Our Humanity Reflected in a Funhouse Mirror: Mediated Reality and Identity

A longtime interest of mine has been how media shapes us; from thought, affect, perception, and imagination to behavior, relationships, identity, and ideology. But most interesting of all is how this largely happens unnoticed and so disappears into the unconscious. In the background, it becomes instilled and internalized, enculturated and enacted, structured and institutionalized, rationalized and normalized. It becomes reality as we know it, that is to say ideological realism; as over the decades and generations and centuries, it simply gets built into the entire civilizational project and paradigm. Then we lose all capacity of critical thought in no longer being able to imagine the world as it actually is or as it otherwise might be.

As research shows, media in the broader McLuhanesque sense — as technologies, environments, systems, and infrastructure — even fundamentally alters brain structure and neurocognitive development (Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World). We are physically, psychologically, and socially transmogrified without realizing it, as we reorient in line with the ground moving beneath our feet. It’s as if we landed in Oz while not noticing the house had been lifted into the air. The home we’ve always known still surrounds us, if the landscape is now alien. That’s why older generations complain about the younger, in seeing the differences over time — it’s always easier to see something in another than in oneself. Whereas each new youngest generation just adapts unquestioningly and accepts it, until they too become old. The changes, like an undertow, carry us into terra incognita.

Yet some generations, no matter stage of life, gain greater perspective than others. In particular, last wave GenXers and first wave Millennials grew up on the precipice, during a period of transition and transformation. This peer cohort on the cusp is sometimes referred to as the MTV Generation (adolescents and young adults from the 1980s to mid-1990s), of which I’m a member (b. 1975). We came of age as one media order tipped over into another. So, we have equal understanding of what came before as what replaced it. For that reason, though intimately familiar with both, maybe not fully at home in either.

The older generations are mostly lost in nostalgia of post-war mass media, while the younger generations have never known anything else besides constant personal tech that preoccupies nearly every waking moment. But it’s precisely the contrast between the two media systems, cultures, and worldviews that offers a vantage point, allows some distance to think dispassionately or else at an angle. With less exclusive loyalty to only one mediated social order, we media borderlanders are more likely to take various media technologies as unique tools to be used. In this, we have greater flexibility. Our identities potentially can be less singularly entrenched.

About a year ago, an old friend of mine moved back to town. We were hanging out one day, as she looked through a box of old papers. She came across letters I had written her when she first moved away. One epistolary message was from 1998 when I was still in my early 20s. If with much of the angst and uncertainty lingering from my teens, there also still remained some youthful optimism and excitement about the world (it was pre-9/11, after all). I described getting my first personal computer and my own internet connection (dial-up), about which I sang praises — a shiny new thing!

Of course, earlier in my family’s home and at school, I’d had access to computers since a child. And my initial experiences with the internet were during high school. But it was different to suddenly be immersed in it while living out on my own, to spend hours freely surfing the web and joining online forums. And I recall being conscious of how it changed me, how it was restructuring my mind. I was old enough that my mentality had developed in a slower and gentler media world, between shelves of books and old network television, plus an Atari video game system. Yet the ruts in my brain were not so hardened that I couldn’t take in new impressions, that new media couldn’t lay down new tracks of thought.

It’s similar to learning to speak a second language or code switch when younger. Or it’s like moving to an entirely different place early in life. That also happened to me. When in middle school, my family relocated from a small liberal college town in the Midwest (Iowa City, Iowa) to a metro area with a military fort in the heart of the Deep South (Columbia, South Carolina). It has caused me to be obsessed with the differences in regional cultures ever since. I’m highly sensitized to noticing cultures and how they influence people. Well, the same thing applies to how I pay attention and relate to media cultures.

As I’ve aged, just having turned 50 years old, the sense of changes has been made salient. The young-but-maturing generation in high school, in college, and entering the workforce is Generation Z (AKA Zoomers or Doomers). They are largely the children of GenXers and some older Millennials. Their parents include my brothers, cousins, and friends. So, I’ve personally observed GenZ grow up in this media-saturated world; and, of course, it’s gone from saturated to drowning with Generation Alpha. My oldest GenZ niece got her first job as an elementary school teacher and it’s been shocking for her. Kids these days!

In a couple of years, I’ll be coming to my 30th anniversary of full internet immersion. So, it’s not only that I’ve seen the totalizing change from the old new media to the new new media but also I’ve observed how the internet, cellphones, social media, etc have become something entirely different, as big tech has literally taken over the world in having bought governments and now actively seeks to create techno-feudalism. In the calm and quiet early online world, there was little to no concern about trolls, bots, algorithms, algospeak, censorship, shadow banning, deplatforming, demonetizing, AI, automation, and on and on. Now we worry about brain rot, the surveillance corporate-state, and technological apocalypse.

As a good liberal and critical leftist, I’m not prone to right-wing culture war, moral panic, and nostalgia-mongering. But admittedly, there is more than enough reason to have serious trepidation about the state of society. It’s not that there has never before been tumultuous and destabilizing change, including rapid developments of media technology. Then again, the pace of near constant innovation is now rapid in a way that hasn’t previously occurred. Before we can catch our breath, the next media technology has been introduced, mass marketed, and wholesale adopted. Then the next and the next.

Meanwhile, we peons of the masses have become pawns in the ideologies and agendas, schemes and machinations, visions and fantasies of tech oligarchs and their cronies in the capitalist class and among the political elite. Even at the height of cultural Cold War, no global superpower wielded a propaganda system of mind control as powerful and pervasive as presently manipulated and weaponized by big tech companies that are enmeshed in governments or have outright taken over governments, in their being part of a new techno-fascist inverted totalitarianism operating at a transnational level. The global swamp! [See: shadow network, butterfly revolution, Epstein files, etc.]

The game has changed because mentalities have changed. It’s not only the general public who has been targeted for a new kind of brainwashing, indoctrination, perception management, and social control. The elite themselves have been altered, one might say deranged, in ways they apparently don’t realize. As I’ve argued, the controllers are out of control, which causes them to ever seek more control, yet to simultaneously cause everything to go out of control as they project their internal chaos upon the world. It turns out that apocalyptic accelerationism is not a wise philosophy to rule by.

[For context: “Research shows that, as one ascends the ladder of socioeconomic status, capacity for cognitive empathy tends to decline, related to declining generosity. The fact that both Musk and Trump were born into extreme wealth and power could explain their problems with empathy, specifically their indifference and cruelty toward others, but also their disconnection and derangement. In lacking self-control, they seek to control others. But the more they try to gain control the more everything goes out of control“ (Liberal Empathy, the Weapon of Satan).]

Also, consider that the elite are likewise indoctrinated, as they’re even more deeply embedded in the system. That’s how we end up with elites who are well-educated conformists, the last ones to see it all for what it is (William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite). And about media as a propaganda system, keep in mind that the upper class individuals in positions of authority and influence are the first and most important targets: “The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an ‘official narrative’ that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them” (C.J. Hopkins, Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works).

My present thoughts, however, are on the more immediate level. As an ordinary nobody just trying to get by in life, I wonder how this media system is affecting me, along with those around me and those I interact with. I’ve grown dissatisfied with not just social media but online comment sections entirely, even on the best platforms. I feel constantly on edge and on the defense. The quality of online dialogue has declined over the decades and is now plummeting into a state of total shitfuckery, possibly having to do with the dead internet theory. There is now more AI content than human content on the internet. And in many countries, most internet traffic is monopolized by bots.

But it’s worse than that. As we humanoids interact with bots, AI, and all they produce, we internalize it, model it, and become like it. It’s not only AI that is training on us. We’re training on it and so feeding back to it, in a vicious loop that will over time become our shared culture and social norms. We mere humans, specifically us commoners, are certainly not in control. And then worse than worse, we carry this online culture back out into the real world. We humans will increasingly become like bots and AI. Even offline, the algorithm imprinted on our brains will continue to operate. We’ll lose the capacity to think, speak, and act as free-range beings.

On a more mundane level, it’s simply the way it constrains us. We forget how to interact normally; or, in the case of some, never having learned it in the first place. Cloistered in personal space, it’s near taboo to just call someone up or knock on their door unexpected, the kind of thing that was normal human behavior for most of human existence. In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari described sitting in a coffee shop. While pretending to read a book, he eavesdropped on two guys talking. Apparently, they were online ‘friends’ who were meeting offline for the first time. They talked to each other as if each on their own separate social feeds. One would give a soliloquy about his life. Then the other would do the same.

It was as if neither was listening nor responding to the other. They didn’t know how to have an ordinary conversation as mutual dialogue, instead each residing within their own private bubble. Hence, they existed in parallel with no actual meeting point of engagement or likely any social awareness, much less cognitive empathy. One senses this kind of thing is becoming common. That is to say narcissism may be taking over as the standard operating mode. That wouldn’t only be individual narcissism but also group narcissism. Our identities are becoming insular and exclusionary, similar to our media environments becoming epistemically enclosed echo chambers and reality tunnels.

There is a related issue. It’s also how we’re getting trapped in ideological identities, though not in terms of ideology in the normal sense. Maybe I’m just noticing it more, but it feels like it’s increasing. On the early internet, ideological identities used to be less relevant and prominent. Most people mostly related as individuals. Groupthink, however, seems to be taking over. As this happens, ideological labels become ever less connected to coherent ideologies, rather being expressions of warped identities, posturing, and aesthetics; something like ideological LARPing. I keep coming across self-styled ‘libertarians’, ‘anarchists’, and ‘communists’ who are various forms of crypto-authoritarians, crypto-dominators, and crypto-reactionaries; from Putin tankies as red fascists or state capitalists to ancaps (i.e., anarcho-capitalists) as social Darwinists or aspiring corporate oligarchs.

That is not exactly a new phenomenon. What’s changed is that it’s become more prevalent and widespread, to the point of dominating entire online groups. Real ideological discussion is often near impossible, as few have meaningful ideological knowledge. Image has replaced substance. This co-opting and recuperating of ideology is a pattern among reactionaries that probably has always been around, but in the past it was limited to a small minority of bad actors and those on the fringe. It’s what Corey Robin describes as the behavior of the reactionary mind, which I’d link to the dark triad traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (+sadism).

To get back to the main topic, we can understand this with the research and scholarship of media studies. The literary mind increases the level of abstract thought, which has both benefits and downsides. But under present suboptimal conditions as literacy is replaced and displaced by or else filtered through post-literate media of image and voice, these abstractions are not only reified through social structures but, more problematically, amplified through agonism (Walter J. Ong’s secondary orality) and tribalism (Marshall McLuhan’s global village), along with passivity (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death) and distraction (Johann Hari, Stolen Focus). Through anxiety and fear, stress and sickliness, alienation and dislocation, it’s exacerbated further into extremism.

For a specific example, one I often repeat is from cultivation theory. When people are repeatedly exposed to media portrayals of violence and crime (Fox News, crime procedurals, etc), there is a corresponding increase of mean world syndrome: distrust, paranoia, exaggerated threat perception, authoritarianism, xenophobia, and punitiveness (e.g., liberals who learned of the 9/11 terrorist attack from tv reporting with endlessly looping footage of the event were later more supportive of right-wing policies, such as Homeland Security and the Iraq War.) People internalize dark narratives, project them outward onto others, and then attack those others as the threat they themselves have become. In fear, they create a world of fear and really do make the world a more harsh, cruel, and dangerous place. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’ve long contemplated and posted about the pitfalls of mediated reality (Battle of Voices of Authorization in the World and in Ourselves; & The Great Weirding of New Media), playing no small part in the mass derangement that overtaken us across my lifetime (The Great WEIRDing of the Jaynesian Ego-Mind as a Civilizational Project), if far from limited to only media problems (A Theory of Societal Retardation). People are getting ever more strange, year after year. All of the above is what I think about in trying to decide how to deal with our present media world and mediated reality. My mood is that of caution and so I offer my observations as a warning but also as an explanation. First and foremost, we need to see clearly what’s happening around us and to us.

With the new year having begun a short while back, I was contemplating my own media diet, in wanting to find the best balance between my mental health and gaining an audience for my writings (A New Year, a New Era). But in observing the harms incurred, I’ve ever more been erring on the side of protecting my own sanity in a society that sometimes feels downright psychotic. For the collective level, the public needs far better media literacy and intellectual self-defense. There is nothing wrong with media changes, if we understand our situation. Yes, some things we’re attached to or take for granted are weakened, compromised, or entirely lost. But there is also much that might be gained. It’s the old scenario of opportunity being the other side of risk, if admittedly the risks are great. Media is a powerful force. Like it or not, a new age is upon us.

Not Embracing Todd McGowan’s “Embracing Alienation”

A while back, I picked up Todd McGowan’s Embracing Alienation.

It’s a catchy title. And the premise is enticing. It’s a counterintuitive advice, at least in the modern West. He notes that most people, even many on the right, have come to see alienation as wrong, problematic, and undesirable. It’s something, we’ve come to believe, that is not our natural state and so that we should seek to overcome.

I too tend to see alienation as a bad thing, based on personal experience, societal observation, and intellectual study. But I was intrigued and interested to be challenged. Part of me even wanted to be proven wrong, to have my horizons expanded. Maybe I was misunderstanding what alienation represents. There is nothing I love more than a thinker who can reframe how I understand and perceive the world.

It’s not hard to understand one possible argument that eschews or extends beyond Karl Marx’s complaint about workers alienated from their own production. If alienation is based on the isolated individual, and if hyper-individualism is fundamentally false, then it’s possible alienation could point us toward our true human nature. In that sense, instead of being a block to our true nature, it would be a guide. So, by paying close attention to it, we might gain important information about what it really means to be human.

I kept hoping that was where he’d go. But alas, quite the opposite. He simply embraces alienation as normal and maybe as normative. That felt false and dissatisfying.

Plus, while he does range about a fair amount in his chosen sources of inspiration and critique, he didn’t come across as all that well informed or else narrowly focused. Some of his examples and other evidence was extremely weak and unpersuasive. It was so easy for me to poke holes in his view using counter-evidence. I was disappointed because I was expecting more. And even as a leftist, I found myself disinterested in his critique of Marxism, not to mention it’s lack of application to the situation we face:

“The book’s flaw is the constant repetition of “a society that aims to transcend alienation will fail” and “we must embrace alienation as key to any political project.” These are paraphrases but are repeated endlessly. Its misstep is that it provides no way to actually cohere this vision or what this vision means for leftist political projects. It feels very vibes-based and easily co-opted. I’m sure the author expects pushback in their Hegel-Marx duel and I’m hardly read enough to do so, but the constant harp on that even though Marx doesn’t use alienation in his later work but the vibe of it is still there hardly feels like any analysis I want to get behind.

“Even though they malign Marcuse for not going far enough I think One-Dimensional Man much better explores what happens to administrative systems that try to act as “one”. I think the book fails to acknowledge the struggle that embracing alienation has already produced since recognizing everyone’s alienation is inherent to class consciousness and thus organizing, movement building, etc. It fails to acknowledge or put forward a coherent argument about what we’re supposed to do when embrace alienation. It feels stuck in terms and arguments from 19th and 20th-century thought without incorporating a concrete set of politics.”

~pkeye’s review, from The Story Graph

McGowan seems to not fully grasp alienation in its complexity. Maybe because it’s a vague word that has been used to describe different experiences and ideas across distinct contexts, areas of study, and theoreticians. It doesn’t refer to any single thing, in the way he wants to treat it. I’m not alone in that assessment. Another reader said that,

“I found it to be sloppy, sorta shallow, and not genuinely engaging in the topic of alienation in its many forms. […] It seems like a position that can only come from focusing entirely on theory and completely disregarding people’s lived experience. The vague political vision that this book puts forth seem very detached from actual life, and McGowan doesn’t offer any sort of way to instantiate it in social and political life.

“[M]y beef is that this type of Hegelian-Lacanian subjective alienation is very different from being alienated from your friends or being alienated from your community or even being alienated from the fruits of your labor, and McGowan equates all of them, as if types of alienation and degrees of alienation were of not import. I agree that you’re never going to fully overcome alienation from your community, but being more or less integrated has a tangible effect on people’s mental health; same with being alienated from what you produce”

~kroxyldyphivic, at Sources for Zizek on alienation

Alienation would include the oppressed, persecuted, and rejected; such as the unhoused, minorities, immigrants, LGTBQIA+, prisoners, refugees, slaves, and the sex trafficked; along with the victims of systemic prejudice, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, genocide, etc. Additionally, it would include the mentally ill, not only in terms of how they’re often stigmatized, impoverished, and/or institutionalized but also  psychiatric states like anhedonia, depersonalization, derealization, dissociation, psychosis, fragmentation, and PTSD.

One could also speak of common and/or mundane forms: family estrangement, gaslighting, mind/body dualism, nature deficit disorder, mediated reality, and similar things. Think of how, in research on cultivation theory, repeated media portrayals of violence and crime induce mean world syndrome that involves exaggerated perception of violent crime. Individuals become estranged from the actual world around them, in not recognizing their real situation. A more extreme media example is AI psychosis.

Is he really generalizing all ‘alienation’ as identical and of equal significance? How or why would one embrace any of that?

One reviewer offered an explanation for why he overgeneralizes:

“[I]t seems he falls prey to a dualism of opposing thinkers who want to overcome alienation and those who do not. It is clear, as mentioned earlier, that this follows from his thinking of alienation as an ontological category rather than historical. Thus, for him, any attempt to overcome alienation is necessarily misguided, and he finds this problem in historical sequences or political movements.

“Marx’s alienation is specific to the capitalist mode of production and it is not enough that the worker realises one’s alienation, but this realisation must also lead to action to overcome this specific alienation, which will in turn lead to the realm of genuine human freedom. It is in this context that the author’s suggestion of simply recognising one’s alienation along with that of others for solidarity seems weak. There remains a gap between this realisation and action.”

~Debjyoti Sarkar, at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

His indifferent and dismissive attitude toward how devastating alienation can be indicates he has had lived in privilege and comfort, safety and security. As a middle class professional, specifically an academic, it’s highly probable that he has never known economic struggle or any other kind of desperation.

His conception of alienation is trivial, while somehow also being amorphous, as he portrays it as our state of being. It’s hard to see how just accepting it applies to real world problems, much less political projects. Similar critiques have been made about McGowan’s take on Hegel in other books, as seen with this review of Emancipation After Hegel:

“[A]lthough McGowan defends Hegel admirably, I’m not sure I buy some of his defenses, such as the articulation of Hegel’s idea of sovereignty and freedom in the Philosophy of Right. McGowan at times seems to defend Hegel to the core, relying on the centrality of contradiction as a sort of ace-in-the-hole answer to everything. This becomes particularly contentious when McGowan criticizes Marx for being a right-wing deviation of Hegel (a stance sure to ruffle the feathers of many Marxist-Leninists). McGowan defends this by arguing that Marx puts faith in a substantial Other through the dream of revolution and establishment of utopian communism in the undetermined future, thus trying to get rid of contradiction.

“This is certainly an interesting critique, and one I think well-worth tarrying with. Yet, this sole focus on the irreconcilability of contradiction seems to preclude most forms of a positive political movement. While this reliance on contradiction helps provide pathways that break through polarization and stagnant discourse, the promise of “emancipation” after Hegel was a bit lacking at the end. McGowan admits that Hegel himself thought that his philosophy resulted in recognition over action, and while McGowan insists that contradiction as a solution is the path forward for the Left, what such a path looks like in practical terms remains rather obscure and vague.”

~J. D. Davis, at JDDavisPoet

To be fair, it’s not that McGowan isn’t offering anything concrete. A key claim is that we are not identical to ourselves or to our communities, and so his perspective follows from that. We don’t belong anywhere specific and so, maybe in a sense, we potentially belong everywhere. The alienated subject can only find value and purpose as part of the public, which is where all the alienated subjects come together in shared space.

His one practical piece of advice is we need to build more public spaces, or what many today are calling third spaces. That is why, I guess, he argues we aren’t natural beings. We don’t belong in nature but in the polis. Humans, therefore, come into their own in civilization. Or something like that.

By the way, he distinguishes the ‘public’ from ‘community’ and the ‘commons’, as he claims the latter two can’t serve this purpose. Only the public represents a collective form and expression of the alienated subject. Some questions, then, follows:

• Were humans a lost cause for the hundreds of millennia prior to civilization and any conception of a public?
• Wouldn’t alienation, as a hindering spandrel with no adaptive advantage, have been counterproductive to survival of the species?
• If so, why did alienation form and persist as part of homo sapiens thriving, succeeding, and spreading across the earth?
• Is alienation just a variety of Original Sin that is existentially baked in into our broken nature?

McGowan never entertains and contemplates, much less answers, these questions. Along these lines, particularly disappointing in the book was the section “Perverse Satisfactions” in Chapter 1: The Disturbed Subject.  The analysis came across as profoundly naive.

In making a moral judgment (“extreme,” “excesses,” “violates,” “deviates,” “horrors,” etc), McGowan takes a subjective and culturally biased view of perversity as demonstrable proof that it couldn’t have a natural explanation in biology and evolution, as one finds in evolutionary psychology. This is taken as necessitating a denaturalized and alienated subject as the motivation for such behaviors.

“[R]ather than theorizing obesity as the result of the subject’s alienation, certain naturalistic thinkers see it as a development of an evolutionary mismatch. […] [C]ultural changes worked faster than natural selection […] Scholars in all fields and most of the public tend to […] accept that we are natural beings rather than alienated subjects” (p. 33).

Instead of surveying the research on the causes of something like obesity, he baselessly speculates and expects the reader to accept it without critical thinking. He simply refuses to engage with experts in other fields who study these issues. As another example, human sexual behavior just doesn’t make sense to him. He argues there is no plausible theory of survival benefit for individuals and the species to be prone — at least under certain conditions — to male promiscuity, non-procreative sex, etc and even humans living beyond reproductive age.

This is sheer ignorance or intellectual carelessness. Many of these kinds of behaviors aren’t limited to humans. Yet he makes no claims of alienation for these non-human species. Nor do these behaviors in humans lack possible explanations, however he might dismiss them out of hand.

After initially having given up on the book, I’ve since continued reading further and grappling with it. I decided to give McGowan another chance and find out if there is something to the argument and evidence for his theory.

What motivated me is that, in recent years, I’ve increasingly seen many other books that make counterintuitive or atypical arguments for reinterpreting and embracing what our culture has tended to criticize, dismiss, and find troubling and contrary. Besides his take on alienation, there are a slew of other topics that have come to be defended in various books:

• silence (Jerome Sueur, Natural History of Silence)
• invisibility (Akiko Busch, How to Disappear)
• forgetting (Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting)
• non-egoism (Jay Garfield, Losing Ourselves)
• determinism (Robert Sapolsky, Determined)

The modern Western self is being challenged and its justifications interrogated. Admittedly, I’m all for that, the reason for my reading this kind of material, even when my initial response is skepticism and disagreement.

Something about this pattern of writing by public intellectuals seems indicative of our public mood right now, as we find ourselves in a poly-crisis and meta-crisis, maybe even a new crisis of identity, along with what arguably is a paradigm shift and a revolution of the mind, as sometimes precedes a societal, political, and economic revolution. I take it as a sign of a population, society, and culture that’s destabilized, stressed, traumatized, uncertain, anxious, fearful, threatened, etc. It’s reaching the point of existential crisis for the entire civilization.

So, ever more people are questioning if we can go on like this. And if not, what other options are there?

But I see it from another perspective as well. Under such extremely sub-optimal conditions, the human psyche tends to get overwhelmed and so shut down (low ‘openness to experience). When that happens, reactionary mentality and right-wing ideology becomes attractive. Or else the mind skews in odd directions. In any  case, the tenets, attributes, and expressions of liberalism and liberal-mindedness become victims of doubt.

Fundamental Western ideas and ideals like progress, individualism, free will, and such feel less persuasive and compelling. All the things we’ve collectively valued and taken for granted seem to have failed, been corrupted, shown to be false, or somehow are compromised and problematized. Hence, much falls under scrutiny, to be held at a distance or to be discarded entirely.

McGowan and these other authors don’t necessarily or, in many cases, maybe even likely understand the oppressive and harmful conditions that make them prone to a critical and skeptical stance. Such larger societal influences tend to be pervasive and insidious, with few having much knowledge of the social science theory and research that would explain it.

So, the underlying motivations too often go unnoticed and unexplored. And that is precisely what interests me, not so much the focus itself but what’s behind it, the conditions surrounding it.

About McGowan’s coming to the defense of alienation as an underdog, it took me a while to understand what he is positing, for what purpose, and to what end. He is trying to revive Hegel’s belief in an inevitable and totalizing process of alienation as inherent to humanity. As he sees it, we have no choice other than to embrace it. Otherwise, it would be akin to alienation upon alienation. Hence, we must learn to be less alienated toward our intrinsic alienation. It’s just who we are. Deal with it!

In particular, according to this view, education or Bildung is necessary violence inflicted on our natural being to induce alienated subjectivity. It forces us into an awakening of sorts, and so allows a fuller and better expression of who we are and were meant to be. We must be freed from our own false self but also freed from any seeking toward a true self. It’s self-identity itself that is precisely the problem.

“For Hegel, alienation is positive because it delivers us from the stasis of self-identity. Through alienation, the subject enters into what is other than itself and becomes who it is as it transforms into what it isn’t. Alienation rips us out of our natural being and generates subjectivity. Hegel theorizes the subject as an entity that must find itself at home in what is absolutely other to it, and this can only occur through a process of alienation. Dialectics is, for Hegel, a system in which there is no respite from alienation, in which alienation is total” (pp. 88-9).

“Subjectivity, according to Hegel, finds itself through “violence at its own hands [that] brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction.” We discover the truth of our subjectivity not in what we initially take ourselves to be but in how we end up after we have enacted this violence against ourselves. […] [H]e conceives of education as an act of violence done to the child, a violence that disrupts the child’s inherent tendencies rather than allowing them to blossom according to their own logic. […] the alien violence of education is what initially frees the child from its familial and social situation. In this sense, education is an emancipatory violence” (pp. 92-3).

That is deemed to be the ultimate aspiration and expression. This is proposed as a good thing and, besides, it’s declared there is no alternative. But to my mind, that comes across as ideological realism. And that makes me look for the unstated and likely unconscious assumptions, biases, and prejudices.

Achieving alienation is somehow both essential and impossible to avoid, whereas attempting anything else would be worse than failure, a catastrophe. There presumably is something in our nature that impels us to destroy and go beyond our inborn nature. It’s our telos or destiny. We find our freedom in our fate.

As far as I can tell, this implies a dualism between nature and society, with the latter presumed to be more genuine and/or important. We aren’t fully real and our experience isn’t fully valid until we’ve been civilized, that is to say alienated.

[Side thought: It’s more than a bit confusing. Hegel asserts, “Nature has to be contradictory to give birth to the contradictory subject.”

Querying it, another asked, “if nature really were contradictory yielding but contradictory things wouldn’t it possess the necessity then of producing something contradictory to its contradictory self–i.e., only things noncontradictory?” (jamesbarlow6423’s comment at United We Lack: Todd McGowan‘s Response to Slavoj Žižek).

This leaves me entirely unclear about what this could possibly mean. If alienation from nature is implicit within nature, then denaturalization while not being nature is also inseparable from nature, in which case it too is nature. WTF! Is this just sophistry or is there more to it?

It feels like we’re talking in circles. This supposedly denaturalized alienation is simultaneously a process, as a result, and totalizing, in that it couldn’t be otherwise. Yet it must go against what is, nature, to become something else that is a denial and unfolding of what is, denaturalized.

But if Hegel is himself alienated from nature, as supposedly we all are, how could he even know what is this ‘nature’ from which he is alienated? Am I missing something? Why talk about alienation from something we can’t know? In that case, is ‘alienation’ as a term somewhat of an empty signifier?]

Like Hegel, McGowan claims that we need to escape our natural state in order to achieve emancipation, whatever that might mean. Hence, alienation, as rupture, is the only mode of freedom. Is this rupture an emergence of something genuinely new and unique?

Assuming I’m correct about the undertones, my sense is this is a philosophical secularization of the theological belief in a fallen human nature, but where the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is idealized. That is what it means to embrace alienation. There is no return to the Garden of Eden. The gates are permanently shut and the lock can’t be picked. To my mind, it feels like a reified abstraction that’s being imposed on all of humanity. I’m not persuaded — intellectually, morally, or psychologically — to accept this religious-like conviction and doctrine.

By the way, McGowan is taking his argument a step further. It’s not only that alienation happens but that we want to be alienated. It’s fun and enjoyable. It’s tiresome, dissatisfying, and pointless to go against our contradicted and alienated subjectivity.

He claims that, for example, destruction of the natural world is enjoyable. Accordingly, we don’t want responsibility. But this misses something. Unlike the Mad Men scene he describes, most indigenous people show no indication of wanting to or enjoying environmental destruction.

How can he take a fictional scene portraying middle class whites in mid-20th century United States as the standard of all humanity?

This is where McGowan’s analysis is ultimately philosophical, specifically ontological but with what feels like an existentialist impulse. There is no escape or none that is worthy and desirable. Rather, what we really long for is ‘a way out’ (The Gesture of Tank Man):

“Kafka’s ideas on imprisonment, catastrophe, freedom and ways out are not as simple as they might seem on the first reading of, for example, The Trial . The short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ provides further insight into the type of freedom that Kafka had in mind. The hunting expedition of the Hagenbeck Company captured an ape. To train him, they put him in a very small cage on the company’s steamboat, a cage that was too low for him to stand up and too small for him to sit down. At the same time the sailors tormented him. The ape realizes that if he wants to live he has to find a way out. But he does not contrast his distressing situation with freedom: ‘No, it was not freedom I wanted. Just a way out; to the right, to the left, wherever ; I made no other demands ’., The way out is not directed so much to a specific goal, i.e. freedom or return, but is simply a way out.”

~Anke Snoek, Agamben’s Joyful Kafka, Kindle Locations 358-375

That is supposedly what embracing alienation accomplishes. Our struggles end, if our alienation does not.

More generally, even as he styles himself as an intellectual renegade, part of the reason his book fails is proscribing his thought almost entirely to conventional, mainstream thought, largely Hegelian philosophy, in the Western tradition. As such, he never goes beyond his WEIRD bias to explore other possibilities. He appears to have little familiarity with the social sciences, particularly not anthropology; with only brief mention (in a single note) of the likes of David Graeber and David Wengrow.

The argument for alienation feels like the product of siloed academia and so feels prone to intellectual masturbation. One doesn’t get the sense that he is seriously engaging with other views, in offering them up as straw men.

Let’s consider the anthropological literature. I can think of examples, such as the Piraha, that seem to generally lack alienation and seem to be fine without it. The only exception that comes to mind was when, after killing someone in another tribe, one Piraha tribesman banished himself. That is to say he embraced alienation as social death, certainly not to transform himself into a member of the public.

The reason for this suicidal action was that it was a common understanding that Piraha don’t kill. There was no law against it, nor punishment. The murderer, in feeling alienated from his own former Piraha identity, banished himself to the jungle where he soon after died alone. The thing is this is a rare experience. It was the only time it had happened in living memory. It’s the exception that proves the rule. The Piraha don’t embrace alienation. Neither would they see value in it, assuming they could understand it. Alienation is simply the precursor to removing oneself from the community and from the genetic pool.

Such tribal dividuals appear to have all the traits of a functioning unalienated community that McGowan believes cannot exist:

“The security the community provides is always illusory. No symbolic identity can ever relieve one of the problem of alienated subjectivity. Even within the comforts of a community and the identity that it offers, one remains an alienated subject. The problem persists. The community gives me a symbolic identity, but that identity ends up being at odds with itself. Its security is ultimately insecure” (p. 120).

It comes down to whether one ascribes to bundle theory of mind or ego theory of mind, whether individualism or dividualism is closer to the evolutionary norm, whether or not our natural state is 4/5E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, & extended; + ecological). But that debate goes unmentioned, presumably off McGowan’s radar or even entirely outside his sense of reality.

I still struggle to wrap my mind around his take on alienation. And so I’m not sure, in my negative appraisal, that I’m getting it right or what substance there is to get right. Apparently, it’s not natural but it’s inevitable or near inevitable. He also has a weird mixing of how freedom necessitates fate, in our being confronted by our situation but alienated from it.

All I can say is that, assuming that I’m not confused, it doesn’t match much of the anthropological study of forager tribes and the theories used to explain their cultures and mentalities. Does he consider such people, if they really aren’t alienated, to not be free? And if alienation defines the human condition, are they not fully human or have not fully achieved their humanity? Or what?

In terms of the Piraha, there is no equivalent of education as violence that inflicts alienation. They’re one of the most egalitarian groups I’ve ever come across in that they entirely lack dominance hierarchies, power disparities, authority figures, punishable rules, etc. In their version of dividualism, they simultaneously have immense autonomy of the person and a strong shared identity of the tribal community enmeshed in a sense of place. However, ‘community’ might be too weak of a concept to describe their tight-knit and immersive sense of communal identity and reality.

I just don’t see how alienation fits in, is required, or would be desirable; even as it’s the condition we find ourselves in and within which we feel trapped. Sure, it might be the case that, in modern civilization as is operated up to this point, the violence of the alienating process is necessary for creating citizen-subjects who will comply with authoritarian systems and dominance hierarchies. But dividualistic tribes aside, was that always true for all civilizations? Were feudal communitarians really alienated in the way we understand in capitalism? I remain unconvinced.

McGowan wouldn’t accept that humanity has ever been different, and sees no reason to explain when and how alienation first emerged. He’s content to aver that it’s all we are and can know. He wants an alienation that would apply to all humans. Otherwise, if a single exception exists, it means non-alienation is possible. For some reason, he doesn’t want to allow for that possibility.

“I think the kinds of sophistical and specious arguments McGowan makes are fairly representative examples of how most discourse works today, and not just academic discourse. His task here seems to be to dismiss Marxist, psychoanalytic, existentialist, and any other left-leaning discourse as foolishly naive, and replace them with an updated version of the Romantic ideology, which will finally set us all free.

“This isn’t unusual, of course. English professors have been doing this for as long as there have been English departments, and Romantic poets and philosophers have been doing it as long as there has been capitalism. But most of us still fall prey to this strategy exactly because it is so successful in university departments and with publishers. We are taught all the time to think poorly, and so we think we have found something radical and new every time somebody relabels Romanticism.

“The first move McGowan makes is simply to redefine alienation. […] McGowan suggests that when “leftists” want to “fight against alienation” they are “missing its emancipatory quality” and giving it “a bad rap.” But what he seems to mean by alienation is something else entirely. He simply redefines alienation as what “frees us from our situation,” what “gives subjectivity an ability to act against what would otherwise determine it.” That is, alienation is simply redefined as whatever it is that gives us the capacity to “transcend” the economic, cultural, and even biological determinants that would otherwise limit our action in the world. Okay, we might say, but if that’s what you want to talk about, why use a word that already has an existing definition quite different from this? Surely we would want to embrace this capacity for agency, but why relabel agency with the term “alienation,” which already has a very specific and quite different meaning? [,,,]

“So far, then, McGowan has decided that “alienation” should be redefined as the ability to freely choose; he then goes on to insist that choices are only free when they are in fact not at all in our conscious or rational control, when we “don’t deliberate on a course of action and experience in the course of choosing it.” If this doesn’t strike you as bizarre reasoning…well, you’ve read too much Wordsworth and Blake, I guess. It is, after all, fairly typical of Romantic ideology.”

~Embracing Alienation, from The Faithful Buddhist

Disconnection and Ignorance in a Dominance Hierarchy

“It may be no exaggeration to say that stupidity has killed more people than all the diseases known to medicine and psychiatry.

“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.”

~Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

“There’s probably a lot of rich people who are pretty dumb and then get really lucky and do really well in business. And there might be some rich people who are pretty smart but I wonder now if being this level of rich and having all these influential people if it makes you dumber.

“The reason why I think it makes makes you dumber is for exactly the effect that I mentioned before, that you’re always talking to people who are like ChatGPT, who are sycophantic. And I feel like that makes you stupider because you’re not getting any hardcore resistance. You’re not getting any friction.

“More and more your ideas are getting taken up as having insights, which reinforces the idea that you’re really smart, which removes the filter on your thoughts. You just say any old stupid thing and people are just like, “Yeah, that’s really interesting. There’s an interesting insight there.”

“So, you just become dumber and dumber and dumber because nothing you say is getting any friction or resistance to the point where all of the sudden you just become basically an idiot with money.”

~The Philosophy of Jeffrey Epstein, 55 minute mark,
Pill Pod Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast

The highest echelons of the upper class are the most disconnected and isolated. Their entire social reality is siloed and forms an echo chamber that repeats back to them their own biases and prejudices. They are told what they want to hear by yes men, flatterers, fluffers, subordinates, employees, servants, and beneficiaries. And they hear their views repeated by pundits, public intellectuals, talking heads, lobbyists, politicians, etc. So, they fall into confirmation bias and smart idiot effect. All they really know is how to maintain plutocracy and manipulate the system. Think of Jeffrey Epstein having stated that real work is only for the ‘goyim’ (i.e., the inferior).*

The economic, cultural, and ruling elite are alienated and estranged from the lived experience of most of humanity, from reality and basic knowledge on the ground. Robert Anton Wilson argued this is why the people controlling society and creating the rules are so dumb and incompetent, leading to failure and decline.** In a dominance hierarchy, each person avoids telling any inconvenient and uncomfortable truth to superiors and authority figures, so as to keep their job and keep out of trouble. Level after level, after the message finally gets to the top, it’s been filtered and shaped to fit the social norms, cultural expectations, conventional ideology, dominant paradigm, master narrative, and ruling system.

This is why the emperor can be made to walk around naked believing he is clothed in the finest garment. In the story, the child points out the truth and makes it public knowledge. But in our society of near total information control, that rarely happens. The child would never be heard, would never be platformed, would never make it into the MSM or national politics. This is why Epstein, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, falsely believe they’re genius-level masters of the universe. The whole system serves them. They’ve come to believe their own lies. The best con succeeds by the con man first conning himself.

Alienation works differently for the permanent underclass. They are propagandized and indoctrinated, disinformed and made ignorant. But what the dirty masses aren’t is disconnected from the real world problems and consequences. And neither are they as stunted in terms of cognitive empathy, as research shows that the poor have the greatest ability to accurately read the minds and predict the behavior of others. The awareness of the subjugated, though, is distorted by the system of social control they’re trapped in. For most of them, they only know what the elite allow them to know.

The middle class, however, might have the most interesting position. In being better educated and more well read, they’re not as ignorant and disinformed as those below them but more so than those above. Simultaneously, they’re not as clueless and obtuse as the elite, if to a far greater extent than the masses. So, though in one sense they’re less worse off than both the dominators and the dominated, their middling position means they neither have the advantages found at the polar ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. The middle is a muddle. They lack the perspective from the top and the bottom. This is why it’s most dangerous when the middle class allies with the ruling class.

* * * *

Notes:

*In a 2009 email to Roger Schank, Jeffrey Epstein explained that, “This is the way the jew make money… and made a fortune in the past ten years, selling short the shipping futures, let the goyim deal in the real world.” As a Zionist and Jewish supremacist, he really did want a Jewish cabal that conspires to control the world. But his attitude is identical to the non-Jewish oligarchs and plutocrats who have seized the US government. Consider Elon Musk and Peter Thiel with their grandiose vision of a Butterfly Revolution that will lead to techno-feudalism. They fantasy about balkanizing civilization into big tech fiefdoms that are ruled separately by each of them as lords and masters over their respective serfdoms.

**In an essay published elsewhere, I discuss empathy in terms of sociopolitical conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO) (Liberal Empathy, the Weapon of Satan). I argue that it’s because of a lack of cognitive empathy, including of their own mind, that they lack self-awareness and hence self-control. [Self-awareness is a subset of social awareness, as the child must first learn to model the minds of others before they can do the same for themselves.] Then they project their inner sense of chaos and disorder outward onto the world. So, in feeling out of control, they seek to control others and all of society. But as they’re unconscious chaos agents, they wreck everything they touch with problems, failures, and crises proliferating.

* * * *

Wilson uses the eye in the pyramid as a symbol of the dysfunction of hierarchies. Every level except the top is blind, but the eye can see only one way. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Celine’s Second Law
from Wikipedia

“Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.”^[2]

Wilson rephrases this himself many times as “communication occurs only between equals”. Celine calls this law “a simple statement of the obvious” and refers to the fact that everyone who labors under an authority figure tends to lie to and flatter that authority figure in order to protect themselves either from violence or from deprivation of security (such as losing one’s job). In essence, it is usually more in the interests of any worker to tell his boss what he wants to hear, not what is true.^[3]

In any hierarchy, every level below the highest carries a subtle burden to see the world in the way their superiors expect it to be seen and to provide feedback to their superiors that their superiors want to hear. In the end, any hierarchical organization supports what its leaders already think is true more than it challenges them to think differently. The levels below the leaders are more interested in keeping their jobs than telling the truth.

Wilson, in Prometheus Rising, uses the example of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Hoover saw communist infiltrators and spies everywhere, and he told his agents to hunt them down. Therefore, FBI agents began seeing and interpreting everything they could as parts of the communist conspiracy. Some even went as far as framing people as communists, making largely baseless arrests and doing everything they could to satisfy Hoover’s need to find and drive out the communist conspiracy. The problem is, such a conspiracy was greatly exaggerated. Hoover thought it was monolithic and pervasive, and any agent who dared point out the lack of evidence to Hoover would be at best denied promotions, and at worst labeled a communist himself and lose his job. Any agent who knew the truth would be very careful to hide the fact.

Meanwhile, the FBI was largely ignoring the problem of organized crime (the Mafia), because Hoover insisted that organized crime did not exist on the national scale. Not only does the leader of the hierarchy see what he wants to see, but he also does not see what he does not want to see. Agents who pursued the issue of organized crime were sometimes marginalized within the organization or hounded into retirement.

In the end, Celine states, any hierarchy acts more to conceal the truth from its leaders than it serves to find the truth.

The People Making “The Rules” are Dumber Than You
by Kevin Carson

The people who regulate what you do, in most cases, know less about what you’re doing than you do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s nominally a “public” or “private” organization, or how smart the people running it are as individuals. No matter how smart the people in charge are, they are systematically stupid in their organizational roles, because of the dynamics of information flow in hierarchies (as described by Robert Anton Wilson, for example).

Organizations are pyramids, and the people at the tops of the pyramids tend to communicate much more effectively with each other than they do with those at the bottoms of their own respective pyramids. That means that most organizations are riddled with “best practices” based almost entirely on feedback about how well they worked from people at the tops of the other pyramids. And those latter people have almost no valid knowledge of how the policies actually worked in their own organizations.

Remember the story of the Emperor’s new clothes? Large organizations are designed to insulate naked emperors from unpleasant feedback. That set of clothes must look good, because the emperors at the other organizations all have a set just like it, and they can’t stop talking about how great they look!

The state, by promoting centralization and hierarchy and insulating bureaucratic organizations from the competitive consequences of their inefficiency, causes such irrationality to predominate in our society. We’re living in the world of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

The Illuminatus Trilogy
by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea

It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people’s brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation’s capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.

It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell’s 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a “radio” built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, “Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?” This little voice the Freudians call “the superego,” which Freud himself vividly characterized as “the ego’s harsh master.” With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as “a set of conditioned verbal habits.” This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of “conditioned verbal habits”). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart—that is, from the biogram.

No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.

Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram— what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants —is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less “real.” They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, “a tool, a machine, a robot.”

Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class— the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe— is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

Everything is Under Control
by Robert Anton Wilson w/ Miram Joan Hill

Another factor tending to multiply conspiracy theories beyond necessity lies in the fact that all intelligence agencies have two functions, viz.:

1. Collection of accurate information.
2. Planting and encouraging inaccurate information.

An intelligence agency, in other words, needs to know “what the hell is really going on” for the same reason a bank or a grocer or you and I need that kind of factual input. Hence, the huge budgets for item 1 above.

Intelligence agencies, however, also need to keep ahead of their competitors, the rival intelligence agencies of other and, hence, perfidious governments. They therefore engage in frenetic efforts of spreading misinformation, “disinformation” (a euphemism for the former), “cover stories,” “cover-ups,” etc. In order to deceive whoever currently functions as “the enemy,” these fantasies must have enough facts mixed into them, and enough general plausibility, that they will deceive many others not yet defined as “enemy.” Always, they must deceive persons of average intelligence and average education or they just don’t work. The best disinformation should also deceive persons of more-than-average wit and know-how, for a while at least.

In brief, modern secret-police work functions much like poker. All players try to send false signals at least part of the time, and ll players try to detect “the real truth” behind the false signals sent by the others.In a world where nations relate to each other in this manner, conspiracy models flourish like bacteria in a sewage system. As Henry Kissinger allegedly said, “Anybody in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.” Indeed, any citizen in a world run like that who doesn’t have some “paranoid” suspicions must have suffered brain damage in childhood.

When the government engages in extensive (well-publicized) snooping and spying on the public, this paranoia escalates rapidly. Where there exists a secret police agency of any sort, in any nation, the people soon learn to suspect those who suspect them. Concretely, many Americans fear that any part of government, or even any organization not admittedly part of the government, may function as a front for the CIA, the FBI, the BATF, the National Security Agency, or groups even more esoteric and manipulative.

Thus, the more omnipresent the government’s “control,” the more suspicious and uneasy the people become. And the more people indicate a lack of faith of such government, the more such government will need to spy on them, to feel absolutely sure they have not become alienated enough to hatch rebellion or set off more homemade bombs of the Oklahoma City variety. The government will therefore increase its spying and snooping, and the people will become more “careful.” As a crude kind of survey, I have asked audiences in hundreds of lectures and seminars if any of them ever willingly tell the whole truth about anything to a government official. Nobody has ever held up their hand and claimed that degree of faith and tractability.

No man or woman in the United States today wants the Feds to know too much about what he or she is really doing. Since the government long ago passed the point of “anything not forbidden is compulsory” and now also wishes to enforce “anything not compulsory is forbidden,” we all suspect that we are technical criminals at least, although like Kafka’s hero we are never quite sure which statute or statutes we may have violated.

We thus arrive at a situation that in the Army is called Optimum Snafu. Those at the top are never told what might cause them to punish the informant, and those at the bottom keep their mouths shut about more and more of what they actually see, hear, smell, taste, or otherwise sense of the environment. In the long run, the top people in the pyramid are attempting to regulate things they know nothing about, based on reports that have been invented by liars and flatterers to prevent them from using their awful powers too destructively.

But if most people always lie a little in dealing with the State, the State must have a very weird and inaccurate picture of who the people are and what they really think and want. Laws will therefore direct themselves to a fictitious citizenry, not to the people we really are. Thus, the laws increasingly make no sense to the folk who have to endure them, and more hostility to government appears.

All these cycles make up a set of Strange Loops and Vicious Circles from which there presently appears no exit. Unless, as suggested before, the funding runs out or Divine Intervention occurs, conspiracy theories will flourish, both among the increasingly anxiety-ridden citizenry and among the politicos and bureaucrats who try to command them. And every voice that tries, or pretends, to tell the truth in this schizoid situation immediately comes under suspicion as another possible Deceiver and Manipulator whose yarn has to be looked at as critically as any PostModernist would look at the Declaration of Independence or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

We are all Deconstructionists now, whether we ever heard the word before or not.

Saying the Right Thing, Doing the Right Thing

“I’ve met all sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”
~Noam Chomsky

“Chomsky played a part in cultivating the Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi wing with alt media that defends [Jeffrey] Epstein, & by extension the other forces of ruling-class pedophilia. Remember that all of this comes from the campaign to promote a non-communist left, which Chomsky embodies.”
~Rainer Shea, Substack

That view of Noam Chomsky is something I’ve been chewing on for a long time. While often impressed by his intellectual scholarship and leftist critique, as early as 2010, I noticed something that bothered me.

When asked by a young man about what to do, all he gave was a quippy response that amounted to nothing “Ye slaves, find yer own ways.”

He offered no genuine alternative, solution, or pathway forward. Without articulating a collective project, his ideology has left the individual stranded against forces far beyond us all. He didn’t propose any hope of solidarity, of class or group consciousness.

Though I had a hard time putting my finger on it at the time, I now look back at it with greater knowledge and perspective.

It reminds me of how, during the Cold War, the CIA funded and promoted postmodernists so as to suck out the oxygen from the room of leftist spaces (literary magazines, writer workshops, etc). It was intended to drown out and silence Marxists. It was successful in that postmodernism became so prominent that right-wingers came to complain about it.

Maybe Chomsky’s anarchism has served a similar role for the powers that be. He offers a critique that, if not empty, is impotent. It leads nowhere and so fuels demoralization and helplessness.

“Reading Chomsky’s emails and advice to Epstein, who by then was already known for pleading guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, is enough. It actually lends more credence to the idea that Chomsky was controlled opposition and a government asset, a herder of leftism to pacify revolutionary tactics and discourage its practice.”
~Rex Eloquens, An Epitaph for Noam Chomsky

Why would he willingly serve this role in crippling the left? And now in his ties to Epstein being proven, why would he destroy his entire reputation and legacy?

“There’s nothing that makes me crazier than when a guy who I know is ten times smarter than me acts like he is dumber than me.”
~Jimmy Dore

“While attaining credibility for doing the most basic, human thing for Palestine, he ran in the same circles of Zionists like Epstein who wanted to overthrow Syria, Iran and Russia among others. The same people who wanted to destroy Gaza and have done so. He knew who Epstein was and his affiliations with Zionism; how he wouldn’t have known about his Mossad ties? Was he an idiot? No. More likely an opportunist.”
~Fiorella Isabel, from X

Though presenting himself as an outsider, he has been an insider for his entire career.

And so he wasn’t offering a genuinely outside perspective. But until recently, it wasn’t clear what kind of insider he was or rather exactly what he was inside of. This is the problem with any public figures aligned with the Democratic Party, as was Chomsky.

It’s not to suggest he was consciously part of a conspiracy. It’s simply that, in being drawn into the system of power, he took on the biases of it. One doesn’t have to be among the ruling elite to have one’s imagination and identity constrained by the ideological realism that maintains elite rule.

Chomsky almost certainly began with good intentions, as most people do. And he came to believe in the bullshit of lesser evilism, if we are to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He is a lesson to us all.

The moral decadence inherent to that worldview slowly led him into the gravity of a blackmail pedophilia ring, what seems to have been part of a vast transnational intelligence operation. Likely, all along the way, he stated persuasive reasons for why he did this or that. The transition over time was probably so subtle that he never, at any given point, realized how far he had gone into a world he once would’ve hated.

That is how he ended up as a partisan stooge, in maintaining the bipartisan control of the American Empire.

Democrats aren’t an opposition party but controlled opposition. They operate as part of the gatekeepers. They are the managers of the Overton window who, in consistently attacking the broad left (and silencing the left-liberal supermajority), declare what’s allowable or not: This far left and no further!

Related to this, it’s how we the American public have allowed ourselves to be controlled and manipulated. The following are my thoughts during the presidential campaign season before the 2016 election:

“I’ve always had an oddly optimistic side of my personality. Despite my depression and skepticism, I’m a possibility thinker and I try to gain a larger perspective to see beyond whatever shittiness is going on in any given moment. It’s easy to be cynical, but that seems like a boring way to live if that is a knee-jerk reaction and thoughtless attitude.

“Yet the political left supporting someone so horrific as Clinton is snuffing out what hope I’ve held onto all these years. I’m shocked by how few people comprehend how far gone is our society. It’s long past the time of playing these kinds of games. I don’t want to give up on this country, but so many Americans have already given up by default of the choices they’re making. Fighting the good fight is seemingly ever more pointless as time goes on.

“I’m starting to think we’re just going to have to let the situation go beyond redemption and then rebuild out of the rubble. We will collectively take our problems seriously when there is no other choice left, after we’ve wasted all other opportunities and have backed ourselves into a corner. That is a sad conclusion to come to.”

It reminds one of the old quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” If we haven’t yet quite tried everything else, one suspects we’re getting close to that point. It would be nice for the American people to finally move onto the final stage of doing the right thing.

My above words were from the comments section at one of my earlier writings, The Chomsky Problem (2016).

“Noam Chomsky’s life and work cannot be understood without taking into account his militarily-funded linguistics research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There were, I believe, always two ‘Noam Chomskys’ – one working for the US military and the other working tirelessly against that same military. This contradiction cannot explain every aspect of Chomsky’s puzzling friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. But it is the underlying contradiction that helps us understand why someone as radical as Chomsky ended up being involved with someone as reactionary as Epstein.”
~Chris Knight, The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle

I’ve long complained about Chomsky, such as his repeatedly acting as a sheepdog for the corporate Democrats.

But in my linked piece, I clarified that it’s a deeper problem, as he long ago was mired in Pentagon money and hence a part of the military-industrial complex, something he rationalized away as he did with Epstein’s crimes (Chomsky subreddit, Noam & Valeria Chomsky’s reactions to Epstein’s sex trafficking charges). Working at MIT, it was simply the water he swam in.

For all his outward opposition to capitalism, in the end, Chomsky was part of the capitalist system. And he protected it, if he may not have realized how he was being duped and used.

But it’s also telling how, strangely as it seemed in the past, he was always ready to dismiss ‘conspiracy theories’. What made this strange was precisely that his political scholarship described conspiracies in great detail. He provided the undeniable and irrefutable proof that so-called  conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts. He couldn’t recognize it, though; or he couldn’t allow it into his awareness.

Maybe his reluctance to openly speak of conspiracies was because, in a sense, he realized he was part of one.

“There is no ethical way to be a billionaire. Literally, having that much money and power destroys your brain, destroys your morality to the point where it’s clear from these files that Epstein and others considered themselves completely above the law and held any sort of value for human life. And that’s what really comes out of these things, that the billionaire class that rules us has to be destroyed and overthrown.”
~Alan MacLeod

One might add that neither is there an ethical way to be associated with the billionaire class.

Many of Chomsky’s fans and supporters are now shocked to find him in the Epstein files. It turns out he was a close friend and adviser of Jeffrey Epstein.

“One email from Chomsky and his second wife Valeria describes the couple’s friendship with Epstein as ‘deep and sincere and everlasting’. Another from Valeria describes Epstein as: ‘our best friend. I mean “the” one.’ Meanwhile other messages – signed only by Chomsky himself – are equally generous to the convicted sex offender, saying, for example, ‘we’re with you all the way’ and ‘you’re constantly with us in spirit and in our thoughts.’”
~Chris Knight, The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle

He helped Epstein to launder his reputation after his horrendous crimes were revealed. That is to say Chomsky gave advice on how to manufacture consent, by managing his public image. In return, Epstein gave Chomsky financial advice, along with paying for his flights and hotel rooms, and basically funding a life of luxury. Chomsky even flew on the infamous Lolita Express.

To the very end of Epstein’s life, Chomsky continued to defend him in the press. But he forgot to mention his financial ties to Epstein.

Sadly, cynical as I’ve become, I was unsurprised. I knew there was something off about Chomsky long ago, if it required more careful analysis to figure it out back then. But now it’s become obvious how corrupted and complicit he has been. This is why we should avoid hero worship.

“He gave a confirmed rapist advice on how to dodge the latest allegations against him.”
~Anna Kasparian

More importantly, this demonstrates how bad things have gotten when even many of the leading critics of the system of power are themselves implicated in what they criticized. It’s a broader problem. There is a reason to speak of it being systemic, as it’s not only about individual bad actors.

But we also must come to more than a mere intellectual understanding.

Chomsky is one of the greatest living leftist intellectuals. Yet his keen mind and vast knowledge didn’t protect him. That’s likely because he lacked social science understanding, in spite of being an expert in linguistics. Though talking about systems, and though somewhat understanding how the system invades the mind through media rhetoric, apparently he didn’t fully grasp how this operated psychologically, couldn’t see it happening to himself.

Self-awareness is often a weak point in human nature. That is all the more reason to carefully study the so-called soft sciences.

There are some leftist critics, though, who have maintained their moral commitment and principles. Another Jewish public intellectual, Norman Finkelstein, was also personally invited into Epstein’s social circle. But he refused and basically told them to fuck off. He is one of the harshest voices against Zionist Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

Maybe that is what allowed Finkelstein to see the Epstein group for what it was. Then again, he didn’t have any knowledge that wasn’t also possessed by Chomsky, as the latter was likewise anti-Zionist. But in the end, one has to want to see.

[As a side note, there is another earlier piece (Anarchists Not In Universities) where I wrote about Chomsky and academia, specifically in terms of power and compromise. I used the anarchist David Graeber as a contrast.

That analysis was from 8 years ago. My other writings on the topic mentioned above were even earlier from 2010 and 2016. So, off and on, this has been on my mind long before any known connections to Epstein. Just some things kept bothering me about Chomsky.]

“My guess is, if Epstein put your daughter at age 15 in such a position, you wouldn’t publicly describe him as a ‘friend’ and person of ‘integrity’. In fact, I would hope that you’d promptly throttle both Epstein and Dershowitz.”
~Norman Finkelstein

As a citizenry, we need to learn to discern between the likes of Chomsky and the likes of Finkelstein. Outwardly, they may appear to be similar as public intellectuals. But we should always be wary when someone like Chomsky, though a boring intellectual as a supposed anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, was a guest on corporate MSM more often than one would expect.

There probably is good reason Finkelstein, on the other hand, has remained largely unseen in the legacy media and been kept unknown to most Americans. He has refused to play nicely with the powerful, has refused to tone down his harsh message of righteous denunciation.

We need to recognize such people as Chomsky for who they are without requiring a massive conspiracy reveal like the Epstein files. All the evidence was available long ago to mistrust Chomsky for those who wanted to understand. We must develop the moral courage to look at what’s uncomfortable, including and especially about those we perceive as being on our side.

This requires, though, to have that aforementioned self-awareness. It’s not only Chomsky who can fool himself. We all have that capacity.

With all the craziness going on right now, it’s hard to feel excited that so much is being forced to the surface. It shouldn’t ever have been allowed to go so far, to get this bad.

Democrats could’ve stopped it. Any number of political leaders, government figures, bureaucratic officials, and influential elites could’ve stopped it. But they all knew what was happening, knew where it was going, and complicitly did nothing (A Deep Dive Into the Deep State; & Who Are the Distractors and Who Is the Distraction?); or sometimes actively did the worst, such as Democrats always willing to vote in support of the next GOP bill to fund ICE, Israel, etc.

It’s tiresome to be one of the individuals to see it all coming and yet unable to stop it or even get many others to pay attention.

“But the Epstein files reveal more than personal loyalty between him and Noam Chomsky. They expose political coordination.

“In emails with Epstein, Chomsky discussed the war in Syria, specifically the use of armed Salafi and Wahhabi groups to overthrow the Syrian government. Chomsky acknowledged that US and allied efforts against President Bashar al-Assad relied heavily on extremist factions including al-Muser front and ISIS.

“Rather than rejecting the strategy outright, Chomsky framed the rise of these groups as an unfortunate but tolerable consequence of a broader campaign for regime change. Privately expressing views that sharply contrasted with his public opposition to US interventionism.”
~Mnar Adley

If I made complaints of Chomsky even a month ago, many (most?) leftists would’ve ignored it or defended him. Why did it take the partial release — maybe 1% —  of the Epstein files for more people to be capable of demanding and hard-hitting critical thought? Why do we have to let things turn so dark and destructive before we no longer can ignore them?

If democracy is ever to be possible, we’re going to have to become better as a people. Sadly, in many ways, we do get the leaders we deserve in that we get what we accept and allow. Too many Americans want to be lied to, want to be told a nice story.

As such, it was easier to listen to Chomsky’s words than to look at his history of actions, to research and study his background. What is not spoken may say more.

“If Chomsky’s defining intellectual contribution was the naming of structural violence — the unseen forms of harm produced by political and economic systems — then what we see here is its fraternal twin: structural silence.”
~Richard S. Pinner, Structural Silence: Chomsky, Epstein, and the Architecture of Elite Immunity

It’s a welcome change that this situation is forcing awake more Americans, left and right. But it doesn’t change the basic problem. The moment it slips out of public awareness again, as new scandals and catastrophes replace it, what will stop Americans from forgetting about it and falling back to sleep?

That has been my worry.

Trump will eventually be forced out of office. He’ll be voted out, he’ll get impeached, he’ll die, or dementia will finally catch up with him. Then what? Will we go back to the lesser evil voting that constantly brought us to greater evil? As a cartoonish supervillain for the public to organize against, Trump may represent our last opportunity to finally and fully destroy the corrupt system.

We can’t let big money Democrats step in to normalize it again, as they’ve done in the past. That is what happened with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Democrats helped to establish George W. Bush’s imperial presidency as a precedent and so set the stage for Trump’s MAGA fascism by, after twice having regained the presidency, having refused to enact democratic reforms.

The answer to fascism isn’t to make it kinder and gentler, more hidden so that creeping authoritarianism can operate unseen. Then the rot will have set in, the cancer would be terminal.

That would be the worst outcome possible. If we don’t deal with the problem now, the next wannabe dictator is likely to be far worse than Trump and far more successful. We the American citizenry have a narrow window in which to do the right thing, finally.

* * * *

Further sources about Chomsky and Epstein:

“He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy.”
~Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein and the Politics of Betrayal

“Since Noam cannot speak or write and explain his relationship with Epstein, the matter is fraught. There is nothing to say on his behalf. When the photos and emails appeared, I was immediately disgusted by Epstein’s paedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him. There is no defence for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage.”
~Vijay Prashad, On the Emails Between Jeffrey Epstein and Noam Chomsky

Beyond the Clickbait: Epstein, Chomsky, Trump & Hero Worship in the Age of Digital Disinfo
by Fiorella Isabel & Vanessa Belley

A Note on Chomsky and Epstein
by Jeffrey St. Clair

Jeffrey Epstein thought he was mostly innocent. So did Noam Chomsky.
by P. Z. Myers

Noam Chomsky involved in dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.
by Tendance Coatsey

Noam Chomsky’s Epstein Problem
by Deniz Karabacak

When a Critic of Empire Sits at the Table of an Abuser of Power
by Emily

Unravelling the connection of Noam Chomsky with convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein
by Robin Westenra

Noam Chomsky Was Devoted To Epstein To The End
from Violet News

“By staying at MIT, Chomsky chose to maintain his career, in relative proximity to the centers of power he would later become an icon for denouncing. However, it shows that Chomsky, from this time onward, began to make some choices that undermined his radicalism to an extent. Chomsky may have rationalized his decision to stay at MIT in the 1960s because it gave him a better platform from which to espouse his political and anti-war views. It is not unheard of for prominent public figures to make such compromises. However, in light of the recent Epstein revelations and what they appear to signal, it seems that Chomsky, particularly in his later years, may have become too comfortable and too willing to make these types of compromises – ones that a much younger Chomsky would have surely rejected.“
~Whitney Webb, Unraveling the Epstein-Chomsky Relationship

“A crucial principle I learned from Chomsky: to understand power, you have to follow the money. And that’s still true. Except — what Chomsky fails to consider — is that he himself is part of the system of power that he claims to unravel. In assuming academic objectivity, he took himself out of the system without any justification.

“Because, if you do follow the money, some pathways run through him, whether in his prestigious and privileged position at MIT, or, a $1,400-a-night suite in Manhattan, paid for by Epstein. That’s where he stays. And that’s where we are. […]

“What did Chomsky give in exchange for Epstein’s favors? Was it his position disfavoring BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel while it commits apartheid and genocide in Palestine? Or is it his loyal support for a “two-state solution” 20 years after Israel has paved over that idea’s grave with the Apartheid Wall? Don’t we have a right to ask?”
~Ramsey Hanhan, Epstein Academy