Questioning and Skepticism

Connecting Project 2025 and Scopes Monkey Trial

Posted on March 30, 2025 by greg

Project 2025 calls for establishing a government that would be imbued with “biblical principles” and run by a president who holds sweeping executive powers. Christian nationalism believes that the Christian Bible, as God’s infallible law, should be the basis of government and have primacy over public and private institutions. Its patriarchal view does not recognize gender equality or gay rights and sanctions discrimination based on religious beliefs. Also, supports the elimination of the Head Start childcare program despite the fact that for nearly six decades the program has helped low-income children and families with nutrition, education, and high-quality, affordable day care to prepare children for school and enable low-income parents to work. It recommends banning abortion, ensuring that only pro-life government policy prevails, and outlaws the mailing of abortion-inducing medication. The major means to bringing about such deep and lasting change is by eviscerating the federal civil service; loyalists would be hired in their place.¹

The Scopes Monkey Trial, a 1925 event centered on the teaching of evolution in schools, is sometimes connected to discussions about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) due to its historical context of religious fundamentalism versus scientific inquiry, which can be seen as a precursor to modern debates about diverse perspectives and inclusion. In 1925, John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, was put on trial for teaching evolution, violating the state’s Butler Act which prohibited the teaching of evolution and mandated the teaching of the biblical account of creation. The Scopes trial continues to resonate today because it raises questions about the role of science and religion in education, as well as the importance of diverse perspectives and critical thinking. The Scopes trial’s legacy can be used to advocate for the inclusion of diverse perspectives in education and society, ensuring that all voices are heard and that different viewpoints are respected.²

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people. The concept of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) has roots in the social justice movements of the 1950s and 60s, particularly in the US, focusing on civil rights and combating discrimination based on race, gender, and other factors. Inclusion, as a core component of DEI, emphasizes creating environments where individuals feel valued, respected, and included, regardless of their background. DEI encourages organizations to welcome and promote a diversity of perspectives, actively empowering all individuals to make significant contributions. Project 2025 expresses a special contempt for the LGBTQ+ community. The Project outlines deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights.

The scientific foundation for DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives lies in understanding how diverse perspectives, inclusive environments, and equitable access to opportunities lead to better outcomes in various domains, including research, education, and the workplace. Diverse teams bring a wider range of experiences and perspectives, leading to more innovative solutions. Diverse perspectives can help identify and address problems more effectively. Inclusive environments create a sense of belonging and value, leading to higher employee engagement and retention. Diverse perspectives can help organizations make more informed and balanced decisions. DEI initiatives can help to address unconscious biases and create a more equitable environment for all. Diverse and inclusive organizations are better able to build strong relationships with the communities they serve. DEI initiatives can help to address systemic inequalities and create a more equitable society. Encouraging open dialogue and collaboration across different groups can help to build understanding and trust.³

On the other hand, “DEI became shorthand for something very complex,” explains Aisha Leach, Chief People Officer at The Last Mile. “It was treated as a quick fix – a way to signal values without grappling with the deep, systemic changes that true equity requires.” DEI initiatives face challenges including resistance to change, lack of accountability, and a focus on surface-level changes rather than addressing systemic issues. Many employees resist DEI initiatives, perceiving them as threatening to established organizational norms and processes. A culture that values homogeneity or is resistant to change can stifle DEI efforts, even if leaders are committed. Some DEI training programs focus on identifying unconscious biases but fail to provide actionable steps on how to address them. DEI efforts may focus on surface-level changes without addressing the underlying systemic issues that perpetuate inequality.

Some diversity efforts lost momentum after GOP President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s backed corporate deregulation policies asserting companies should address discrimination internally, Hollins said. Then, George Floyd’s murder in 2020 renewed the push for DEI leadership roles and initiatives at major corporations. Some critics argue that DEI efforts can lead to reverse discrimination, where individuals or groups are disadvantaged based on their race, gender, or other characteristics. DEI initiatives can unintentionally exclude certain perspectives or voices, particularly if they focus on specific identities or groups. These efforts can result in tokenism, where individuals from underrepresented groups are hired or promoted to meet quotas rather than based on merit. Adequate resources, including funding, training, and staff, are crucial for successful DEI implementation. Without institutional support and leadership, DEI efforts may not be sustained or prioritized.

Evolutionary psychology explains the appeal of religious fundamentalism in terms of social functional behavior, since it promotes coherence and predictability among individuals within religious groups. Fundamentalism requires a departure from ordinary empirical inquiry: it reflects a rigid cognitive strategy that fixes beliefs and amplifies within-group commitment and out-group bias. Recent studies have linked religious fundamentalism to denial of scientific progress, and reinforced its role in prejudice towards out-groups. Although people may think subjectively of religious belief as a true or false representation of how the world is, it is notable that certain religious beliefs do not generally update in response to evidence, and that conservatism is especially notable in the case of fundamentalist beliefs. Empirical beliefs are indications of how the world appears to us and are updated according to accumulated evidence. Fundamentalist religious beliefs, in comparison, do not track and predict variation in the world. Rather, they appear to track, and predict, social group-level commitments.⁴

Among the many ironies at the Scopes trial, two surrounded the textbook at the center of the controversy. First, Tennessee mandated that George W. Hunter’s A Civic Biology (1914) be used statewide to teach biology, but the text endorsed evolution, effectively requiring biology teachers to violate the Butler Act. Second, Hunter’s endorsement of evolution – a doctrine championed by Scopes’ supporters as the enlightened view – was derived from his embrace of eugenics as a means of protecting the white race, which he deemed superior, through hereditary selection. However, civic boosters recruited a teacher to challenge the law. The trial, which lasted eight days, attracted national media attention and became a spectacle, with William Jennings Bryan, a prominent figure in the anti-evolution movement, prosecuting the case and Clarence Darrow, a renowned defense attorney, representing Scopes. The jury found Scopes guilty after deliberating for less than ten minutes and fined him $100.

In 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species,” which explained his theory of evolution by means of natural selection. Darwin’s theory was seen as a direct challenge to the biblical story of creation by many fundamentalist Christians at the time. That contention came to a head in the 1920s when state lawmakers began considering outlawing the teaching of evolution in public schools. While the jury sided with the prosecution, the case generated more attention and interest in the theory of evolution. Did we move forward? Most recently in Texas, new state curriculum has sparked criticism due to its inclusion of biblical references, a lesson that asks students to repeat the phrase that starts the creation story in the Book of Genesis and an activity requesting that children remember the order in which the Bible says God created the universe. Basically, the issue did not go away.

Project 2025 wants to make faith the government’s job. A well-funded coalition wants to put the Bible ahead of the Constitution. Right-wing groups do not want to ensure all Americans have religious freedom, but want to impose conservative Christian views on a religiously-diverse country. Project 2025 would jeopardize federal scientists’ independence and undermine their influence. In addition, Project 2025 – the sweeping right-wing blueprint for a new kind of U.S. presidency – will sabotage science-based policies that address climate change, the environment, abortion, health care access, technology and education. It would impose religious and conservative ideology on the federal civil service. “The independence of science is being attacked across the board in this document,” notes Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Climate and Energy program at the nonpartisan Union of Concerned Scientists. “The importance of this science is that’s how we can ensure people’s health and the environment are being safeguarded.”⁵

The plan is authoritarian and Christian nationalist and threatens separation of powers (as created by the U.S. Constitution), separation of church and state (created by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights) and civil liberties. Project 2025 would destroy the U.S. system of checks and balances and create an autocracy. Project 2025 is rife with bad ideas that, if enacted, would inflict harm on students and schools across the country. It is not just a policy wish list – it’s a plan to dismantle unions and erode workers’ rights. It seeks to fundamentally reshape federal government policies across various sectors, including social safety nets, civil rights, and environmental protection. When we realize that 100 million Americans, one way or another, depend on or benefit from social safety net, environmental, and civil rights protections, managed by the “administrative state,” we can see how devastating dismantlement – and far-right micromanagement – of these departments could be.⁶

As human beings, we owe each other basic respect, kindness, and fairness, forming a foundation for a positive and harmonious society, and striving to be helpful and supportive when someone is in need. We need a better social contract that recognizes our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, and expects more of individuals in return. Whether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. A new social contract should be based on key principles including stakeholder capitalism, skill development, economic security and a transition to net zero. The best way forward to a new social contract is to defeat Trump and his Project 2025 initiatives at the ballot box. ⁷

¹ https://kettering.org/project-2025-the-blueprint-for-christian-nationalist-regime-change/

² https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=connection+between+scopes+monkey+trial+and+DEI#cobssid=s

³ https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=science+behind+DEI

⁴ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5500821/

⁵ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/project-2025-plan-for-trump-presidency-has-far-reaching-threats-to-science/

⁶ https://www.socialworkers.org/Advocacy/Social-Justice/Social-Justice-Briefs/Project-2025-on-Social-Safety-Net-A-Social-Work-Perspective

⁷ https://questioningandskepticism.com/rousseau-and-freedom-a-renewed-social-contract/

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How Our Loneliness is Feeding Authoritarianism

Posted on March 15, 2025 by greg

Throughout the 16^th century, loneliness was often evoked in sermons to frighten churchgoers from sin – people were asked to imagine themselves in lonely places such as hell or the grave. But well into the 17^th century, the word was still rarely used. In 1674, the English naturalist John Ray included ‘loneliness’ in a list of infrequently used words, and defined it as a term to describe places and people ‘far from neighbours’. A century later, the word hadn’t changed much. In Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), he described the adjective ‘lonely’ solely in terms of the state of being alone (the ‘lonely fox’), or a deserted place (‘lonely rocks’). In Hamlet, William Shakespeare’s tragic hero experiences loneliness and isolation that is mostly self-imposed. In the 19^th century, amid modernity, loneliness lost its connection with religion and began to be associated with secular feelings of alienation.¹

Thinkers as early as Aristotle observed that man is, by nature, a social creature. For this reason, there has been a surge of media attention on the “loneliness plague” which the Information Age has wrought. The collapse of community perhaps explains the meteoric rise of “social” media. A recent study revealed that people who spent more time on social media were more likely to experience feelings of loneliness, especially if their motive for being on social media was to maintain contact with friends and family. The problem, of course, is that social media seems to be doing more to divide people than unite them – or in Arendt’s words, isolate humans “against each other.” Volunteering is a way out of the loneliness epidemic. Volunteering often provides a new perspective on the world. It can introduce us to new ideas, communities, and ways to be grateful for what we already have.

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. Totalitarians in power found a way to crystallise the occasional experience of loneliness into a permanent state of being. Through the use of isolation and terror, totalitarian regimes created the conditions for loneliness, and then appealed to people’s loneliness with ideological propaganda. According to Hannah Arendt, important factors that made totalitarianism possible included collapsed political structures and masses of uprooted people who had lost their orientation and sense of reality in a world marked by socio-economic transformation, revolution and war. While the leaders of the movements belonged to the “mob”, their many supporters were recruited from these rootless and lonely “masses” through propaganda.

The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Arendt believed that totalitarian rulers crave complete control and use propaganda and rewriting of history to instill fear and loyalty in citizens. When you live in post truth society, you can’t do anything because if there is no truth there can be no coordination and therefore no action. Project 2025 is a plan to shatter democracy’s guardrails, giving presidents almost unlimited power to implement policies that will hurt everyday Americans and strip them of fundamental rights.

Today’s GOP is the totalitarian force it claims to oppose. The right’s intrusion into private life is exactly the characteristic of modern authoritarianism decried by 20^th-century conservatives. The militant blurring of the private and public spheres is a signal characteristic of totalitarianism, as mid-century political thinkers understood it. Whatever else the Trumpian right may be, it is not at all squeamish about the politicization of private life. There’s a heightened sense on the American right that culture is the fulcrum of society and politics – “hence you have to intensify the culture wars.” Trump’s own ongoing assault on the electoral structure of democracy is itself a brand of culture warfare, with sinister election workers and voting-machine makers undermining the rightful pride of place accorded to white nationalist rule in the American system.²

Hannah Arendt argues that power is communication not coercion and control: power radically differs from control, domination or violence in that it cannot be exercised over someone; it can only be exercised with others through communication and cooperation. “You can’t launch a coordination from the top if you’ve got all these distracting little people exercising their thinking and voting, running around talking about pluralism.” Big money has always spoken loudly in American politics. The power elite control what you think through proxies who control information and communication, and through their lobbyists who influence what most of your politicians believe. In November 2024, America rebelled against political elites by again electing a self-proclaimed champion of the people, Donald Trump. Eight weeks into a second mandate, it is now out in the open this government is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires than ever before.

Beyond appealing to the past, power also relies for its continued legitimacy on the rationally binding commitments that arise out of a process of free and undistorted communication. Because of this, power is highly independent of material factors: it is sustained not by economic, bureaucratic or military means, but by the power of common convictions that result from a process of fair and unconstrained deliberation. Power is also not something that can be relied upon at all times or accumulated and stored for future use. Rather, it exists only as a potential which is actualized when actors gather together for political action and public deliberation. It is thus closely connected to the space of appearance, that public space which arises out of the actions and speeches of individuals. Indeed, for Arendt, “power is what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence.”³

The most prevalent cause for loneliness was feeling disconnected. Cognitive discrepancy theory suggests that loneliness is a subjective, unpleasant, and distressing phenomenon stemming from a discrepancy between individuals’ desired and achieved levels of social relations. Many young adults spoke about being lonely because they felt unable to express themselves, their feelings or talk about their issues. They also talked about being lonely due to feeling they did not matter to others and were not understood. Challenges pertaining to social media and materialism in contemporary culture contribute to loneliness as does pressure associated with work, fitting in and social comparison. Social media play a major role in exacerbating these experiences. The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life. Arendt focuses on loneliness in her analysis of the origins of totalitarianism.

Arendt writes of entire populations who “had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.” She describes the masses’ escape from reality as ‘a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.’ She points out that in societies riddled with elite hypocrisy, ‘it seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values, and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.’ Toward the end of her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt maintained that what makes a society vulnerable to takeover by authoritarians and totalitarians is loneliness. She defined loneliness as “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man (sic).”⁴

We do need the narratives, but the real danger is we need them even if they are not real. Applebaum gives the example of people who fall for QAnon conspiracies and their prophet Q because of their desperate need to be part of an ongoing story. They can now belong to a community in which their views are accepted and reinforced, but, even more importantly, they “have access to special and secret information that most Americans don’t have. So you’re a community that has special knowledge. You’ve been gifted with this special access to a different reality.” Authoritarians would have you think that they can do certain things better than their counterparts who have to deal with checks, balances, and public opinion. Authoritarian leaders share conspiracy theories to attack opponents, galvanize followers, shift blame, and undermine democratic institutions. Authoritarianism, in politics and government, is the blind submission to authority and the repression of individual freedom of thought and action.

As the crisis of neoliberal global capitalism unfolds, and as we move to the brink of another economic crisis, global capitalism is once again resorting to authoritarianism and fascism to maintain its power. Basically, exposure to neoliberal ideology increases loneliness and decreases well-being by reducing people’s sense of connection to others and by increasing perceptions of being in competition with others. Loneliness is feeding authoritarianism. To defend democracy and decency, we must build belonging. Authoritarianism is defeated by offering people a social contract that works again, so they don’t have to flee into the arms of strongmen for a sense of safety and security when societies are collapsing around them. Liberals throughout history have made this mistake again and again. In Nazi Germany, liberals didn’t offer people anything much – it was the Nazis, in fact, who promised them the world. The same was true in Soviet Russia. And it is true again in America today.

¹ https://aeon.co/essays/for-hannah-arendt-totalitarianism-is-rooted-in-loneliness

² https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/republican-totalitarianism/

³ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/#ActiPowe

⁴ https://www.womensordination.org/blog/2022/06/07/loneliness-and-authoritarianism/

Posted in authoritarianism, neoliberalism | Tagged Arendt | Leave a comment

Political Doublespeak and the Breakdown of Society

Posted on March 1, 2025 by greg

Modern western civilization reached a pinnacle in the last half of the 20^th century, spending over 200 years evolving and spreading throughout the world. A robust social contract, technological advancement and pervasive economic success in the context of democracy and capitalism propelled the project. Scientists, historians and politicians alike have begun to warn that Western culture is reaching a critical juncture. Cycles of inequality and resource use are heading for a tipping point that in many past civilizations precipitated political unrest, war and finally collapse. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse.¹

The personality traits of narcissism and entitlement are not organically innate; they are products of capitalist socialization, which instills and perpetuates such values and practices. In a capitalist society, individuals are often encouraged to prioritize self-interest, competition, and material success over communal well-being and cooperation. This environment fosters a sense of entitlement and narcissism, as people are conditioned to view themselves as superior and deserving of special treatment. The focus on personal gain and achievement at the expense of others erodes collective values and promotes a culture where these traits are normalized and even rewarded. The understanding of social roots of narcissism and entitlement is essential for addressing their pervasive influence. The stagnation of the working class – wages were suppressed by policy choices made on behalf of those with the most income, wealth, and power; coupled with the degradation of the environment and the collapse of social welfare, led to political discontent and populism in many countries.²

Political leaders use language to convey their messages, shape public opinion, and mobilize support for their agendas. Rhetoric, speeches, and propaganda are all examples of how language is used in politics to influence and persuade. Politicians use language strategically to frame issues, shape narratives, and sway public opinion. The choice of words, tone, and rhetoric can influence how policies are perceived and debated. Likewise, understood rhetoric is a powerful political weapon for shaping political belief and action. In other words, Trump’s language appears to be designed to align him with non-politicians, to assert his identity as a ‘common man’. Compared with the other speakers, Trump uses shorter words and a more restricted vocabulary, suggesting that his language will appear familiar to a larger proportion of people. Although his language, both in content and in style, is odd for a political leader, it is familiar to his audience. It is the true language of populism.

Political discourse operates indexically, meaning that every single word being used either implicitly or explicitly expresses some political view point. This could even be as subtle as an accent, or how people are addressed. Political discourse is always aimed at interaction, including interruption, debate, and negotiation. Political discourse also tends to be vague, almost like the words of a horoscope, leaving the electorate up to interpret what is being said as they would like to understand it. Trump makes vague implications with a raised eyebrow or a shrug, allowing his audience to reach their own conclusions. And that conversational style can be effective. It’s more intimate than a scripted speech. People walk away from Donald Trump feeling as though he were casually talking to them, allowing them to finish his thoughts. Trump, a master at the art of political persuasion, was able to influence voters about a better future during 2024 election.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. The statement , “an observation that a person’s sense of morality lessens as his or her power increases,” was made by Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Power corrupts those who never deserved to wield it in the first place because they never had the right values or ideas to fight various temptations. It corrupts because it gives a person an ever greater/easier means and opportunity to take the path of least resistance and shortcuts to attain a goal. “When you feel powerful, you kind of lose touch with other people,” Kelter explains. “You stop attending carefully to what other people think.” People with power may not only act inappropriately in the workplace, gamble, and act impulsively, but also lose empathy for others. Also, the narcissist is extremely selective in how and when they show the limited empathy they have.

Such people with egocentric self-absorption have three types of tendencies at the same time: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. The fact that these people not only often seek power but also succeed in acquiring power has two main reasons. The first is that these people are often very good at manipulating people. They can often appear charming when necessary and lie and cheat outright to get their way. The second reason, according to Klaas, has to do with an evolutionary ingrained tendency of people. That tendency is to think that powerful, aggressive men are good leaders in tense situations. Moreover, many people in positions of power find themselves in the situation that the people around them mostly talk to them, which may lead them to believe more and more in their own right and take their privileges for granted.³

Corruption is the enemy of development, and of good governance. It must be got rid of. Both the government and the people at large must come together to achieve this national objective (Pratibha Patil). Philosopher Terry Price suggests that powerful individuals can engage in “exception-making” – believing that the rules and laws that apply to others do not apply to them. This can be an easy source of corruption. There is also evidence that the more power people possess, the more they focus on their egocentric desires and the less able they are to see others’ perspectives. Powerful people and leaders need to understand that their obligation is to use that power wisely and to benefit others. Not to abuse it and certainly not use it to justify their illegal or immoral behavior that harms others. Corruption results from a balance between opportunities and constraints.

Even with increased knowledge of power’s corrupting effect and safeguards put in place to counteract such tendencies, power abuse remains rampant in society suggesting that the full extent of this effect is not well understood. The best antidote to power and corruption is humility. It is important that leaders and others with power have the humility to evaluate their behavior objectively. They need to realize that their power is given to them, that it can be fleeting, and it is the obligation of those close to the leader – the inner circle – to hold a mirror up to the leader’s actions and to hold the leader accountable. On analysis of culture of corruption – follow the money – corruption and graft punish the poor, undermine development, and corrode honest governance. And because the corrupt will always try to protect their interests, anti-corruption initiatives themselves can also become politicised for end gain.

The narcissist feels a powerful entitlement to admiration, his need for praise is insatiable. The outside world’s continual confirmation of the narcissistic self’s uniqueness is vital. Moreover, hyper-sensitivity to criticism places premiums on the narcissist’s surrounding himself with sycophants. No wonder the narcissist needs courtiers around him. Narcissists seek out the rich and other celebrities. A billionaire like Trump seeks out the company of other billionaires, for they are the sole persons qualified to respect fully his success and to applaud it. The narcissist is by nature an existentialist. For that approach offers the maximum freedom to do whatever the need of the emotional moment is, and to avoid doing anything that is uncomfortable or inconvenient. That is also why a narcissist is distinctly uninterested in precedent, in the norms observed by others, in lessons as to what falls within the realm of the impossible, the painful, the costly.

Corruption establishes patronage systems, builds loyalty, pays off rivals and opposition, co-opts accountability institutions, and buys votes and immunity from prosecution. With politicized corruption, the spoils are not just for personal enrichment but rather to win, stabilize and extend political power. High levels of inequality are associated with economic instability, corruption, financial crises, increased crime and poor physical and mental health. When we look around: tax concessions, tax avoidance and tax evasion remain widespread. Corporate tax rates have fallen. This has reduced resources to invest in the very services that can reduce inequality: social protection, education, healthcare. The corrosive effects of today’s levels of inequality are clear. We are sometimes told a rising tide of economic growth lifts all boats. But in reality, rising inequality sinks all boats. Confidence in institutions and leaders is eroding.

With inability for deep emotions, narcissists lack a positive vision for the future and hence are not very strong in developing compelling long-term strategic perspectives. Furthermore, they are easily bored when things are too normal and under control which makes them create one crisis after the next whilst constantly increasing the incurred risks. For the narcissist Hitler, in his mind, the German people had failed, his generals had failed, his soldiers had failed. They had failed Germany but, more importantly they had failed him – and he wanted them punished for failing him. As Trump’s elaborate façade of competence and invulnerability is punctured and shattered in real time for the world to see, he will begin to move from denial to the early stages of lashing out and making threats. When a narcissist starts to lose power, he will turn on his followers. This is laying ground work for social turbulence in the near future.

The escalation of narcissistic entitlement in global politics means planetary limits are more likely to be ignored. Narcissists and their culture of entitlement erode the collective foundations of society, promoting individualism in a way that enables capitalism to thrive without resistance. This shift undermines communal bonds and fosters an environment where personal gain is prioritized over the common good. The resulting fragmentation weakens societal cohesion, making it easier for exploitative systems to perpetuate themselves. Now in the US a specific form of corruption occurs when elites seek public funds, originally intended to be invested in services that benefit the larger population, to fund projects that would only benefit them. Look around – economic decline, political corruption and social inequality and class conflict are signs you are living in a collapsing society. This breakdown includes the loss of collective capacity to meet basic needs of the population, and the difficult-to-reverse loss of capacity to carry out basic functions.⁴

¹ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731610-300-end-of-days-is-western-civilisation-on-the-brink-of-collapse/

² https://countercurrents.org/2024/07/capitalism-and-its-narcissist-culture-of-entitlement/

³ https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/cutting-edge-leadership/202402/how-and-why-power-corrupts-people⁴https://beyond.ubc.ca/what-is-societal-collapse-and-why-does-it-matter/

⁴ https://beyond.ubc.ca/what-is-societal-collapse-and-why-does-it-matter/

Posted in Individualism, The Narcissist's Vocation and the Economic Debacle, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

When Symbolic Violence Turns into Symbolic Warfare

Posted on February 15, 2025 by greg

The title, The Fountainhead, refers to the source of human progress which, according to Rand, is ego – act on the virtue of rational self-interest. By 2018 Ayn Rand and her novels had become widespread cultural reference points among wealthy bankers, CEOs, tech moguls, and right-wing politicians. Rand’s philosophy had its roots in nineteenth-century classical liberalism and in her impassioned rejection of socialism and the welfare state in the twentieth century. Her anti-statist, pro–“free market” stances went on to shape the politics of what came to be called libertarianism, during a period of rapid expansion in the 1970s. The Mont Perlin Society was drawn together by the common sense of crisis. The gap between the public face and the relatively hidden political planning of neoliberals has been described by David Harvey as a contrast between the utopian theory of neoliberal freedom and the practical class project of installing oligarchical elites at the center of economic and state power.

Rand’s influence floats over all libertarian theories as a guiding spirit for the sense of energized aspiration and the advocacy of inequality and cruelty that shaped their worldviews. Drawing on deeply familiar cultural narratives derived from the fantasies of European empire, she outlines heroic characters and romance plots that appeal especially to white teenagers. Rand’s novels present “superior” characters and eroticize their contempt for and cruelty toward “inferior” others. She presents readers with her ideal capitalist: a haughty individualist with no need for the collectivism of government, unions or human solidarity. Donald Trump describes himself as an Ayn Rand fan. But she despised Trump’s kind of crony capitalism tied with government favors and corruption. Atlas Shrugged tells us that if left unresolved, conflicts between reason and whim can lead even great men and great nations to destruction. Rand noted: “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”¹

Organized primarily by economist Friedrich Hayek, the more than one thousand economists, journalists, policy makers, and other thinkers who eventually gathered under the Mount Perlin Society umbrella formed what Philip Mirowski has called a “Neoliberal Thought Collective” – an intellectual/political intervention that eventually defined a new era of capitalism. Hayek published his book The Road to Serfdom in 1944 with new ideas, sounding the alarm that the West was rapidly abandoning its inheritance of individualism. He claimed there was a slow process under way in which important personal liberties were being extinguished by the state. The neoliberals set out to retool the state in relation to the market values of property rights and corporate hegemony. While their public propaganda efforts emphasized the keyword freedom and linked so-called free markets with free minds, they set out via activist interventions in state policy to create a decidedly planned version of “laissez-faire.” ²

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence is pivotal in understanding the subtle mechanisms of power and dominance in society. This concept refers to the non-physical means by which social hierarchy and power relations are maintained, often internalized by individuals to the extent that they accept and perpetuate their own subjugation. Symbolic violence refers to the subtle and often unnoticed forms of domination and control that are exerted through social norms, values, and cultural practices. They challenge the universalising ‘truths’ of the economic system, calling it a ‘double discourse which, although founded on belief, mimics science by superimposing the appearance of reason… on the social fantasies of the dominant’. Symbolic violence operates through cultural means, such as language, education, and social norms, to legitimize the status quo. Many of Trump’s speeches enable rather than demand violence and ultimately, they provide a warrant for any violence that ensues.

Bourdieu’s approach to social change – it is necessary reconceptualise society in order to make visible power relations and injustices which are hidden through processes of ‘dehistoricisation and universalisation’. We must escape what Bourdieu terms the symbolic violence within our own minds which prevents us from thinking critically. He argues that this is a necessary step towards creating a more just society. In the current dominant framework of neo-liberalism, individualism, and self-responsibility, symbolic violence often leads people to (unjustly) blame themselves for their own suffering whilst the role of society remains hidden (Bourdieu et al, 2000). Bourdieu describes neo-liberalism as a ‘mental colonisation’ which operates globally. The sheer scale and pervasiveness of neo-liberalism and the many damaging effects it has, make it a pressing target for criticism – a project which Bourdieu has contributed much to. An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and personalities.³

For Bourdieu, neo-liberalism is deeply complicit in numerous types of symbolic violence. Not only does it ‘betray’ and abandon of all types of social work, but the ideals of individualisation and self-help serve to hide the role of neo-liberalism in the creation of suffering and “[make] it possible to ‘blame the victim’ who is entirely responsible for his or her own misfortune”. Thus, both social workers and those receiving help are denied much of the support they need and exposed to a logic which claims that their worsening situation (meaning tougher working conditions) is their own fault. Ultimately, neoliberalism acts as a veil that obscures systemic social relations of power in its quest to crown each person as an individual who is master of their own fate. It thereby becomes an overwhelmingly influential, yet cloaked and diffuse, discourse that persuades people to deny their interdependence with each other, as well as with the environment.

The neoliberal considers a particular use of symbolic violence to humiliate and crush one’s political opponents in public settings with the backing of institutional power. The current populist US president Donald Trump is such a case. His manipulation of language and of the television cameras are the two main elements of the symbolic warfare he wages against anyone who challenges his authority. His use of disparagement and ridicule, his conman-like manipulation of the interactional context and his use of Twitter to address his supporters directly, not only discredit the very institutions that have brought him to power but are raising fundamental questions as to the future of presidential power and democracy in the United States. This extraordinary abuse of power is leading the country to a constitutional crisis forcing Americans to rethink the very bases of their electoral system, the separation of powers of their government, and the undemocratic values promoted by their commander-in-chief.⁴

But Trump’s dark power is also playing out among a larger group – GOP lawmakers who disdain his strongman radicalism but are afraid to speak out against him because they think loyalty is the only way to save their political skins. The acquiescence of most Republicans has long enabled Trump’s assaults on the rule of law and shows little sign of hardening into opposition to the President. And it played out again when President Trump issued full commutations and pardons to those indicted and/or sentenced for the January 6^th attack, GOP senators dodged calls to condemn Trump’s actions. But appeasing Trump’s culture of violence is not limited to the RNC. In a continuing attempt to ignore the violent scenes, multiple Capitol Hill Republicans have whitewashed the truth of January 6. Many others have tried to obstruct the committee or mislead about its purpose. Pam Bondi, as new Attorney General, is disbanding anti-corruption teams, and ending FBI efforts to combat foreign influence in US politics, for some reason.

The framing of news stories is another example of symbolic violence. Media outlets often highlight stories in ways that reflect and reinforce societal power structures. For instance, the focus on crimes committed by minorities can perpetuate the stereotype of these groups as inherently criminal. Conversely, the achievements and positive contributions of these groups are often under-reported, contributing to a biased public perception and justifying discriminatory policies and practices. Advertising is replete with symbolic violence through its reinforcement of gender norms and beauty standards. Advertisements often depict women in subordinate roles or emphasize unrealistic beauty standards, contributing to body image issues and the internalization of gender roles. This not only affects women’s self-esteem and behavior but also perpetuates a societal structure that values women primarily for their appearance rather than their abilities or accomplishments.⁵

Rand popularity reappeared with the financial crash and the presidency of Barack Obama that followed. Spooked by the fear that Obama was bent on expanding the state, the Tea Party and others returned to the old-time religion of rolling back government. Neoliberalism has produced a broad landscape of cruelty, precarity, and disposability. The recent circulation of public narratives and public displays of cruelty and moral indifference continue to maim and suffocate the exercise of reason and social responsibility. What we have been witnessing in the United States since the 1980s and the Reagan-Thatcher disavowal of all things social is a kind of hardening of the culture marked by an increasing indifference to matters of empathy and an erasure of ethical considerations. Rand lionises the alpha male capitalist entrepreneur, the man of action who towers over the little people and the pettifogging bureaucrats – and gets things done.

The polarizing of American politics has its strongest roots in Rand’s classic, Atlas Shrugged, where a capitalist elite engage in a perpetual cultural warfare for the soul of America, fighting society’s “moochers, looters and parasites,” anyone and everyone demanding government money to solve their problems. But neoliberalism is more than a standard right wing wish list. It is a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals. In short, neoliberalism is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made just to support the autocracy. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practice and believe: that the only a way of structuring all reality is the model of economic competition. Project 2025 includes Christian nationalists wish list for Trump’s second term. American democracy is at a dangerous inflection point, as Americans evaluate the long-term consequences of Trump’s recent mean-spirited policies outlined in a series of executive orders.

By choosing Rand’s theory of objectivism, which turns selfishness into virtue, libertarians get around the need to explain social Darwinism. Trump’s culture of cruelty views violence as a sacred means for addressing social problems and organizing society. His cabinet and donor lists are full of Rand fans who support neoliberal cruelty. For tycoons of the digital age, Vanity Fair suggests, Rand is the most influential figure in the industry. The Rand influence is manifest less in party political libertarianism than in a single-minded determination to follow a personal vision, regardless of the impact. Musk is following Rand’s golden rule, by which the visionary must never sacrifice himself to others. Project 2025 is symbolic warfare – installing oligarchical elites at the center of economic and state power, replacing symbolic political violence – voluntary submission to legally-sanctioned relations of domination resulting in and sustaining a social power imbalance. Americans are now in the streets protesting this confusion, chaos in their government.⁶

¹ https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ayn-rand-and-the-cruel-heart-of-neoliberalism/

² https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/ayn-rand-and-the-cruel-heart-of-neoliberalism/

³ Pierre Bourdieu – Challenging Symbolic Violence and the Naturalisation of Power Relations https://www.e-ir.info/pdf/181

⁴ https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/language-as-symbolic-power/when-symbolic-violence-turns-into-symbolic-warfare/4C360085F550A7953548590C3FACA36D

⁵ https://easysociology.com/sociological-perspectives/symbolic-interactionism/examples-of-pierre-bourdieus-symbolic-violence/

⁶ https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/the-obscure-economist-henry-george-ayn-rand?srsltid=AfmBOor8ILXn6c-in9d_4BeSZm2_17J82iNR0DIPjT3g_KIog48GWuco

Posted in authoritarianism, economic inequality, neoliberalism | Tagged Ayn Rand, Donald Trump, Friedrich Hayek | Leave a comment

Trump and the Politics of Neoliberal Distraction

Posted on February 1, 2025 by greg

Research, conducted on humans and macaque monkeys, concludes that our ability to focus is designed to work in bursts of attention, rather than uninterruptedly. For instance, while it may seem that you are continuously focusing on reading this article, the reality is that you’re zooming in and out of attention up to four times per second. The researchers found that in between those bursts of attention, we are actually distracted. During those periods of distraction, the brain pauses and scans the environment to see if there is something outside the primary focus of attention that might be more important. If there is not, it re-focus back to what you were doing. “The brain can’t process everything in the environment,” explains Ian Fiebelkorn, an associate research scholar at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute “It’s developed those filtering processes that allow it to focus on some information at the expense of other information.”¹

In 1952, a Readers’ Digest article decried the negative health consequences of cigarette smoking. The following year was the first year in two decades that the sale of cigarettes dropped. The tobacco industry responded by setting up the Council for Tobacco Research. This was the beginning of a survival strategy. This meant denying the health consequences of smoking. Deceiving customers about the true nature of cigarettes through marketing and PR, as well as damaging the credibility of industry opponents. This including introducing distractions by drawing attentions to other agents like radon gas, asbestos, arsenic, silica and chromium. The tobacco companies joined many associations who typically oppose taxation and promoted themselves as supporters of freedom of expression, but blocked making available any information linking smoking to death or any negative outcomes. Today the growth of next generation products includes electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes), which can also be referred to as alternative nicotine products and vapes.

Politicians may strategically time unpopular measures to coincide with newsworthy events that distract the media and the public. In an applied sense, the politics of distraction can be seen in the strategic or manipulative effort by the powerful to mislead or misdirect people in order to cover or hide more critical issues which may be harder to address. Donald Trump strategically and repeatedly employs ‘distraction techniques’ to sidetrack critical issues. He does this by choosing to highlight more trivial matters which he dresses up as ‘bright, shiny objects (BSOs)’ through linguistic devices such as empty intensifiers and puffery. Such distraction techniques have earned Trump the nickname of ‘super spreader of distraction’, whereby discourse is catapulted away from serious and more complex issues. While extreme in the case of Trump, such distraction techniques are not uncommon amongst politicians in general, and indeed amongst decision-makers and public figures in other disciplines.²

Along with this being the post-truth era, it is also increasingly the era of distraction – when politicians dangle shiny objects to distract media and voters from deception going on elsewhere. Politicians deliberately time controversial actions with major news events. For each channel, we look at the top three stories. And the idea is that the more time you spend on the top three stories, the less time is going to be available for everything else, including the conflict. For spin doctor rule number one is like, “Dump all the bad stuff when the world is not watching.” For example, a really good point for a lot of these big things, like a controversial executive order by the president. The capitalist system we live in encourages our apathy and complacency by constantly presenting us with distractions, desensitizing us to the ills of the world and making us cynical about our ability to create positive change.

Neoliberalism has not succeeded in reducing either poverty or inequality. From the perspective of the international capitalist class, it has failed in terms of the system itself. It has not recreated the conditions for capital accumulation which existed during the Great Boom. Above all, it has failed consistently to increase the rate of profit. To the extent that it has intermittently done so, it has not achieved rates comparable to those between 1948 and 1974. Accumulation has increasingly come to rely on increasing productivity on the one hand (making fewer people work harder) and decreasing the share of income going to labour the other (paying workers less in real terms). The suppression of real wage levels in Canada and the US has encouraged the very dependence on borrowing that has now entered crisis. US household debt has risen by nearly 50% over the last two decades, after adjusting for inflation.³

In response to concerns raised in the 1970s the corporate elite set in motion processes to dismantle the New Deal social compact, clearly recognizing that some people will now do with less to ensure an elite (big business) have more. This response to the crisis in capitalism also included moves to union busting. A key hegemonic claim is that the market provides a natural mechanism for rational economic allocation. Thus, attempts to regulate capital via political decisions produce suboptimal outcomes. This thinking is used to undermine the mechanics of popular engagement in determining policy. The actual individuals – the economic elite – who control the decision-making undermine other associations, like unions, under the rhetoric of personal freedom. Neoliberalism’s nonsense of individual freedom and equality, and its promise of prosperity and growth, are slowly being revealed as fabrications. Economic nationalism serves to distract the working-class from the very real questions about domestic distribution of economic resources by casting dispersion on foreigners.

Neoliberalism has ushered in a new Gilded Age in which the logic of the market now governs every aspect of media, culture, and social life from schooling to health care to old age. The goal was to weaken the welfare state and any commitment to full employment, and – always – to cut taxes and deregulate. But neoliberalism is more than a standard right wing wish list. It is a way of reordering social reality, and of rethinking our status as individuals. In short, neoliberalism is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made just to support the autocracy. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practice and believe: that the only a way of structuring all reality is the model of economic competition. The rise of digital technology, particularly smartphones, social media and instant messaging, has created an environment ripe for distractions.⁴

Today, shareable and trending posts on popular social media sites are rapidly closing in on television as the breaking news source for North Americans. Voters these days are easily distracted by politicians’ desperate bids for attention. In recent years, politicians have questioned a president’s birth certificate, resorted to ridiculous tweeting, and, amongst other stunts, promoted alternative facts. Using such distractions, politicians are gaining unprecedented control over their message. Politicians often now resemble celebrities rather than thoughtful policy-makers. The adage that there is no form of bad publicity appears to be truer than ever. Donald Trump, who reportedly consumes more television news than any president before him, would appear to also be the president who understands how best to manipulate it. The more outlandish his tweets, radical his policies, and atypical his actions, the more attention he receives from the media. His detractors become more infuriated; his base of support more invigorated.

To rule by distraction is a time-tested tool of autocratic and authoritarian regimes. The idea is to create enough chaos and distraction that all eyes remain on that. The key is to make “normal” a moving target (i.e. change what it means to be normal on a regular basis). Doing so allows for drastic steps to take place behind the smoke screen and distractions. In a “rule by distraction” situation, the survival of the administration depends on people not being able to process the complete information. By creating multiple simultaneous distractions, the administration overloads the attention of its citizens. In essence, then, they are not lying to the people, they are just creating enough alternative explanations that “truth” becomes debatable. Add political polarization to this and consistent bashing of the “other” side and you have a loyalist following locked up that will disregard anything that questions the government.⁵

Trump’s distractions are the new normal. Leaders increase their social media activity and shift the topic from domestic to foreign policy issues during moments of social unrest, which is consistent with a conscious strategy to divert public attention when their position could be at risk. Polarization is distracting us from the real issues. And yet, during a time of political polarization, it is more often the serious business of governing that is a distraction – from the partisan combat that has become our all-consuming pastime. Indeed, polarization, which drives many of our public and private choices, is so pervasive that we often fail to see how it structures our whole worldview, even our perceptions of events and things that at first do not appear even to have a political dimension. Rising political polarization is, in part, attributed to the fragmentation of news media and the spread of misinformation on social media.

Polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. At one time it was believed that the Internet was going to be the greatest tool for expression and democracy. Notwithstanding, the economic elite use social media to create confusion and advance a neoliberal agenda. The mass media has become skilled at controlling what we see and hear and hiding what the wealthy elite don’t want us to see. Also, digital distraction risks exacerbating inequalities. The algorithms feed each of us information that supports views we already have, and creates the conditions for us to be more susceptible to falsehoods. In post-truth politics social media assists political actors who mobilize voters through a crude blend of outlandish conspiracy theories and suggestive half-truths, barely concealed hate-speech, as well as outright lies. Misinformation that seems real – but isn’t – rapidly circulates through social media. The problem is only getting worse.

¹ https://www.wired.com/story/brain-distraction-procrastination-science/

²https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14664208.2024.2358692#d1e268

³ https://usafacts.org/articles/the-state-of-household-debt-in-the-us/

⁴https://questioningandskepticism.com/take-back-control-of-the-public-sphere/

⁵ https://www.mpsanet.org/ruling-by-distraction/

Posted in authoritarianism, neoliberalism | Tagged Donald Trump | Leave a comment

On the Road to Authoritarianism: The Challenges

Posted on January 15, 2025 by greg

Throughout most of U.S. history, when prosperity and opportunity have been more broadly shared, especially for women and people of colour, it’s been hand-in-hand with the expansion of democracy and individual freedoms, not their curtailment. Structural and systemic economic unfairness in the U.S., and the accompanying severe economic inequities, were brought into sharp relief during the pandemic. Multiple programs were put in place to confront them. The advance of democracy entails a decrease in political inequality but does not guarantee decreases in inequalities of other sorts. Economic (and other) inequalities have historically followed their own dynamic, independent of whether electoral democracy exists. Governments can reduce inequality through tax relief and income support or transfers (government programs like welfare, free health care, and food stamps), among other types of policies. What is the best way to reduce inequality in the society? Adopt policies, especially fiscal, wage and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality.¹

Common explanations of backsliding in the United States have focused on the (assumed) negative impact of globalization and waning ability of citizens to die wealthier than they were born, which along with a growing lack of political tolerance and a surge in misinformation on social media has facilitated the rise of right-wing populist leaders. One reason that there has not been greater resilience against this trend, some have argued, is that Americans have become apathetic about democracy – in part because it is so long since they experienced the downsides of tyranny. Although governments do hold power over countries’ economies, it is the big banks and large corporations that control and essentially fund these governments. This means that the global economy is dominated by large financial institutions. Economic globalization can exacerbate income inequality, as it can lead to job losses and lower wages in developed countries, while wages in developing countries may remain low.²

Globalization, thus, has powerful economic, political, cultural and social implications for sovereignty. Globalization has led to a decline in the power of national governments to direct and influence their economies (especially with regard to macroeconomic management); and to determine their political structures. Studies also suggest that globalization may contribute to income disparity and inequality between the more educated and less educated members of a society. This means that unskilled workers may be affected by declining wages, which are under constant pressure from globalization. This can lead to growing public discontent and calls for protectionist policies. Globalization shocks, often working through culture and identity, have played an important role in driving up support for populist movements, particularly of the right-wing kind. Globalization and the international economic order have undermined economic-human security – that is economic, food and health security – which in turn has contributed to the generation of personal, community and political insecurity.

A recent report published by the Commonwealth Fund reviewed data from 70 healthcare systems in 10 high-income nations: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Among the countries studied, the U.S. ranks last in life expectancy, with the average American living to 77.5 years, and has the highest rate of preventable and treatable deaths. The report reveals roughly 30% of U.S. adults live with two or more chronic conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease, nearly double the rate of other wealthy nations. The lack of affordability was cited as a pervasive problem due to a “fragmented insurance system” that saw 26 million Americans without insurance. Despite spending nearly 17% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care – far more than any other nation – the U.S. ranks last overall in health system performance.³

Finally, the role of crucial events on the global and national level cannot be underestimated. The 2008 financial crisis and its consequences across the world exposed the limitations of contemporary advanced economies, highlighted growing social inequalities, and reduced the resources available for responding to old and new social problems. The COVID-19 pandemic that disproportionately affected Western countries introduced an additional set of challenges and further exposed the weaknesses of their health and welfare systems. All these factors contributed to the rise of populist and radical left- and right-wing parties and movements in many countries, allowing their leaders to deliberately challenge liberal values and democratic norms. Populist politicians mobilized on resentments, grievances, and growing anger toward political institutions. Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as exemplified by Donald Trump in the U.S. and Brexit in the UK.⁴

Resentment as a cultural response to economic struggle has political consequences. More than half of US workers are unhappy with their jobs. The frustration you experience by not living the life you imagined is created by the resentment that the outcome of an event is less than you imagined it would be. Donald Trump himself is a cauldron of resentment, who has deeply internalized a life-time of deep resentments, and thus is able to tap into, articulate, and mobilize the resentments of his followers. Donald Trump – figured out how to harness their disillusionment and growing anger – is superior to the others in exploiting the narcissism of small differences to recruit the Republican base. His support for lower taxes and smaller government has surrounded himself with enablers. Enablers support Trump’s behavior out of fear, love, or a misguided sense of loyalty. Autocrats, like Trump, surround themselves with their political cronies and lackies rather than competent people – have no way of eliciting, recognizing or assessing useful criticism.

Dictatorial drift emerges from above by authoritarian leaders who, after legitimately winning elections, strive to concentrate executive power, marginalize political opposition and representative institutions, instrumentalize the judicial system, and manipulate electoral institutions to escape constitutional and political constraints and controls. They seek to gradually destroy independent media, civil society organizations, and formal and informal checks and balances, and they actively mobilize anti-liberal forces and incite social and political conflicts. Both the erosion of democracy and dictatorial drift are underpinned by the emergence of conservative and reactionary civil society, which mobilize and channel the demand-side anti-liberal and authoritarian preferences. Economic insecurity refers to a person’s exposure, and vulnerability, to an economic loss. Economic stress obviously activates latent authoritarian tendencies and can render even liberals less tolerant. Economic disruptions can fuel nationalist populism, because belonging to an identity group can restore one’s sense of control and coherence by means of attachment.

According to Foucault ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are created by those in power. What we take to be true is the dominant worldview that we have been provided with: it is received wisdom, not truth. Foucault rejected the idea that society was progressing. The world is not getting better or getting closer to truth, it is just moving through different worldviews. Foucault’s theory of power: to maintain power, those in positions of authority rely on the production of knowledge. They do this by creating information systems (unrestrained digital markets have given us monopoly, pervasive surveillance, and powerful vectors of disinformation) which allow them to exercise surveillance and control over the population. It has been argued that inequality is not an unintended result but itself an important feature of neoliberal politics because it is supposed to serve as a mechanism to increase competition and productivity (Foucault, 2008; Mirowski, 2014).⁵

Disinformation can be dangerous on social media because, the sheer amount of information there and the length of readers’ attention spans can allow it to go unchecked. Social media platform algorithms are designed for optimized user retention and engagement, and are not looking for misinformation or disinformation. A combination of lies and religion are used to control the people. There is no difference between the fake news, misinformation, disinformation of today – such lies have been churned out for years, but today it is designed to support the plutocracy. Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than focusing on processes to counter the plutocrats who are ripping them off. The truth is that present capitalism creates enormous wealth, but it concentrates into oligopolies and monopolies, to the extent the economic elite creates and normalizes a culture of lying to itself leading to its inherent instability.

The true value of Nineteen Eighty-four is it teaches us that power and tyranny are made possible through the use of words and how they are mediated. The theme of lies in 1984 is: lying, deception and false appearance is usually connected with the want for power and control, the belief that no one will find out, and avoiding punishment, which are evident in 1984. George Orwell observes: “The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” Orwell demonstrates how a government’s manipulation of technology, language, media, and history can oppress and degrade its citizens. The book was written as a warning of what could happen if people allowed their governments to obtain too much power after Orwell saw what happened to the people in Nazi Germany. Orwell concludes: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Speaking truth to power is a non-violent political tactic, is required against the received wisdom or propaganda of the Trump clique regarded as oppressive, authoritarian or a cult. The concept of “speaking truth to power” often requires those who pursue it to confront personal and social risks. Michel Foucault highlights the courage needed to speak out against dominant systems, as doing so can lead to consequences like social isolation, loss of freedom, or even death. For Foucault, to challenge power is not a matter of seeking some absolute truth, but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time. There is truly no universal truth at all, only systems of power creating a regime of truth. As US slips into authoritarian democracy, it is key to call out any combination of censoring of the media and restrictions on civil liberties.

¹ https://theloop.ecpr.eu/how-income-inequality-threatens-democracy/

² https://www.exploros.com/summary/How-does-the-global-economy-work-2

³ https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/the-us-is-failing-shocking-study-of-10-wealthy-nations-reveals-americans-die-the-youngest-live-the-sickest-lives-despite-the-us-spending-the-most-on-health-care-here-s-the-problem/ar-AA1wzr4Q?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=b07a7a2a481542b8b9c5c052dcbcbf51&ei=52

⁴https://ash.harvard.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2023/12/democracy_and_authoritarianism_in_the_21st_century-_a_sketch.pdf

⁵ https://questioningandskepticism.com/how-disinformation-supports-post-truth-and-authoritarianism/

⁶ https://questioningandskepticism.com/responding-to-a-society-controlled-and-manipulated-by-lies/

Posted in authoritarianism | Tagged Donald Trump, Foucault, George Orwell | Leave a comment

Trump As the Conduit for the Alt Right: The Consequences

Posted on January 1, 2025 by greg

Digital media has played a significant role in the rise of right-wing populism, facilitating the circulation of extremist propaganda. Around the world populist movements are wreaking economic destruction and social turmoil in the name of moral principles. The biggest takeaway from this research is that social emotions like anger, envy, and spite are very powerful motives. They often outweigh economic self-interest, and they tap into the brain’s reward centres – the same brain areas that play a role in addiction. These emotions can fuel a behavior called ‘costly punishment’: where people take on a personal cost to punish another person for being unfair. It appears people just wanted to hurt the person who had hurt them, and that’s an anti-social motive. Most likely people might be punishing for antisocial reasons but telling themselves and others they are punishing for moralistic reasons. Populist messaging has been very effective in channelling retributive impulses into votes.¹

For Guénon (1886 – 1951) and other Traditionalists, a caste system that placed a spiritual elite at the top and manual workers at the bottom was the natural order of human society. The increase in an individualist ethos, especially one that treats all humans as equal because of their status as consumers, erodes the caste system in the “west.” In tandem with the falling away of caste and the rise of individualism is the ascendance of the value of equality and its attendant institutionalized political form in democracy. Over and against such a vision of society Guénon promoted a hierarchical social order rooted in a primordial tradition, where people know their place, and because they know their place (whether as a cook, blacksmith, mother, or father) had a clear meaning and purpose in their lives. This political theology sought to preserve hierarchy, suppress the individual, and enforce conformity to an ideal only known by a select few.²

Curtis Guy Yarvin (born 1973), also known by the pen name Mencius Moldbug, is an American blogger. He is known, along with philosopher Nick Land, for founding the anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic philosophical movement known as the Dark Enlightenment or neo-reactionary movement. In his blog Unqualified Reservations, which he wrote from 2007 to 2014, and on his later Substack page called Gray Mirror, which he started in 2020, he argues that American democracy is a failed experiment that should be replaced by an accountable monarchy, similar to the governance structure of corporations. In the 1980–1990s, Yarvin was influenced by the libertarian tech culture of Silicon Valley. Yarvin read right-wing and American conservative works. He has been described as a “neo-reactionary” and “neo-monarchist” who “sees liberalism as creating a Matrix-like totalitarian system, and who wants to replace American democracy with a sort of techno-monarchy”.³

The libertarian University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds introduced Yarvin to writers like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard. The rejection of empiricism by Mises and the Austrian School, who favored instead deduction from first principles, influenced Yarvin’s mindset. Yarvin’s reading of Thomas Carlyle convinced him that libertarianism was a doomed project without the inclusion of authoritarianism, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s 2001 book Democracy: The God That Failed marked Yarvin’s first break with democracy. Another influence was James Burnham, who asserted that real politics occurred through the actions of elites, beneath what he called apparent democratic or socialist rhetoric. In the 2000s, the failures of US-led nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened Yarvin’s anti-democratic views, the federal response to the 2008 financial crisis strengthened his libertarian convictions, and Barack Obama’s election as US president later that year reinforced his belief that history inevitably progresses toward left-leaning societies.

Far-right intellectuals like Steve Bannon claim to speak for a working class put upon by out-of-touch liberal elites. But their anti-modernist, hierarchical vision of the world doesn’t offer workers what they really need: more money in their pockets, and more power at the workplace. He turns to Yarvin and Guénon to support his ideas. In Yarvin’s view, democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful and should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose “shareholders” (large owners) elect an executive with total power, but who must serve at their pleasure. The executive, unencumbered by liberal-democratic procedures, could rule efficiently much like a CEO-monarch. Yarvin gave a talk about “rebooting” the American government at the 2012 BIL Conference. He used it to advocate the acronym “RAGE”, which he defined as “Retire All Government Employees”. Vice president-elect JD Vance has cited Yarvin as an influence.

Yarvin advocates an American ‘monarch’ dissolving elite academic institutions and media outlets within the first few months of their reign. Drawing on computer metaphors, Yarvin contends that society needs a “hard reset” or a “rebooting”, not a series of gradual political reforms. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts sees the think tank’s role as “institutionalizing Trumpism” and is a friend of Vance, whom he’s referred to as “one of the leaders of our movement.” Under Roberts, Heritage has shed its former identity as a home for free trade fanatics and Reagan Republicans and has fully leaned into an ultranationalist MAGA ethos. Vance wrote the foreword to Roberts’ book Dawn’s Early Light, whose publication date was pushed back from September until November – after the election. With Project 2025, the foundation has positioned itself as a policy and personnel force in the next Trump term, similar to how the thinktank proved critical to Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Yarvin supports authoritarianism on right-libertarian grounds, claiming that the division of political sovereignty expands the scope of the state, whereas strong governments with clear hierarchies remain minimal and narrowly focused. According to scholar Joshua Tait, “Moldbug imagines a radical libertarian utopia with maximum freedom in all things except politics.” He has favored same-sex marriage, freedom of religion, and private use of drugs, and has written against race- or gender-based discriminatory laws, although, according to Tait, “he self-consciously proposed private welfare and prison reforms that resembled slavery”. Tait describes Yarvin’s writing as contradictory, saying: “He advocates hierarchy, yet deeply resents cultural elites. His political vision is futuristic and libertarian, yet expressed in the language of monarchy and reaction. Yarvin wants American democracy toppled, and he has prominent Republican fans who have read and admire his work.

According to Tait, “Moldbug’s relationship with the investor-entrepreneur Thiel is his most important connection.” Thiel was an investor in Yarvin’s startup Tlon and gave $100,000 to Tlon’s co-founder John Burnham in 2011. In 2016, Yarvin privately asserted to Milo Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel” and that he had watched the 2016 US election at Thiel’s house. In his writings, Yarvin has pointed to a 2009 essay written by Thiel, in which the latter declared: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron. Investor Balaji Srinivasan has also echoed Yarvin’s ideas of techno-corporate cameralism. He advocated in a 2013 speech a “society run by Silicon Valley […] an opt-in society, ultimately outside the US, run by technology.

Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics. No one online has shaped Vance’s thinking more than this neoreactionary blogger, Vance said on a right-wing podcast in 2021. Vance didn’t stop at a simple name-drop. He went on to explain how former President Donald Trump should remake the federal bureaucracy. “I think what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, and replace them with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” Vance is smart enough not to cite Yarvin in public now that he’s the vice president, and he hasn’t publicly supported some of the blogger’s more repugnant views. But that doesn’t mean he’s not plugged in.⁴

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to re-sign an executive order known as Schedule F, which could reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants into at-will political appointments, who Trump could fire and replace with loyalists. He’s also assigned billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to run the “Department of Government Efficiency,” an advisory board that will explore ways to slash the federal budget. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will lead a new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE for short. The theory: Putting up a target of at least $2 trillion in annual government spending cuts – one-third of federal outlays, excluding interest on the debt. The goal: A weaker regulatory apparatus or infrastructure allows business to do a lot more and have a lot more freedoms than it did previously, so business executives or those in the private sector may call this efficiency.

Trump is the conduit for the alt right. This is how US extremism is going mainstream. In parallel and closely associated with the expansion of populist politics there has been a surge in alt-right politics that usually articulate populism’s anti-establishment appeals to far-right ideologies based on race, ethnic and nationalist forms of identification. Trump used populist rhetoric to get elected. Now elected, he is supported by enablers, profit mongers and blind believers. Trump is governing as an elitist, promoting an authoritarian democracy. Authoritarian democracy is a type of democracy in which democratic institutions and processes are used to legitimize an authoritarian regime. Political opposition will be suppressed, civil liberties will be restricted, and the media can expect to be censored or controlled by the government. The general public will have limited opportunities for political participation, and decisions will be made by a small group of individuals.

¹ https://www.weforum.org/stories/2017/01/how-populism-taps-into-the-human-desire-for-punishment/

² https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/theorizing-modernities/political-theology-traditionalism/

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

⁴ https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/16/24266512/jd-vance-curtis-yarvin-influence-rage-project-2025

Posted in authoritarianism, neoliberalism | Leave a comment

How Disinformation Supports Post-truth and Authoritarianism

Posted on December 15, 2024 by greg

Postmodernism is defined as the reaction to assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. Postmodernism says that there is no real truth. It says that knowledge is always made or invented and not discovered. Postmodernism is based on the principle that concepts, ideas and language itself are subjective and arbitrary “constructs”. As postmodern people search for truth, they base their conclusions on their own research, individual experiences, and personal relationships instead of on the truth accepted by their parents, government or church. Thus all conceptual thought, including science, is also oppressive. There can be no objective truth. Because knowledge is made by people, a person cannot know something for sure – all ideas and facts are ‘believed’ instead of ‘known’. Remember the greatest fault of postmodernism is that it lacks an agenda for social change. Kierkegaard observes, “Everyone one wants progress, no one wants change.”

Decision-makers on Wall Street with extreme individualism and a sense of entitlement chose not to apply critical thinking, but to intentionally take advantage of people, which led to the meltdown of the economy in 2008. Many in the middle class saw their comfortable retirement, their home equity, and their dreams destroyed. With rising financial integration, world economic growth has lessened in recent years. The threat to individual freedom and opportunities to pursue one’s goals today comes not from political oppression, but from economic failure. Because of growing disillusionment and anger students and workers voted for leaders outside the mainstream party candidates during the 2024 presidential election – the consequence of being left behind by soaring inequality and the economic burden on workers. Donald Trump – figured out how to harness their disillusionment and growing anger – was superior to the others in exploiting the narcissism of small differences to recruit the Republican base.

People’s judgements about inflation and immigration were harsh during this election season, and these views harmed their assessments of Kamala Harris and strengthened the case for Trump. Donald Trump convinced many Americans that the economy is terrible, but a new analysis shows that’s just as false as his election fraud claims that fueled the Jan. 6 insurrection. Many Americans are struggling economically, and inflation was indeed high two years ago, but the unemployment rate is low, inflation has dropped significantly, economic growth is strong and median household income is higher than in Trump’s last year in office, wrote journalist and author Steven Greenhouse for The Guardian. “The truth is that the economy was in far worse shape during Trump’s last year in office, when the unemployment rate soared to 14.8 percent during the pandemic, compared with 4.1 percent in 2024.

Despite having access to more information than ever before, Americans’ trust in the news media has been declining in recent years, and nearly three-quarters of Americans say the news media is making political polarization worse. In a situation where public confidence in news reporters is very low and new generative AI tools make it easy to create and disseminate fake pictures, videos, and narratives, the 2024 campaign was rife with organized efforts to sway voters, twist perceptions, and make people believe negative material about various candidates. The internet platforms that control online distribution can limit the reach of various stories if they want to, but the baseline case is that they don’t want to. A story that appears in any outlet can go viral. This has two critical implications. One is that you can’t actually stop a given piece of information from reaching people just by having “mainstream” outlets ignore it.

The disinformation risks have grown stronger in recent months due to new tech tools such as generative AI. There are easy-to-use tools that can create false pictures, videos, audio, and narratives. People no longer need a technical background to use AI tools but can make requests through prompts and templates and become master propagandists. We need digital literacy programs that train people on how to evaluate online information and spot fakes and deceptions. In a situation where public confidence in news reporters is very low and new generative AI tools make it easy to create and disseminate fake pictures, videos, and narratives, the 2024 campaign was rife with organized efforts to sway voters, twist perceptions, and make people believe negative material about various candidates. Polling data suggest that false claims affected how people saw the candidates, their views about leading issues such as the economy, immigration, and crime, and the way the news media covered the campaign.

According to candidate Trump, there were hordes of migrants overrunning the country’s southern border, unfairly monopolizing scarce public resources and endangering public security through dangerous crime waves. Actual border statistics consistently showed weak support for those claims, but that wasn’t enough to quell unfavorable views about Harris on border security. The idea that 10 million migrants had crossed the border and that many were released after capture was not true, according to independent fact-checkers. Actually, apprehension and release numbers dropped during the Biden administration and were comparable to figures during the Trump administration. Harris had bet on a blue landslide on abortion rights, but forgot that voters care most about guarantees over basic needs. When voters don’t feel economically stable or secure, they will vote against whichever party is in power when given the chance. Democrats need to back off diagnosing, and focus on listening to voters.

Finally, many individuals and organizations have financial incentives to spread blatant lies. Through websites, newsletters, and digital platforms, they make money from subscriptions, advertising, and merchandise sales. As long as spreading lies is lucrative, it will be hard to get a serious handle on the flood of disinformation that plagues our current system. Post-truth is a term that refers to the widespread documentation of, and concern about, disputes over public truth claims in the 21^st century. In an era when technological innovations support increasingly inexpensive and easy ways to produce media that looks official, the ability to separate real from artificial has become increasingly complicated and difficult. Conspiracy propagandists are part of the anti-government movement. These groups and individuals intentionally spread disinformation and advance misinformation about government institutions and officials. With the rise of social media and partisan news outlets, everyone now has their own opinions and their own facts.

It is often said that for ‘post-truth’ politicians like Donald Trump, ‘truth itself has become irrelevant’. The post-truth camp rejects the consensus of established expert authorities as untrue, implying that the ‘so-called experts’ are not really experts. Moreover, Trump presents ‘facts’ of his own and even makes them central elements of his rhetoric. The purported facts are often expressed in mathematical formats signaling hard, scientific expertise, that are easy for most to fact check. By setting himself as a crusader against Washington and the media, Trump has played on Americans’ declining trust in both. The practice of post-truth – untrue assertion piled on untrue assertion – helped get Donald Trump, who lied or misled at an unprecedented level, to the White House. The truth camp, in contrast, closely follows the established experts – Democrats tried to convince voters that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the country’s future – lost the election.

There is no difference between the fake news, misinformation, disinformation of today – such lies have been churned out for years, but today it is designed to support the plutocracy. There is an orchestrated counter-revolution based on polarization. Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than focusing on processes to counter the plutocrats who are ripping them off. Trump and his allies stoke racial tensions even as they seek to cut taxes on the rich by shedding affordable health care for everyone else, dismantle protection for workers and consumers, and tear down environmental protections that stop wealthy corporations from poisoning communities. In post-truth politics social media assists political actors who mobilize voters through a crude blend of outlandish conspiracy theories and suggestive half-truths, barely concealed hate-speech, as well as outright lies.

When elites turn neoliberalism into crony capitalism instead of well-functioning free markets, they doom democracies and stabilize authoritarian politics. We are in debt to Donald Trump for exposing the ugly network of lies that Rousseau predicted that creates the society in which we live. He pulled back the curtain on the metaphor of the invisible hand exposing the oligarchy that is responsible for the increasing economic inequality between the wealthy and the rest of society. Trump also illustrated how emotion drives decisions – facts are now secondary – how politicians promise change to get elected, then once elected do an about turn and cater to corporate money. Trump ushered in the post-truth era in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts. The truth is important because it brings clarity which invites better choices resulting in better outcomes or experiences.

According to Foucault ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are created by those in power. What we take to be true is the dominant worldview that we have been provided with: it is received wisdom, not truth. Foucault rejected the idea that society was progressing. The world is not getting better or getting closer to truth, it is just moving through different worldviews. Foucault adds that the essential political problem for us, today, is trying to change our “political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth” (where truth is modeled on the form of scientific discourse), in order to constitute a new ‘politics of truth’: “The real political task in a society is to criticize the workings of institutions that ‘appear’ to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”¹

¹ https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1260.Michel_Foucault

Posted in authoritarianism, economic inequality, United States Economy | Tagged Donald Trump | Leave a comment

The Plutocracy and Big Money: the Cost of Money in Politics

Posted on December 1, 2024 by greg

Billionaires do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. Hedge fund billionaire Bob Mercer and his family spent millions in GAI (Government Accountability Institute), Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign to get Trump elected. Hillary Clinton did propose a tax on high-frequency trading of securities, which is reportedly a favorite of Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies. The Mercer Family Foundation gave nearly $3.6 million to Citizens United between 2012 and 2014, which sued for access to Clinton Foundation-related emails and whose president David Bossie also got a senior job on the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica was a data mining and data analysis company that obtained the data of 50 million Facebook users, constructed 30 million personality profiles, and sold the data to US politicians seeking election to influence voters, without the users’ consent. Mercer’s investments helped Trump win the 2016 election.

Americans for Prosperity, founded in 2004, is a libertarian conservative political advocacy group in the US funded by David and Charles Koch. The AFP Foundation describes its mission as “educating and training citizens to be courageous advocates for the ideas, principles, and policies of a free society – knowing that leads to the greatest prosperity and wellbeing for all – especially the least fortunate.” In reality, it is part of a network that uses dark money to fund an interlocking array of organizations that can work in tandem to influence and ultimately control academic institutions, think tanks, the courts, statehouses and Congress. This system eliminates the need to debate libertarian ideas in elections; but ensures that libertarian views on regulation and taxes are ascendant in majority of state governments, the Supreme Court and Congress. These activities account for the fact protections for employees have been decimated, and hedge fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle class workers.¹

What links climate change and inequities? “A few billionaires (corporations) together have ‘investment emissions’ that equal the carbon footprints of entire countries like France, Egypt or Argentina,” claims Dabi “The major and growing responsibility of wealthy people for overall emissions is rarely discussed or considered in climate policy making.” These billionaire investors at the top of the corporate pyramid have huge responsibility for driving climate breakdown. The evidence is mounting: a World Bank report estimated that an additional 68 to 135 million people could be pushed into poverty by 2030 because of climate change. As the poorest tend to be excluded from the decision-making process, there is always a risk of underinvestment in actions that would be particularly beneficial to them. Policies need to be tailored to ensure the economic elite do not impose undue financial constraints on those who have the fewest resources.²

It seems strange, but it shouldn’t. Governments and central banks around the world took exceptional measures to support the financial system during the pandemic, and it worked to excess. Fantastic amounts of money were made in stocks, housing, cryptocurrency and more during a pandemic that killed 6.2 million people and rocked the global economy. Billionaires’ wealth has risen more since COVID-19 began than it has in the last 14 years. At $5 trillion dollars, this is the biggest surge in billionaire wealth since records began. A one-off 99 percent tax on the ten richest men’s pandemic windfalls, for example, could pay: to make enough vaccines for the world; to provide universal healthcare and social protection, fund climate adaptation and reduce gender-based violence in over 80 countries. All this could be done, while still leaving these men $8 billion better off than they were before the pandemic.³

While a plutocracy is a government ruled by the wealthy, an aristocracy is a form of government ruled by an elite few or a privileged, minority ruling class. The 1% aren’t just the biggest climate wreckers, they also greatly influence how the world responds to the crisis. Some critics think that the supergiant tech corporations that have spawned so many modern billionaires operate in ways that resemble feudalism more than capitalism, and, certainly, plenty of billionaires operate like the lords of the Earth while campaigning to protect the economic inequality that made them so rich and makes so many others so poor. They use their power in arbitrary, reckless and often environmentally destructive ways. Donald Trump received a “small” loan from his Dad; Elon Musk used his smarts not his father’s money from emerald dealing and property development, and even the beloved Buffett had help from his politician/businessman father. We are told it’s a meritocracy, when in fact we exist in a plutocracy.

Neoliberal globalization is a system of smoke and mirrors where the basic instability and unsustainability of the whole system leaves a financial elite who hold governments to ransom. Exploitation here isn’t just about direct wrongdoing. It a spectrum that moves from being blissfully ignorant to actively manipulating systems to safeguard or increase their fortunes, often at our expense. The reality is that the staggering levels of wealth that billionaires amass necessitate practices like maintaining low wages, evading taxes through intricate global schemes, and prioritizing corporate profits over the well-being of communities and the environment. It’s tough to see how you can rack up that kind of wealth without being tangled in systems that inherently make the rich richer and the poor, well poorer. The dysfunctional US economic system doesn’t work for ordinary people – making it ripe for exploitation by a populist such as Trump.⁴

Social media manipulation of public opinion by political actors is a growing threat to democracies around the world. Citizen influencers are used to spread manipulated messages. Our brains use shortcuts to navigate the complex world around us and keep us safe and healthy: We pay more attention to fearful, dangerous stimuli to stay safe. We remember things that hurt us more than things that help us so we can predict future consequences. We tend to follow the popular opinion of those around us to build stronger communities around shared ideas. But these shortcuts don’t work perfectly in every situation. They can become cognitive biases, or ways in which our brains’ patterns make us vulnerable to errors in judgment, manipulation, and exploitation. Confirmation-bias draws us in to the one-sided outlets, and the cognitive dissonance pushes us away from conflicting ideas. Cognitive dissonance stops us from hearing other opinions that conflict.⁵

Individuals and corporations can become rich by relying on market power, price discrimination, and other forms of exploitation. But that does not mean they have made any contribution to the wealth of society. On the contrary, such behavior often leaves everyone else worse off overall. Economists refer to these wealth snatchers, who seek to grab a larger share of the economic pie than they create, as rent-seekers. The term originated from land rents: those who received them did so not as a result of their own efforts, but simply as a consequence of ownership, often inherited. With the help of new technologies, they can – and do – engage in mass discrimination, such that prices are set not by the market (finding the single price that equates demand and supply), but by algorithmic determinations of the maximum each customer is willing to pay. Bloomberg notes it’s the “biggest daily increase” of wealth it’s seen since the index began in 2012.

The power elite control what you think through proxies who control information and communication, and through their lobbyists who influence what most of your politicians believe. A little more than a year after America rebelled against political elites by electing a self-proclaimed champion of the people, Donald Trump, its government is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires than ever before. Interrogating a culture of cruelty offers critics a political and moral lens for thinking through the convergence of power, politics and everyday life. It also offers the promise of unveiling the way in which a nation demoralizes itself by adopting the position that it has no duty to provide safety nets for its citizens or care for their well-being, especially in a time of misfortune. There is more to introducing change than getting rid of Trump, we need to deal with plutocrats – the wealthy donors who sabotaged Kamala Harris’s presidential bid.

Big money has always spoken loudly in American politics. During the election cycle, Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy were being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups determined to win at all cost. Partisan gerrymandering renders the House of Representatives so polarized that most lawmakers now fear a primary challenge from the right or left more than they fear losing to the other party in a general election. They have no incentive to compromise. This cries out for non-partisan redistricting commissions to redraw the lines and make House members more accountable to people other than the extremes of each party. The influence of wealthy donors has only gotten more pronounced over the years: the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in the Citizens United case overturned certain long-standing restrictions on political fundraising and spending. It is necessary to overturn Citizens United and fully adopt public financing of elections.

¹ Mayer, Jane. (2016) Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

² https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-million-times-more-greenhouse-gases-average-person

³ https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/ten-richest-men-double-their-fortunes-pandemic-while-incomes-99-percent-humanity

⁴ https://www.whatshesaidtalk.com/are-billionaires-good-for-society/

⁵ https://www.humanetech.com/youth/social-media-and-the-brain#question-1

Posted in authoritarianism, economic inequality | Tagged neoliberalism | Leave a comment

Shapeshifting Supports Republicans Getting Back into Power

Posted on October 31, 2024 by greg

For the past forty years meritocracy has been used as a smokescreen to justify policies that increase inequality. Donald Trump won the 2016 election with this proposed solution to inequality: meritocracy, capitalism and nationalism. Meritocracy has become a rationalization that allows the rich to abrogate any sense of duty to those less fortunate. In fact, meritocracy serves to justify the status quo – perpetuate the existing upper class – merit can always be defined as what results in success, thus whoever is successful can be portrayed as deserving success, rather than success being predicted by criteria for merit. Meritocracy supports a growing oligarchy as demonstrated by the growth in income inequality and a reduction in economic mobility. Shapeshifting has been an essential characteristic of capitalism that may continue. Uneven economic growth and the widening gap in wealth and income may accelerate capitalism’s shapeshifting.¹

Perhaps one of the most intriguing characteristics of shapeshifters is that it is sometimes difficult to sense their intent. Many can be good, evil or both. The Japanese kitsune, a fox, takes the form of a young girl, a beautiful woman or an old man in order to seduce or advise confused humans. We are all psychological shapeshifters, constantly shifting between archetypes based on our current circumstances and setting. By recognizing our archetypes and consciously choosing to shift between them, we can develop new patterns of behavior that are more aligned with our goals and values. What does shapeshifting symbolize today? This ability allows characters to assume various identities, animals, or even objects, which can symbolize deeper themes such as transformation, deception, and the fluidity of identity.

“If Trump wins, we’re entering uncharted territory where private actors with vast wealth and power join with a corrupt president to pursue their own ends and not those of the people of the United States.” Charen added that the conservative Supreme Court greased the wheels for all involved by essentially making the former president above the law. As she put it: “Put those things together, and you have a perfect recipe for massive official corruption.” In Leo Strauss’s view perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them. At the core of the thinking of Straussian neocons is the idea of lying to achieve their goals. Project 2025 is a right-wing wish list for another Trump presidency developed by the Heritage Foundation, one of Washington’s most prominent right-wing think tanks.²

Trump has a dramatic range no other candidate can begin to match. This was important for Trump’s initial success in the 2016 primary. With Trump, you never have the sense that it’s a one-or-the-other binary choice. Instead, he is working a dial, which he can turn to whatever setting he wants. Cash notes that all political systems must endure some such exposure to the lure of narcissism, fantasy, illogicality and distortion. Cash thinks that psychoanalytic theorist Joel Whitebook is correct that “Trumpism as a social experience can be understood as a psychotic like phenomenon, that “[Trumpism is] an intentional […] attack on our relation to reality.” Whitebook thinks Trump’s playbook is like that of Putin’s strategist Vladislav Surkov who employs “ceaseless shapeshifting, appealing to nationalist skinheads one moment and human rights groups the next.” Trump changed our understanding of both public opinion and the media.³

In 2021, when J.D. Vance was asked at a conference why he had converted to Catholicism just two years earlier, he had a fairly simple answer. “I really liked that the Catholic Church was just really old,” he said. Vance tells the story of how his beliefs have changed by reference to other people. After serving for four years in the US Marine Corps, in 2007, with the world not yet ended, he went to Ohio State University. He read the New Atheist thinkers Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and declared himself one of their number. He rejected his faith, he explained in a 2020 essay in Catholic journal the Lamp, to fit in with the “social elite” he was now surrounded by. “I began to think and then eventually to say things like: ‘The Christian cosmos is more like North Korea than America, and I know where I’d like to live.’”

Peter Thiel changed Vance’s mind. At Yale Law School in 2011, Vance went to talk by the right-wing venture capitalist billionaire, who was “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met”—and yet, a Christian. Inspired by Thiel, Vance read St Augustine and the French Christian philosopher René Girard, questioned his beliefs once again and, in 2019, was baptised as a Catholic. In the Lamp essay, Vance explains his journey back to faith in that period, during which he wrote his bestselling 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy. He liked the idea, as advocated by Girard, that Jesus was a “scapegoat” for society’s sins. It made him think about the way people pick on society’s “chosen victims” – the targets of online mobs, say. He took to heart the Biblical dictum, “For if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged”, meaning that people should examine their own faults before finding them in others.⁴

The former president also says he wants to deport up to 11 million migrants. If he’s elected, you can bet he’ll try because Trump is Trump. For all his faults, this man lays his cards on the table. Vance, though, discards over and over again, always creating a new hand, like life is one big rummy game. Vance is a shape-shifting opportunist. He will bend his viewpoint to whatever is advantageous. He’ll morph to climb: When a person first confronts the realities of elite power, they have a decision to make. Play along or burn it down. Vance has always played along with whoever can offer him the most power. He was never a voice for the voiceless, as Charen once called him; with his book, he sold out the working poor for prestige. And Vance is only 40 years old. If he survives these headlines and continues to morph, he may prove to be the perfect kind of politician for this click-driven century.⁵

Most shapeshifters can only take on the appearance of others, meaning skills and memories are not copied and as such they can’t answer questions about the person they impersonate. This requires some knowledge about the person in question but is usually a good way to identify a shapeshifter. This constant shape-shifting gives Mr. Vance one more very interesting function in American politics, beyond the present moment. At some point between 2016 and 2022, when he won his Senate race in Ohio thanks to Mr. Trump’s backing, he sensed that being with Donald Trump was more profitable than being against him. The Ohio senator once condemned abortion ban exceptions, but has shifted his view to better match Trump’s. But Vance’s record reveals a politician who seems more than willing to go where the winds blow when it comes to one of the most divisive and strongly-felt issues in American politics.

Sometimes Shape Shifters get caught in flux, as Trump did in 2021, when he bragged about Project Warp Speed and got booed by Alabamians who didn’t believe in vaccines. Three years later, Trump now considers his rival, independent candidate and anti-vaxer Robert Kennedy Jr. for a significant health portfolio. It should be no surprise. Shape Shifters don’t like it when anyone questions their inconsistencies. Donald Trump’s antipathy toward the press isn’t because it’s the “enemy of the people.” Journalists are in natural opposition to Shape Shifters because they write things down and record things. The trouble with Shape Shifters is that, while they’re good at rising to power, they often don’t know what to do when they get it. For Trump’s next try, that has been taken care of. He has surrounded himself with admirers who will be in his administration to implement new ideas, along the lines of Project 2025.

In political shapeshifting there is no law only power. In 2024, a political world overrun with politicians making similar shifts, voters are left to wonder which manifestations are real. People say what they have to say to get ahead. These individuals will change their beliefs, their clothes, their haircuts – whatever it takes – to suit the situation, to please whoever’s approval they crave. These are the characteristics of the shapeshifters, Donald Trump and JD Vance. Basically, there is no real Donald Trump or JD Vance, they change as their circumstances do. Trump and Vance shifted abortion position during the vice-presidential debate. The goal here is to get back into power which is incredibly dangerous and problematic. Today with social media they can shapeshift in real time. Vance is adept at appealing and adapting to power. Vance’s addition to the ticket inspires little confidence and further deepens concerns about the future of American democracy.

¹ https://questioningandskepticism.com/meritocracy-disguises-inequality-supports-growing-oligarchy/

² https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/politics/fat-cats-getting-theirs-conservative-raises-alarm-at-billionaires-cashing-in-on-trump/ar-AA1tdtYv?ocid=winp2fptaskbar&cvid=fb39da803a8846a1fab67b87c429d811&ei=13

³ https://democracyjournal.org/alcove/donald-trump-shapeshifter/

⁴ https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/united-states/67486/the-shape-shifting-hypocrisy-of-jd-vance

⁵ https://www.chicagotribune.com/2024/08/04/opinion-jd-vance-changed-views/

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