Electoral Fortune Tellers
As nations struggle to replace the ugliness of pure Capitalism or a faceless Socialism as means to organize societies we are simultaneously having difficulty finding a new identity within these two social ideologies. Socialism has been widely used by people of very different political persuasions. It is the most basic and most broadly understood terminology. It refers to combined political and economic system in which private property has no place in favor of communal property. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels take credit for the original idea of a “Utopian Socialism,” where all inequality, injustice, and evil could be eliminated from a social fabric.
Marx and Engels, however never told us who could be in charge of transforming capitalism to socialism or how it could be accomplished without bloodshed which is at the crux of the issue. We have witnessed the transformation of the Soviet Union from communism to an oligarchic class that controls not only the means of production but the freedom of its citizens. Can this transformation be accomplished with benevolent results?
In Western societies a framework has been proposed to replace capitalism in a gradual manner, with no revolution and without violence. This transition is to happen by means of a legislative process in which these new social democratic parties win elections, from the government in charge, and install policies that would reform capitalism to improve the human condition. This adoption of ideas would gradually move towards a socialist system controlled by an electoral process such as the Scandinavian model. Opposed to this method are those who viewed this approach as a subject of corruption by powerful capitalists who therefore would opt for a violent overthrow of the existing order rejecting any accommodation with any gradual accommodation.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov better known as Lenin, was the most vociferous advocate of burning the social order and building a new one from its ashes. In present day America, Steve Bannon, proposes dismantling the administrative state and building from its ashes a new nationalistic system with the shared views of Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin, in Russia, Nigel Farage in Britain, Jean Marine le pen in France and Geert Wilders in Holland among others in Europe who are clamoring for a new structure of their societies aloud. However, these voices are neither shouting a passive notion of National Socialism through a legislative and electoral process that is to be governed by authoritarian decree nor in the same sentence, advocating for a lethal combination of strong rule and a robust corporate-state that should run the nation and the world.
Trump in the US wants to use the experience he gained negotiating with corrupt government officials on behalf of his organization and extend this experience beyond the limits of a constitutional order into a corporate-state-order. His rhetoric is aligned in a direction Europe calls “dirigisme”, but, in essence, is only a modern term to describe social organizations of the past such as Nazism and Fascism.
The opposite voice is Bernie Sanders who hails the attainments of the New Deal with modern Keynesian doctrine where he wants to empower women, minorities, and other dis-empowered members of society not only as a matter of policy but also in their everyday treatment and more important still, in their dignity. Bernie Sanders wants capitalism to stop viewing people as objects of capital and reform it to his vision of social change without tanks and bullets. He does not want another Alexander Dubcek, the Slovak politician who attempted to reform communism but was stopped by the tanks of the Warsaw Pact nations.
But how can a political vision become reality? How to sway public opinion over one side or the other?
Modern mind manipulators now side step palm readers and fortune tellers of the past or ancient mantis by following more recent professional propagandist like Joseph Goebbels in Germany. The Internet provides the best platform for belief manipulators who are now engaged in using sophisticated algorithms and big data mining to pattern public opinion based on simple likes and dislikes psychometrics of digital thoughts left in social media as a personality profile. It sounds like Sci-fi or Orwellian but it is real!
In the Brexit referendum and our own Presidential election, there were implants of big data that was weaponized by mind twisters to provoke the outcome predicted by digital footprints analytics and psychometrics and leaving professional pollsters scratching their heads.
Michal Kosinski, a Polish academic graduate of Cambridge University and now assistant professor at Stanford University, has been credited with the initial digital psychometric research. Kosinsky issued warnings concerned that his research discovery could be turned into a military grade mind control device. A British company by the name of SCL Group hired researchers at Cambridge University to turn Kosinsky’s psychometrics into a social weapon algorithm for manipulating big data and offset public opinion. The group started buying and mining big personal data for applying its psychometrics algorithm on controversial social questions where public judgement could be reverted. Funding was funneled from billionaire hedge-fund manager Robert Mercer, who also became a major Trump’s campaign donor in support of the corporate-state ideology. The original vision of the SCL Group was for military disinformation campaigns to social media branding and voter targeting and was tested with great success in Brexit. This new technology make statistical polling the lagging indicator of public sentiment for a real time targeted messaging of fake news that can sway public opinion at the last minute befuddling professional pollsters and providing us with a FAKE PRESIDENT.
