independent’ Trump supporter.
No mention of republicans driving cars into peaceful protesters, or waving automatic weapons at protesters while screaming at them, or threatening to douse them in petrol and set it alight, no mention of Trump encouraging police to be more violent, or egging his audiences to beat up people who come to his rallies and disagree, and then vowing to pay their legal defences for assault… and this is completely ignoring the way people on the right regularly make death threats against people like the parents of children who died at the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, or climate scientists or…. I guess this could have nothing to do with their leaders and media telling them some realities are just unreal plots to hurt the USA.
Guess he must live in a news silo.
Lets shift to a more formal source. Tucker Carlson, who reportedly earns 6 million a year for a show on Fox News, (he is one of the media elite, if anyone is), says of Black Lives Matter protesters:
These are definitely not protesters. They’re not even rioters. They’re the armed militia of the Democratic Party. They’re working to overthrow our system of government. They’re trying to put themselves in power.
That’s all obvious now. It’s genuinely sinister. We’re worried about it. We’ve said that. We mean it.
Obviously people wanting the power to change the circumstances of their lives is bad. Carlson goes on to explain that as they are not genuine protests (by his own proclamation), they are obviously something much worse.
This is not about George Floyd. It’s not about ‘systemic racism,’ whatever that is. America is not a racist country. You are not a bad person for living here.
Who said anyone was bad for living in the US? Although this statement serves to imply those who object to BLM, or who are nervous about it, are the real Americans. Likewise, if there is no racism in the US (other than from black people), then clearly these protests are not about anything straightforward like people being killed by cops because of their race, it has to be much, much worse. It is, we are told, Democrats engaged in armed rebellion against American order, even if the protesters do not seem to be armed – after all this was not a pro-Republican protest.
Fox News itself reported on Carlson, clarifying the issues:
Democratic politicians don’t fear the mob… Why? Because they don’t need to. They control the mob. The mob operates with their permission. These are their foot soldiers. This is their militia. In unguarded moments, Democrats make it very clear that they know this….
Career bureaucrats in the federal agencies support the Democratic Party. That means they support the mob as well. It’s their militia too
What you’re watching in the streets is an attempt to crush the holdouts,.. Ask yourself who is being targeted for destruction right now? Anyone who’s not on board with their program…
We’ve known for 50 years that much of the poison in our society emanates from the universities. But we’ve done nothing whatsoever to fix that. We’ve continued to fund them…
There has been no meaningful reform of the CIA or the FBI or any of the other terrifyingly powerful agencies that operate independently from our democracy and on the side of the Democratic Party.
Yes of course, that is why the FBI released the information that they were investigating Clinton’s emails yet again, just before the end of the election campaign. They must have helped Trump through a totally unforeseeable accident. I may be wrong, but I understand him to imply that meaningful reform, means that US institutions must be forced to not, in any way, seem to offend any Republicans.
Carlson is a strong defender of neoliberalism, and of Donald Trump. His programs aim at making his audiences angry. He does not seem interested in people living together, but in people being loyal to the Republicans and their neoliberal policies, and being furious with everyone else.
Opposing Black Lives Matter is part of these tactics. It is reasonable to suppose he does not want people to be curious about what the movement is about, or to develop any sympathies with protesters. The aim is to divide and conquer ordinary people and keep the ruling wealth elites in power. He aims to set up conflicts over relatively unimportant things, while Trump continues his path of eco-destruction and poisoning for corporate profit – and to increase the chance of armed protest, if the ploy fails and the Democrats win an election.
Then there are hashtags like #taketheoath, in which people take the oath of alligence and say God bless our President and lets defend him because we are under attack, etc… Sounds innocent, but the ideas seem to be to pledge loyalty to this particular President as representing the USA, and to imply that people who disagree with him, are not real, loyal, Americans.
Preparation for Civil War is the boosted by the President joining in and saying that the US is under attack by the radical left and the Democrats.
This is from a speech on the 4th July, which is a special day for all people in the USA – a day of unity and pride in the USA.
The PRESIDENT (07:48)… as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.
Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!…. [added from the official Whitehouse transcription]
PRESIDENT: (10:24) … In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us.
Make no mistake. This left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress. To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage….
AUDIENCE: (12:28) Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!
THE PRESIDENT: (12:51) I am pleased to report that yesterday, federal agents arrested the suspected ringleader of the attack on the statue of Andrew Jackson in Washington, D.C. — (applause) — and, in addition, hundreds more have been arrested. (Applause.)
Under the executive order I signed last week — pertaining to the Veterans’ Memorial Preservation and Recognition Act and other laws — people who damage or deface federal statues or monuments will get a minimum of 10 years in prison. (Applause.) And obviously, that includes our beautiful Mount Rushmore. (Applause.)
(13:54) The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets and cities that are run by liberal Democrats in every case is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions. Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition. This movement is openly attacking the legacies of every person on Mount Rushmore. They defiled the memory of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. ….
(25:39) No movement that seeks to dismantle these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart. Can’t happen. No person who remains quiet at the destruction of this resplendent heritage can possibly lead us to a better future. The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice, but in truth, it would demolish both justice and society. It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and it would turn our free and inclusive society into a place of a repression, domination, and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.
Donald Trump: (27:11) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much…..
The PRESIDENT: They would tear down the beliefs, culture and identity, that have made America the most vibrant and tolerant society in the history of the earth. My fellow Americans, it is time to speak up loudly and strongly and powerfully and defend the integrity of our country.
To me this sounds like the President is engaged in a campaign speech, not a national day speech, and is trying to portray people who disagree with him as being enemies of the USA, enemies who are evil – not just opposed to him, but evil. It seems he is setting up a basis for conflict and suppression. It also sounds like he has a dedicated group in the audiences attempting to whip up support and a sense of enthusiasm for his position.
We know Trump had peaceful protesters cleared with tear gas for a photo opportunity outside a Church. Trump’s first defence secretary, retired United States Marine Corps General James Mattis, described these actions as an “abuse of executive authority” and suggested that Trump should be held to account for making “a mockery of our constitution”.
When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside…
We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.”
With the riots, we can also see videos of cops attacking peaceful people, cops arresting and beating journalists, or selecting black journalists to arrest, videos of cops pulling people out of cars, who could not have been in the protests and beating them, presumably because they were black. We can see the pictures of cops pushing an old guy over, and walking past him despite blood pouring out of his ears, and we can hear the President slander the man as an extreme radical.
We can see all of this, but in the right wing media, and the President’s speech, we merely hear that the USA is under attack by leftists, and that people who bravely oppose the mob are being sacked (not good if true). No reflection at all on the problems people are trying to point to, no reflections on the violence of the State, or the suppression of protest. Just the evil of these protesters. And yes, that does not mean that some protesters might not have got out of hand, but the point is that the official Right line is not to recognise any validity at all to the protests. These protesters are bad and not-Americans, unlike those armed protesters who burst into some Democratic State legislatures.
BLM people are being demonised by the Right, for political purposes. Indeed, that is what we should expect, as it helps build up the anger of their base, and build polarisation. But the polarisation already exists because Black Live don’t appear to matter.
The point of all generating all this hysteria about an evil left, is that if you are Republican and the life of Republicans is threatened, then you can do anything in retaliation. You can suppress votes. You can lie. You can probably encourage some preemptive strikes to help intensify the tension, and lead to some actual violence against people. If a group was wanting a civil war then giving the people who want violence the sense that they are a persecuted minority, is a good way to go.
Background
For some while now Republicans and their media have been cultivating the idea that they and their supporters are the only real Americans, that they are people who should rule, and that people who oppose them are traitors, degenerate and deserve to be defeated in any way possible.
Trump’s whole strategy of life is to rip off others, smear others, abuse others and create conflict. His main drive is to find people to blame and abuse, and to praise himself. I’ve never seen any sign whatsoever of him trying to reach out to all Americans, and bring the nation to work together in peace. He always tries to splinter people. Civil war is the end point of what he wants, and how he behaves.
As ex-marine general Mattis says:
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort.
While people may want President Trump to be a competent innocent, or a person fighting bravely against the Deep State, there is no evidence of it anywhere.
What we see from him is the neoliberal war for power in its final stages. The ultimate sacrifice of people to the gods of money. Trump is the Right’s perfect demagogue and apparently without any principle other than gaining victory. He delivers almost exactly what this Dark Right want. He is one of the real wealth elite that rules the US for its own interests.
Conclusion
There is every indication that Trump was prepared to help the Republicans claim the last election was stolen if he lost, and he seems to be doing the same again. This inability to take loss fundamentally means civil war, and the memes and speeches, we began with, are preparations for it.
If it was just Trump trying to ramp up civil war if he looses, I would worry, but the subjective evidence suggests that the Party as well as the usual neoliberal forces are also in favour of civil war in response to loss – and that is very worrying. However, they may change their minds. I guess part of their problem is that Trump has been so incompetent that he has almost given media respectability to the left again, and to mild attempts to reign in corporate supremacy in the Green New Deal.
From an environmentalists point of view the Green New Deal is not enough action and too late, but from the neoliberal wealth elite’s point of view it could foreshadow a beginning of the end for ecological destruction, and provoke some kind of more equitable distribution of wealth and power. It could restart what they saw, in the 1970s, as the Crisis of Democracy; that is the participation of ordinary people in government.
If it takes civil war to stop that, they may well feel war is justified.
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 