In American mythology, enemies of the peopel come to the attention of the state because they are doing something that worries the state. The people who got in trouble with the Soviets, for example, were either freedom fighters, skeptics of communism or religious people just trying to practice their faith. In other words, the person getting the business from the state, were both heretics and a specific threat. The state rationally picked them out from among the population for special treatment by the goons of the system.
The truth is, there is a great deal of chance involved in these situations. The Chinese have always understood this. The Chinese curse, “May you be recognized by people in high places” captures the serendipity that is always part of government. There are minor nuisances, who get caught up in the government dragnet, while others, who are very serious subversives escape attention. Sometimes it is simply a matter of pissing off the right person, or wrong person. Sometimes it’s just bad luck or bad timing.
Ideological government, either the hard type like the Soviets or the soft sort like we have in America, needs enemies. More specifically, it needs examples. In order to reinforce the rightness of the civic religion, they need to demonstrate the wrongness of heresy. That means the demand for heretics is constant. Finding heretics one at a time is expensive, so it soon becomes a bulk operation. They cast the net, pull in some trouble makers, throw away the small ones and keep the useful ones.
Social media has proven to be excellent fishing waters for this sort of operation. The need to preen and signal, means left-wing fanatics flood these sites. They become chum, attracting the sorts who enjoy criticizing Progressive piety. Every once in a while, a heretic gets caught up in the nets and is hauled aboard for defenestration. It’s no surprise that doxing, the tactic of leftists where they harass heretics at their work and school, almost always starts on social media. Swim near the trawlers, risk getting caught in the net.
There seems to be a corollary to this practice in the realm of official propaganda. The fire hose of fake news, conspiracy tales, and selective reporting is also an economical way of solving the propaganda issue. Instead of spending time and money coming up with credible narratives and high production values, the ideological state can simply reduce the verity of all social information to zero. If everyone comes to believe everything they hear is false, the critics of the regime have no way to convince the public.
Think of it this way. Imagine JFK was actually assassinated by a secret cabal within the government. In order to avoid detection they could find a sucker to setup for the crime, but there’s the risk someone could notice defects in the narrative. What if the sap they selected has an alibi or some physical evidence contradicts the story? The other choice is to try and erase all evidence pointing to the conspiracy, but this is hard to do. There’s always a few bread crumbs that point investigators in the right direction.
A third option is to create and promote a wide range of conspiracy theories that are plausible, but lack proof. This not only muddies the waters, it attracts the sorts of people who seek attention. Before long all of the Mike Cernovich types are promoting their favorite theory of the crime. Not only does this obscure the facts of the crime, it makes the real theory seem just as nutty as the fake conspiracies. The very act of trying to identify who killed Kennedy disqualifies the person doing it.
This is a pattern, by the way, we see with lots of unsolved mysteries. The official inquiry comes up dry or seems to lack official support, so there is a flood of conspiracy theories by professional conspiracy mongers. Obama’s birth certificate is a great example. Team Obama let that linger, because they wanted people talking about the birth certificate, rather than the gaping holes in Obama’s official biography. Before long, anyone puzzling over his backstory was cast as a “birther” and laughed off the stage.
Maybe that’s what has happened to our media over the last few decades. The ideological state no longer has to sell a credible narrative. They just have to allow the fake news to flood the zone so that the public assumes everything is fake, even the people criticizing the ideologues in charge. In a zero trust society, the value of subversion falls to zero, but the value of the institutions grows geometrically. Therefore, the people controlling the institutions increase their power, even as they become less credible.
That’s not to say the people in charge sorted this in advance. That would be a conspiracy theory of its own. No, these things may simply evolve. In the late stages of the Soviet Union, dark humor about the near total lack of trust in Russian society was common. It’s probably not an accident that some of those jokes are making a comeback in modern America, particularly in response to the Russia conspiracies. In a world where there is no truth and no one can trust anything, all you can do is laugh.
In 1922, under Lenin, the USSR started a humor magazine, Krokodil. It lasted until 2000. It lampooned stupid bureaucrats, bread lines, etc., letting off steam for the regime, which itself never was criticized. And it attacked the regime’s enemies. Sort of like the allowed humor today in the USA.
Perhaps a bit tangental, but the image of the Obama birth certificate posted by the gov could readily be seen to be a fake by anyone who has ever used Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Not saying there isn’t a real one but I wonder if it was someone’s sense of humor to post such an obvious fake.
The fact that the people most invested in the birther stuff were liberal propagandist was the tell. It was a straw man they loved, because it was a great distraction. It’s why Team Obama dragged their feet on the birth certificate. They thought it was great for their side.
The QAnon stuff, by the way, was an obvious liberal troll on the dumb and the gullible.
You mean like Arpio and Trump? Both them were invested in exposing Obama’s fake BC.
The reason it had traction because much of Obama’s past is shrouded in secrecy. Here’s man who comes out of the cornfield and becomes president. Anyone who is the least bit curious who wounder who exactly is Obama and what’s his background. For the most part he seemed to be a artificial creation.
Obviously not. As I used to phrase it back then. Only liberals and lunatics are invested in this story. In the liberal press did not promote it, no one, including Trump, would have cared.
Again, Zman, interesting insight. Reminds me a bit of signal to noise ratio study from college days. Run up the noise and the signal becomes less detectable. However, I’m a hopeless optimist I guess. I still believe there is signal detectable in the mountain of noise being shoved at us. You’ve just got to be savvy wrt to detecting and discarding the noise. Part of that process is using one’s common sense, developing critical thinking skills, and reading some of the heavy thinkers out there for guidance. MSM is almost never useful. But like the old TV show refrain…The truth… Read more »
The bottom line is that our overlords want us powerless. Whether it’s flooding us with foreigners or fake news and wacky conspiracy theories, the result is a public less able to trust, bond and unite with each other over a common cause.
That shit only works on white Americans because we’re already fragmented beyond belief and have no fight left in us. OTOH the ruling class is signing it’s death warrant by importing all these 3rd worlders. Once the population of Brownskins and Shariah types gets big enough they will simply sweep away the Cosmic whites and business types who have been running the the show until then. Why? These people have a strong ethnic identity, they aren’t afraid to fight and do prison time either. So they aren’t cowed like whites. Their gangs are often a extension of their ethnic community.… Read more »
In information theory this is called “chaffing”, that is, you flood the wheat with chaff in order to hide it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaffing_and_winnowing
Good catch. I was going to go in that direction, but I’m saving that for another post. Hiding the truth in plain sight is going to become more important as the surveillance increases. Prisoners are adept at this.
Z: “The demand for heretics is constant…Swim near the trawlers, risk getting caught in the net.” Those two paragraphs were funny great.
Z: “In a world where there is no truth and no one can trust anything, all you can do is laugh.” I guess that’s why the Manhattan shrug became so well known. The guys living there have long experienced our world of confusion to come.
I totally agree. Also, in a zero credibility environment you have zero loyalty. A state can’t have leaders with zero credibility and expect loyalty from either the citizens, the bureaucrats, or even the minor politicians, especially in far-flung places. I have no doubt that when the big red Soviet flag was hoisted in red square every morning, the random Muscovites who saw that flag either felt nothing and paid no attention, felt fear and trepidation, or felt a flash of anger towards a system that was impoverishing them. But at no time, except for maybe half a percent of the… Read more »
A country as large as America could only hold together so long as there was a certain amount of homogeneity, a feeling of a shared past and a shared destiny. Since the floodgates of the third world have been opened, the social trust has not only weakened through population replacement by wildly different tribes, but broken the bonds of White Americans, as Putnam found. These might be the birthing pangs of a collapse of the Empire and a splitting into independent, more ethnically based nations.
The current state of the Democratic Party is where we are all headed. Totally incoherent and at each other’s throats. The republicans will hold the mastery even without the majority by dint of having a coherent philosophy and intelligent strategy. Much the way white European minorities dominate Latin American countries. That’s what we’re converging towards.
I don’t see that. I find the Democrats to have a much more coherent philosophy, a failed one, but a coherent one. It even has a sort of utopian vision at the end, which is very appealing to the janitor in some office building. Republicans have always been defined as the low tax party. It’s really the only thing that most Republicans agree on. I consider myself to be more conservative than most Republicans, yet I’m an independent. I find the foreign adventurism of that party to be appalling, and too many are Paul Ryan clones that whore themselves to… Read more »
I agree. We are a tribe of money, nothing more, held together by the dollar bill. This is ephemeral, and doesn’t get a country through the hard times, which all countries have every so many decades. The Soviet Union couldn’t be held together with rubles, subsidies and welfare checks, so when the hard times came, there was nothing worth protecting.
“However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing.”
In a world of societal and institutional dysfunction, all you can do is improve your own robustness and reproduce. Large government has become a living thing in itself, and it treats dissenters as a disease that must be cured. And the US federal government has the strongest survival imperative of any living thing on the planet. And the DNA of a democratically elected government is the demographics of the voting population. And the composition of the voting demographic is now determined by who can be most easily bribed with government gravy. And the end result is a growing parasite population.… Read more »
Yeah yeah you’re right, that’s exactly it. The culprit is who jack ruby tells us it is, and more or less some weighted version of Unzs story. So there’s a flood of the media with Bizzarre conspiracy theories and kook books, all of which seem to fail to mention the actual probable perps. Oliver Stone weighs in with his movie. doesn’t it seem like when these issues are always in the air, he creates a movie to white wash the narrative? Think of Wall Street and Gordon gecko, which was a response to the savings and loan crisis, and W.,… Read more »
Thoroughly destroying the credibility of the news media is an old totalitarian trick. Once upon a time Americans looked to the media to find the facts and report them. Now, Soviet style, we have no expectation that corruption will be brought to light. Which suits the crooks just fine.
Yesterday, probably after binging on episodes of Dragnet on YT, I stumbled upon the pilot for Pettycoat Junction. Now it was unquestionably a Hollywood whitewash of small-town America in the mid-fifties; but its propaganda was so pure, white and wholesome — utterly unlike the filth we are are constantly bathed in today — that I actually wept. I am done with today’s America. The trawlers ARE too close, with nets deployed! Like a man seeking obscurity, and perhaps oblivion, in the Foreign Legion; I declare: “VERITAS PATRIA MEA.” I am gladdened by this backwater of truth seekers.