Re: <nettime> In God We Tryst

[Flick Harrison <flick@flickharrison.com>]

It’s interesting that we have the problem even on this list of the “brainwashing” label being used to quash any arguments against a certain ideology, and we also have the nostalgia of McCarthyism as a backdrop, but from the other side.  These techniques might be evidence of a spiritual belief that defends itself by any means necessary, but in all these cases it should be seen as evidence of authoritarianism as a gut instinct as well - not spiritual but animal.

When Trump argues, for instance, or when a police officer decides how to deal with a smart-alecky subject, they're not constructing a philosophy based on well-considered beliefs; they are switching to animal mode and simply generating the words that will destroy the resistance as surely as possible.  “Fake News!” isn’t a spiritual _expression_, it’s an insult and a weapon.  “I felt threatened” isn’t an _expression_ of a policing pedagogy, but a defense mechanism, to alleviate both personal and public guilt.

These instincts are amped up by social networks that seek profit in rewarding people for their gut instincts, however unsavoury or unhealthy.  The networks also bring people together to agree with one another, reinforcing their worst instincts despite the obvious benefits for marginalized people to also use these networks to organize.

Stephen Harper, our very Conservative Prime Minister for around 10 years, had a sarcastic chuckle that he would use as a preface to a serious question or challenge.  The campaigns they ran against the Liberals for that whole period mostly amounted to childish bullying, which is a good gut-level strategy to bring their natural supporters on board with strength and aggression. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHEX4LifR9A

But:  Certainly, you can treat most ideologies as a form of cult or conspiracy theory.  I mean, I believe we’re living under a lot of structural racism and patriarchy, and I believe that capitalism is a powerful self-generating force to centralize power and wealth.  But at a certain point it’s obvious that no amount of new information is going to stop me from thinking that.  When I find myself muttering grumpy old white man rebuttals to myself after a particularly galling over-reach in a hyper-intersectional Facebook post, I usually take a deep breath and say a few hail-mary equivalents instead of responding.

Often any evidence of, say, structural anti-racism or structural feminism (like Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms for instance) can be angrily dismissed from a spiritual angle as a challenge to this worldview.

On Jan 25, 2021, at 12:30 , tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com> wrote:

On 25 Jan 2021, at 13:40, McCorkle T. Diamond wrote:

This  idea has been on my mind for a while and is serious. The U.S.
equivalent of de-Nazifying white supramacists needs to be done. When  -
immediately. How, is the question.

Pretty hard, given that they've rightist lore about "brainwashing" and "mind control" has been an article of faith for them for many years. As with lots of conspiracy theorizing, you'll find lots of little truths scattered throughout the fictions. In this case, citations and references to '50s-era scholarly studies of mass-manipulation, interrogation techniques, and so on are a staple in Whitist fantasies. It serves a few purposes: it provides a ~genealogical link to McCarthyite anti-communist rubbish and POW–MIA dolchstossquatsch, which is both legitimizing and nostalgic. It serves as a preemptive rhetoric of projection ("You're brainwashed, not me!"). And it functions as a kind of conceptual vaccination, by internalizing a basic critique. It's worth noting that these functions all kind of blur together and form a sort of continuum — which is pretty much what epistemologies do, isn't it? So de-nazifying would mean de-epistemologizing.

In the case of Germany post-WW2, the fact that the country — its people, landscape, government, institutions, economy, and more — had been shattered certainly made the task of de-nazification more tractable. If the physical proofs that nazism worked were broken, it didn't require a big leap to conclude the nazi worldview was broken too. In the US now, it would require a leap-in-place: believers would have to wake up one morning believing all their Whitist stuff is true, after N days have passed, wake up and see, smell, hear, and do all the same things yet believe their Whitist nonsense is false. That kind of thing is extremely difficult for an individual to do, let alone a population stretches across an entire continent. I don't believe it's possible.

But the first thing we'd need is get past the starting gate and build a consensus that Trumpism is more 'like' nazism than not. The last four years of Arendt-splaining, scholastic quibbling about how Trump isn't *really* fascist, how 500K killed by the use of biological agents for partisan ends isn't *really* genocide, how using every legitimate and illegitimate lever of power to overturn or overthrow a democratic election isn't *really* a coup — all this has made it plainly clear that the historical analogy is a non-starter. Seriously, if Trump openly acknowledged a trove of documents that explicitly said "I will use every power I have to cause Covid to kill 25% of the Democrats in the US so the GOP can establish a one-party system that lasts for 500 years," within a few days you'd have Serious People arguing that Democrats aren't ethnically homogeneous and 500 isn't a thousand. The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one, but the dominant chatter in the US is all denialist.

Fortunately, I think the whole epistemology analysis overstates the case. AFAICT, the number one factor that's caused the Qrazies, Three Percenters, and their spoor to chill out is the de-platforming of Trump. It takes a LOT of energy to maintain absurd, obsessive, and action-oriented beliefs, and that energy comes from relentless torrent of nazi media. Turn that off and it turns out the vast majority of the believers are deplorable but not much beyond that.

So, basically, the first big step toward de-nazifying the US would just be a functional FCC.

Cheers,
Ted
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