Hearing Voices

Maybe start by considering the ease with which large segments of a population might be seduced. The classic example of this goes back roughly one hundred years to the work of Edward Bernays (Freud’s nephew and inventor of modern PR). He demonstrated the power of psychology in advertising by luring a generation of emancipation-seeking women into the world of smoking – those lighted cigarettes, you see, are actually torches of freedom. Bernays expanded this unseen mechanism as a way to mold public opinion for political purposes in his seminal work Propaganda.

Variations on the theme have been used to sell foreign policy initiatives (some may recall that tumbling domino imagery in the leadup to the Vietnam war by maintaining the equilibrium of the Dingdong by containing the ever encroaching Doodah). Others may recall the stagecraft behind the selling of that ill-fated Iraqi incursion in 2003 (U.N. address featuring the WMD blue-capped vial). Policy sold like dish soap.

Now add the power of the internet and social media to seduce a crowd. The opportunity for real reflection, once offered by legacy print media, communal discourse, and quiet contemplation has now largely been replaced by the incursion of those twenty-four hour nodal connections to hyperactive Ids. Reflex over reflection.

That brings us to our focus piece (click: Rapid-Onset Political Enlightenment) on the collapse of the 20th-century media pyramid and its replacement by monopoly social media platforms to enable the Obama White House to sell policy and reconfigure social attitudes and prejudices in new ways .

Our discussion will center on the establishment of an omnipotent thought-control machine, leaving an entirely new type of power center that might account for much of the “instability” we’ve experienced over those ensuing decades. It offers a cautionary tale for us today.

In essence, technology has enabled a new way to control the narrative as “public opinion” becomes forged through the initiatives advanced by relatively small groups, whether from the White House or activist organizations or captive “political verticals” controlled by corporate interests. The reach of technology has thus made it easy for the rise of an entirely new class of experts, think tanks, and NGOs who credential each other through feedback loops to invent a kind of parallel reality. The legacy media stands no chance beyond playing a small part.

This top-down “whole of society” machinery can then process various new “thought-viruses” to be marinated into its own reality for subsequent feeding to a credulous public. Resistance is futile as the very essence of this so-called permission structure machine (a term coined by David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign consultant) is that the reinforcing network short-cuts the traditional methods of validation and analysis. You are the product.

The whole notion of obedience to voices coming from outside yourself invites a discussion about the nature and source of your own belief system. Try to pinpoint the origin of your own thoughts (and speculate as to that of others) on such consequential matters as white privilege, defund the police, and border security. Do you honestly think Covid came from a wild bat?

What’s at stake is the prospect of a top-down totalitarian essence such that the integrity of the individual is to be sacrificed to further the superior interests of (any) party that presumes to know which beliefs are right and which are wrong i.e. the presumption of humanity’s superego.

Obedience to voices outside of oneself smacks of Moses taking instructions from a burning bush. MM isn’t in the business of hallucinations. From either party.

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