[Why do I keep writing about Trump? Isn’t this blog supposed to be about climate and technology? Yes, but it is also about disorder and unintended consequences, and the sociology of information.
In the contemporary world Trump has become central to, and illustrative of, these phenomena. He is not responsible for them, but he seems to use, and intensify, them to both keep power and to assert power. He uses the dynamics which are already present with apparent expertise, and his success with those dynamics not only shows something about how they work, but may eventually undermine the ability of the USA to function. That is why I find Trump and ‘Trumpism’, interesting.]
Democrats and the left in general are being way too optimistic about what is happening in Washington.
Trump has not left the White House. He has another two months in which he has the power of an elected King and, given he owns the attorney general and many judges, pretty much the power of an absolute monarchy.
He is engaging in legal warfare. He is stacking agencies with his own people (including a guy who had called Obama a “terrorist leader”) and sacking opponents (including the man who contradicted him over the potential use of the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty military units against protests). It is reported that he was wanting to strike Iran’s main nuclear site, as Iran was (not surprisingly) increasing uranium stockpiles. He was persuaded not to, possibly by Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo and others [1], [2]. The Iranians warned that “Any action against the Iranian nation would certainly face a crushing response” [3]. Assuming he leaves office, Trump has two months left in which to try and threaten and irritate the Iranians into a war, so we shall have to see what happens.
He has the Republican party gathered around him, playing along with him, to keep their power and position. He has a massive network of underground media which has no responsibility to anyone or any Truth other than Republican Victory, and the victory of the wealth elites.
On top of that he can, and largely has, established in the minds of Republican voters that there is a question about this election. And that question will remain, even if all of Trump’s challenges fail in the courts, or in the recounts (And some may succeed, who knows? Mistakes do happen). It may even remain if he concedes, but he may never concede – why should he?
That will justify Republican non-cooperation with Biden. It will justify Republican attempts to impeach Biden, and find cause to impeach him – this is despite the ease with which they refused to even listen to the evidence about Trump.
Even if the voting claims do not pan out, then some Republican states might say there is enough doubt to ignore the votes and use their powers to send whomsoever they want to the Electoral College – which would probably benefit Trump. There are apparently precedents.
But even if this does not happen in enough States to make a difference, Trump’s current campaign will keep the fake news sites hot and may even justify continual popular insurrection. Attempts to end that insurrection will be taken as showing the repressive nature of Democrats and the ‘deep state‘. It is likely to justify a Trump family campaign at the next election and the return of overt fascism – this time with few pretenses.
You should not dismiss what he might do.
Most democrats are assuming the law and convention counts for something. They gave in to the ‘referees’ in the Bush/Gore election. However, authoritarians know the law is about power and establishing their legitimacy. It is a weapon – nothing else.
The law will not save us against a united determination by a major power block to keep power – especially if one side foolishly believes in the others obedience to lawful process and convention.
The usual answer is that it is someone who works with ‘dark forces’.
However that is not quite enough. Even if we were clear what ‘dark forces’ were, sometimes we need to work with the chaos, or destructiveness, to produce healing.
I guess that is the point: the black magician works with dark forces for their own personal power or for the pleasure of destruction.
The most obvious dark forces present today, are the forces of the socially repressed but vengeful collective unconscious – brought out by a failing and flailing society. Trump manifests what Jung calls the shadow, the denied harmful parts of the collective personality, and its projection onto those with little power.
The use of these forces for personal power and destruction is why I think of Trump as a ‘black Shaman’.
[I should add that there are large dispute as to whether ‘shaman’ is a valid analytical category – see Kehoe’s book Shamans and Religion for a relatively good introduction to the debate – I’m using the term in its normal western meaning of a person who summons, travels with and/or listens to spirits, even if that is no excuse]
Trump seems to have spent most of his life creating chaos and destruction to build his power and support his ‘righteousness’ or his apparently unending ability to ignore, or celebrate the harms he creates – an ability which often seems contagious, so that we are dealing with collective shadow forces.
The Background
In business Trump appears to use threats and the promise of using the law to attack, and an ability not to be held responsible for failure. He is an excellent salesman, and self-promoter, although it appears he sees what he wants to see, rather than face ‘what is’. He is excellent at self-deception. I am sure he really believes that Covid is not a problem and that he cannot lose.
However, he has many failures and not a few frauds to his name, but is imagined to be a success. this imagined success is vital to his real success.
He has repeatedly threatened to sue individuals who speculate he’s exaggerating about his riches, and he once even made good on such a threat, suing the author of the 2005 book TrumpNation for estimating that his empire was worth as little as $150 million. (That lawsuit was thrown out.) Forbes editors also say Trump regularly lobbies them to increase the magazine’s estimates of his wealth…. Forbes pegs his fortune at about $4.5 billion
having looked at Donald Trump’s detailed financial filing with the Federal Election Commission: He owns assets worth at least $1.4 billion and has liabilities of at least $265 million.
He supposedly persuaded workers in his Casino companies to take stock in the company as their pension fund, so when the companies went bust the workers lost their pensions. This was perfectly legal. Even more scrupulously:
Trump used his company as a means of transferring his personal debt load onto shareholders, issuing rounds of junk bonds to build up cash that would erase his own debts.
So he partly salvaged his loses on the backs of his workers. Despite this, his supposed business success, his TV success and his celebrity, makes him a symbol of the American dream. Winning in America creates its own morality, which justifies that victory. He is considered ‘tough.’ Even his documented tax evasion might help amongst those who hate taxes. He is not a person, but a vessel for shadow mana – a projection of what American people should want to be, and do want to be – although it is probable that a nation composed of people like him would collapse in faction and distrust. However, his image attracts and energises; even those who do not worship him, still find their thoughts returning to him, without considerable effort – and this reinforces his attraction and centrality to the world.
In politics, he works with, and summons up, the genuine grievances of the American people, who have been abandoned, suppressed, marginalised, and thrown out of decent paying work and who suffer precarious survival chances. They face loss of home and landscape, and have lost hope, through the consequences of the kinds of policies he, and his fellowship of the wealth elite have bought and supported for their own benefit.
The American people’s living standards have at best remained stable. Social mobility appears to have slowed. Their children probably don’t have a great future. Yet they are bombarded with messages that tell them if they just think positively, or act right, then they can overcome everything. They too can learn The Secret and succeed. They can be wealthy, sexy, healthy and attractive. Those who fail to do this are clearly worthless – it’s easy after all, just a matter of correct thinking. In the neoliberal illusion, there can be no talk of social class or opportunity structures (inequality, corporate power, the distribution of wealth, and the coming environmental collapse) which might explain the problem. It is all personal failure, which is also known to be untrue. It is an immobilising contradiction.
Trump gives people hope again. He is is one of the few politicians (who can get media coverage) who acknowledges what people feel, and directs that feeling into action – even if the action is primarily just letting off steam, or threatening outgroups. His followers can do something, and feel something together with crowds of others feeling the same, which gives them validation. Now, they can fight for their own improvement, and positively hope for further upgrades.
Rather than cultivate that grievance so as to overturn the policies that make the problems, or investigate what should be done to deal with these real problems, Trump turns those grievances into hatred and anger against his enemies – who just happen to be the people most likely (not certainly) to repeal those destructive policies.
Trump gives the real grievances a false target, and given that you cannot talk widely about the real causes of ordinary peoples’ loss in the US, then it works pretty persuasively. After all the mainstream media says similar things, and ignores or hides the real problems, and has been for a long time. This is part of what I have called the “Neoliberal Conspiracy” initiated by the powerful and wealthy. Ordinary people seem to be being conspired against by the wealth elites, although it is hard to tell if the conspiracy is deliberate, or whether it just grows out of the wealth elites defining corporate power and corporately dominated “free markets” as good.
In this sense, Trump benefits twice: once from the policies that transfer the people’s wealth to himself and which support his business crimes against workers and contractors, and second from the anger that the results of these policies generates.
Trump persuasively creates a fictional world in which life makes sense, people can find someone to blame (which is easier to deal with, than blaming the system which is praised on all sides), and he has plenty of people who have already been playing along with that position, who try to be radical by dismissing any critical narratives about real power, and pretending that Trump stands alone, with real Americans, against the horrors. We can see that what seem to be pure right wing ‘news’ sites are flourishing, without responsibility, and are now perhaps the new mainstream – boosting the message. The background creates the conditions for his performance.
Trump as ‘Shaman’
Trump is dependent on his audience for energy. He must give speeches to feel their energies flowing through him. In that sense he seems dependent on the crowds for meaning as they are dependent on him for meaning. And yet the speeches are odd, full of incoherent rambling. Looked at as words they can be almost meaningless, yet I suspect they act as incantations – disrupting what is left of the rational mind and replacing it, like an Eriksonian hypnotist, with repeated phrases about how great we are, how persecuted we are, how we can overcome everything, how things are going well, how the Democrats are traitors. How things are better if we just hand over our power to the shaman.
You know, when people see it, I walk in, we do polls, and they do a poll. “We interviewed 73 people, and President Trump is down 57 points.” This is a poll. See, this is a poll. When you draw crowds like this. This is not the crowd of somebody that’s going to lose the state of Michigan. This is not. This is not. And look at this crowd. You can’t even see the end of it. You can’t. This is not the crowd of a second place finisher. Do you agree with that? No. No. This is our crowd, all together. We’re in this together and we’re doing it together. As long as I’m President, we will remain the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere on this planet. And for the first time, we are energy independent. You never heard that term before. We’re energy independent, and you know, we have very good relationships in different parts of the world. In some we help. We don’t have to, though. Now we don’t have to do … We do what we want, but we have some very good allies and partners that we’ll help them, but we don’t need their oil anymore. We have so much oil. We have more oil than anybody, okay? And it’s an incredible thing that it’s happened over the last few years. A lot of great things. And you’re paying, what, $2 a gallon for your gasoline? That’s okay.
Through this incantation, and subversion of coherent thinking, he gives hope. He gives endless hypnotic positive assertions. Things are not bad, the awareness of bad things is promoted by his enemies, you can ignore them, as things really are going well. And if some of the media don’t agree with him, then that just proves everything is really fine, because we know the media are evil.
And it doesn’t matter if he lies, the lies point to the greater truth. As a shaman, he utters mystic symbols, which point towards the real truth of what cannot be said (perhaps what the truth should be). This is the truth that is felt in the heart or in the gut – which needs no testing. Reasonable speech tends not to speak to the passions, it is denuded of affect and ineffective – especially to crowds who want passion – who want to be enlivened, lifted out of a sense of powerlessness – and he enlivens them – he frees their energy. And this is Good.
Looked at literally much of what he says is lies. Lies repeated so often, they become assertions of faith – that mark the believer. As Hannah Arendt said:
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
…one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness…..
If the ‘other side’ can be defined as responsible for all evil, then victory is all that counts. If lies help win that victory, split the opponents, or cause them discomfort the lies are good by definition. It does not matter if words are literally false.
Such lies function as what some psychologists call “blue lies”; lies which are told on behalf of one’s group against another group – they reinforce identity (and the denied identity politics Trump engages in), and are recognised as being used to hurt the others. These lies can:
actually strengthen the bonds among the members of that group….
University of Toronto psychologist Kang Lee explains, blue lies fall in between generous “white” lies and selfish “black” ones. “You can tell a blue lie against another group,” he says, which makes it simultaneously selfless and self-serving….
The lies are beneficial for your group…. They help bring some people together by deceiving those in another group….
“Many people are angry about how they have been left behind in the current economic climate” [Maurice Schweitzer says]… Trump has tapped into that anger, and he is trusted because he professes to feel angry about the same things.”
“Trump has created a siege-like mentality,” says Schweitzer. “Foreign countries are out to get us; the media is out to get him. This is a rallying cry that bonds people together.”
The suggestion Trump makes is that Trump is persecuted like his followers are persecuted. He is one of them. If correct, this serves as a further example of the functioning of ingroups and outgroups. Outgroups are those who can be lied about when it benefits the ingroup, or confuses the outgroup, or angers them. If the ingroup lies about itself to boost its standing and power, that is also good. If the outgroup lies about anything, then that is still bad, as it points to their greater falsehood.
These lies are to believed when useful. They may never be taken entirely seriously, but they are never entirely disbelieved, or put aside (truth and falsehood are no longer taken as absolute opposites in practice). People are free to use the lies whenever it becomes time to denounce the others, and they will not be called out. At worst these lies are taken as rumours which point to the real truth about how dastardly the others are.
Lying can also be regarded as an art which produces admiration. A person might go along with the lies in admiration of the sheer entertaining effrontery and fantasy of it, and because of their inner truth. Going along with the lies, may well later lead to a tacit belief in the lies.
Sometimes Trump’s aim seems to be simply to turn his followers grievances against those who stand up to him, or who say he was wrong (and get defined as outgroup), but would not threaten the policies which are the basis of his power. Part of the illusion he attempts to create is that he is always right, so people who disagree must be wrong, and be deliberate saboteurs; again outgroups are evil. In any case they are enemies, and they are the real liars.
In this act of suppression, he can use the force of others. It was not he who gets armed people into the streets, or who generates death threats to Dr. Fauci, it is the peoples’ legitimate anger which he encourages and excuses. Through these threats they are standing up to the elite – unfortunately not the right elites.
He also attempts to create the idea he is the victim; “no president has been more persecuted than myself”. This relies on people’s short memories. Many presidents have been attacked more than him; some have been shot, some have faced years of intrusive inquiries with little result.
However, as already stated, this victimhood establishes the idea he is one of the real people who are victimised daily, just as his misspelling, and incoherence in his tweets, and the mockery they promote, supports this ideal connection; and as does the dismissive snobbishness of much of the ‘intellectual’ response to Trump – that will not recognise the real base of his power in people’s discontent and powerlessness.
However, his victimisation is fictitious, and it is easy for him to stand against it – he is squarely part of the inherited wealth elite, he has wealthy and powerful contacts in the US and internationally, and he is President of the United States – an elected King, with power of war, secret police, appointment of justice, pardon and preferment. This victimisation distracts from his overt power, and creates the illusion he is fighting against what oppresses the people, and that he is standing up for them, and mastering their problems. And he can invent solutions which have never happened, but such is his persuasive power that his supporters do not seem to question this, as these events should be happening, and will if we hold strongly to the belief and don’t challenge it.
Given the problems he identifies are immigrants, Mexicans, black people, rioters, professors, journalists, feminists etc., these are also relatively easy to defeat. They also fit in with the already established modes of hatred in the community – people who are different – people who are sometimes unpleasant, or up themselves, but who have little power.
These processes also disarm the Democrats and other opponents, who seem to think, even after these past four years of Presidency, that the law will stand up and act to enforce the conventions and fair play, when the law is largely a tool of power, and Trump and his party are the power.
Occupy Washington
The current occupation of the White House illustrates how this works.
Before the elections, Trump tried to cast doubt on the results if he lost. He threatened to challenge the results. He campaigned on the idea that his followers were going to be cheated and disenfranchised – while attempting to disenfranchise large parts of the population by making pre-polling difficult where possible, by casting doubt on postal votes and trying to suggest postal votes should not be counted, or would not be counted. This was on top of the usual Republican efforts to prevent people in their outgroups from voting. He was doing what he alleged the enemy was doing. That someone was doing it, made it plausible the enemy would do it. This would also distract from the fact that his side was doing it.
However even if these Republican threats to disenfranchise people did not disturb the awareness of his followers, they were still rightly feeling cheated (the system does not work for them) and disenfranchised (the vote and the party, really does not deliver people who really represent them or do anything for them). Corporations ride over them. They are even threatened with losing employment, livelihood and survival to protect the despicable weak because of Covid.
On top of that, if the other side is truly evil and victory is all that counts, then Trump’s behaviour is perfectly ‘reasonable’. If the outgroup won then it would clearly be dire, because even when ‘our group’ wins the consequences are not great now (possibly in the future) – imagine how bad it would be if the others got in?
So Trump used people’s sense of disenfranchisement to increase their disenfranchisement, and set up the possibility of a rule by force. A rule in which he stayed in the White House whatever the people voted. This rule would sever any responsibility to the people, because he had broken the system. What keeps it going is he, himself and his shamanic power to channel unconscious rage at the system, whose workings people are not conscious of. He can appoint who he wants to, and do whatever he wants, because he spoke directly to the people and reinforced the deception through scapegoating. Republican politicians would know that they have depended on the deception for their power and, if the real fraud was revealed, their party would probably suffer – although in reality many people would never believe the fraud was unreal. How could the President, the magic man, the success icon, really loose?
The politicians would also know that nobody would protect them from the President’s vengeance, if they did not support him.
At this moment what does it cost them to play along with the President? If he goes, and the fraud charges stick, they can use them to justify attempting to tear Biden down. If the fraud charges fade away, they can carry on as usual, without fearing others in their party, and if the President succeeds in his coup, then they can claim to have supported the fraud charges all along and without having risked the wrath of the autocrat. Also they might find it reassuringly useful to believe that the Democrats cheat and lie like they do themselves, that makes it fair.
Comments by Jung
As some people will recognise this piece is influenced by memories of Jung’s work on the period before World War II.
After writing this piece I browsed Jung’s collected Works Vol 10 Civilisation in Transition, to see what I had forgotten. In this section are some very free paraphrases of what Jung wrote, together with a few paragraphs from an old interview, and a few additions by myself I have substituted Americans for Germans for example – please don’t take these as direct quotations from Jung, hopefully they add to the ‘analysis’ above.
Of course Jung is talking about Hitler, not Trump, and while they may be very different, the similarities seem significant enough for the purpose.
*****
[#454] The individual Americans’ feeling of weakness, indeed of non-existence brought about by the social system and its response to them, was thus compensated by the eruption of hitherto unknown desires for power. It was the revolt of the powerless. Americans wanted order, wanted revenge, and wanted a meaningful life, but they made the fatal mistake of choosing a victim, and creator, of disorder and unchecked greed, for their leader.
This man was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat.
[#419] Another diagnosis of Trump would be ‘pseudologia phantastica’ which is characterized by a peculiar talent for believing one’s own lies. … Nothing has such a convincing effect as a lie one invents and believes oneself, or an evil deed or intention whose righteousness one regards as self-evident. Especially if it can be changed for another lie as needed – which one also believes is true. A person who tells people what they want to hear, at that moment, will nearly always be more persuasive, than one who is consistent, or checked by reality.
[#418] All these pathological features — complete lack of insight into one’s own character, auto-erotic self-admiration, denigration and terrorization of one’s fellow man (how contemptuously Trump speaks), ability to summon the shadow, falsification of reality, determination to impress by fair means or foul, bluffing and double-crossing — all these were united in the man whom a strange fate chose to be the political, moral, and religious spokesman of the USA for four[?] years.
Is this pure chance? Or is it some kind of destructive compensation? Some longing for death and destruction to break the monotony and desperation of people’s lives?
[#454] Because of his closeness to the shadow, Trump spoke for that shadow (the inferior part of everybody’s personality), to an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why people went for him. These failings of psychic development allowed the President to crystalise the problem, and symbolise a way forward…. He gave them other people to denounce; a focus for their hatred and loss. He joined them together in their collective shadow. He forged that shadow from the ruins of the country and its despair. He gave relief with a cause identified, even if wrong.
[#455] In Trump, every American should have seen his own shadow, his own worst danger. It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow. But how could the Americans be expected to understand this, when nobody in the world can understand such a simple truth when it applies to them? How many on the left, gained a sense of righteousness for themselves by denouncing Trump’s followers as their own shadow, rather than engaged with them as people? The point of the shadow is to separate, and promote retreat into fantasy and violence, to keep oneself proud, while bonding with others who denounce the same people.
[interview] Trump’s voice is nothing other than his own unconscious, into which the American people have projected their own being; that is, the unconscious of seventy or so million Americans. That is what makes him powerful. Without the American people, and their collective psychological states, he would be nothing…
[interview] Trump does not think – he listens to his shadow and its whispers and speaks it directly. He is like a man who listens intently to a stream of suggestions in a whispered voice from a mysterious source, and then acts upon them….
[interview] Trump’s power is not political, it is magical. With his unconscious perception of the real balance of political forces at home and in the world, he has so far overcome the merely rational expectations of any opponent. His apparent irrationality is a strength, which undermines any supposedly rationally acting opposition with its unreal, customary and derogatory, expectations of him….
[#426] Believing one’s own lies when the wish is father to the lie is a well known hysterical symptom and a distinct sign of a sense of inferiority – one cannot face up to truth… Reality, only dimly perceived at best, is to be completely blotted out. In an individual we call this sort of thing an hysterical twilight-state. When a whole nation finds itself in this condition it will follow a mediumistic leader over the housetops with a sleep-walker’s assurance, only to land in the street with a broken back.
[interview] With Trump you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man; because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation, or the nation’s disruptive unconscious. What he thinks at that moment is taken by him as righteous with no quarter. Agreeing with him merely 95% of the time may not be enough to satisfy him. I take it to be literally true that he has no personal friend. How can you talk intimately with such a person?
[#432] The phenomenon we have witnessed in America is nothing less than an outbreak of epidemic insanity, an irruption of the unconscious into what seemed to be a tolerably well-ordered world (but which, ultimately, was not), channeled by an otherwise empty shaman, probably initially by accident, until he came to crave the power and meaning it gave his own life.
Trump is no mere gangster or thug and understanding him as such will not help combat him.
Addenda June 2025
Trump celebrates the Shadow of America. It is all out in the open: greed, pettiness, bluster vindictiveness, fear of difference (whether political, racial, sexual, intellectual), sacrifice of the inferior, attraction to violence and dominance, vicious hierarchies, and multiple people beating up on much fewer people. Through identification with the leader people can throw off repression of the shadow, which is energising and exuberant. You can hurt anyone who is not approved. It feels good to throw off repression along with crowds of others. By following Trump you can be free.
There is so much information coming in, I could be mistaken about anything at this moment, but that is the situation that we live in, so let’s go on anyway. The talk is of fraud, and it is probable someone is being fraudulent.
If there was widespread evidence of fraud coming from independent sources, then it would be vital to challenge the election result. However, the challenge is largely coming from people who don’t seem to have much regard for the truth, who have spent months beforehand preparing to challenge the results, who tried to make pre-poll voting as awkward as possible by limiting booths, who tried to stop mail voting, who tried to stop the post office delivering mailed votes, who tried to stop the counting of mail votes, who have argued that no votes should be counted after election day, who regularly try to disenfranchise large sections of the population, who have essentially threatened not to leave power, who alleged the results of the last election that they won were fake because they did not win the popular vote, who threatened that they would only accept the results of the previous election if they won, who ‘joked’ about staying for at least three terms, who seem unconcerned about foreign states intervening in the election on their behalf, who actually asked supporters to vote twice, who never seem to worry about how easy it is to hack voting machines, and so on. Coming from those people, it simply seems a way of potentially avoiding loss.
For some strange reason despite the claims of fraud, the Republicans have managed to keep the Senate, and it looks like they managed to take seats in the lower house, but they managed to lose several ‘Republican States’ in the Presidential vote. This seems to be being forgotten – so its an odd set of election frauds.
It is also odd, because, previously, Republicans fought hard and successfully to prevent a recount in Florida in the Bush/Gore Election, so their current concern with voter fraud, and preventing a miscount, is a bit weird at best. Even more weirdly, they have not yet lost the Presidential election, and they seem to be asking for counting to stop because the results are not going their way – not to examine fraud. This could change of course.
That a party wants to win, or thinks they should win, is not evidence they have won. That they think the votes should not change when absentee votes are counted is not evidence either.
True, votes need to be held up to scrutiny. People from both parties need to watch the counting (which as far as I can see is happening, despite allegations otherwise), although crowds of unofficial observers are not being let in, for what seem like obvious reasons to me, unless you want vote theft to occur. So its fair enough that people outside observe through binoculars if that makes them happy, although a video link would be easy to maintain.
All votes need to be counted, unless there is evidence which suggests particular votes are fake – such as two postal, or booth, votes supposedly from the same person. With postal votes, it is easy to set the votes aside for investigation before counting. We need to find out how many people, if any, appear to have voted twice. We could even ask which vote the person wants to be accepted, if the person wants to comment and we cannot prove they voted twice. Checking votes for legitimacy, should be easy to do – otherwise the system needs changing.
Recounts need to be routine, not special, especially if the vote is close. Anyone can make mistakes. However, votes should not be discarded because they are votes for the ‘wrong person,’ and parties should not be able to stop a recount when the result is close.
Democracy depends upon conventions. If the conventions become routinely broken, then democracy becomes broken. President Trump has destroyed conventions repeatedly. His party even refused to listen to the evidence in his impeachment case. He lies repeatedly. He lies to such an extent, that any sensible person would think that any assertion Trump makes which appears to benefit himself, is likely to be false, unless proven otherwise.
Democracy, of any type, depends on the assumption that your opponents are honourable. Unfortunately after this election it seems impossible to assume our opponents are honourable. It does not matter what side you are on, Donald Trump has now disrupted that sense of honour for everyone , and this will almost certainly not be fixed easily. Whoever wins, significant numbers of the other side will feel they have been cheated, and will likely feel any future cheating and dishonesty by themselves is justified by this.
Democracy is fragile. US democracy may never recover from what has happened, because Trump has set a precedent for ignoring conventions and for discovering that abuse of power can be hidden by assertion, party support, repeated fiction and what looks like a dedicated networked propaganda machine of youtube videos, internet rumour, and minor stations. Every unscrupulous politician in the world will have learnt how easy this is.
Trump will probably not stop the destabilisation. There is a story told by Richard Branson, from before the 2016 election, which possibly illustrates Trump’s behaviour. You don’t have to trust Branson, for it to be relevant, but what did he gain from this?
Some years ago, Mr Trump invited me to lunch for a one-to-one meeting at his apartment in Manhattan. We had not met before and I accepted. Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.
He didn’t speak about anything else and I found it very bizarre. I told him I didn’t think it was the best way of spending his life…..
I was baffled why he had invited me to lunch solely to tell me this. For a moment, I even wondered if he was going to ask me for financial help. If he had, I would have become the sixth person on his list!
One story is not evidence of anything, but it fits with what we know of Trump’s continual vindictiveness against those he perceives as opponents. We also know he blames others for his failures.
According to USA Today back in 2016:
the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits….
since he announced his candidacy a year ago, at least 70 new cases have been filed, about evenly divided between lawsuits filed by him and his companies and those filed against them. And the records review found at least 50 civil lawsuits remain open even as he moves toward claiming the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in seven weeks….
The legal actions provide clues to the leadership style the billionaire businessman would bring to bear as commander in chief. He sometimes responds to even small disputes with overwhelming legal force. He doesn’t hesitate to deploy his wealth and legal firepower against adversaries with limited resources, such as homeowners. He sometimes refuses to pay real estate brokers, lawyers and other vendors.
As he campaigns, Trump often touts his skills as a negotiator. The analysis shows that lawsuits are one of his primary negotiating tools. He turns to litigation to distance himself from failing projects that relied on the Trump brand to secure investments.
This is unsual, even for an ‘important’ business person.
Trump does appears vengeful, and probably will continue his denial of loss and use the courts in an attempt to prevent loss. It seems improbable he will concede defeat and he will cling on in the hope that he can make any Biden victory be the subject of suspicion and contempt – wrecking things for others might be pleasurable for him. He has until mid January to wreck as much as he can – it is only convention that stops sitting presidents from doing this after they are voted out.
Whether he needs to be successful or not in persuading his selected judges to decide for him, we are all probably set for an even greater run of authoritarian and non democratic power, whatever the declared result of the election.
We should also remember, that should he get in, Biden will have to work with a hostile Senate, particularly if they stick with the view he is a fraud, that attacking him as a fraud is popular electorally, or with the view they had of Obama that they need to destroy him. Then it will be awkward to get anything done.
Likewise, there is probably no solution to the Covid problem, now the disease is so established, and now the anti-vax movement will feel free to protest against Trump’s vaccination solution given that Trump is not proposing it.
This is a description of how I try to sort out the highly politicised from the less politicised information. It cannot be definitive and other people may well do a lot better in smaller space.
Its important because almost all research into, or attempts to understand, contemporary social phenomena cannot avoid politicised information or the media – it is the sea we swim in, the air we breathe etc.
Video evidence
First off, never trust 5-10 second clips on youtube, or elsewhere, of someone saying something.
This technique of extraction is frequently a deception, or at best aims to give a false impression. Some tapes are edited so that the subject of the comment is provided by the narrator/presenter rather than the person speaking, which makes distortion even more likely. “Here is Bill Gates laughing at the State of world economy” Shift to Bill Gates saying “We are stuffed” nervous giggle. Everything is being framed, or given meaning, by the commentator providing context, not by the person being ‘quoted’ or their conversation.
Meaning does not inhere in words alone, but in words and context together. Giving words a completely different context can change the meaning of the words radically.
Consequently, you always need a considerable amount of the actual interview before and after the particular clip, to figure out what people are trying to say. Often people fail to say what the context makes clear they are trying to say – live language is messy and often badly formed. The short clip usually depends, for its political effect, on people not bothering to check up the actual context.
It is wise to be even more distrustful of clips which slow down a person’s facial expressions or freeze them.
If there is a facial close up, then we need to check whether that actually has anything to do with what is happening. For example, there was a video of Trump’s expressions when he was asked to condemn white supremacy in the last debate. His pain, reluctance and dilemma seemed obvious. However, the close up had no context that could not have been added by the editors. Did his expressions have anything to do with the questions he was being asked in the background? Were the shots from somewhere else in the interview? In other words the presentation could be perfectly real, but we were not given the evidence to make sure it was real. If we took it at ‘face value’ then we were trusting the video makers and allowing them to manipulate us, if that was what they wanted to do.
Likewise a couple of days ago I saw a video of people being beaten up at a Trump Rally and a cut back to Trump saying something like “We are having a really good time here. USA, USA, USA” – how do I know Trump’s comments had anything to do with the beating without more context? Before I would comment on his facial expressions, or the sayings, I would need to check other videos, full transcripts etc.
Videos are easily edited nowadays, and some people can construct fake videos of people saying things they did not, completely from scratch.
Believing with your own eyes, can need caution, but believing a short and obviously cut video is leaving yourself open to manipulation.
The research principle is simple. When you are using someone’s words against them then always start with the best and most complete source, and make the context visible. Be aware that some people will chop up and misquote sources, so you always need to check.
Go to the full source, if possible
Consequently, when someone shows me or tells me of something particularly stupid, ignorant, incoherent or vicious that Trump has said. I refuse the 5 second youtube clip and go to the whole transcripts (when possible – the WhiteHouse and Rev.com seem good sources) – or to his tweets (there is also a search engine for his tweets). If there is a real issue as to what he said, then transcripts with video are good, as its easier to get body language as a context as well as other words, situation and what he is responding too, if necessary.
Tweets are useful because they can show you how some Trump supporters are reading what he has written. This helps reveal ‘dog whistles’ and makes it easier take note of fake corrections (when he has officially doing as his advisors advise but which he does not believe). But even that does not necessarily tell us what Trump himself thinks. For that you need to look at the surrounding Trump tweets to get the context.
Repetition helps resolve meaning and intent
Repetition says a lot. Anyone can say things they would rather not have said in a moment of passion, but if they say it repeatedly then it is telling. For example, if we get repeated messages from Trump telling police to be violent towards protestors, or telling supporters to beat up protestors, or giving support for people who hurt protestors or offering to pay their legal fees, or supporting people who do armed protests and occupations, then we can more sure that this is substantial part of his politics. Whether you want to call this ‘fascist’ or not is up to you – that is an interpretation.
Likewise if a person repeatedly says they know more about ‘blah’ than people who work in ‘blah’ for lots of different ‘blahs’, then we can hypothesise that they really do think they know nearly everything, and are not smart enough to recognise their incompetence in fields they have no experience in. Thus we can be less inclined to take their pronouncements in those fields as being accurate or automatically trustworthy.
Again if a person repeatedly contradicts what they said less than five minutes ago, then that is also part of their modes of operation.
These are reasons why some of my blogs about Trump go on and on. I’m just trying to use lots of his words to show that what he is saying, or how he approaches a problem, is not a momentary aberration. I provide lots of context, so it is easier to conclude that he actually does seem to think in that way….
The same with anyone, I go to a decent whole source, not a hostile newspaper, TV channel or a person on Youtube, if at all possible.
Confirmation from the person
If I can’t find any official source for some widely alleged process, such as for Trump’s supposed war on child rapists, I check what is available and look at how plausible it is. Has Trump tweeted about this a lot (before recently, when he may have heard its popular with his voters)? Has he spoken about it a lot (before recently)? Are there any of the results being claimed, being reported or used by the Republican party officially in a tight election campaign when it would be useful? Given the lack of any supporting evidence of material which we would not expect to find under any President (checking what past presidents have done or said), this war does not seem remotely plausible.
Trump has not acknowledged it, until it became useful. The charges which are supposedly being made against major ‘enemies’ have not been laid. He has not confirmed them, or the evidence against his enemies. Just vague assertions.
What reasons do we have to think that ‘Q’ or their followers are not false flags? are not part of the ‘Re-elect Trump committee?’ are not lying or directing us to false sources, and so on?
Looking for overt bias
If a youtube or media, presentation continually and casually slams one side of politics and avoids important parts of the question which could throw a bad light on their side, then I assume they are probably so biased as to be ‘fake news’, and only to be taken seriously as ethnographic studies. Even so, one should never dismiss the possibility that they could be right on occasions. There is always the joke about the stopped clock.
I generally save myself time by assuming that the Murdoch Empire lies and abuses people for political reasons. They seem to attempt to generate anger and contempt in their audience against their enemies. This generally shuts down curiosity and investigation in that audience – these enemies are not worth checking up on. Everytime I’ve ever investigated something the Murdoch Empire have been plugging, which sounds off, it has turned out to be wrong. However, I still quote Murdoch stuff because sometimes it is a useful source for what people believe, or which creates what people believe. Again, they may sometimes be correct, just remember the hypothesis that their prime function is to please their owner and boost his power.
However, if someone in the Murdoch Empire reports something that happens to slam those that Murdoch normally supports, then that is probably worth investigating, as possibly accurate.
Mainstream media
A frequently used argument takes the form of “you rely too much on mainstream media.” Or you don’t do research because you rely on mainstream media.
Let us be real, mainstream media is not always accurate. Some media is more biased than others. Often I find people who say this tend to trust highly biased mainstream media, that appears to condemn other media as part of its marketing campaigns – to manufacture trust for itself.
However, the bias of mainstream media does not mean that a person on youtube who reports the news you want to hear, is necessarily unbiased, nor attempting to manipulate you, or not financed by those attempting to manipulate you. Exactly the same tests should be applied to them as you might apply to mainstream media. To repeat: if they casually nearly always dismiss one side of politics, then the chances are high they are not doing their research.
However, you define mainstream media, (some people appear to say that Fox or Breitbart are not mainstream, which almost certainly shows they are likely to have been manipulated), it does not mean that everything which is reported as mainstream is necessarily untrue. I’ve said before that if the mainstream media tells me that it is likely that a 200m fall without some form of safety equipment will kill me, then I don’t have to disbelieve it on principle. Again the problem is that I am likely to accept what I, or my friends, assume is true without bothering to check. It is also not the case that because most of the mainstream media do not always flatter Trump, that I have to think he must be a good guy – the media might be correct about that. There might be some media owners who legitimately think Trump is a fraud, because they have business experience with him, or something.
Many people seem to think that research simply means trying to confirm or elaborate what you already think you know. Or they might think that by looking at ‘underground’ news or youtube videos, or self-proclaimed ‘alternative news’ they are getting the truth. This is not necessarily the case. It may even be that many of these sites are even less concerned with accuracy and responsibility than the ‘lamestream’ media.
It is also worth looking at the emotional context of the ‘news’. If the main context is the host’s anger, contempt, mockery or shouting, then you can probably assume the station is not unbiased, and may well be aiming at replacing accuracy with manipulation. The show may not want you to be curious and think, it may just want to get you stuck in a ‘frame’ in which you always see whoever they define as the ‘bad guys’ as bad, who are not worth checking up on, to see if the reports are coherent, consistent or correct. Again, this does not mean everything they report has to be wrong, but it does imply that it needs to be checked up. Was what they were saying or implying actually real, or confirmed by better sources?
If one is going to be skeptical about media sources, which is clearly a good thing, then don’t only be skeptical towards media that reports things you would prefer not to be true. This is directed skepticism, which often functions as a form of dogma, misdirection or manipulation.
Accounts of what evil people do
If a book or document is supposed to show how corrupt the writers are, I read the text, just as I would go to the original words of the a person who is supposedly saying something that admits they are corrupt. This is yet another instance of how research involves going to the best original source. It is way too common for political writers to distort the words of others, either deliberately or not – knowing that most people will never check, they will just assume the pre-defined ‘evil people’ are ‘evil’. One of the major aims of political parties is to stop people reading the other side – hence read the other side as a matter of principle, you may well be pleasantly surprised.
Same when a movement is being dismissed as white supremacist, socialist, or violent. Don’t assume it has to be true.
Media Silence
If something is not talked about in the media, that is significant. Thus I find the lack of discussion, during the previous election, about Trump being charged with child rape interesting. I wonder why Trump’s business crimes have such little media traction, or why there is so little interest in his promotion of pollution and wilderness destruction. I wonder why Trump’s military activities get such little reporting, that many consider him a peace president, I wonder why most people don’t seem to know about the Republican’s efforts to shovel taxpayers’ money at the corporate and billionaire sector, rather than the people, as part of their Covid response. I wonder why the media accepted Barr’s summary of the Mueller report, when any sensible person would have wondered about Barr’s accuracy. I wonder why the ecological crisis is so under reported by most news media, and the work of denialists and delayers is so widely reported.
I also find it interesting that despite what seemed to be massive amounts of twitter video showing what seems like unprovoked police violence at protestors, bystanders, or even against black people trying to drive away from the ‘riots,’ this seems to be ignored. Even though some of the people being harassed were journalists. When I also come across twitter reports of white guys looting and burning, with the police just standing by and watching, I wonder why this is not news? I also wonder why police where allowing armed white folks to wander around through a disturbance even when this was also obviously being filmed. I then wonder why Biden’s condemnation of the violence was so under reported, while him supposedly not condemning the violence was being widely reported.
This silence does seem pretty coherent.
What does it say about the media?
A sample argument
Recently there has been an argument about doctors receiving extra money for Covid treatments. I had always understood that hospitals received more money for serious diseases in the US. There was a lot of discussion about this payment in April or earlier, before it exploded again in November. This extra money is not surprising or unreasonable as some Covid cases are dangerous and require extended treatments, although I understood the payment was for Covid patients on respirators, not general Covid patients etc.
My understanding of the current (November 2020) scuffle is that Trump said
Our doctors get more money if someone dies from Covid. You know that, right? I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say ‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of Covid’ .
So Trump was accusing doctors inflating covid deaths to get more money for themselves personally.
Trump presents no evidence, which is not also simply evidence of how he thinks (“people claim false stuff for their own advantage all the time”). I don’t know if doctors also get money for individual cases they are treating, they may not. Without direct evidence to the contrary, I assume that most doctors have some professional integrity. They are not politicians trying to to keep the economic figures good by persuading people that a disease is less dangerous than it appears, not wanting to count cases, or pretending that people really died of other causes, or claiming to know the results of elections before the votes are counted.
I have not found any evidence in favour of that proposition about doctors inflating cases to get money. My understanding is that doctors and other people, were denying that doctors fixed results to get payment, not the assertion about payment itself, but I can’t read everything – it is possible that someone did argue that hospitals do not get paid – but that is not evidence of a general position.
It seems quite common for people to take an attack on a dubious statement, and turn the attack into an attack on something less dubious and triumphantly refute the made up allegations about the non-dubious part. In this case they might say that Doctors were denying there was extra payment for Covid cases, when the Doctors were denying this led them to rig Covid figures as a matter of course.
This commonness of this process implies that it is a good idea to actually read the attack and get the full message to see if they were attacking what they were said to be attacking.
As a matter of interest I note Forbes is claiming that “More than 20% of U.S. physicians have experienced a furlough or pay cut as financial hits from the coronavirus strain COVID-19 batter the healthcare industry, a new analysis shows.” Which I guess by the same kind of logic would imply that physicians and surgeons are more likely to dismiss the dangers of covid to restore their incomes. But that does not seem to be reported widely.
If I did want to find how the payment system works, there will be a government website somewhere that has hospital payment figures on it (unless Trump is having it suppressed, which seems unlikely) and I would use that to find out if individual doctors, as opposed to hospitals, get paid. A good news article will reference that source – if they are attacking doctors and they don’t, they are problematic.
Likewise if I want to find out how much the death rate seems to have increased through the disease I will look for figures on excess deaths. If those figures suggest there are less deaths than normal, then it may be the case that coronavirus helps people survive with other diseases. If the excess deaths is still excessive when Covid deaths are subtracted I will probably assume we are underestimating Covid deaths, or there is something else majorly wrong, such as another unknown pandemic. I would also like to know how many people are long term sufferers from the disease or who receive what looks like permanent damage from the disease, as that seems anecdotally commonplace, but so far no luck.
Another Sample
Earlier in this blog I investigated the common allegations that Trump told people to drink bleach to combat Covid-19. He didn’t. He responded to announcements that forms of light and disinfectant killed the virus quickly outside the body, by suggesting research should be done into the possibilities of killing covid inside the body with similar techniques.
This may not have been that sensible, but was understandable.
However, after the fuss developed, rather than saying these were suggestions for research and people should not do this at home, Trump appeared to claim he was being sarcastic, possibly to expose journalists. There is no evidence of sarcasm either. But it does seem evidence that taken with other evidence, suggests he does not generally respond well to criticism.
Final sample
In the week before the election the Trumpsphere, was full of a video clip of Joe Biden which was used as ‘evidence’ that Biden was fixing the votes. It had Biden saying
We have put together I think the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.
Now this is suspicious, because:
All the versions of the video I have seen provide no context, other than condemnation. They just give that statement, non of Biden’s surrounding words at all, or the questions he might have been responding to.
They don’t report where the statement was made, so its difficult to check.
They are implausible, as who is really going to say that they are going to defraud the electorate in public?
Biden is known to mangle words on occasions – not whole paragraphs like Trump, but sentences, so maybe he meant something else?
We have Police Vice squads, major crime squads etc. While we may be cynical about their effectiveness, we don’t expect them to officially promote vice and major crime. So, without the hostile framing, Biden used a normal linguistic construction meaning an ‘extensive organisation against voter fraud’.
These kinds of issues should have made people suspicious, especially given that it seemed to be used by, and possibly originate with, the Trump campaign. We should not expect the Trump campaign, or any other campaign, to be 100% honest. So we need to find the original. This is not that hard, if you were really doing research as opposed to looking for what you want to find. This is the context. I quote it at length simply to demonstrate the importance of context. I’ve italicised the excerpt to make it clear.
one of the things that I think is most important is those who haven’t voted yet. First of all, go to iwillvote.com to make a plan. Exactly how you’re going to vote, where you’re going to vote, when you’re going to vote. Because it can get complicated. Because the Republicans are doing everything they can to make it harder for people to vote. Particularly people of color to vote. So go to iwillvote.com. Secondly, we’re in a situation where we have put together, and you guys did it for President Obama’s administration before this, we have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics. What the president is trying to do is discourage people from voting by implying that their vote won’t be counted. It can’t be counted. We’re going to challenge it and all these things. If enough people vote, it’s going to overwhelm the system. You see what’s happening now. You guys know it as well as I do. You see the long, long lines in early voting. You see the millions of people have already cast a ballot. And so, don’t be intimidated…..
Thirdly, for those who’ve already voted, it’s not enough, God love ya, it’s not enough that you voted. You got to go out and get your friends. You’ve got to go out and get your family. You’ve got to go out and get people. There’s so many people like the old days when we used to be it used to be a lot easier. There’s so many people when you get over that, were you able to knock on doors and know Mrs. Smith didn’t have a vehicle that you drive her to the polls. You make sure that you get your friends, your family, because, look, you know, as John Lewis said before he passed away, you have a sacred right and it’s a sacred obligation to vote, particularly young people.
So yes, it seems like Joe Biden was worried about Republicans trying to encourage people not to vote.
Use of Media
Let’s be clear, newspaper articles, news site articles ,youtube videos, etc are at best a starting point, or something that can be quickly used to point in a direction for research. Nowadays, articles or stories are written and produced quickly, with the best information the person can get at the time or, in the case of the Murdoch Empire, the best guess at what Rupert wants to said (This is massively documented by the way). There is lots of media analysis, which explains why time, advertising and financial pressures make media not as good as it was 20 to 30 years ago. Although its now old, Nick Davies Flat Earth News was a good starting book – and since then it has got worse.
I have found the Guardian to be generally, but not always, accurate. More importantly I have found them willing to correct articles when they have made a mistake, and to acknowledge the mistake. This is heartening, although clearly what is a mistake can be disputed. The only time the Murdoch empire seems to correct a mistake is if they are threatened with legal action and think it is libelous and they cannot get away by pretending it is opinion – and the correction is often not connected to the original article at all.
If a media source does not check out, then I don’t use it, or retract the use. I don’t just pass on to the next source.
There are always better sources.
Hopefully this at least gives the reader some idea of what is involved in trying to find truth in the world. It takes a bit of work.
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.
‘Fascism’ is a term which tends to be used to designate dislike so we need more understanding than that to use the term analytically.
Fascism is
1) NOT anti-corporate. Corporations can flourish under fascism; they can get State support, massive arms deals, monopolies, disposable slave labour, and so on. The corporate sector can support fascism with enthusiasm, and often does if they think they own it, and it will give them security and stability (which it won’t).
2) NOT a specific doctrine, or body of theory, as such, somehow related to the party of Mussolini – but it does have a set of recurring techniques, themes and strategies, some of which are described below.
Fascism involves
A Leader
Trust in the leader. There is no policy other than what the leader demands. The leader knows and understands everything, with a competence far beyond that of other people.
The leader is strong. The leader has will. Everyone must yield to the leader. Nothing should hold him back.
The leader should be emulated, even though it is impossible, he is so virtuous, with such impressive skills.
The party should be purged of those who have doubts about the leader. Having doubt or disagreement, with even the most obvious falsehoods is a sign of treachery.
Ultimately, the leader is the favoured of God or the cosmos. Disobedience to the leader is disobedience to God, or to the nature of the Cosmos. The leader has their own true revelation, of how things really are. He is inevitably correct unless mislead by traitors.
Strong and enforced social categories
Fascism depends on emphasised and hierarchical, in-group and out-group identity categories. People in the in-groups are automatically superior to those in out-groups. Men are superior to all but exceptional women. Party members are superior to non-party members. High up members of the party are superior to lower party members. People of a particular race are superior to people of all other races, which appeals to people who identify as belonging to that race who feel they should be valued above those of out-groups, and who feel they have not been. Fascism emphasises the category of ‘we good people’ vs the category of ‘those evil people’.
People of specific, or even most, out-group categories are evil subhuman enemies who must be destroyed, or captured and held where they cannot cause harm. All methods may be used to get rid of, or contain, these people.
Fascism uses scapegoating. Everything that goes wrong is the fault of out-group members. Ideally out-group members are reasonably powerless in the face of in-group police. ‘party soldiers’ and troops. This reinforces the idea that out-groups are inferior and must be controlled or exterminated. Weakness, especially in the face of violence, or the encouragement of violence, is taken as a clear mark of inferiority.
Policing of categories and of people in out-groups is intense and violent, and this violence is encouraged. Armed vigilante members of ingroups are praised and unconstrained in their attempts to police social categories and crush unrest in out-groups. The true believer must fight against these out-groups. This fight demonstrates that the true believer is part of the in-group and builds in-group loyalties and bonds. Reluctance to engage in pursuit of the out-group may demonstrate one is not really part of the in-group, which is a frightening place to be.
On the other hand, violence by out-groups, even if in self-protection, is condemned. No terrible accusation can be disbelieved when it is about out-groups, because they are already defined as completely evil.
For Fascists, the nation state is an essential in-group marker. In the early days of the regime it is claimed that the leader will make the nation great again. The Nation, before the leader arrived as saviour, was somehow inadequate, or fallen from its peak due to out-group conspiracy or dilution of the in-group with out-group members, who must now be purged.
Membership of the Nation State is restricted. The Nation State is a kin-group of related people. Migrants, or people of races not defined as the true race, are at best suspect. They need to be controlled. People identified as coming from other nations, even if they have lived in the country for generations are suspect, and subject to violent policing. The nation, as an identity category, must be kept pure.
People who do not support the leader and his party, clearly become non-members of the Nation State and an out-group subject to obliteration for their own safety.
Authority gives coherence
As should be clear, authoritarianism is a primary mark of fascism, although not all authoritarians are fascist. For Fascists, democracy is an evil which can be supported for as long as it gives the ‘correct’ result and indicates support for their authority. If it fails to do this, then results can be faked, ignored, or be said to result from out-group plotting.
Fascist politicians are not consistent in their opinions and doctrines. They are, however, always consistent in acting to benefit the power of the party and the power of the leader, and in their attempt to crush out-groups and opposition. If they have to contradict themselves to achieve those primary aims, then that is what is required. Success and power is everything. It is possible that incoherence, intense emotion and overt contradiction induce hypnotic states in people by disrupting conscious rationality and filtering, and make them more easily manipulated.
Thus for fascists violent insurrectionists can be heroic supporters of the leader or out-group provocateurs depending on who the fascists are talking to.
Fascists may claim to favour the rule of law, but the law is whatever supports the leader and the party and allows the violent suppression of evil out-groups, traitors and scapegoats. Members of the inner party cannot be corrupt by definition, unless the leader wants to get rid of them. The law and the police become militarised and an arm of the leader, because this is ‘necessary’ due to the evil of out-groups and to promote awe amongst the population.
Heroism
Fascism encourages heroic struggle, in which people risk their lives for the glory of the leader, in fighting for the Nation, and in fighting against evil and subversive out-groups and so on. Fascism needs enemies and will generate them, to have something to struggle against. Fascism is often specifically anti-communist, even when there are no communists in positions of influence. These apparently necessary communists will be manufactured.
Ordinary people can participate in the Heroic Struggle by denouncing the outgroups, participating in name calling the outgroups, making threats to the outgroups, being rude in the streets, sticking up posters, trolling outgroups on the internet, making death threats, mocking what the outgroup fears, cheering the heroic leader, and so on. They are standing up against those defined as evil, and thus being brave. This helps increase the intensity of the struggle, as well as helping the supposed victimised mainstream feel it is participating in politics as both an individual and as a group, and can no longer be ignored.
Fascism tends to be about the triumph of the will rather than accommodation to what is. The will of the leader is the will of the nation. The world should yield to that will. Failure to attain the will of the leader, shows people are not trying hard enough, and are not heroic enough. They are a disgrace, or traitors.
Other nations are default enemies and inferiors, although short term alliances may be maintained with similar kinds of authoritarian States or States which are identified as belonging to the same race – for as long as those alliances are useful. Democratic States may be pacified, but ultimately they are to be considered as weak enemies.
War and conquest is the ultimate expression of fascism, because how else is heroism best put to test, and how else are enemies brought to heel? War can initially be against those the party defines as internal evils, but it will ultimately move against external evils and inferiors, as the fascist leader fails to solve all the problems facing them through suppression – and this failure cannot be admitted, or must arise from the actions of supremely evil out-groups.
Information is about power
Education exists to inculcate admiration for the leader, the party and the nation (which cannot be separated) as well as obedience to the leader as that is the natural consequence of admiration. All history, philosophy, or religion etc. is only useful in so far as it shows the leader and the party are the inevitable climax of this exceptional nation’s struggles for self-actualisation. Education should emphasise how people from the past, who the party favours, display nobility of character and are heroes. Those who the party dislikes are clearly the villains. Out-groups have always been despicable. Only the party’s interpretation of history and politics is allowed, all other versions are cancelled and forbidden. This suppression is supposed to foster unity and national values.
Information which does not support the leader and his party is clearly wrong and must be suppressed. The leader only wants positive information, as negative information indicates that the people reporting it have not tried hard enough, or are enemies.
The party has no hesitation in lying to the people, because the will and genius of the leader and the heroic struggle of the people, makes whatever they assert to be the case, to be the case. Anything which gets the people to support the leader and the party, and fight against out-groups, is correct. Truth can change day by day, but the party and leader will never be wrong.
Fascists have no interest in political discussion with out-groups. After all, out-groups know nothing useful by definition. Fascists are interested in struggle against the out-groups, heroic assertion, together with lots of shouting (which shows dominance and strength of emotion), and whipping up loyalty amongst their own. Intellectuals must yield to the force of the leader’s will and truth, or they are clearly traitors.
Eventually not attending to accurate but unwanted information will bring the regime down but, it will have caused significant damage in the process.
Support
Initially, Conservatives can support fascism because they agree with the promotion of love of Nation/Country, hierarchy, discipline, strength and order. They see the search for the Nation’s soul and tradition as being valuable, but eventually they realise that fascists have no interest in any tradition that does not support the party, virtue that does not support the party, checks and balances that do not support the party, constitutional rules that do not support the party, religion that does not support the party and so on. They eventually become disillusioned, but have little real idea what to do about the crisis they have helped bring about.
Ordinary workers and middle class people can support fascism, because, in the current situation, they see themselves being ignored, loosing prosperity, loosing security, and facing disorder. They have lost respect for normal authority and its elites which they see as corrupt. The Party offers hope. After a while they come to see the party primarily offers fear and death for themselves, friends and loved ones, but by then it is too late. The irony is that it is usually the power of capitalist hierarchy which has produced this sense of abandonment, but the rage is channeled away from those who benefit from the the system to those who try to mollify it.
Conclusion
Fascism is ultimately an authoritarian manipulation of social categories and information, to maintain the power of the leader and the party. The aim is national and party glory. That is all.
The party is led by self-proclaimed heroes, and seeks glory fighting against opposition, even if it has to manufacture the enemies it needs to give itself, and its members, meaning. The party’s goals will never end in peace, because peace is inglorious and unheroic.
Fascists can and will believe anything that says their side is good and the other side is evil, because that has to be true.
Without enemies there is no point to fascism. Struggle is never ending, and it is triumph in that struggle which indicates a person and a nation’s value. A successful fascist State that conquered and subdued the world would eventually tear itself to pieces in seeking internal enemies and scapegoats.
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.
Community energy may be the way to go, all over the country, or indeed all over the world.
In Australia, we clearly cannot wait for the State and Federal Governments to do anything, as they seem quite happy with increasing emissions either here or elsewhere in the world, or in confusing people so that they build solar farms and find they can’t connect to the grid.
Neither State nor business, will do it in time. We have to do it ourselves at the local level, and be willing to fight the obstacles that State and business will put in our way. But we can learn from each other, and every time some community has a victory, it needs to be widely advertised.
Perhaps we need a clearing site somewhere to put up these victories and how they were performed? I’d be happy to put up a web site if there was nothing happening.
Congrats to all those who have been involved in making the video below….
[as a footnote, I’m not sure why the sheep are not expected to graze on the solar farm under the panels, in the farm part of the story…..]
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 