Think Tank Knowledge vs. Corporate Power
Epistemic Justice in the War of Ideas
“politics is war by other means” — Foucault
THOUGHT CRIMES OF WAR
What is the relationship between think tanks and war? Most think tanks take war for granted and try to work to solve problems within given parameters. But think tanks are largely corrupted by corporate influence, and we know this from the NY Times expose last August (2016). Think Tank Watch has done an excellent job of collating the various reactions to it, most of which confirms and adds to the depressing revelations. It is my assessment that while this is great journalism for NYT, it did not go far enough in its critique, which would also have to indict the media as well.
The think tank issue is indicative of a much wider problem, of dark money, deep states, and dumb politics. We must strive to think outside the confines of a tank, pacify thinking within it, and hold so-called knowledge experts accountable for their obvious mistakes and machinations. This post builds on ideas set forth in Beyond Metamodernism, The US Policy Environment and Political Climate Change, and The Role of Think Tanks in Meta-Governance.
This critique is long overdue — too many “think tanks” have been getting away with climate change denial for decades, among other things. If earth science isn’t a litmus test for proper meta- science, nothing is. Although I do know that the war-on-drugs is equally stupid as climate change denial, and many think tanks are ensnared in the bogus prohibition narrative. If the intelligentsia is so scientific and Popperian, why don’t they know that these beliefs and policies have been falsified long ago? There should be a moratorium on all nonsense, but the denial runs deep through think tanks and political discourse.
When push comes to shove many think tanks are pro-war if not hawkish. Why? because its all contextual — a ‘bounded rationality’ that is subordinate to American empire. A handful of think tanks are explicitly focused on ‘peace studies’ and the like…But few, if any, are strictly anti-war. Because to be anti-war is to challenge the cornerstone of the state; organized violence. This is in part explained because of a bias known as ‘methodological nationalism,’ as opposed to ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ (cf. Beck).
When it comes to the work of think tanks, notwithstanding truly global science, policy wonks are beholden to their geographic hosts and financial backers. But more broadly, its a problem of epistemology and self-awareness. What then does this say about the quality of research and policy from think tanks? Not much. In order to do their job think tanks need power, influence, and legitimacy, but most important, they need to have a public epistemology; a common way of knowing that empowers citizens and policy makers with powerful abstractions.
We have to recognize that virtually all knowledge (all but the most abstract, critical, and objective) is functioning in terms of a status-quo that normalizes war. It is built into our political language (“We need to fight, fight, fight!” — no, we don’t actually… we need to talk… we need to listen). A disproportionately high amount of political ads are purely negative (attack) ads, and not about the issues. The mudslinging expenditure was about 5:1 over positive ads in the recent Montana election, in which a wrestling move prevailed. Knowledge is highly politicized and distorted. The politicization of knowledge is not some postmodern lamentation; it refers to the abstraction of war into words that scrambles your mind like jet chaff ruins radar.
Nothing in the United States receives more funding and investment than the abstraction of war, because it abstracts to the level the world concern. It projects itself to protect the global capitalist infrastructure that makes profit and peace possible (and apparently war is fun and lucrative as hell if you gamify it). At least, this is the justification the paranoid mind gives. Not the ‘paranoid style’ of conspiracy theory, but the paranoia of (pre-emptive) war; of the conspirators themselves. It goes far beyond guns, tanks, jets, and other dumb weapons, and infiltrates discourse and language. War is everywhere. War is at work in maintaining poverty and ignorance. It controls our minds and whips us up to do its bidding. It ‘trickles down’ to the most banal conflicts between fellow citizens, and scales up to nuclear holocaust, because people are made fearful of greater truths which would resolve or dissolve the conflict.
Think tank researchers, policy wonks, and politicians are all paid to know things, but also paid not to know certain things. Ironically, this means that war proponents have a very weak abstraction of peace in mind. They have no knowledge of real peace, only security. They are paid not to know, and consequently they know too much about war. To them, peace is a mere abstraction, an illusory condition of the absence of invasion, not an achievable utopia in anyway. But what happened in the 60s is that war became much more abstract. Racism became more abstract. All the deep sources of inequality and oppression became even more hidden and mystified.
The civil rights movement was granted victory in the battle, but not the war. Wars became more covert and digitized. Republicanism became more anti-intellectual and obscurantist. Democrats became more cynical and corrupt. War has gotten so out of control that it’s co-opted the very idea socialism — the principle of the social, and even the sociological — to pay for itself, leaving both civilians and veterans to subsist on bread crumbs. It has made everyone against everything, and against ideas themselves. To the unimaginative, war is the only way to bring about political paradigm shift.
War is both real and an abstraction. It is real and particular in obvious ways. It is not obvious how it is abstract. We can have a general conception of war, which is abstract. The nature of war is abstract, in its chaos and complexity. Understanding war conceptually requires an enormous capacity for abstraction. War is also abstract in how immaterial it can be: consider cyberwar, meme war. It is also abstract in how much redundancy is retained in the equation: consider the obsolescence of fighter jets and the doubling down on the utterly pointless F-35. Consider nuclear stockpiles (I’m sorry, what are those good for?) and how much stored value is wasted in them.
A lot of very smart people came up with these weapons and war games because they made sense within a certain game-theoretical matrix; one in which the US cheats to achieve marginal gains and security, while seeding blowback. Meanwhile, the US has been at war with itself since its very inception. Think tanks have been exceedingly good at computing the details put into it, but horribly bad at abstracting outside the contradictions of capitalism and educating the public. Think tanks are chiefly responsible for the anti-intellectual erosion of civil discourse, as it occured right under their noses.
All of this highlights the ironic normalization of war as a path to peace, but more importantly it proves that think tanks know little about peace itself. Every military operation makes the assumption that its for the greater good, but it is often the case with the US that the actions are illegal unprovoked acts of war, justified as part of some globalization imperative. We know that comparatively very little is invested in peace, conversely. We know that the democratic world community (the UN and global civil society) are collectively hamstrung and obstructed by one country above all others, who rules hypocritically and leads by example. This country is the United States and it has manifested the global diffusion of its abstract empire at its own expense.
America can’t do democracy or secularism right at home, yet its trying to export it abroad by force. The cutting of education should be rightly seen as an act of war. While globalization has quicked, America has sickened. Instead of easing into a comfortable retirement, passing the torch to the younger generation, it set the ground ablaze with scorched earth politics. It blew a golden opportunity to redeem itself for over a half-century of global hegemony. That geopolitical agenda has been written largely by think tanks. Political candidates have been chosen largely by think tanks and their money networks. That is the point. And now, they are still calling the shots (pun intended), with their postmodern pragmatism instead of higher-order truth. The left and right wings are flapping haplessly and we’re in a tail spin.
“Maybe in an age of think thanks it takes a think tank to really find out what’s going on inside think tanks.
“What we need is the mother superior of all think tanks, one that monitors and studies the others to foreclose any oligarchic loopholes.” — Truth-out.org
THINK ANTI-WAR
What ever happened to the anti-war movement? Anti-war used to be more cohesive (circa Vietnam) but the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy has worked viciously to fragment progressives. Postmodernism has helped up to a certain point, but is a bridge to nowhere. Metamodernism is the bridge being built from the other side. The war on anti-war has brought us to our current state of post-truth. The various causes have forgotten their common ancestry, where they occassionally re-unite under a single banner of truth and justice: anti-war. To make this idea cohesive again, we must understand how war is featured everywhere; it is over-determined. Therefore you must be blindly against war, as a matter of religious conviction.
The ideals of pacifism and non-violence are barely even discussed — it’s too abstract! — if only to be ridiculed. Of course, how can discuss ‘anti-war’ when we are permanently at war? The possibility that a state could be so charming that it’s literally disarming written off. Canada is trying pretty hard America, take notice. And what of think tanks? Most are implicitly anti-war, but its lip-service. The Abs-Tract Organization (TATO) is an anti-war think tank par excellence; at least in theory. That is, TATO is all about idealism and enlightened absolutism, about deconstruction and reconstruction of the abstractions we use daily. Also, TATO is meta- and virtual for now. We exist in principle, for first principles.
It is our mandate to depoliticize knowledge, but this does not go far enough. We must also demilitarize and disarm it, figuratively and literally. War has been sanitized through knowledge filters, to hide the nihilistic purpose of it. If we abstract to the level of humanity or world, war is simply self-defeating. We have to demilitarize war and depoliticize knowledge at the same time. They are two sides of the same bitcoin that will finance our future. The military is typically at the forefront of technology, which somewhat justifies the value-added nature to society but also serves to tacitly immunize the defense industry from criticism. This perhaps is its one saving grace, but we are past the point (if there ever was one) that the most advanced technology should be in the hands of militant secretive technocrats and bought politicians.
Believe it or not, deweaponizing our culture is a surefire way to make sure less shots are fired. And who wouldn’t want to live in that world? The military-industrial-etc complex is just that, a ‘complex’; psychic repression that leads to abnormal fears and behaviour. Eisenhower’s explicit warning was not a call to arms, it was the opposite; a call to disarm.
There is a lot of creative ways we can do this. Military bases could be converted into refugee crisis centres and experimental socialist eco-villages. Military training can be expanded to include expressive martial arts (poetic symbolic combat), meditation, and civic education; all of which are antithetical to war. Soldiers can be reformed into civil servants and aid workers offering humanitarian intervention. We can best honour the military and its members by playing more peace games over war games. Their lives are less at risk if the US war machine is not threatening the world and spying on everyone.
I argue that think tanks need to demilitarize their knowledge production. This means total divestment from war. Total abstention from conflict of interest. Total commitment to abstract and big-picture thinking with real world correspondence. Metamodern journo-scholar Seth Abramson recently drew our attention to “deconfliction.” In the war context, it is essentially the prevention of mutual-interference or friendly-fire. As Abramson points out in a long twitter thread, deconfliction also applies to resolving conflicts of interest, in the legal sense. Deconfliction is important enough to have its own wiki, but unfortunately there is no explanation beyond its war context. This is suggestive of a hole in our thinking about war, along with lack of knowledge about de-escalation and demilitarization. Abramson urges that it’s the “most important word” of the day, and I am inclined to agree. And of course the media is misleading, because they don’t know where were going.
Knowledge is power, and constructed ignorance creates injustices that arise as a result of the deprivation of key knowledge. Think tanks produce invaluable strategic knowledge, but they have completely dropped the ball when comes to finding consensus and educting the public about key issues. The blindspots of think tanks are therefore monumental, yet only think tanks can save themselves. Only abstraction can solve for abstraction. Power has become the master of knowledge, enslaving it, but abstraction can take it back.
The abstract point of view reasons across all levels, and debunks all bad ideas. Critical abstraction is the skeleton key to the war chest. It is time to distribute the funds and return the loot, in order to restore faith in disgraced think tanks. It’s a matter of epistemic justice, which seeks to address the “knowledge gaps” in society for just social outcomes. Consumer protection is an important example of an institutional enforcement mechanism to do this, but we need to think more broadly about education.
How is knowledge production instrumentalized by think tanks? How aware are war advocates of the unknown consequences and negative externalities of their policies? How and why are funders, thinkers, and voters constantly undermining their own interests with bad research? We have to answer for how think tanks are engaged conflicts of interest or tacit collusion. The research priorities for all think tanks need to converge on the meta-problem. This was already prescribed by the Club of Rome in the 1970s, and were it followed we probably would have avoided many of the crises we’re facing now.
The Abs-Tract Organization calls itself a ‘metamodern think tank’ but normatively we are anti-tank. Yes, this is a playful equivocation of the word ‘tank,’ but the confusion of language is at the root of many conflicts. Look at the enormous human energy and ingenuity put into making a machine (a tank) that distances and abstracts the conflict between us, only to destroy life. How abstract! The world does not need yet another orthodox think tank; there’s over 6000. What good are any of them if they can’t prove how wrong war is, especially in the case of the most obvious contrived war-on-drugs? How unproductive, immoral, and inhumane it all is. The think tank needs to think anti-tank. It brings a new meaning to phrase ‘creative destruction’!
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