Anchors in a Sea of Chaos

Dear friends,

Things are getting quite interesting in the mainstream media. Here and there, something real is seeping through the omnipresent facade.

I read in an opinion paper in the New York Times (author: Maureen Dowd) that Biden was removed from the presidential race through a genuine “coup” or overthrow. It’s just an isolated article amidst the vast sea of media content that upholds the illusion of the day, but it’s still being picked up here and there in the mainstream media.

The content of the original article goes like this: Biden fell victim to an actual conspiracy by Obama, Pelosi, Schumer, and Jeffries. On alternative media, this conclusion was reached much earlier: the way Biden was removed from the race bears all the characteristics of a coup. This conclusion was drawn from a series of factors, including the fact that in the first days after the withdrawal, neither Biden himself nor people from his entourage publicly communicated about the withdrawal from the race, except through a letter signed by Biden “as if with a gun to his head.”

Is it a problem that a number of influential Democratic figures forced Biden behind the scenes to withdraw? Yes, because Biden was indeed democratically elected as the presidential candidate by millions of Democratic Party members. Kamala Harris was not democratically nominated at all.

The choice of Harris is, to put it mildly, remarkable. She initially had little to no grassroots support within the Democratic voter base; her knowledge of crucial aspects of the state system and key societal issues (such as the pressing phenomenon of inflation) seems almost nonexistent; and nature certainly did not endow her with rhetorical prowess.

Either the Democrats had an incredible poverty of available candidates, or they believe so blindly in the propaganda machine that is being mobilized that they dare to go to the elections with just anyone. A combination of these two factors seems most plausible to me.

Certain aspects of how the propaganda machine is used to influence elections have already been extensively documented. The development of elementary technological infrastructure for Google and many other popular Internet applications was originally funded by the US State Department due to their potentially extraordinary usefulness as propaganda tools. And that turned out to be a good bet.

Propaganda is not primarily the art of lying; it is the art of psychological manipulation. It is primarily the art of directing attention. Propaganda ensures that you notice certain aspects of reality and not others. And what is more suited to that than a search engine? Google is nowadays the Great Other that answers all your questions.

And that answer is far from “objective” or “neutral.” Google more frequently directs you to “desired” narratives than to undesirable ones. And sometimes the disbalance is quite outspoken. To give just one example: In the days following the attack on Trump, it was signaled frequently that the search term “assassination attempt” in America yielded little to no results referring to the assassination attempt on Trump. Instead, one would get content referring to all sorts of assassination attempts.

This suggests that those who believe the whole attack on Trump was a “deep state”-orchestrated publicity campaign for Trump are wrong. The attack on Trump was indeed extremely good publicity for Trump, but the establishment did everything to minimize that publicity.

While the manipulation of search strategies about the assassination attempt on Trump is still somehow speculative, the same is not true when talking about the 2020 elections. This much is clear: propaganda works stunningly well. It seems that the enormous propaganda machinery might even be able to achieve the impossible: making a candidate without grassroots support, without rhetorical talent, and without significant intellectual abilities the president of the US.

The Democratic Party in America is rapidly discarding any democratic character and is transforming more and more into a fully developed totalitarian structure. Under Biden’s rule, it became more or less normal to prosecute and imprison political opponents and dissident journalists (according to some sources, this involved hundreds of dissidents); he actively and explicitly helped create social support for the assassination attempt on Trump; he incited violence against the people of the MAGA movement in a barely concealed way; and in true totalitarian style, he kept the numerous (and perhaps justified) legal allegations against him and his family members out of the media.

The coup against Biden confronts Biden himself with a core characteristic of totalitarian systems. As Hannah Arendt already said: a totalitarian system always ultimately becomes a monster that devours its own children. Biden now knows this: he became a victim of the beast he himself abundantly fed.

That rising beast is, of course, not merely an American affair. It is a global phenomenon. The social dynamics set in motion by the riots in Great Britain illustrate this abundantly, for example. What is happening in Great Britain is socially so important that I will dedicate a separate article to it, but I will already touch on it here.

The totalitarian censorship there entered the next stage. People who articulated a dissident opinion on social media are now being imprisoned almost arbitrarily. In some cases, the posts indeed incite violence to some extent; but in other cases, it’s hard to detect anything in the post that could be legally sanctionable. And ultimately, this is exactly what the legislator announces: the post doesn’t have to be illegal for social media platforms to be forced to censor it.

In this way, the totalitarian system achieves something typical: it cancels every law (see, for example, Solzhenitsyn’s “there is no law”) and replaces it with a system of ad hoc rules that whirls around and ultimately descends into radical absurdity. In that sense, totalitarian systems are variants and outgrowths of the bureaucratization of society:

In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant. – Hannah Arendt, On Violence

Ultimately, in such a bureaucratic-totalitarian system, every psychological anchor that the law normally provides is lost. In place of the law is a completely irrational and inconsistent rule system. In this way, our rationalist culture culminates in exactly the opposite of what it sought to achieve.

The absurd, suffocating networks of rules first turn against those who do not want to go along with the system. But those who do engage with the system also fall prey to it, narrowly escaping, if at all, the machine they themselves built.

In a totalitarian system, no one is safe; everything and everyone can fall under the rules that are rewritten daily on the walls of Animal Farm by the pigs in charge. This gives us a glimpse of what the coming years will mainly bring: unimaginable chaos and psychological dislocation. And the only anchor will be precisely what our rationalist Enlightenment society pushed to the background: loyalty to ethical principles even if it means losing whatever you possess in the world of appearances.

Image credit: Armands Brants