The Manipulators and the Manipulated
“All reality is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is constructed by power, and ergo all reality is constructed by power. Thus . . . reality turns out to be a construction of power, which makes it both detestable (if by “power” we mean the Power that dominates us) and malleable (if by “power” we mean “in our power”).”
These are strange times. The most powerful democracies in the world are ruled by tyrants who got elected on the back of popular public support. While dissent against their policies is vocal and unrelenting, the dissenters aren’t lynched or gassed. The supporters get increasingly hysterical but stop at online trolling and death threats. The instrumentality of the supporters zeal stops at hyperventilation. The fence sitters are increasingly forced to take multiple choice examinations where the options are either a)The establishment is right or; b) the antagonists are wrong. In the ultimate analysis; nobody’s quite sure what they are opposing and what they are supporting. That’s because both the opposition and the establishment seem to ceaselessly engage in shapeshifting. Politics appears to be both evil and emancipatory. We all know we support certain ideals, and those ideals are represented by someone in the political realities of our lives.
But who is this someone? Who is this great knight in shining armour that is supposed to emancipate us from all our problems? Who is this strong leader?How can you define individuals like Putin or Modi?
They don’t fit into our templated versions of political leaders. They have no respect or regard for established and implicitly agreed protocols and institutions; they definitely do not fit into the standardised hero-villain binary. They are heroes with words and villains in their actions. Who are they?Are the regimes they manage dictatorial or democratic? Are they totems of change or are they offsprings of our society’s socio-political decay? Are they just benign salesmen of utopia or are they here to rob us of our ideals?
How do we figure out what’s going on? Who do we Trust?
The most profound political questions of our times have no answers.The Media, The intellectuals; the administrators and the mediating institutions of our society are all stuck in a proverbial quicksand of increasingly regressive morality.
What do we do?
In order to figure out the answer to the questions, we must first decode the problems. And the problems of our times are not merely economic or political or technological. There isn’t a 7s or 5 forces model that can help decode and solve them. There isn’t another technological revolution around the corner that will help us decide which fork in the road we will have to take.
How did we get here?
The roots of our current social condition lie in the postmodern critique of power. Philosophers, in arguing that all knowledge is an instrument and an expression of power undermined the legitimacy of knowledge to act as a force against power. The politicians and the financial elites understood the importance of mediating institutions of knowledge and set out to establish their hegemonies through financial and administrative controls. Wherever the politicians could not establish such lasting controls, they partnered with the financial elites in developing arguments to privatise such institutions and then transferred ownership of such institutions to the financial elites. In return, the financial elites supported such political leaders through campaign contributions and favourable media coverage. The Political arguments in favour of such transfers were always articulated under benign proclamations of improving standards and bettering output in the form of skilling for the future. The focus on skilling as the outcome of education weakened the transformative and enlightening aspects of education. Education lost its ability to articulate and demystify increasing complexity of the human condition.
This was the first step towards undermining the strength of knowledge to argue against elements of power. But, If knowledge is a constituent of power; how can it become the antagonist to the same mechanism that controls it?
In some cases like India and the United States, mediating institutions of knowledge; namely, the universities have provided considerable intellectual ballast against the power of the state and the financial elites. The state and the elites in turn; have accelerated their project of delegitimizing the institutions through systematic programs of targeted propaganda. The elites have consistently targeted and attacked state financial support to universities by continuously branding it as subsidies for the undeserving. State-funded education is no longer seen as an investment into the future of the society; it is increasingly painted as a burden on the taxpayer. This argument has been popularised in the media through various talking heads and their ‘expert’ commentary.
This is a phenomenon that has played out in many democracies over the last few decades. The result of this propaganda is that the average citizen now only thinks of education and knowledge as instruments to gain access to power. Other than that, education and knowledge serve no purpose to the common man or woman.
This systematic delegitimizing of knowledge and its mediating institutions means that we now have a generation of ‘educated’ individuals who turn increasingly to emotions and feelings. For them, all forms of rational explanations are merely arguments for power.These individuals are characterised by their gullibility in falling for propaganda and; their cynicism towards everything that does not validate their emotional state. These individuals; to borrow a phrase from Journalist Peter Pomerantsev are Gullible Cynics.
Why are these individuals gullible? In order to understand their susceptibility to propaganda, one must look at the dominant conceptions of identity in our society. Identity is expressed in multiple ways. It is expressed in our professional designations. But in a society where individual peculiarity is superseded by organisational identities; where language in the workspace is appropriated by catch phrases and acronyms and individual expression outside of the organisation is also often controlled by corporate guidelines; professional identities are hardly a reflection of one’s individuality. Creativity as an expression of identity is only accepted and celebrated if it has a commercial value. Other than that, it is classified as a ‘hobby’ and something to do in your spare time. And anything that you do in your free time has little value because the less free time you have from your job, the more ‘hard-working’ and ‘committed’ you are considered to be. Hard work and commitment give you more social capital than being creative (unless it has commercial value) can. Education and the pursuit of knowledge are already de-legitimised as expressions of identity since they are considered merely as instruments of power. Consumption of products and services as a marker of identity is meaningless because globalisation and e-commerce have ensured that the same goods are available to everybody all across the world. Owning a product which has a limited seasonal appeal (since corporations have to encourage you to buy again) cannot suffice as a marker of identity. The products we buy can only be transitive expressions of who we are. And conspicuous consumption and the economy of excesses means that most of what we consume is rarely a part of our affect. So what can we hold on to, that gives us our identity roots and permanency? The three things that give our identity roots and have a sense of permanency are religion, race and family legacy. It is true that one may change one’s religion or forsake it for other faiths but; in order to completely give up all markers of faith requires one to give up everything including one’s own family name to signal complete freedom from religion. Religion also sometimes helps provide cover to hide our own existential problems. Race, on the other hand, is an aspect of our identity we cannot change. Family legacy is also a form of inheritance that is attached to us all our lives. We may choose to disown our respective family legacies, but doing so often invites censure and stress. Family legacies also Inevitably, have strong elements of religion, class and position in the social hierarchy.
The political leaders and the financial elites have recognised the fact that in order to advance their agendas, they have to use the lasting aspects of individual identity; namely religion, family legacies (expressed in the form of caste and class) and race. The political leaders understand that centering their messages around permanent aspects of identity will invite emotional responses. These emotional responses can then be used to create binaries of race, religion and class. This agenda is then carried out through relentless stereotyping of ideological opponents. A bearded man dressed in an ethnic kurta is projected as a Marxist, A tattooed woman drinking at a pub is framed as ‘loose’, a professor questioning the subversive methods of the state is pronounced anti-national; and a co-religionist challenging the traditions of the faith is belittled as a ‘sickular’. The advent of the social media has accelerated this stereotyping considerably. And there isn’t one ideology to be blamed for this phenomena. All sides of the ideological universe are at it. The right-wing, in most cases, seems to have the upper hand now because it uses the information dissemination and the financial powers of the state to co-opt privately owned media in this project.
Social media has also become an increasingly important tool for the political leaders and the financial elites to spread their propaganda. Most of such messages; often in the form of ‘jokes’ are concentrated around stereotyping of ‘others’. This kind of messaging is designed purposely to initiate emotional responses from the receivers. There is, to be fair, other forms of messaging which are often benign and seek to address issues such as development and progress. But these are shrouded in homilies such as ‘Sabka Saath Sabka Vikas” (together with everyone and development for everyone) which are at best slogans.
The receivers at their end, do not engage in critical analysis of the content because the very tools that education was supposed to have provided to them to initiate such an exercise were either ignored by the receivers since they neither formed a part of the definitions of academic success; nor were they seen as objective instruments for enquiry. The term Marxist critique, for instance, has the word ‘Marxist’ in it. If you are systematically taught and incentivised to hate marxism all your life; you will never even understand the mechanisms involved in such a critique; leave alone critique them.
The cynicism aspect of the gullible cynics emanates from the lack of credibility of almost all institutions of the society. Institutional values are just empty words. All mission and vision statements of almost all private and public institutions are meaningless. None of them mention the fact that in our times, all institutions exist to either establish or advance their hegemony in the section of the society they operate in. In the private sector, this love for hegemony is exhibited in myriad ways such as the evasion of taxes; the below-living wages paid to workers; non-existent real wage growth for the lower rungs in their organisations and the ever-widening pay gap between the management elites and the workers. In the Public sector, this love for hegemony is exhibited in the form of increased surveillance and monitoring of the citizens and the punitive power of the institutions if the citizen chooses to challenge them.
The mainstream Media; which was supposed to enable such challenges to both the power of the state and private interests is itself in terminal decline. It behaves and interacts with the citizens both as an agent and as an informant for the corporations or of the parties involved in the struggle for administrative power.
This fuels cynicism amongst the citizens for they have no institution to turn to; to help them make sense of the increasing complexity of the world. This cynicism is also exacerbated by the fact that the traditional boundaries of politics, media and corporations have disappeared. In democracies like India, Media owners are now politicians, politicians have become media owners, and corporate heads are now both media owners and politicians. To the citizen, it is almost impossible to distinguish between them. The Media is now a spokesperson for both corporations and politicians, the politicians are agents of both the media and the corporations, and the corporations are media owners and political agents. This incest on the part of the media, the corporations and the politicians fuels cynicism amongst the citizens as they feel they cannot trust any one of these entities to stand up and speak up against the other. The citizens also feel that the instruments of education provide them with no reliable tools to challenge this convergence of incest.
There is a small and increasingly diminishing minority of people who still use the tools of education and rationality to argue against elements of power. But the approach of these individuals is to fight emotional responses with facts or universal truths. They assume that when they talk about topics such as history, that the other side also agrees to the basic common definition of what history means. But if you are arguing with an individual who disowns the commonly accepted definition of history as established in our education system and; cannot distinguish between a historian and an ideologue, no matter how hard you try; you will never get him to agree with you. To him, the concept of history only makes sense if what is mentioned under the heading of history validates his emotional need to belong. Other than that need; he has no concept of history at all. And this holds true for almost everything that is important for the society to survive and to progress. When everything is an interpretation, and there is no consensus on what the truth is; how does a society survive?
In order to answer this question, we have to first realise that the very definition of society is fragmented. Society today is not an agglomeration of various classes or interest groups. Society today is a disparate group of individual islands each of which; have their own subjective and objective realities. In order to survive in their respective ideological habitation, they do not feel the need to engage and negotiate the meaning and the purpose of the most fundamental questions of the human race. The dominant islands try their best to control the social discourse that seeks to define the sanitised common reality for everyone. This is not a new phenomenon. In the past, this process of defining social realities was constructed by political and administrative leaders. The only change that has happened in the last 10 years is that now, this process has been taken over by political technologists.
These are not your average Public relations or media professionals. The new age political technologist is a psephologist, a social media expert, a public relations professional, a legal expert, a statistician and a filmmaker all rolled into one. For them, politics is both a theatre and a game.
The Game
From Edward Bernays to Vladislav Surkov, the role of the political advisor has evolved from that of an image-maker to that of an alternative reality builder. While Bernays used the techniques developed by his uncle (Sigmund Freud) to help corporations and governments advance their interests, his methods were widely critiqued. The criticism was possible because the motives behind his mechanisms could be easily decoded and analysed. His methods were rooted in psychoanalysis which itself, was structured and widely researched across educational institutions. While Bernays’s endeavours were aimed at encouraging affiliation and consumption, the efforts of the new political technologists are aimed at generating confusion and diversion. Confusion is created through the promotion of mutually conflicting stories in the media and diversions; in the form of often inaccurate and click-bait pieces in alternative media outlets. These alternative media outlets are propped up as passionate purveyors of national interest. Their only editorial policy is to distract and amuse readers through sensationalism. The target audience for these media outlets are not the informed, rational and analytical readers. Their target audience is the gullible cynics. Examples of such outlets include Breitbart.com, postcard.news, infowars.com to name a few.
Although propaganda news outlets are not new, in the past such outlets clearly identified their political leanings and were often a talent pipeline for the political parties they represented. Setting up and running such outlets required considerable investment in equipment, labour and facilities. In our times, technological innovation and the ubiquity of the internet has meant that such investments are minimal and that management profiles can be easily obfuscated. One might ask, though, that if such outlets can be easily managed; then why does it seem that one side of the ideological divide appears to dominate in this alternate new world?
The answer is simple. For political parties that are in power, it is easier to manage and legitimise such outlets because they have the ability to leak sensitive information about individuals. The digitisation of our behavioural footprints and the opacity of governments in revealing how our data is used by the government and its private sector partners means that the government has a lot of inherent coercive power that it can exercise to silence criticism and dissent. Such media outlets become the chosen vehicles to malign and discredit opponents and dissenters. The political antagonists out of power do not have access to such information. Therefore they have to depend mostly on whistleblowers to gain access to information that can be incriminating for the current administration. All governments understand this fact and have lately done everything in their power to either discredit individual whistleblowers or to block any attempt at legislation which seeks to protect the whistleblower.
The alternative media outlets are not mere propaganda tools to advance one ideology. They are also vehicles used to infiltrate other ideologies. While their political reporting may seem one sided, they use their reporting in other areas to construct strawman arguments against any issues that the opposing political ideology may support. This may include issues such as the environment, government regulation, defence and civil rights.
The Endgame
The political and social endgame of our sociopolitical condition will neither be the long-term hegemony of the right wing, the terminal decline of the left or the resurgence of a centrist political force. The current push towards making our societies more culturally insular and the resentment against immigrants will also be merely transitive issues with recurrent episodes of volatile outbursts. The long-term endgame will be the emergence and dominance of nihilism as an ideology. Citizens will increasingly believe that nothing that they experience is real anymore. Morality will be seen as a contrived concept which has no instrumental meaning. In the absence of any reality and morality, life will increasingly become a set of experiences which are chosen for the sake of discovering reality. And each such experience will be polluted by the actors enabling or participating in it. In the end, our societies will become a room full of mirrors; ceaselessly reflecting back at us our own images. While this may be exciting for a while, cognitive vertigo arising out of this phenomena will lead the human race into collective despair.
How will we get out of this condition?
None of the tools that humans invented as measures of progress will help us get out of this condition. Our rationality will fail us, so will our education, our political and corporate leaders and our institutions. In order to get out of our fast approaching oblivion, we will have to turn to two endeavours of the human race that helped make sense of the world and helped us organise, co-operate and civilise: Religion and Philosophy. This effort will be different from similar endeavours in the past as it will involve exploring religion not as dogma but as philosophy.In fact, the first step in this effort will be to get rid of the dogma.This will be followed by regaining spaces for enquiry by taking away the influence of religious institutions in deciding the process of enquiry. Religious institutions will be used both as patrons and safe spaces to develop newer ways of conceptualising our condition.
But one might ask: Why would religious institutions participate and agree to patronise this process?
I posit that religious institutions and their leadership will agree to shepherd this process because they will see this project as a way to regain their credibility and relevance as institutions that have both moral authority and those that provide a moral compass to navigate through existential challenges. When society has no morality, religion will have no relevance to the lives of humans. The project to rescue and reinvigorate humanity will also be the project to rediscover religion and its philosophical roots.
While we may have created conditions for our own existential crisis, We also have the instruments to emancipate ourselves from our own condition.
As Maurizio Ferraris suggests, our realities may be malleable, but as humans, we also have the ability to mould the lens through which we experience and analyse these realities. We have to understand that this lens is both within us and outside of us.
There has never been a better time to define, shape and construct the new us.
Let us begin….
