If You Can’t Convince Them, Confuse Them

Plundering the rabbithole

When Jean Baudrillard wrote in his essay The Spirit of Terrorism ‘the World Trade Center & New York hits, the absolute event, the “mother” of events, the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened…’ you can easily take him out of context. In fact ‘authorities’ accused Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek of celebrating the terrorist attacks.

Most people don’t understand that ideas and beliefs are tools, not ends in themselves, and they apply this principle to the statements of philosophers. That attitude proves more dangerous than the premises themselves.

Regard the tenets of philosophers as tools for the mind, super magical goggles you can wear to see the world in different ways. You’re less likely to blow yourself up, both literally and metaphorically.

Baudrillard declared ‘Reality’ dead 20 years ago. He said that the line between fact and fiction no longer exists. Occasionally something real happens, like a natural catastrophe, but the majority of people who do not personally experience the catastrophe only see images in the media, with the added thrill of the images representing something real. They put fund-raisers on television to back it up, to help you believe it…and believe it you do.

Believing something doesn’t make it real.

Are you upset now? Most people get upset at that part. Remember the above, you are wearing some seriously cool LSD eyeglasses. In the words of Bill Hicks ‘It’s just a ride’.

I am very interested in what happened to that poor line between reality and fiction. Did it simply snap off like a 0.1 HB? Did it put up a fight? In this context I don’t take Baudrillard literally (though doing so produces some interesting results).

More alarming than taking literally his statement that September 11 never happened is his portrayal of the contemporary terrorist:

“One must recognize the birth of a new terrorism, a new form of action that enters the game and appropriates its rules, the better to confuse it. Not only do these people not fight with equal arms, as they produce their own deaths, to which there is no possible response (“they are cowards”), but they appropriate all the arms of dominant power. Money and financial speculation, information technologies and aeronautics, the production of spectacle and media networks: they have assimilated all of modernity and globalization, while maintaining their aim to destroy it.”

I am surveilling global events with a cracked Baudrillardian lens as part of my research for a PhD thesis. While digging around in the refuse of our dying ideologies I find the carcass of Reality all too often. Like the pelt and bones of a dead rabbit in a crumpled magicians hat. I spy the spectre of the new terrorist, either as a caricature or Dr Evil personified peeking out from nicotine and fried-spam stained curtains.

If you can’t convince them; confuse them — Harry S. Truman

The recent Sandy Hook shootings and the Boston Bombings in the U.S attracted global social media attention that conforms to Baudrillard’s statement that ‘not only are all history and power plays disrupted, but so are the conditions of analysis.’ “Authorities”, as a knee-jerk reaction to the thousands of amateur sleuths poring over photographs and documentary evidence went so far as to issue a statement saying that social media users were interfering with the case. Do you see a negative-feedback loop here? I quote William Burroughs, ‘everything is recorded, and if it is recorded it can be edited.’

I watched the television broadcasts and accessed all available news stories on the internet as both of these events occurred and I found myself lost. The vast contradictions in the stories from different news corporations at points still have me reeling in confusion. Not unlike when a news reporter says ‘Israel’ three different ways in one sentence.

Both of these cases have one thing in common, they had people convinced they were staged and that the victims and perpetrators were actors; in short, many people believed they were simulated events.

It seems a lot of people are experiencing Baudrillardian symptoms. Too much gaussian blur on that broken line. The only line remaining is the one between the luddites who will never buy a 3D television and those impatiently waiting for a real life holo-deck in their living rooms.

The luddites in this case got out that decaying rabbit and waved it around saying that lone nut ‘conspiracy’ theorists are practically terrorists themselves. The problem is, ‘conspiracy’ is a neutered word. The myriad of misuses and the amount of meddling with its semiotic chains of connection have rendered it intransitive, neither active or passive. Using dead language to deflect attention away from outrageous scenes of improbable contradictions won’t succeed in dazzling the sheeple from asking questions, any longer.

What is happening here?

Boston Bombings Staged: 44,100,000 results *

Sandy Hook Actors: 25,900,00 results

Either we are living in a simulation or a Diocletian war theatre… ‘reality’ no longer has an anchor in our consensus world view…or perhaps there is no consensus truth and there never was.

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* I wrote an early draft of this article on April 28 2013. The results quoted above have now drastically reduced (Boston 1,380,000, Sandy Hook 10,500,000) I have no idea why. Millions of links deleted? Interestingly a brief sample of the surviving links are all ‘conspiracy’ websites. See my comments above about neutered words.