A Lie is a Lie — Linear Politics in Non-Linear Times
A spectre is haunting the world. This time around it is neither fascism, nor communism, nor any other -ism. It is a perplexity of the political body. Brexit, Trump, Duterte, Bolsanaro, Modi, Putin, AfD…the list goes on. Why are we struggling to form meaningful opposition to the political dynamics and phenomena and tactics they wield? Especially considering that the positions they represent or enact are largely unpopular. Why do we have to deal with unpopular populists?
Is it speaking of a deeper political animus of resignation and what I call mindset of the cataclysm (the level of expectation and ultimately collective impatience that is brought towards the totalitarian doomsday scenario we’ve made for ourselves over-stretching our resources vastly)? Perhaps. On a methodological level it denotes a luckily much more traceable dichotomy that might be more constructive in assessing the situation.
All of our lives and almost all of human reality has been fundamentally impacted — disrupted — by the advent of the internet. While we seem to all have understood that when it comes to say the economy and business or education, we haven’t fully wrapped our heads around what that meant to our ways of forming political will.
The systemic shift responsible for these disruptions, is that perhaps for the first time in human history we’re experiencing an environment that favours non-linear processes over linear processes. What does that mean? It is the fact that single tweets have the potential to bring entire multinational organisations to their knees. The fact that a single human can operate an organisation that reaches its audience or consumers all across the globe. The fact that everybody needs to use the term singularity with a deep wink and nod in posts like this one…
Asymmetric warfare — however — is perhaps the most plastic example for this — in so much as Al-Qaeda represents much more a modern expression of non-linear systems gaining an upper hand than anything else. Similarly ISIS. Keen to figure out how a modern non-linear order — or rather disorder — of things benefitted them, they exploited a sense of religious patriotism, civic disillusionment, economic lack of perspective, and modern asymmetric warfare and propaganda tactics. Youtube is one, the collective underbelly of the internet being another. This methodological foresight undoubtedly made for much of the allure they had, drawing many others from far away places to them.
Luckily, we also see ethically good examples of this phenomenon. Black Lives Matter — perhaps the most successful political movement of our time as some rightly state — has shown how to organise under these new presets: decentralised structure, focus on the movement body not the leaders as well as an astonishingly decentralised yet constructive message, and communication. The Democrat Blue Wave but before them also the Tea Party Movement has shown how to use these new underlying parameters for their own good forming their own methodologies around it: immediate, disruptive and decentralised.
The formation of collective/political will thus far has always depended on linear processes. Forming parties and platforms, electing committees, policies etc. all depend on linear processes -ones that consume a temporal succession of steps logically building on each other. This does not state whether one is better than the other.
As you can imagine, linear processes have also always contributed to privilege, the accumulation of wealth and to keeping others out — linearity veils and perhaps even guards a certain sense of feudalism. Politically, economically, socially. But the more pertinent question is: how do we reshape our political processes in a way that we regain constructive and maybe even reliable outcomes?
A Lie is non-linear
The press’ original sin with Donald Trump was not to call him out as the liar he is. Shocked with a tone they never had to deal with, they came up with the euphemism fake news (maybe more to save their own faces and not his), which he then turned around and began using against them. Ironically they had endowed the term with the little legitimacy it had.
It displayed how powerless the institutions were faced with the ultimate Tea-Party-President. He understood the new underlying parameters — probably based on his lifelong trial and error approach (mostly error) couched by his enormous White Privilege that let him get away with unspeakable faults — both in character and in action.
They should’ve said what it was much earlier than they ultimately came around in doing so. He was lying his ass off all the damn time. What benefitted him was the simple fact that while both the truth and the lie are non-linear, truth-finding as opposed to lying is linear. It builds on processes of checks and balances, on evaluation of fact, witness, testimony etc. This explicitly does not state whether a lie is more sustainable long-term or not. Even under these new non-linear parameters, truth-finding might ultimately be the more sustainable modus. Short- or mid-term speaking he mopped the floor with the press’ befuddlement — and our’s too.
While the press and media didn’t leave it there but began reconfiguring itself (unforgettable to me was a video by a New Yorker editor who gave one of Trump’s speech transcripts a New Yorker-editing-treatment in a boring New Yorker conference room resulting in a total remainder of 2–3 coherent sentences while millions were watching), this serves as a meaningful lesson.
How do we form meaningful and constructive political resolve faced with destructive input (and he isn’t much more) that seemingly is benefitting on a much higher scale from the new non-linear than constructive input could?
Behold the Brexit stalemate. In a vote late March, none of the eight propositions in how to deal with Brexit gained a meaningful majority. While you can interpret this as a failure on a large scale, I choose to look at it as a marvellous expression of the collective unconscious. Not the defined outcomes of either proposition are the issue or at stake at all during these votes. Whats being expressed by consequential no-votes is a rejection of current linear processes that are bound to fail faced with the non-linear power house of destructive motives that is Brexit.
A first step is therefore to allow ourselves to observe and recognise this dynamic. It is also important to look at how other political systems — faulty as they might be — are dealing with it. The Chinese social currency system has drawn much attention and dread. While we won’t agree with the targeted outcomes we can look at the methodological advantage that is perhaps causing more of that eery feeling than anything else, which is: the Chinese system seems to work measured by the objectives defined for it but largely because of the non-linear methods applied.
But what if we take the method and redefine the targeted outcomes? The system works because it is based on seamless and ever-present processes of granular and direct feedback loops. People’s daily realities are assessed at a much more qualified and granular level (even though for all the wrong reasons) than the linear processes of political institutions in western democracies could ever assess the needs landscape of their base. Non-linear approaches can help.
Assume we coded our progressive, democratic values into the method of direct, granular feedback: protection of civic freedoms, protection of personal data and privacy, self-determination of the individual and of groups etc. we would be able to take away all the disruptive and ill-intentioned dynamics of a Trump. It would result in a system of much greater reliability that can absorb non-linear developments in the environment it seeks to govern.
Intuition vs. Deliberation
Another dynamic that plays into this is what’s conceived to be the crisis of intuition- specifically in the West. We’re governed by deliberate and partly defunct processes to a degree that we’re yearning for a more archaic impetus. Empathy has been a quick victim of new connectivity and recycled social-media communication. People aren’t only left behind because they feel a system forgot them.
People also feel that their ritualised attempts to connect with others aren’t reaching anybody outside their communication bubble. A young, democratic congresswoman said about her mid-term election success that some of her best allies were republican women. They — so she claims — just wanted to see somebody caring and empathetic back in power.
Of course, in tribal times imprinted with a fervour for intuition an impresario of it like Trump falls on fertile yet destructive grounds. When people roar at his rallies they might not even register what he raves. They want to see somebody vomit from their gut without reflection and little to no consequence or punishment, notwithstanding or exactly because of the outlandish quality of nearly all his statements. Michael Moore said it this way about Trump-voters from the Midwest: They saw a system that they felt was hurting them and they threw a Molotov Cocktail [Trump] in it to destroy it.
Our system is shifting and for the most of it it has been daunting. Being unable to form collective will on a large enough scale will only leave us disoriented and incapable as societies. Dealing with large scale problems like climate change (you name it…), it is enormously pivotal for us to configure political processes that both parse our collective needs as well as an underlying non-linear and permanently evolving set of circumstances and conditions. Just because our societies and systems seem to be growing increasingly chaotic, our collective decisions don’t have to be.
