Defund the Police: Steps in the Right Direction?

Defund the Police. That was one of the main messages and demands back during the Black Lives Matter protest movement.

It received much public attention and was part of a major public debate. But in the ‘mainstream’, it was typically criticized or dismissed as too far left-wing, too radical. Supposedly, it was unreasonable and impractical, extreme and dangerous. The pundits and politicians, at the time, refused to honestly and fairly discuss the actual proposal, instead having caricatured it and scapegoated its advocates.

In reality, it wasn’t about eliminating the police so as to allow criminals run free while all of society fell into uncontrolled anarchy and violent chaos. Rather, the stated purpose was to stop police from doing non-policing work so that they could, properly, spend their time policing. That seems like a rational solution to a straightforward problem.

Police departments can’t be used to solve all of society’s problems nor should they be expected to try. To respond to their inevitable failure by demanding more policing is simply insane. More cowbell!

In a functioning liberal democracy, most of what a government does should involve preventing and remedying problems, or at least reducing and compensating for the harmful consequences, long before they get to the point of needing police involvement at all. (This is why Blue states, by investing in the public good, have lower rates of violent crime, poverty, etc.)  The police showing up at all in any situation almost always represents a failure of society, something having gone wrong on the collective level.

It’s similar to our severely problematic medical system that, while the population is flooded with harmful substances (air pollution, microplastics, toxins, agrochemicals, PFAS, carcinogens, obesogens, endocrine disruptors, food additives etc), only treats people after they are damaged and sick, often near death (e.g., cancer). In some cases, such as with childhood lead toxicity, it’s the same source causing physical disease, neurocognitive problems, psychiatric disorder, and criminal behavior.

Then further persecuting, terrorizing, and punishing the harmed and traumatized victims of that sickly, oppressive, and dysfunctional society through militarized policing, school-to-prison pipeline, and police abuse — in treating the poor and minorities as enemies of the state in an occupied warzone — isn’t exactly a solution worthy of a sane society that aspires to be free.

Whenever possible, specifically as long as it doesn’t involve violence and crime, the police should have absolutely nothing to do with marital conflicts, mental health issues, substance abuse problems, juvenile delinquency, homeless camps, and other everyday complaints, conflicts, and crises. For one, police officers lack the education, knowledge, training, and expertise — likely also lack the psychological profile — to optimally engage with such situations.

Besides, the mere presence of the police can be problematic.

When a call is made for intervention, many distressed individuals are already agitated, worried, troubled, disturbed, panicked, angry, defensive, and/or distracted. They might not be in a rational state of mind: inebriation, anxiety attack, autistic meltdown, schizophrenic episode, PTSD flashback, etc. With an implied threat of violence or arrest, a burly cop approaching them with gun, taser, and handcuffs strapped to his belt quite likely will increase or exacerbate tension, anxiety, fear, conflict, and aggression.

That is the opposite of de-escalation.

What is needed, in such a situation, are those working in social services. Sure, at times when there is potential for threat, danger, and harm, social workers and such may need to be accompanied by a police officer. But the vast majority of the time, that isn’t the case. And even when it is the case, the police should only be there as backup and assistance, not initiating the engagement, controlling the situation, and determining the outcome; certainly not holding people’s lives in their hands as judge, jury, and executioner.

If political and media elites still refuse, as usual, to acknowledge that left-wing activists were right about Defund the Police, it looks like some local governments, such as here in Iowa City, have been taking action along these lines. Back in 2024, the ICPD established the Crisis Co-Responder team.

It’s purpose is actually to help people in need, not punish or institutionalize them.

“The Crisis Co-Responder team is part of the Police Department and features a unique collaboration between PD and CommUnity Crisis Services. The team features Kristie, an officer, and Karen, a professional Mental Health Liaison from CommUnity who works through ICPD.

“Together, the team responds to 911 and 988 calls for individuals who are going through a mental crisis. Though from different professional backgrounds, the duo uses their shared skills in de-escalation to make sure those struggling with mental health can be connected to the appropriate community resources instead of being sent to the ER or jail.”

~ICPD’s Crisis Co-Responder Team has big first year in 2025*

It sadly amusing that, even when left-wingers win, we rarely get credit. The revolution, as has been said, won’t be televised.

Depending on how it’s designed and implemented, the above Crisis Co-Responder team potentially could be a somewhat radically leftist policy and program, as was closer to the case in some other places (Roger Karma, Los Angeles voters just delivered a huge win for the defund the police movement; Fabiola Cineas, San Francisco hasn’t defunded its police force yet — but just voted to make it smaller). But it will never get framed that way or likely be allowed to become that.

It also doesn’t matter that most Americans have long agreed with BLM positions on the absolute necessity of police reform. We on the broad left neither will get credit for winning the public mind and moral imagination. Nor will the political and media elites even mention that the American majority in general, as supporting social democracy or democratic socialism, is far to the left of the entire two-party system.

This is how it always works.

The left promotes something and it gets publicly and vocally rejected by the powers that be. Then covertly and silently it’s adopted over time, partly or entirely, and so it eventually becomes normalized. Everyone forgets that it was ever a leftist idea and, in having originally reacted to it, even the right accepts or at least co-opts, recuperates, and subverts it (e.g., Enlightenment individualism was liberatory anti-traditionalism and anti-authoritarianism until it was usurped by neoliberal ideology as an attack on collective organizing; e.g., after fighting against it, the majority of conservatives now support legal rights of same sex marriage and the majority of young evangelicals now support legal rights of abortion access).

As I’ve said before, what is old to the Left becomes new to the Right. Or to put it another way, “the next New Right puts on the shed skin of the last Old Left, to hide from sight it’s rotting flesh.” (I have a poetic way with words.)

Society moves on and the leftist victories will be mostly written out of the history books or rather revisionastically rewritten so as to be obscured and undermined, in the hope of defanging their challenging potential. As a key example, radical and sometimes revolutionary early proto-leftist liberalism in the Anglo-American tradition, from Thomas Morton to Thomas Paine, was recast as ‘classical liberalism’ so as to be recuperated into the capitalist realism, social Darwinism, etc of a corporate klepto-plutocracy built on high inequality, power disparity, and dominance hierarchy.

So often, even as leftists win, they lose.

Well, in the short term, if leftist sometimes gain advantage over generations and centuries. Progress is typically gradual and imperceptible, often not feeling like progress at all. For every several steps forward, there are a couple steps backward, again and again. Such progress is halting, inconsistent, and wildly zig-zagging across the landscape with no certain destination.

Even a program like that described above, Iowa City’s Crisis Co-Responder team (in a town that does have well-funded social services), barely scratches the surface of the problem. That’s because it’s still a reaction to the downstream effects, not radically getting at the root cause. Most of the calls to the police are the product of a society that itself is the problem. If there were fundamental reforms and improvements to environments and conditions, systems and structures, cultures and communities, such things as violent crime epidemics and mental health crises (e.g., school shootings) would be resolved before they began.

We’re in an epidemic of overlapping social and economic problems, as part of political failure.

It’s a collective crisis, not an individual crisis; or rather the latter follows from the former. We need to determine and resolve the factors that are behind the ongoing rise, across generations, of mental illness, trauma, and antisociality: community breakdown, social isolation, nature deficit disorder, urban heat islands, sedentary lifestyle, addictive media tech, propagandistic news media, unhealthy food system and diet, increased chemical exposures, worsening socioeconomic stress (inequality, poverty, debt, homelessness, etc), and on and on.

All of that is beyond the scope and capacity of police departments. We could further fund policing (police departments, FBI, ICE, etc), we could turn the entire country into a totalitarian police state, and yet all of these problems would persist and worsen still.

That brings us to the second issue.

In Defund the Police, the defund part was to indicate police departments don’t need the specific part of funding that involves dealing with issues that have nothing to do with policing in the first place. If we limited police departments to police work only, then they could get more actual policing done with far fewer resources required to accomplish that end. Instead of being part of the problem, the police could be part of the solution — they could be a public force of the public good. Imagine that!

So, we don’t necessarily need to raise taxes in order to more fully fund the other areas of government that directly and effectively promote the betterment of communities and society. In being fiscally responsible, there is plenty of government waste that could be eliminated, then redirected and better used toward public programs and public services that ensure that we get the most bang for our buck, that would effectively achieve real public good.

Sending police officers out in a society like ours is like sending army medics onto a battlefield. Sure, it’s good to treat wounded soldiers. But better yet would be to end the cruel violence of war. That would be an apt metaphor if it weren’t for the fact that, with the militarization of the police, officers are closer to being the wounded soldiers (often traumatized by moral harm), our communities the warzone, and we the public the enemy.

But it’s not about getting rid of the police. This gets to the point that it’s not only about defunding but, more importantly, what’s funded in its place. Obviously, American policing has lost its way, as has the entire society.

Over the generations, there has been a massive increase of funding not only for police but also prisons, military, surveillance state, etc; including agencies like CIA, FBI, ICE, and Homeland Security — all of it feeding into the military empire’s insatiable hunger for resources, as an investment in death. In all of US history, we’ve never been so heavily policed by a police state. If policing was the answer (and if empathy was the problem), then we’d expect America to be a utopia at this point.

This funding for authoritarian social control is piled on top of public wealth being siphoned off into corporate subsidies (big oil, big ag, etc) and bank bailouts (never paid back after 2008), along with tax cuts for the rich — all of it part of an old strategy of Starve the Beast and Two Santa Clauses. Additionally, that socialism for the rich is combined with other socialized costs, especially health-related (e.g., 40% of global deaths from pollution, mostly from factories), and privatized theft of the commons (e.g., natural resources sold off public lands at discount with the public paying for the infrastructure built for its removal).

On a global scale, the externalized costs amount to at least $7.3 trillion a year (Production sectors cost trillions in damages to world environment – UN-backed study). But considering still other kinds of externalized costs, it could be trillions of dollars annually just at the national level for the United States alone. One has good reasons to suspect that is an extreme underestimation, as environmental harm and problems touches upon absolutely everything, and as it can’t include the vast immeasurable costs across the board.

  • What is stolen when a life is cut short?
  • What is the loss of ‘human capital’ in class war, systemic racism, patriarchal oppression, slow violence, and on and on?
  • What is the devaluation for all of humanity with shit life syndrome and deaths of despair?
  • What price is paid for transgenerational trauma enforced by centuries of oppression an impoverishment, struggle and suffering?
  • What is the economic calculation for destroyed opportunities, suppressed possibilities, undiscovered solutions, thwarted progress, stunted potential, and misused resources?
  • What is (or was) the worth of an ecosystem that once was thriving, top soil that used to be thick and healthy, a species before it went extinct, natural resources that had been abundant, etc? 

That waste, far beyond wealth and resources, causes irreparable harm and weakens our society, as well as corrupts our government.

In the final accounting, it’s a net loss for humanity and the earth, now and for generations to come. In 2013, a United Nations report found that, when environmental and other damages are included, no major global industry produces more wealth than it consumes and destroys (Achim Steiner & Barbara Maxwell, Sustainability at a Profit). An assessment of the US has found the same thing (Herman E. Daly & John B. Cobb Jr, For The Common Good).

Basically, we have an economy that is eating the seed corn of future generations.

With the money that gets drained off to maintain a police state, military-industrial complex, and kleptocratic oligarchy, we could easily invest in major public projects, programs, and other improvements: universal healthcare and guaranteed childcare, free higher education and job training, greenspaces and recreation centers available to all, etc. A mere fraction of what we have available, instead of used for authoritarian social control and socialism for the rich, could be applied to fixing, preventing, lessening, and compensating for numerous social and economic problems. Not to mention reparations for centuries of harm.

We have all the public wealth, natural resources, human expertise, scientific knowledge, technological capacity, and expertise know-how to build a fully functioning social democratic or democratic socialist eutopia, as most Americans want and deserve.

Defunding the police would just be the beginning. We need to defund authoritarian oppression in all ways, especially fascism and ICE, but also imperialism, the police-surveillance state, and the military-industrial complex. More fundamentally, we’d need to defund the kleptocracy, plutocracy, and oligarchy by starving them out of power.

That would also require a reform movement that could end political corruption, break up monopolies and oligopolies, overhaul society, and rebuild it from the bottom up. But first, we’d likely need official investigations (e.g., Epstein network), as part of a truth and reconciliation commission, to get at the political evil that has allowed it all to get so bad.

It’s about an entirely different vision of society, about what kind of people we want to be.

Will we continue to submit to oppressive and violent social control because the ruling elite tell us it’s good for us? Or do we want to be free? If the latter, will we demand that freedom by any means necessary? Will we demand accountability and follow through with the political will to get it done? Will we demand that the government, police and otherwise, represents and serve us?

* * *

*Note: The Iowa City government has also implemented a Community Police Review Board. But the Republican-controlled state government effectively neutered it. State law now prohibits public review of police conduct. That is the very purpose of such attempts at oversight by and accountability to the citizenry.

Republicans, as authoritarians in defense of dominance hierarchy, want to protect corrupt, oppressive, and abusive police officers. It’s part of their same motive for having created a police state.

But of course, if they or their families and friends were treated unfairly and illegally (in the way that regularly happens to minorities and immigrants), these same right-wingers would cry foul. They assume the police are there to protect US-born whites, specifically right-wing WASPs and well-off men; while punishing all others.

This is the problem with conservatives, on average, being less intelligent, educated, and critical thinking, and more disinformed with higher rates of motivated reasoning. In naively believing complicity with political evil, state terrorism, and crimes against humanity  will save them, they don’t understand that giving away their own power to an authoritarian ruling elite doesn’t only hurt their perceived enemies. In being ignorant and clueless about the past, they are giddy to repeat the horrors that have happened again and again.

They might find themselves surprised. After one scapegoat is eliminated, another will take it’s place and then it might be them. Worthy of being quoted endlessly, as the German Martin Niemöller famously put it in reference to Nazi takeover,

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

For context, he was a conservative, pro-Nazi pastor who was commenting on his own moral failure, both as a citizen and a Christian.

His failure wasn’t only in supporting the death of millions. Even if only for base self-interest and group narcissism, he failed to protect himself and his own loved ones, his own community and congregants. It resulted in his having spent years in prisons and death camps. He wrongly thought that he was one of the protected members of the Nazi movement. He thought that the brutal oppression and persecution only applied to others.

We’re now in a similar position and the Trump regime has shown it will go after any and all who get in the way, who stand up against moral wrongdoing, or who simply intervene on behalf of the victimized. Think of Alex Pretti. He was the Veteran of Affairs healthcare worker, a US-born white man, who was illegally executed by an ICE agent for his having legally carried a gun in public. His main crime, though, was trying to help someone who was injured, as was his job as a federally-employed nurse.

If MAGA ICE as neo-Nazi SS can brazenly kill such a person without legal consequence and without anyone stopping them, then we might be at a point when they can do anything to anyone. No one is safe.

Sex, Gender, and Culture

In Sex is a Spectrum, Augustin Fuentes begins Chapter 6, No Biological Battles of the Sexes, by bringing up John Gray’s 1993 pop psychology text, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. Gray’s book stayed on the bestseller list for 121 weeks. Fuentes notes that, “more than three decades later, [it] is still selling tens of thousands of copies.” The views expressed in it even continue to be heard among some biologists to this day.

As a true believer of the liberal religion, I have a shameful sin to confess. I read that book in the mid-nineties and, at the time, found it compelling. In retelling an ancient cultural master narrative, it confirmed longstanding Western biases of gender norms and social roles. Ignorant and naive, I didn’t understand how I had been enculturated and indoctrinated. I now seek to make amends for the error of my ways.

Of course, all the way back in the ancient late 20th century, a good liberal such as myself having been drawn into that particular ideological realism simply made me a typical American. Such material was considered enlightened even, as acknowledging these perceived differences was deemed a way of respecting the supposed distinctive and unique worth of each sex, that a mutual balance was beneficial and necessary. A yin-yang kind of thing.

Back then, that was a genuine expression of core values within social liberalism and egalitarian leftism. I was raised in uber-liberal religion, the Unity Church, that already in my childhood had a majority of women ministers and did same sex marriage ceremonies. Books like Gray’s would’ve been popular among Unity congregants. It perfectly fit into New Thought theology and progressive religiosity, along with Jungian-inflected spirituality, of the divine as both female and male.

That theological and cultural brand of left-liberalism was radical for its time and still remains radical in many ways. Take, for example, the Unity minister Marianne Williamson who has twice run as a Democratic candidate with a progressive message of love, compassion, and care for all; and John Gray endorsed her. That’s particularly radical in this moment of rising fascism in the Republican Party and fascist complicity in the Democratic Party.

But the fact of the matter is scientific knowledge has advanced immensely over the past several decades. What seemed obvious with earlier understandings are now seen as, at least partly, to be the product of cultural influences. Culture doesn’t only shape how we perceive but also how we act, each feeding back into the other. Cultural outcomes get taken at face value and so are treated as objective facts, which in turn justifies the cultural assumptions and practices that reinforce those cultural outcomes.

That isn’t to say there are no real biological differences between the sexes, if they’re far fewer and far smaller than we once believed. The problem is that, because of WEIRD bias of researchers and test subjects, we’re forced to honestly and humbly admit we’re downright ignorant to an immense degree. We simply have no practical way to disentangle all the confounding factors so as to make an ‘objective’ assessment. So, we’re not sure what to make of the differences we do detect, as we don’t know what’s causing them.

As an example, in the MBTI personality test, approximately three-quarters of men are Thinking types and three-quarters of women are Feeling types.* That leaves, of course, one in four who don’t fit gender stereotypes of personality. Even if culture played no role, that would still be a significant portion. But then consider that, if we could somehow control for confounders, most likely some of the gender difference would disappear. How much? No one knows.

Speaking more broadly, none of this should be surprising. The challenging and overturning of old binary assumptions about sex and gender has been going on for a while now. I’m not sure when the topic first appeared on my radar. But obviously it’s been a hot topic for a long while. And I was writing about it at least as early as about a decade ago (What is inheritance?; & Is the Tide Starting to Turn on Genetics and Culture?).

Furentes’ book, published in 2025, hopefully will help push changes along. Maybe one day culture and science will more closely coincide. As sex is a spectrum, we should remind ourselves that culture too is a spectrum. If we are to transcend our own cultural reality tunnel, researchers will have to confront the replication crisis by expanding their focus to entirely different cultures, if that’s a challenge. Entirely non-WEIRD populations are disappearing quickly with spreading modernization and Westernization.

* * *

*Note:

Admittedly, I’m biased in my assessment of bias. I’m one of those ‘girly’ men who is a Feeling type. Not only that but specifically one with dominant Feeling and of the Introverted variety (Fi), which is even more ‘girly’. I’m one of the notorious INFPs known as the most idealistic of idealists, prone to unmanly flights of fancy and all things artsy-fartsy. Of course, it goes without question that I lack all proper macho dominance behavior and have been an utter failure within social Darwinism.

It’s probably caused by my having been culturally raised in a ‘girly’ religion with strong women as role models. Besides female ministers who demonstrated leadership, my mother was assertive, confident, college-educated, and financially independent. She had her own professional career and had internalized basic feminist values. And we can’t forget that I’ve spent most of my life in a liberal college town (diversity, political correctness, progressivism, etc). That is to say, there never was any hope for me.

* * *

Sex is a Spectrum
by Augustin Fuente
Chapter 6: No Biological Battle of the Sexes
pp. 111-

Of Minds, Means, and Behavior

The “females and males as very different” camp often points to cognition (“minds”) as the proof of their position. Everyone knows men and women think differently, right? Over the past few decades, massive studies called meta-analyses reviewed patterns in many of these cognitive variables, such as math, verbal, and spatial-ability skills, communication dynamics (verbal and nonverbal), social and personality variables such as aggression, negotiation, helping, sexuality, leadership, introversion/extroversion, general psychological well-being, some motor behaviors (throwing, balance, flexibility, etc), and a few other psychological states and behaviors (moral reasoning, cheating behavior, etc). These meta-analyses involved data form more than twenty thousand separate studies involving more than twelve million participants. The results are clear: Across most topic areas in psychological science, the difference in responses and outcomes between males and females is small or very small.

Here “small” and “very small” are measures of how far apart the means of massively overlapping variations are. That is, pretty much everything being measured in these studies overlaps almost completely between 3G categories (usually based on self-reported genders), but the means of the distributions of the measured variables, when separated by 3G-sex category or gender, can be different from one another. Think of the height example from earlier in the book: 78 percent of folks in the United States are not identifiable to 3G sex simply by height, but the means of the overlapping distributions of 3G-male and 3G-female heights are different. So, on average, one can say 3G males are taller than 3G females. But that might not tell you much at all about any specific individual, or about height as a biological characteristic, given the massive overlap between 3G categories. In the “mind” studies, most of the differences between the means are much, much smaller than in the height example. The difference between the means in these studies is assessed by the common statistical tool called the “cohens d” measure, which reflects how far apart the means in the overlapping distributions of the measurements are in standardized units. So “small” suggests that the means are very close to one another and “very small” even closer (with almost 100 percent overlap). The between-gender differences in these huge meta-analyses were small in 46.1 percent of all cases and very small in 39.4 percent of all cases. The largest and most recent metanalysis demonstrated this same massive overlap, with about 84 percent of mean differences being small and very small across most traits examined. Again, we really aren’t so different. And cognition is certainly not binary.

Religion, Spirituality, or Something Else

I’m no longer part of organized religion, if I retain an openness to views that aren’t naive realism, reductionist materialism, and simplistic scientism.

To my mind, the world is stranger than we can imagine. It’s easy to realize that truth by trying to wrap one’s mind around modern physics (Matt Strassler, Waves in an Impossible Sea). It’s even more challenging in that we now know quantum physics also applies to the macro level; hence, quantum biology. The way we typically perceive reality is not how reality operates, and as a culture we have yet to come to terms with this (A Paradigm Shift of Paradigm Shifts).

To get to my main point, there is a common distinction made between religion and spirituality, with the two sometimes overlapping in practice. For example, within Christianity, direct experience (anamnesis, revelation, visions, holy spirit, etc) was prioritized and privileged in certain traditions: Paulinism, Gnosticism (or what later got called that by heresiologists), certain strains of Catholicism (mysticism, quietism), certain strains of Protestantism (Pentecostalism, Pietism), Anabaptism, Quakerism, etc.

Experience, though, is a tricky thing. But it’s all we got — there is no escaping it. Even science, ultimately, is just about making sense of experience.

As for religion, I was raised in the Unity Church that is on the far end of the experiential side of the spectrum. Based on a supposed direct relationship to reality, one of the tenets of Unity theology is that every claim should be tested in one’s own mind and life. Nothing is to be taken on blind faith alone! Unity is what’s called New Thought; a mix of 19th century evangelicalism, Swedenborgianism, and Mesmerism.

It attracts many new agey types and so its adherents tend to be open to Eastern spirituality, philosophy, worldview, and practice. The Eastern is more resonant to Unity thought by far than to mainline Christianity and to other conventional varieties of Abrahamic monotheism. For one, Unity focuses on mind, thought, and awareness. The divine is often spoken of in terms of the Mind of God. It’s a short step from there to Buddha Mind or Buddha-nature.

There are a few reasons why I’m thinking on this. I just wrote about why the death of the body, though grief-inducing, can be less disturbing than death of mind, self, and personality as caused by dementia, brain damage, trauma, drug abuse, etc. That led me to bring up some related things about differences in response, what causes grief or not, what disturbs or not, and why.

I find myself often turning to other kinds of cultures, mentalities, and worldviews. I have a particular interest in non-WEIRD dividualism, animism, bundle theory of mind, and 4/5E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, & extended; + ecological). Buddhists ascribe to bundle theory of mind, as opposed to ego theory of mind. Animists have a similar model of psychology. As such, both of them don’t necessarily and entirely share the biases and concerns of  WEIRDos with their inheritance from Christianity.

Maybe that’s why the development of modern Western thought on religion was challenged by these other examples (Kwame Anthony Appiah, Captive Gods: Religion and the Rise of Social Science).

These traditions or cultures were not always judged to be ‘religions’ because they didn’t conform to the conventions of monotheism and and ego theory of mind, such as a belief in an unchanging immortal soul. It’s true these non-WEIRD traditions emphasize experience, what could be called ‘spirituality’ or else something else entirely. But it’s not a matter of an experiential focus in a general sense, rather how it’s experienced and how that experience is understood, along with what kind of identity and reality it expresses.

Daniel Everett asserts the animistic Piraha, for instance, don’t have religion; certainly not in the way we understand it. He has good reason for his argument, in having lived among them.

They lack authority figures and hierarchy, commandments and rules of conduct, formal practices of rituals and worship, theology and cosmology, mythological and folkloric narratives (e.g., an origin story), belief in souls and an afterlife, faith in supernatural beings or forces, etc. Like Buddhists, the Piraha are agnostics and atheists in the strict sense, specifically weak atheists (passive lack of  belief in god, but no active disbelief in god). They simply don’t even think about deities, unless a missionary comes around, but even then it has no relevance to them.

Most important, the Piraha are non-believers overall, since belief isn’t an issue. They simply go by what they immediately experience, which does occasionally include what modern Westerners would deem ‘supernatural’. As a case in point, one time Everett heard the Piraha all yelling down by the river. When he arrived, they were pointing to the other side. They all claimed to see a spirit.

Apparently, it was immediately real to their senses and shared perception, whatever it was that they were ‘seeing’. Still, they have no belief about spirits and so wouldn’t have placed a doctrinal interpretation over their direct experience. It’s all purely what they knew firsthand, if Everett couldn’t see anything at all.

The Piraha only accept what they personally experience or what someone they personally know has personally experienced. In fact, with the Piraha language, it’s impossible to make a statement about reality without specifically attributing it to the experiential source of the claim.

This is why Everett, as a Christian missionary, failed to convert the Piraha. He was forced to admit that he had never met Jesus and so, to the Piraha, his Christianity was moot. They have no use for ‘religion’ proper. And a textual scripture meant nothing to them. Or rather less than nothing, as his apologetical blathering just irritated them. Finally, one member of the tribe told him that, though they liked him as a person, he needed to shut up about Jesus or go away. He decided to shut up.

That’s how Everett lost his faith. The experiential atheism of the Piraha was more compelling, not to mention more satisfying. They showed him the emptiness of his ‘religion’ as a reified abstraction.

Buddhism might be a more interesting example for the reason it’s been in dialogue with monotheism for millennia.

The two traditions were already mixing it up in the Mediterranean world at least by early Christianity. Some Christians at the time praised Buddhists for what was perceived as strong morality or principled behavior, although we should clarify that Buddhist compassion is a way of relating, not a dogma. The initial faith of Augustine, Manichaeanism, was a mix of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Buddhism. Also, Muslims and Buddhists have been dialoguing for centuries in Southeast Asia (not to mention Islam may have partly formed out of Shiva worship, which means there was already and Eastern element within it).

Some sects of Buddhism are clearly religions in the way modern Westerners understand their own faiths-based institutions and practices. Think of the Tibetan Buddhists with theological, symbolic, and ritualistic complexity rivaling Hinduism and Catholicism. But that isn’t the case for all Buddhism.

At its most bare bones, Zen Buddhists don’t always accept a religious identity. It’s Buddhism mixed with Taoism, or possibly having its deepest roots in Taoism (David Hinton). Zen is a philosophy and practice that can be used by those of any religion or lack of religion. Buddha Mind is not something to be believed in like God, nor is it in competition with God — it has nothing to say about theism at all.

The whole point is to experience Buddha Mind and prove it, to understand and be changed by it. Unlike Christianity, Buddhism is operating on an articulated psychology as its foundation.

This talk of what may or may not be a religion is, obviously, a contentious issue. And many people respond to it with defensiveness, as saying something isn’t a religion can sound dismissive to those who place immense psychic energy in the category. Some argue that to say Zen isn’t a religion is a Western bias. Then again, maybe the problem is the insistence that all of the world has to conform to Western language, categories, and ideology.

On the AskHistorians subreddit, someone asked if Zen is a religion. Yes, historically, it’s part of the Buddhist tradition. Still, that doesn’t really answer the question. Historians have no education and training to understand religion, much less to interrogate religious studies. The entire concept of ‘religion’ is a modern Western construct, specifically one that arose in response to Western religion having entered a period of crisis and critique. That’s the point Appiah makes and he demonstrates how complex a topic it is.

This kind of intellectual complexity appeals to my sensibility, as someone who is extremely high on the personality trait ‘openness to experience’.  In being a radical skeptic and experiential realist, I tend to hold my views lightly and warily. I’m always ready to be challenged and ever prepared to change my mind.

This came up as I read Appiah’s book, Captive Gods. It’s a historical survey and ideological analysis, tracing the lines of influence over the centuries.

Appiah’s careful inquiry brought to light so many cultural biases about the socially constructed category of ‘religion’. It might go beyond if this or that tradition is a religion. The very way of thinking about the phenomenon might be all wrong, misleading, or unhelpful. Worse still, since the modern idea of ‘religion’ has been forced upon Christianity, it’s caused us to lose contact with what Christianity originally meant as a charismatic and ecstatic practice (Stephen J. Patterson, The Forgotten Creed).

As others have noted, until the Axial Age, there wasn’t even a notion that was vaguely akin to ‘religion’. But Appiah argues that religion, in the way we understand it now, wasn’t formulated and used until early modernity. Previous conceptual terms can’t be treated as synonyms because the context of meaning was radically different. We make those differences disappear by projecting modern religious studies onto the past.

Into late feudalism, there was no space between Catholicism and the rest of society, between religiosity and everyday life. It seeped into everything. To be Catholic was immersive, not something that happened in a church or cathedral on Sundays.

Even animism is a WEIRD conception placed upon non-WEIRD experience. Animists, as such, don’t need a separate category for their worldview as they know nothing else. It’s absolute and all-encompassing. The world feels dynamically alive to them and so they couldn’t imagine a society like ours that experiences the world as a corpse and a husk, as inert and mute matter.

It makes me think how paltry, how shrunken down is modern humanity’s sense of self and reality. Even our ‘spirituality’ seems tame, weak, and crippled.

The emergence of religion as a conceptual category isn’t only an intellectual accretion. It represents a shift and rupture in the modern psyche. That is what allows us to speak of a separate spirituality. This likely relates to why ‘religion’ has become a political tool and weapon. MAGA evangelicalism represents an extreme endpoint of this fracture. Such religious identity no longer has anything to do with what Christianity meant before. A large number of MAGA evangelicals don’t even attend church. For them, it’s solely a politicized identity.

The religious right worries about the decline of religion. But maybe it’s precisely that we speak of ‘religion’ at all is itself a factor behind the change. It creates a gap in our psyche and society that inevitably grows into a chasm.

Richard Breitman’s Silence On Fascist Genocide

Out of curiosity, I picked up Richard Breitman’s A Calculated Restraint while I was at the library. The subtitle is What Allied Leaders Said About the Holocaust. It’s about why those who held power in the West, while often knowing the details of the horrors going on, chose to remain silent or else only speak selectively and downplay events. It was almost as if there had been a conspiracy of silence. No one wanted to acknowledge how bad it was and to deal with it, nor to navigate the public response.

[That interests me because propaganda, though typically thought of in terms of what is said, is in many ways more powerful in what it hides, obscures, censors, silences, and talks around. What leaders don’t speak is so often why the people don’t know. But in general, I’ve long been fascinated by the historical, psychological, and agnotological study of cultures of silence and ignorance (Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words & A Culture of Make Believe).]

The main reason for the reticence among the political elite in World War II, from what I gather in perusing the book, was calculated realpolitik. Leaders were busy dealing with international conflicts and war, which required gaining public support, building alliances, and maintaining it all under strife and strain as national and ideological interests pushed and pulled in diverse directions. To bring up the ongoing slaughter of Jews and threat of worse to come just complicated negotiations and plans. It was inconvenient. How many Jewish lives could’ve been saved? We’ll never know.

My personal concern, though, is what the author might say about the genocide being committed right now by Israel. Breitman’s book was published just this past year. There is no way he could remain silent about it, right? Sadly, he only brought up the situation at all only to dismiss Palestinians in accusing Hamas of being anti-Semitic — ignoring that Israel promoted Hamas and most Palestinians are too young to have voted Hamas into power. Sure, the world is full of anti-Semitism, as true now as during World War II. But what Zionists don’t want to face is that Palestinians are Semites and so their persecution is anti-Semitism, not that genocide would be acceptable if done to non-Semites.

This is darkly amusing considering that Nazis condemned Jews as anti-German. It’s the same rhetoric, that prejudice against powerless minorities is justified because of claims the targeted victims themselves are prejudiced. Zionism is just a new form of fascism with a new scapegoated minority. For all of Breitman’s historical analysis, he still ends up clueless and lacking in self-awareness. Ironically, he falls into the position of fascist apologist of genocide, if doing so by omission of deafening silence. Maybe he should’ve done some soul-searching, instead, should’ve turned his critical thinking back onto himself and those he identifies with.

I’m not suggesting it’s a bad book. The author seems to offer an accurate and insightful analysis about public messaging on the Holocaust and the fate of wartime Jews. But it’s amazing that, even at this late of date, some people still can’t see the Zionist writing on the wall. Breitman would be educated by reading Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. He should be asking why he is not speaking out about present mass atrocities as they’re happening. It’s not too late to take a moral stand for the genocided victims of fascism.

Our Humanity Reflected in a Funhouse Mirror: Mediated Reality and Identity

A longtime interest of mine has been how media shapes us; from thought, affect, perception, and imagination to behavior, relationships, identity, and ideology. But most interesting of all is how this largely happens unnoticed and so disappears into the unconscious. In the background, it becomes instilled and internalized, enculturated and enacted, structured and institutionalized, rationalized and normalized. It becomes reality as we know it, that is to say ideological realism; as over the decades and generations and centuries, it simply gets built into the entire civilizational project and paradigm. Then we lose all capacity of critical thought in no longer being able to imagine the world as it actually is or as it otherwise might be.

As research shows, media in the broader McLuhanesque sense — as technologies, environments, systems, and infrastructure — even fundamentally alters brain structure and neurocognitive development (Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World). We are physically, psychologically, and socially transmogrified without realizing it, as we reorient in line with the ground moving beneath our feet. It’s as if we landed in Oz while not noticing the house had been lifted into the air. The home we’ve always known still surrounds us, if the landscape is now alien. That’s why older generations complain about the younger, in seeing the differences over time — it’s always easier to see something in another than in oneself. Whereas each new youngest generation just adapts unquestioningly and accepts it, until they too become old. The changes, like an undertow, carry us into terra incognita.

Yet some generations, no matter stage of life, gain greater perspective than others. In particular, last wave GenXers and first wave Millennials grew up on the precipice, during a period of transition and transformation. This peer cohort on the cusp is sometimes referred to as the MTV Generation (adolescents and young adults from the 1980s to mid-1990s), of which I’m a member (b. 1975). We came of age as one media order tipped over into another. So, we have equal understanding of what came before as what replaced it. For that reason, though intimately familiar with both, maybe not fully at home in either.

The older generations are mostly lost in nostalgia of post-war mass media, while the younger generations have never known anything else besides constant personal tech that preoccupies nearly every waking moment. But it’s precisely the contrast between the two media systems, cultures, and worldviews that offers a vantage point, allows some distance to think dispassionately or else at an angle. With less exclusive loyalty to only one mediated social order, we media borderlanders are more likely to take various media technologies as unique tools to be used. In this, we have greater flexibility. Our identities potentially can be less singularly entrenched.

About a year ago, an old friend of mine moved back to town. We were hanging out one day, as she looked through a box of old papers. She came across letters I had written her when she first moved away. One epistolary message was from 1998 when I was still in my early 20s. If with much of the angst and uncertainty lingering from my teens, there also still remained some youthful optimism and excitement about the world (it was pre-9/11, after all). I described getting my first personal computer and my own internet connection (dial-up), about which I sang praises — a shiny new thing!

Of course, earlier in my family’s home and at school, I’d had access to computers since a child. And my initial experiences with the internet were during high school. But it was different to suddenly be immersed in it while living out on my own, to spend hours freely surfing the web and joining online forums. And I recall being conscious of how it changed me, how it was restructuring my mind. I was old enough that my mentality had developed in a slower and gentler media world, between shelves of books and old network television, plus an Atari video game system. Yet the ruts in my brain were not so hardened that I couldn’t take in new impressions, that new media couldn’t lay down new tracks of thought.

It’s similar to learning to speak a second language or code switch when younger. Or it’s like moving to an entirely different place early in life. That also happened to me. When in middle school, my family relocated from a small liberal college town in the Midwest (Iowa City, Iowa) to a metro area with a military fort in the heart of the Deep South (Columbia, South Carolina). It has caused me to be obsessed with the differences in regional cultures ever since. I’m highly sensitized to noticing cultures and how they influence people. Well, the same thing applies to how I pay attention and relate to media cultures.

As I’ve aged, just having turned 50 years old, the sense of changes has been made salient. The young-but-maturing generation in high school, in college, and entering the workforce is Generation Z (AKA Zoomers or Doomers). They are largely the children of GenXers and some older Millennials. Their parents include my brothers, cousins, and friends. So, I’ve personally observed GenZ grow up in this media-saturated world; and, of course, it’s gone from saturated to drowning with Generation Alpha. My oldest GenZ niece got her first job as an elementary school teacher and it’s been shocking for her. Kids these days!

In a couple of years, I’ll be coming to my 30th anniversary of full internet immersion. So, it’s not only that I’ve seen the totalizing change from the old new media to the new new media but also I’ve observed how the internet, cellphones, social media, etc have become something entirely different, as big tech has literally taken over the world in having bought governments and now actively seeks to create techno-feudalism. In the calm and quiet early online world, there was little to no concern about trolls, bots, algorithms, algospeak, censorship, shadow banning, deplatforming, demonetizing, AI, automation, and on and on. Now we worry about brain rot, the surveillance corporate-state, and technological apocalypse.

As a good liberal and critical leftist, I’m not prone to right-wing culture war, moral panic, and nostalgia-mongering. But admittedly, there is more than enough reason to have serious trepidation about the state of society. It’s not that there has never before been tumultuous and destabilizing change, including rapid developments of media technology. Then again, the pace of near constant innovation is now rapid in a way that hasn’t previously occurred. Before we can catch our breath, the next media technology has been introduced, mass marketed, and wholesale adopted. Then the next and the next.

Meanwhile, we peons of the masses have become pawns in the ideologies and agendas, schemes and machinations, visions and fantasies of tech oligarchs and their cronies in the capitalist class and among the political elite. Even at the height of cultural Cold War, no global superpower wielded a propaganda system of mind control as powerful and pervasive as presently manipulated and weaponized by big tech companies that are enmeshed in governments or have outright taken over governments, in their being part of a new techno-fascist inverted totalitarianism operating at a transnational level. The global swamp! [See: shadow network, butterfly revolution, Epstein files, etc.]

The game has changed because mentalities have changed. It’s not only the general public who has been targeted for a new kind of brainwashing, indoctrination, perception management, and social control. The elite themselves have been altered, one might say deranged, in ways they apparently don’t realize. As I’ve argued, the controllers are out of control, which causes them to ever seek more control, yet to simultaneously cause everything to go out of control as they project their internal chaos upon the world. It turns out that apocalyptic accelerationism is not a wise philosophy to rule by.

[For context: “Research shows that, as one ascends the ladder of socioeconomic status, capacity for cognitive empathy tends to decline, related to declining generosity. The fact that both Musk and Trump were born into extreme wealth and power could explain their problems with empathy, specifically their indifference and cruelty toward others, but also their disconnection and derangement. In lacking self-control, they seek to control others. But the more they try to gain control the more everything goes out of control“ (Liberal Empathy, the Weapon of Satan).]

Also, consider that the elite are likewise indoctrinated, as they’re even more deeply embedded in the system. That’s how we end up with elites who are well-educated conformists, the last ones to see it all for what it is (William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite). And about media as a propaganda system, keep in mind that the upper class individuals in positions of authority and influence are the first and most important targets: “The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an ‘official narrative’ that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them” (C.J. Hopkins, Why Ridiculous Official Propaganda Still Works).

My present thoughts, however, are on the more immediate level. As an ordinary nobody just trying to get by in life, I wonder how this media system is affecting me, along with those around me and those I interact with. I’ve grown dissatisfied with not just social media but online comment sections entirely, even on the best platforms. I feel constantly on edge and on the defense. The quality of online dialogue has declined over the decades and is now plummeting into a state of total shitfuckery, possibly having to do with the dead internet theory. There is now more AI content than human content on the internet. And in many countries, most internet traffic is monopolized by bots.

But it’s worse than that. As we humanoids interact with bots, AI, and all they produce, we internalize it, model it, and become like it. It’s not only AI that is training on us. We’re training on it and so feeding back to it, in a vicious loop that will over time become our shared culture and social norms. We mere humans, specifically us commoners, are certainly not in control. And then worse than worse, we carry this online culture back out into the real world. We humans will increasingly become like bots and AI. Even offline, the algorithm imprinted on our brains will continue to operate. We’ll lose the capacity to think, speak, and act as free-range beings.

On a more mundane level, it’s simply the way it constrains us. We forget how to interact normally; or, in the case of some, never having learned it in the first place. Cloistered in personal space, it’s near taboo to just call someone up or knock on their door unexpected, the kind of thing that was normal human behavior for most of human existence. In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari described sitting in a coffee shop. While pretending to read a book, he eavesdropped on two guys talking. Apparently, they were online ‘friends’ who were meeting offline for the first time. They talked to each other as if each on their own separate social feeds. One would give a soliloquy about his life. Then the other would do the same.

It was as if neither was listening nor responding to the other. They didn’t know how to have an ordinary conversation as mutual dialogue, instead each residing within their own private bubble. Hence, they existed in parallel with no actual meeting point of engagement or likely any social awareness, much less cognitive empathy. One senses this kind of thing is becoming common. That is to say narcissism may be taking over as the standard operating mode. That wouldn’t only be individual narcissism but also group narcissism. Our identities are becoming insular and exclusionary, similar to our media environments becoming epistemically enclosed echo chambers and reality tunnels.

There is a related issue. It’s also how we’re getting trapped in ideological identities, though not in terms of ideology in the normal sense. Maybe I’m just noticing it more, but it feels like it’s increasing. On the early internet, ideological identities used to be less relevant and prominent. Most people mostly related as individuals. Groupthink, however, seems to be taking over. As this happens, ideological labels become ever less connected to coherent ideologies, rather being expressions of warped identities, posturing, and aesthetics; something like ideological LARPing. I keep coming across self-styled ‘libertarians’, ‘anarchists’, and ‘communists’ who are various forms of crypto-authoritarians, crypto-dominators, and crypto-reactionaries; from Putin tankies as red fascists or state capitalists to ancaps (i.e., anarcho-capitalists) as social Darwinists or aspiring corporate oligarchs.

That is not exactly a new phenomenon. What’s changed is that it’s become more prevalent and widespread, to the point of dominating entire online groups. Real ideological discussion is often near impossible, as few have meaningful ideological knowledge. Image has replaced substance. This co-opting and recuperating of ideology is a pattern among reactionaries that probably has always been around, but in the past it was limited to a small minority of bad actors and those on the fringe. It’s what Corey Robin describes as the behavior of the reactionary mind, which I’d link to the dark triad traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy (+sadism).

To get back to the main topic, we can understand this with the research and scholarship of media studies. The literary mind increases the level of abstract thought, which has both benefits and downsides. But under present suboptimal conditions as literacy is replaced and displaced by or else filtered through post-literate media of image and voice, these abstractions are not only reified through social structures but, more problematically, amplified through agonism (Walter J. Ong’s secondary orality) and tribalism (Marshall McLuhan’s global village), along with passivity (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death) and distraction (Johann Hari, Stolen Focus). Through anxiety and fear, stress and sickliness, alienation and dislocation, it’s exacerbated further into extremism.

For a specific example, one I often repeat is from cultivation theory. When people are repeatedly exposed to media portrayals of violence and crime (Fox News, crime procedurals, etc), there is a corresponding increase of mean world syndrome: distrust, paranoia, exaggerated threat perception, authoritarianism, xenophobia, and punitiveness (e.g., liberals who learned of the 9/11 terrorist attack from tv reporting with endlessly looping footage of the event were later more supportive of right-wing policies, such as Homeland Security and the Iraq War.) People internalize dark narratives, project them outward onto others, and then attack those others as the threat they themselves have become. In fear, they create a world of fear and really do make the world a more harsh, cruel, and dangerous place. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’ve long contemplated and posted about the pitfalls of mediated reality (Battle of Voices of Authorization in the World and in Ourselves; & The Great Weirding of New Media), playing no small part in the mass derangement that overtaken us across my lifetime (The Great WEIRDing of the Jaynesian Ego-Mind as a Civilizational Project), if far from limited to only media problems (A Theory of Societal Retardation). People are getting ever more strange, year after year. All of the above is what I think about in trying to decide how to deal with our present media world and mediated reality. My mood is that of caution and so I offer my observations as a warning but also as an explanation. First and foremost, we need to see clearly what’s happening around us and to us.

With the new year having begun a short while back, I was contemplating my own media diet, in wanting to find the best balance between my mental health and gaining an audience for my writings (A New Year, a New Era). But in observing the harms incurred, I’ve ever more been erring on the side of protecting my own sanity in a society that sometimes feels downright psychotic. For the collective level, the public needs far better media literacy and intellectual self-defense. There is nothing wrong with media changes, if we understand our situation. Yes, some things we’re attached to or take for granted are weakened, compromised, or entirely lost. But there is also much that might be gained. It’s the old scenario of opportunity being the other side of risk, if admittedly the risks are great. Media is a powerful force. Like it or not, a new age is upon us.

Not Embracing Todd McGowan’s “Embracing Alienation”

A while back, I picked up Todd McGowan’s Embracing Alienation.

It’s a catchy title. And the premise is enticing. It’s a counterintuitive advice, at least in the modern West. He notes that most people, even many on the right, have come to see alienation as wrong, problematic, and undesirable. It’s something, we’ve come to believe, that is not our natural state and so that we should seek to overcome.

I too tend to see alienation as a bad thing, based on personal experience, societal observation, and intellectual study. But I was intrigued and interested to be challenged. Part of me even wanted to be proven wrong, to have my horizons expanded. Maybe I was misunderstanding what alienation represents. There is nothing I love more than a thinker who can reframe how I understand and perceive the world.

It’s not hard to understand one possible argument that eschews or extends beyond Karl Marx’s complaint about workers alienated from their own production. If alienation is based on the isolated individual, and if hyper-individualism is fundamentally false, then it’s possible alienation could point us toward our true human nature. In that sense, instead of being a block to our true nature, it would be a guide. So, by paying close attention to it, we might gain important information about what it really means to be human.

I kept hoping that was where he’d go. But alas, quite the opposite. He simply embraces alienation as normal and maybe as normative. That felt false and dissatisfying.

Plus, while he does range about a fair amount in his chosen sources of inspiration and critique, he didn’t come across as all that well informed or else narrowly focused. Some of his examples and other evidence was extremely weak and unpersuasive. It was so easy for me to poke holes in his view using counter-evidence. I was disappointed because I was expecting more. And even as a leftist, I found myself disinterested in his critique of Marxism, not to mention it’s lack of application to the situation we face:

“The book’s flaw is the constant repetition of “a society that aims to transcend alienation will fail” and “we must embrace alienation as key to any political project.” These are paraphrases but are repeated endlessly. Its misstep is that it provides no way to actually cohere this vision or what this vision means for leftist political projects. It feels very vibes-based and easily co-opted. I’m sure the author expects pushback in their Hegel-Marx duel and I’m hardly read enough to do so, but the constant harp on that even though Marx doesn’t use alienation in his later work but the vibe of it is still there hardly feels like any analysis I want to get behind.

“Even though they malign Marcuse for not going far enough I think One-Dimensional Man much better explores what happens to administrative systems that try to act as “one”. I think the book fails to acknowledge the struggle that embracing alienation has already produced since recognizing everyone’s alienation is inherent to class consciousness and thus organizing, movement building, etc. It fails to acknowledge or put forward a coherent argument about what we’re supposed to do when embrace alienation. It feels stuck in terms and arguments from 19th and 20th-century thought without incorporating a concrete set of politics.”

~pkeye’s review, from The Story Graph

McGowan seems to not fully grasp alienation in its complexity. Maybe because it’s a vague word that has been used to describe different experiences and ideas across distinct contexts, areas of study, and theoreticians. It doesn’t refer to any single thing, in the way he wants to treat it. I’m not alone in that assessment. Another reader said that,

“I found it to be sloppy, sorta shallow, and not genuinely engaging in the topic of alienation in its many forms. […] It seems like a position that can only come from focusing entirely on theory and completely disregarding people’s lived experience. The vague political vision that this book puts forth seem very detached from actual life, and McGowan doesn’t offer any sort of way to instantiate it in social and political life.

“[M]y beef is that this type of Hegelian-Lacanian subjective alienation is very different from being alienated from your friends or being alienated from your community or even being alienated from the fruits of your labor, and McGowan equates all of them, as if types of alienation and degrees of alienation were of not import. I agree that you’re never going to fully overcome alienation from your community, but being more or less integrated has a tangible effect on people’s mental health; same with being alienated from what you produce”

~kroxyldyphivic, at Sources for Zizek on alienation

Alienation would include the oppressed, persecuted, and rejected; such as the unhoused, minorities, immigrants, LGTBQIA+, prisoners, refugees, slaves, and the sex trafficked; along with the victims of systemic prejudice, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, genocide, etc. Additionally, it would include the mentally ill, not only in terms of how they’re often stigmatized, impoverished, and/or institutionalized but also  psychiatric states like anhedonia, depersonalization, derealization, dissociation, psychosis, fragmentation, and PTSD.

One could also speak of common and/or mundane forms: family estrangement, gaslighting, mind/body dualism, nature deficit disorder, mediated reality, and similar things. Think of how, in research on cultivation theory, repeated media portrayals of violence and crime induce mean world syndrome that involves exaggerated perception of violent crime. Individuals become estranged from the actual world around them, in not recognizing their real situation. A more extreme media example is AI psychosis.

Is he really generalizing all ‘alienation’ as identical and of equal significance? How or why would one embrace any of that?

One reviewer offered an explanation for why he overgeneralizes:

“[I]t seems he falls prey to a dualism of opposing thinkers who want to overcome alienation and those who do not. It is clear, as mentioned earlier, that this follows from his thinking of alienation as an ontological category rather than historical. Thus, for him, any attempt to overcome alienation is necessarily misguided, and he finds this problem in historical sequences or political movements.

“Marx’s alienation is specific to the capitalist mode of production and it is not enough that the worker realises one’s alienation, but this realisation must also lead to action to overcome this specific alienation, which will in turn lead to the realm of genuine human freedom. It is in this context that the author’s suggestion of simply recognising one’s alienation along with that of others for solidarity seems weak. There remains a gap between this realisation and action.”

~Debjyoti Sarkar, at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

His indifferent and dismissive attitude toward how devastating alienation can be indicates he has had lived in privilege and comfort, safety and security. As a middle class professional, specifically an academic, it’s highly probable that he has never known economic struggle or any other kind of desperation.

His conception of alienation is trivial, while somehow also being amorphous, as he portrays it as our state of being. It’s hard to see how just accepting it applies to real world problems, much less political projects. Similar critiques have been made about McGowan’s take on Hegel in other books, as seen with this review of Emancipation After Hegel:

“[A]lthough McGowan defends Hegel admirably, I’m not sure I buy some of his defenses, such as the articulation of Hegel’s idea of sovereignty and freedom in the Philosophy of Right. McGowan at times seems to defend Hegel to the core, relying on the centrality of contradiction as a sort of ace-in-the-hole answer to everything. This becomes particularly contentious when McGowan criticizes Marx for being a right-wing deviation of Hegel (a stance sure to ruffle the feathers of many Marxist-Leninists). McGowan defends this by arguing that Marx puts faith in a substantial Other through the dream of revolution and establishment of utopian communism in the undetermined future, thus trying to get rid of contradiction.

“This is certainly an interesting critique, and one I think well-worth tarrying with. Yet, this sole focus on the irreconcilability of contradiction seems to preclude most forms of a positive political movement. While this reliance on contradiction helps provide pathways that break through polarization and stagnant discourse, the promise of “emancipation” after Hegel was a bit lacking at the end. McGowan admits that Hegel himself thought that his philosophy resulted in recognition over action, and while McGowan insists that contradiction as a solution is the path forward for the Left, what such a path looks like in practical terms remains rather obscure and vague.”

~J. D. Davis, at JDDavisPoet

To be fair, it’s not that McGowan isn’t offering anything concrete. A key claim is that we are not identical to ourselves or to our communities, and so his perspective follows from that. We don’t belong anywhere specific and so, maybe in a sense, we potentially belong everywhere. The alienated subject can only find value and purpose as part of the public, which is where all the alienated subjects come together in shared space.

His one practical piece of advice is we need to build more public spaces, or what many today are calling third spaces. That is why, I guess, he argues we aren’t natural beings. We don’t belong in nature but in the polis. Humans, therefore, come into their own in civilization. Or something like that.

By the way, he distinguishes the ‘public’ from ‘community’ and the ‘commons’, as he claims the latter two can’t serve this purpose. Only the public represents a collective form and expression of the alienated subject. Some questions, then, follows:

  • Were humans a lost cause for the hundreds of millennia prior to civilization and any conception of a public?
  • Wouldn’t alienation, as a hindering spandrel with no adaptive advantage, have been counterproductive to survival of the species?
  • If so, why did alienation form and persist as part of homo sapiens thriving, succeeding, and spreading across the earth?
  • Is alienation just a variety of Original Sin that is existentially baked in into our broken nature?

McGowan never entertains and contemplates, much less answers, these questions. Along these lines, particularly disappointing in the book was the section “Perverse Satisfactions” in Chapter 1: The Disturbed Subject.  The analysis came across as profoundly naive.

In making a moral judgment (“extreme,” “excesses,” “violates,” “deviates,” “horrors,” etc), McGowan takes a subjective and culturally biased view of perversity as demonstrable proof that it couldn’t have a natural explanation in biology and evolution, as one finds in evolutionary psychology. This is taken as necessitating a denaturalized and alienated subject as the motivation for such behaviors.

“[R]ather than theorizing obesity as the result of the subject’s alienation, certain naturalistic thinkers see it as a development of an evolutionary mismatch. […] [C]ultural changes worked faster than natural selection […] Scholars in all fields and most of the public tend to […] accept that we are natural beings rather than alienated subjects” (p. 33).

Instead of surveying the research on the causes of something like obesity, he baselessly speculates and expects the reader to accept it without critical thinking. He simply refuses to engage with experts in other fields who study these issues. As another example, human sexual behavior just doesn’t make sense to him. He argues there is no plausible theory of survival benefit for individuals and the species to be prone — at least under certain conditions — to male promiscuity, non-procreative sex, etc and even humans living beyond reproductive age.

This is sheer ignorance or intellectual carelessness. Many of these kinds of behaviors aren’t limited to humans. Yet he makes no claims of alienation for these non-human species. Nor do these behaviors in humans lack possible explanations, however he might dismiss them out of hand.

After initially having given up on the book, I’ve since continued reading further and grappling with it. I decided to give McGowan another chance and find out if there is something to the argument and evidence for his theory.

What motivated me is that, in recent years, I’ve increasingly seen many other books that make counterintuitive or atypical arguments for reinterpreting and embracing what our culture has tended to criticize, dismiss, and find troubling and contrary. Besides his take on alienation, there are a slew of other topics that have come to be defended in various books:

  • silence (Jerome Sueur, Natural History of Silence)
  • invisibility (Akiko Busch, How to Disappear)
  • forgetting (Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting)
  • non-egoism (Jay Garfield, Losing Ourselves)
  • determinism (Robert Sapolsky, Determined)

The modern Western self is being challenged and its justifications interrogated. Admittedly, I’m all for that, the reason for my reading this kind of material, even when my initial response is skepticism and disagreement.

Something about this pattern of writing by public intellectuals seems indicative of our public mood right now, as we find ourselves in a poly-crisis and meta-crisis, maybe even a new crisis of identity, along with what arguably is a paradigm shift and a revolution of the mind, as sometimes precedes a societal, political, and economic revolution. I take it as a sign of a population, society, and culture that’s destabilized, stressed, traumatized, uncertain, anxious, fearful, threatened, etc. It’s reaching the point of existential crisis for the entire civilization.

So, ever more people are questioning if we can go on like this. And if not, what other options are there?

But I see it from another perspective as well. Under such extremely sub-optimal conditions, the human psyche tends to get overwhelmed and so shut down (low ‘openness to experience). When that happens, reactionary mentality and right-wing ideology becomes attractive. Or else the mind skews in odd directions. In any  case, the tenets, attributes, and expressions of liberalism and liberal-mindedness become victims of doubt.

Fundamental Western ideas and ideals like progress, individualism, free will, and such feel less persuasive and compelling. All the things we’ve collectively valued and taken for granted seem to have failed, been corrupted, shown to be false, or somehow are compromised and problematized. Hence, much falls under scrutiny, to be held at a distance or to be discarded entirely.

McGowan and these other authors don’t necessarily or, in many cases, maybe even likely understand the oppressive and harmful conditions that make them prone to a critical and skeptical stance. Such larger societal influences tend to be pervasive and insidious, with few having much knowledge of the social science theory and research that would explain it.

So, the underlying motivations too often go unnoticed and unexplored. And that is precisely what interests me, not so much the focus itself but what’s behind it, the conditions surrounding it.

About McGowan’s coming to the defense of alienation as an underdog, it took me a while to understand what he is positing, for what purpose, and to what end. He is trying to revive Hegel’s belief in an inevitable and totalizing process of alienation as inherent to humanity. As he sees it, we have no choice other than to embrace it. Otherwise, it would be akin to alienation upon alienation. Hence, we must learn to be less alienated toward our intrinsic alienation. It’s just who we are. Deal with it!

In particular, according to this view, education or Bildung is necessary violence inflicted on our natural being to induce alienated subjectivity. It forces us into an awakening of sorts, and so allows a fuller and better expression of who we are and were meant to be. We must be freed from our own false self but also freed from any seeking toward a true self. It’s self-identity itself that is precisely the problem.

“For Hegel, alienation is positive because it delivers us from the stasis of self-identity. Through alienation, the subject enters into what is other than itself and becomes who it is as it transforms into what it isn’t. Alienation rips us out of our natural being and generates subjectivity. Hegel theorizes the subject as an entity that must find itself at home in what is absolutely other to it, and this can only occur through a process of alienation. Dialectics is, for Hegel, a system in which there is no respite from alienation, in which alienation is total” (pp. 88-9).

“Subjectivity, according to Hegel, finds itself through “violence at its own hands [that] brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction.” We discover the truth of our subjectivity not in what we initially take ourselves to be but in how we end up after we have enacted this violence against ourselves. […] [H]e conceives of education as an act of violence done to the child, a violence that disrupts the child’s inherent tendencies rather than allowing them to blossom according to their own logic. […] the alien violence of education is what initially frees the child from its familial and social situation. In this sense, education is an emancipatory violence” (pp. 92-3).

That is deemed to be the ultimate aspiration and expression. This is proposed as a good thing and, besides, it’s declared there is no alternative. But to my mind, that comes across as ideological realism. And that makes me look for the unstated and likely unconscious assumptions, biases, and prejudices.

Achieving alienation is somehow both essential and impossible to avoid, whereas attempting anything else would be worse than failure, a catastrophe. There presumably is something in our nature that impels us to destroy and go beyond our inborn nature. It’s our telos or destiny. We find our freedom in our fate.

As far as I can tell, this implies a dualism between nature and society, with the latter presumed to be more genuine and/or important. We aren’t fully real and our experience isn’t fully valid until we’ve been civilized, that is to say alienated.

[Side thought: It’s more than a bit confusing. Hegel asserts, “Nature has to be contradictory to give birth to the contradictory subject.”

Querying it, another asked, “if nature really were contradictory yielding but contradictory things wouldn’t it possess the necessity then of producing something contradictory to its contradictory self–i.e., only things noncontradictory?” (jamesbarlow6423’s comment at United We Lack: Todd McGowan‘s Response to Slavoj Žižek).

This leaves me entirely unclear about what this could possibly mean. If alienation from nature is implicit within nature, then denaturalization while not being nature is also inseparable from nature, in which case it too is nature. WTF! Is this just sophistry or is there more to it?

It feels like we’re talking in circles. This supposedly denaturalized alienation is simultaneously a process, as a result, and totalizing, in that it couldn’t be otherwise. Yet it must go against what is, nature, to become something else that is a denial and unfolding of what is, denaturalized.

But if Hegel is himself alienated from nature, as supposedly we all are, how could he even know what is this ‘nature’ from which he is alienated? Am I missing something? Why talk about alienation from something we can’t know? In that case, is ‘alienation’ as a term somewhat of an empty signifier?]

Like Hegel, McGowan claims that we need to escape our natural state in order to achieve emancipation, whatever that might mean. Hence, alienation, as rupture, is the only mode of freedom. Is this rupture an emergence of something genuinely new and unique?

Assuming I’m correct about the undertones, my sense is this is a philosophical secularization of the theological belief in a fallen human nature, but where the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is idealized. That is what it means to embrace alienation. There is no return to the Garden of Eden. The gates are permanently shut and the lock can’t be picked. To my mind, it feels like a reified abstraction that’s being imposed on all of humanity. I’m not persuaded — intellectually, morally, or psychologically — to accept this religious-like conviction and doctrine.

By the way, McGowan is taking his argument a step further. It’s not only that alienation happens but that we want to be alienated. It’s fun and enjoyable. It’s tiresome, dissatisfying, and pointless to go against our contradicted and alienated subjectivity.

He claims that, for example, destruction of the natural world is enjoyable. Accordingly, we don’t want responsibility. But this misses something. Unlike the Mad Men scene he describes, most indigenous people show no indication of wanting to or enjoying environmental destruction.

How can he take a fictional scene portraying middle class whites in mid-20th century United States as the standard of all humanity?

This is where McGowan’s analysis is ultimately philosophical, specifically ontological but with what feels like an existentialist impulse. There is no escape or none that is worthy and desirable. Rather, what we really long for is ‘a way out’ (The Gesture of Tank Man):

“Kafka’s ideas on imprisonment, catastrophe, freedom and ways out are not as simple as they might seem on the first reading of, for example, The Trial . The short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ provides further insight into the type of freedom that Kafka had in mind. The hunting expedition of the Hagenbeck Company captured an ape. To train him, they put him in a very small cage on the company’s steamboat, a cage that was too low for him to stand up and too small for him to sit down. At the same time the sailors tormented him. The ape realizes that if he wants to live he has to find a way out. But he does not contrast his distressing situation with freedom: ‘No, it was not freedom I wanted. Just a way out; to the right, to the left, wherever ; I made no other demands ’., The way out is not directed so much to a specific goal, i.e. freedom or return, but is simply a way out.”

~Anke Snoek, Agamben’s Joyful Kafka, Kindle Locations 358-375

That is supposedly what embracing alienation accomplishes. Our struggles end, if our alienation does not.

More generally, even as he styles himself as an intellectual renegade, part of the reason his book fails is proscribing his thought almost entirely to conventional, mainstream thought, largely Hegelian philosophy, in the Western tradition. As such, he never goes beyond his WEIRD bias to explore other possibilities. He appears to have little familiarity with the social sciences, particularly not anthropology; with only brief mention (in a single note) of the likes of David Graeber and David Wengrow.

The argument for alienation feels like the product of siloed academia and so feels prone to intellectual masturbation. One doesn’t get the sense that he is seriously engaging with other views, in offering them up as straw men.

Let’s consider the anthropological literature. I can think of examples, such as the Piraha, that seem to generally lack alienation and seem to be fine without it. The only exception that comes to mind was when, after killing someone in another tribe, one Piraha tribesman banished himself. That is to say he embraced alienation as social death, certainly not to transform himself into a member of the public.

The reason for this suicidal action was that it was a common understanding that Piraha don’t kill. There was no law against it, nor punishment. The murderer, in feeling alienated from his own former Piraha identity, banished himself to the jungle where he soon after died alone. The thing is this is a rare experience. It was the only time it had happened in living memory. It’s the exception that proves the rule. The Piraha don’t embrace alienation. Neither would they see value in it, assuming they could understand it. Alienation is simply the precursor to removing oneself from the community and from the genetic pool.

Such tribal dividuals appear to have all the traits of a functioning unalienated community that McGowan believes cannot exist:

“The security the community provides is always illusory. No symbolic identity can ever relieve one of the problem of alienated subjectivity. Even within the comforts of a community and the identity that it offers, one remains an alienated subject. The problem persists. The community gives me a symbolic identity, but that identity ends up being at odds with itself. Its security is ultimately insecure” (p. 120).

It comes down to whether one ascribes to bundle theory of mind or ego theory of mind, whether individualism or dividualism is closer to the evolutionary norm, whether or not our natural state is 4/5E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, & extended; + ecological). But that debate goes unmentioned, presumably off McGowan’s radar or even entirely outside his sense of reality.

I still struggle to wrap my mind around his take on alienation. And so I’m not sure, in my negative appraisal, that I’m getting it right or what substance there is to get right. Apparently, it’s not natural but it’s inevitable or near inevitable. He also has a weird mixing of how freedom necessitates fate, in our being confronted by our situation but alienated from it.

All I can say is that, assuming that I’m not confused, it doesn’t match much of the anthropological study of forager tribes and the theories used to explain their cultures and mentalities. Does he consider such people, if they really aren’t alienated, to not be free? And if alienation defines the human condition, are they not fully human or have not fully achieved their humanity? Or what?

In terms of the Piraha, there is no equivalent of education as violence that inflicts alienation. They’re one of the most egalitarian groups I’ve ever come across in that they entirely lack dominance hierarchies, power disparities, authority figures, punishable rules, etc. In their version of dividualism, they simultaneously have immense autonomy of the person and a strong shared identity of the tribal community enmeshed in a sense of place. However, ‘community’ might be too weak of a concept to describe their tight-knit and immersive sense of communal identity and reality.

I just don’t see how alienation fits in, is required, or would be desirable; even as it’s the condition we find ourselves in and within which we feel trapped. Sure, it might be the case that, in modern civilization as is operated up to this point, the violence of the alienating process is necessary for creating citizen-subjects who will comply with authoritarian systems and dominance hierarchies. But dividualistic tribes aside, was that always true for all civilizations? Were feudal communitarians really alienated in the way we understand in capitalism? I remain unconvinced.

McGowan wouldn’t accept that humanity has ever been different, and sees no reason to explain when and how alienation first emerged. He’s content to aver that it’s all we are and can know. He wants an alienation that would apply to all humans. Otherwise, if a single exception exists, it means non-alienation is possible. For some reason, he doesn’t want to allow for that possibility.

“I think the kinds of sophistical and specious arguments McGowan makes are fairly representative examples of how most discourse works today, and not just academic discourse. His task here seems to be to dismiss Marxist, psychoanalytic, existentialist, and any other left-leaning discourse as foolishly naive, and replace them with an updated version of the Romantic ideology, which will finally set us all free.

“This isn’t unusual, of course. English professors have been doing this for as long as there have been English departments, and Romantic poets and philosophers have been doing it as long as there has been capitalism. But most of us still fall prey to this strategy exactly because it is so successful in university departments and with publishers. We are taught all the time to think poorly, and so we think we have found something radical and new every time somebody relabels Romanticism.

“The first move McGowan makes is simply to redefine alienation. […] McGowan suggests that when “leftists” want to “fight against alienation” they are “missing its emancipatory quality” and giving it “a bad rap.” But what he seems to mean by alienation is something else entirely. He simply redefines alienation as what “frees us from our situation,” what “gives subjectivity an ability to act against what would otherwise determine it.” That is, alienation is simply redefined as whatever it is that gives us the capacity to “transcend” the economic, cultural, and even biological determinants that would otherwise limit our action in the world. Okay, we might say, but if that’s what you want to talk about, why use a word that already has an existing definition quite different from this? Surely we would want to embrace this capacity for agency, but why relabel agency with the term “alienation,” which already has a very specific and quite different meaning? [,,,]

“So far, then, McGowan has decided that “alienation” should be redefined as the ability to freely choose; he then goes on to insist that choices are only free when they are in fact not at all in our conscious or rational control, when we “don’t deliberate on a course of action and experience in the course of choosing it.” If this doesn’t strike you as bizarre reasoning…well, you’ve read too much Wordsworth and Blake, I guess. It is, after all, fairly typical of Romantic ideology.”

~Embracing Alienation, from The Faithful Buddhist

Disconnection and Ignorance in a Dominance Hierarchy

“It may be no exaggeration to say that stupidity has killed more people than all the diseases known to medicine and psychiatry.

“Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.”

~Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

“There’s probably a lot of rich people who are pretty dumb and then get really lucky and do really well in business. And there might be some rich people who are pretty smart but I wonder now if being this level of rich and having all these influential people if it makes you dumber.

“The reason why I think it makes makes you dumber is for exactly the effect that I mentioned before, that you’re always talking to people who are like ChatGPT, who are sycophantic. And I feel like that makes you stupider because you’re not getting any hardcore resistance. You’re not getting any friction.

“More and more your ideas are getting taken up as having insights, which reinforces the idea that you’re really smart, which removes the filter on your thoughts. You just say any old stupid thing and people are just like, “Yeah, that’s really interesting. There’s an interesting insight there.”

“So, you just become dumber and dumber and dumber because nothing you say is getting any friction or resistance to the point where all of the sudden you just become basically an idiot with money.”

~The Philosophy of Jeffrey Epstein, 55 minute mark,
Pill Pod Philosophy & Critical Theory Podcast

The highest echelons of the upper class are the most disconnected and isolated. Their entire social reality is siloed and forms an echo chamber that repeats back to them their own biases and prejudices. They are told what they want to hear by yes men, flatterers, fluffers, subordinates, employees, servants, and beneficiaries. And they hear their views repeated by pundits, public intellectuals, talking heads, lobbyists, politicians, etc. So, they fall into confirmation bias and smart idiot effect. All they really know is how to maintain plutocracy and manipulate the system. Think of Jeffrey Epstein having stated that real work is only for the ‘goyim’ (i.e., the inferior).*

The economic, cultural, and ruling elite are alienated and estranged from the lived experience of most of humanity, from reality and basic knowledge on the ground. Robert Anton Wilson argued this is why the people controlling society and creating the rules are so dumb and incompetent, leading to failure and decline.** In a dominance hierarchy, each person avoids telling any inconvenient and uncomfortable truth to superiors and authority figures, so as to keep their job and keep out of trouble. Level after level, after the message finally gets to the top, it’s been filtered and shaped to fit the social norms, cultural expectations, conventional ideology, dominant paradigm, master narrative, and ruling system.

This is why the emperor can be made to walk around naked believing he is clothed in the finest garment. In the story, the child points out the truth and makes it public knowledge. But in our society of near total information control, that rarely happens. The child would never be heard, would never be platformed, would never make it into the MSM or national politics. This is why Epstein, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, falsely believe they’re genius-level masters of the universe. The whole system serves them. They’ve come to believe their own lies. The best con succeeds by the con man first conning himself.

Alienation works differently for the permanent underclass. They are propagandized and indoctrinated, disinformed and made ignorant. But what the dirty masses aren’t is disconnected from the real world problems and consequences. And neither are they as stunted in terms of cognitive empathy, as research shows that the poor have the greatest ability to accurately read the minds and predict the behavior of others. The awareness of the subjugated, though, is distorted by the system of social control they’re trapped in. For most of them, they only know what the elite allow them to know.

The middle class, however, might have the most interesting position. In being better educated and more well read, they’re not as ignorant and disinformed as those below them but more so than those above. Simultaneously, they’re not as clueless and obtuse as the elite, if to a far greater extent than the masses. So, though in one sense they’re less worse off than both the dominators and the dominated, their middling position means they neither have the advantages found at the polar ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. The middle is a muddle. They lack the perspective from the top and the bottom. This is why it’s most dangerous when the middle class allies with the ruling class.

* * * *

Notes:

*In a 2009 email to Roger Schank, Jeffrey Epstein explained that, “This is the way the jew make money… and made a fortune in the past ten years, selling short the shipping futures, let the goyim deal in the real world.” As a Zionist and Jewish supremacist, he really did want a Jewish cabal that conspires to control the world. But his attitude is identical to the non-Jewish oligarchs and plutocrats who have seized the US government. Consider Elon Musk and Peter Thiel with their grandiose vision of a Butterfly Revolution that will lead to techno-feudalism. They fantasy about balkanizing civilization into big tech fiefdoms that are ruled separately by each of them as lords and masters over their respective serfdoms.

**In an essay published elsewhere, I discuss empathy in terms of sociopolitical conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO) (Liberal Empathy, the Weapon of Satan). I argue that it’s because of a lack of cognitive empathy, including of their own mind, that they lack self-awareness and hence self-control. [Self-awareness is a subset of social awareness, as the child must first learn to model the minds of others before they can do the same for themselves.] Then they project their inner sense of chaos and disorder outward onto the world. So, in feeling out of control, they seek to control others and all of society. But as they’re unconscious chaos agents, they wreck everything they touch with problems, failures, and crises proliferating.

* * * *

File:Great Seal of the United States (reverse).svg

Wilson uses the eye in the pyramid as a symbol of the dysfunction of hierarchies. Every level except the top is blind, but the eye can see only one way. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Celine’s Second Law
from Wikipedia

“Accurate communication is possible only in a non-punishing situation.”[2]

Wilson rephrases this himself many times as “communication occurs only between equals”. Celine calls this law “a simple statement of the obvious” and refers to the fact that everyone who labors under an authority figure tends to lie to and flatter that authority figure in order to protect themselves either from violence or from deprivation of security (such as losing one’s job). In essence, it is usually more in the interests of any worker to tell his boss what he wants to hear, not what is true.[3]

In any hierarchy, every level below the highest carries a subtle burden to see the world in the way their superiors expect it to be seen and to provide feedback to their superiors that their superiors want to hear. In the end, any hierarchical organization supports what its leaders already think is true more than it challenges them to think differently. The levels below the leaders are more interested in keeping their jobs than telling the truth.

Wilson, in Prometheus Rising, uses the example of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Hoover saw communist infiltrators and spies everywhere, and he told his agents to hunt them down. Therefore, FBI agents began seeing and interpreting everything they could as parts of the communist conspiracy. Some even went as far as framing people as communists, making largely baseless arrests and doing everything they could to satisfy Hoover’s need to find and drive out the communist conspiracy. The problem is, such a conspiracy was greatly exaggerated. Hoover thought it was monolithic and pervasive, and any agent who dared point out the lack of evidence to Hoover would be at best denied promotions, and at worst labeled a communist himself and lose his job. Any agent who knew the truth would be very careful to hide the fact.

Meanwhile, the FBI was largely ignoring the problem of organized crime (the Mafia), because Hoover insisted that organized crime did not exist on the national scale. Not only does the leader of the hierarchy see what he wants to see, but he also does not see what he does not want to see. Agents who pursued the issue of organized crime were sometimes marginalized within the organization or hounded into retirement.

In the end, Celine states, any hierarchy acts more to conceal the truth from its leaders than it serves to find the truth.

The People Making “The Rules” are Dumber Than You
by Kevin Carson

The people who regulate what you do, in most cases, know less about what you’re doing than you do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s nominally a “public” or “private” organization, or how smart the people running it are as individuals. No matter how smart the people in charge are, they are systematically stupid in their organizational roles, because of the dynamics of information flow in hierarchies (as described by Robert Anton Wilson, for example).

Organizations are pyramids, and the people at the tops of the pyramids tend to communicate much more effectively with each other than they do with those at the bottoms of their own respective pyramids. That means that most organizations are riddled with “best practices” based almost entirely on feedback about how well they worked from people at the tops of the other pyramids. And those latter people have almost no valid knowledge of how the policies actually worked in their own organizations.

Remember the story of the Emperor’s new clothes? Large organizations are designed to insulate naked emperors from unpleasant feedback. That set of clothes must look good, because the emperors at the other organizations all have a set just like it, and they can’t stop talking about how great they look!

The state, by promoting centralization and hierarchy and insulating bureaucratic organizations from the competitive consequences of their inefficiency, causes such irrationality to predominate in our society. We’re living in the world of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.”

The Illuminatus Trilogy
by Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea

It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people’s brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation’s capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.

It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell’s 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a “radio” built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, “Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?” This little voice the Freudians call “the superego,” which Freud himself vividly characterized as “the ego’s harsh master.” With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as “a set of conditioned verbal habits.” This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of “conditioned verbal habits”). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart—that is, from the biogram.

No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.

Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram— what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants —is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less “real.” They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, “a tool, a machine, a robot.”

Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class— the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe— is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

I call this the Snafu Principle.

Everything is Under Control
by Robert Anton Wilson w/ Miram Joan Hill

Another factor tending to multiply conspiracy theories beyond necessity lies in the fact that all intelligence agencies have two functions, viz.:

  1. Collection of accurate information.
  2. Planting and encouraging inaccurate information.

An intelligence agency, in other words, needs to know “what the hell is really going on” for the same reason a bank or a grocer or you and I need that kind of factual input. Hence, the huge budgets for item 1 above.

Intelligence agencies, however, also need to keep ahead of their competitors, the rival intelligence agencies of other and, hence, perfidious governments. They therefore engage in frenetic efforts of spreading misinformation, “disinformation” (a euphemism for the former), “cover stories,” “cover-ups,” etc. In order to deceive whoever currently functions as “the enemy,” these fantasies must have enough facts mixed into them, and enough general plausibility, that they will deceive many others not yet defined as “enemy.” Always, they must deceive persons of average intelligence and average education or they just don’t work. The best disinformation should also deceive persons of more-than-average wit and know-how, for a while at least.

In brief, modern secret-police work functions much like poker. All players try to send false signals at least part of the time, and ll players try to detect “the real truth” behind the false signals sent by the others.In a world where nations relate to each other in this manner, conspiracy models flourish like bacteria in a sewage system. As Henry Kissinger allegedly said, “Anybody in Washington who isn’t paranoid must be crazy.” Indeed, any citizen in a world run like that who doesn’t have some “paranoid” suspicions must have suffered brain damage in childhood.

When the government engages in extensive (well-publicized) snooping and spying on the public, this paranoia escalates rapidly. Where there exists a secret police agency of any sort, in any nation, the people soon learn to suspect those who suspect them. Concretely, many Americans fear that any part of government, or even any organization not admittedly part of the government, may function as a front for the CIA, the FBI, the BATF, the National Security Agency, or groups even more esoteric and manipulative.

Thus, the more omnipresent the government’s “control,” the more suspicious and uneasy the people become. And the more people indicate a lack of faith of such government, the more such government will need to spy on them, to feel absolutely sure they have not become alienated enough to hatch rebellion or set off more homemade bombs of the Oklahoma City variety. The government will therefore increase its spying and snooping, and the people will become more “careful.” As a crude kind of survey, I have asked audiences in hundreds of lectures and seminars if any of them ever willingly tell the whole truth about anything to a government official. Nobody has ever held up their hand and claimed that degree of faith and tractability.

No man or woman in the United States today wants the Feds to know too much about what he or she is really doing. Since the government long ago passed the point of “anything not forbidden is compulsory” and now also wishes to enforce “anything not compulsory is forbidden,” we all suspect that we are technical criminals at least, although like Kafka’s hero we are never quite sure which statute or statutes we may have violated.

We thus arrive at a situation that in the Army is called Optimum Snafu. Those at the top are never told what might cause them to punish the informant, and those at the bottom keep their mouths shut about more and more of what they actually see, hear, smell, taste, or otherwise sense of the environment. In the long run, the top people in the pyramid are attempting to regulate things they know nothing about, based on reports that have been invented by liars and flatterers to prevent them from using their awful powers too destructively.

But if most people always lie a little in dealing with the State, the State must have a very weird and inaccurate picture of who the people are and what they really think and want. Laws will therefore direct themselves to a fictitious citizenry, not to the people we really are. Thus, the laws increasingly make no sense to the folk who have to endure them, and more hostility to government appears.

All these cycles make up a set of Strange Loops and Vicious Circles from which there presently appears no exit. Unless, as suggested before, the funding runs out or Divine Intervention occurs, conspiracy theories will flourish, both among the increasingly anxiety-ridden citizenry and among the politicos and bureaucrats who try to command them. And every voice that tries, or pretends, to tell the truth in this schizoid situation immediately comes under suspicion as another possible Deceiver and Manipulator whose yarn has to be looked at as critically as any PostModernist would look at the Declaration of Independence or the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

We are all Deconstructionists now, whether we ever heard the word before or not.

Saying the Right Thing, Doing the Right Thing

“I’ve met all sorts of people, including major war criminals. I don’t regret having met any of them.”
~Noam Chomsky

“Chomsky played a part in cultivating the Michael Tracey, Matt Taibbi wing with alt media that defends [Jeffrey] Epstein, & by extension the other forces of ruling-class pedophilia. Remember that all of this comes from the campaign to promote a non-communist left, which Chomsky embodies.”
~Rainer Shea, Substack

That view of Noam Chomsky is something I’ve been chewing on for a long time. While often impressed by his intellectual scholarship and leftist critique, as early as 2010, I noticed something that bothered me.

When asked by a young man about what to do, all he gave was a quippy response that amounted to nothing “Ye slaves, find yer own ways.”

He offered no genuine alternative, solution, or pathway forward. Without articulating a collective project, his ideology has left the individual stranded against forces far beyond us all. He didn’t propose any hope of solidarity, of class or group consciousness.

Though I had a hard time putting my finger on it at the time, I now look back at it with greater knowledge and perspective.

It reminds me of how, during the Cold War, the CIA funded and promoted postmodernists so as to suck out the oxygen from the room of leftist spaces (literary magazines, writer workshops, etc). It was intended to drown out and silence Marxists. It was successful in that postmodernism became so prominent that right-wingers came to complain about it.

Maybe Chomsky’s anarchism has served a similar role for the powers that be. He offers a critique that, if not empty, is impotent. It leads nowhere and so fuels demoralization and helplessness.

“Reading Chomsky’s emails and advice to Epstein, who by then was already known for pleading guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, is enough. It actually lends more credence to the idea that Chomsky was controlled opposition and a government asset, a herder of leftism to pacify revolutionary tactics and discourage its practice.”
~Rex Eloquens, An Epitaph for Noam Chomsky

Why would he willingly serve this role in crippling the left? And now in his ties to Epstein being proven, why would he destroy his entire reputation and legacy?

“There’s nothing that makes me crazier than when a guy who I know is ten times smarter than me acts like he is dumber than me.”
~Jimmy Dore

“While attaining credibility for doing the most basic, human thing for Palestine, he ran in the same circles of Zionists like Epstein who wanted to overthrow Syria, Iran and Russia among others. The same people who wanted to destroy Gaza and have done so. He knew who Epstein was and his affiliations with Zionism; how he wouldn’t have known about his Mossad ties? Was he an idiot? No. More likely an opportunist.”
~Fiorella Isabel, from X

Though presenting himself as an outsider, he has been an insider for his entire career.

And so he wasn’t offering a genuinely outside perspective. But until recently, it wasn’t clear what kind of insider he was or rather exactly what he was inside of. This is the problem with any public figures aligned with the Democratic Party, as was Chomsky.

It’s not to suggest he was consciously part of a conspiracy. It’s simply that, in being drawn into the system of power, he took on the biases of it. One doesn’t have to be among the ruling elite to have one’s imagination and identity constrained by the ideological realism that maintains elite rule.

Chomsky almost certainly began with good intentions, as most people do. And he came to believe in the bullshit of lesser evilism, if we are to give him the benefit of the doubt.

He is a lesson to us all.

The moral decadence inherent to that worldview slowly led him into the gravity of a blackmail pedophilia ring, what seems to have been part of a vast transnational intelligence operation. Likely, all along the way, he stated persuasive reasons for why he did this or that. The transition over time was probably so subtle that he never, at any given point, realized how far he had gone into a world he once would’ve hated.

That is how he ended up as a partisan stooge, in maintaining the bipartisan control of the American Empire.

Democrats aren’t an opposition party but controlled opposition. They operate as part of the gatekeepers. They are the managers of the Overton window who, in consistently attacking the broad left (and silencing the left-liberal supermajority), declare what’s allowable or not: This far left and no further!

Related to this, it’s how we the American public have allowed ourselves to be controlled and manipulated. The following are my thoughts during the presidential campaign season before the 2016 election:

“I’ve always had an oddly optimistic side of my personality. Despite my depression and skepticism, I’m a possibility thinker and I try to gain a larger perspective to see beyond whatever shittiness is going on in any given moment. It’s easy to be cynical, but that seems like a boring way to live if that is a knee-jerk reaction and thoughtless attitude.

“Yet the political left supporting someone so horrific as Clinton is snuffing out what hope I’ve held onto all these years. I’m shocked by how few people comprehend how far gone is our society. It’s long past the time of playing these kinds of games. I don’t want to give up on this country, but so many Americans have already given up by default of the choices they’re making. Fighting the good fight is seemingly ever more pointless as time goes on.

“I’m starting to think we’re just going to have to let the situation go beyond redemption and then rebuild out of the rubble. We will collectively take our problems seriously when there is no other choice left, after we’ve wasted all other opportunities and have backed ourselves into a corner. That is a sad conclusion to come to.”

It reminds one of the old quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing – after they’ve tried everything else.” If we haven’t yet quite tried everything else, one suspects we’re getting close to that point. It would be nice for the American people to finally move onto the final stage of doing the right thing.

My above words were from the comments section at one of my earlier writings, The Chomsky Problem (2016).

“Noam Chomsky’s life and work cannot be understood without taking into account his militarily-funded linguistics research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There were, I believe, always two ‘Noam Chomskys’ – one working for the US military and the other working tirelessly against that same military. This contradiction cannot explain every aspect of Chomsky’s puzzling friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. But it is the underlying contradiction that helps us understand why someone as radical as Chomsky ended up being involved with someone as reactionary as Epstein.”
~Chris Knight, The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle

I’ve long complained about Chomsky, such as his repeatedly acting as a sheepdog for the corporate Democrats.

But in my linked piece, I clarified that it’s a deeper problem, as he long ago was mired in Pentagon money and hence a part of the military-industrial complex, something he rationalized away as he did with Epstein’s crimes (Chomsky subreddit, Noam & Valeria Chomsky’s reactions to Epstein’s sex trafficking charges). Working at MIT, it was simply the water he swam in.

For all his outward opposition to capitalism, in the end, Chomsky was part of the capitalist system. And he protected it, if he may not have realized how he was being duped and used.

But it’s also telling how, strangely as it seemed in the past, he was always ready to dismiss ‘conspiracy theories’. What made this strange was precisely that his political scholarship described conspiracies in great detail. He provided the undeniable and irrefutable proof that so-called  conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts. He couldn’t recognize it, though; or he couldn’t allow it into his awareness.

Maybe his reluctance to openly speak of conspiracies was because, in a sense, he realized he was part of one.

“There is no ethical way to be a billionaire. Literally, having that much money and power destroys your brain, destroys your morality to the point where it’s clear from these files that Epstein and others considered themselves completely above the law and held any sort of value for human life. And that’s what really comes out of these things, that the billionaire class that rules us has to be destroyed and overthrown.”
~Alan MacLeod

One might add that neither is there an ethical way to be associated with the billionaire class.

Many of Chomsky’s fans and supporters are now shocked to find him in the Epstein files. It turns out he was a close friend and adviser of Jeffrey Epstein.

“One email from Chomsky and his second wife Valeria describes the couple’s friendship with Epstein as ‘deep and sincere and everlasting’. Another from Valeria describes Epstein as: ‘our best friend. I mean “the” one.’ Meanwhile other messages – signed only by Chomsky himself – are equally generous to the convicted sex offender, saying, for example, ‘we’re with you all the way’ and ‘you’re constantly with us in spirit and in our thoughts.’”
~Chris Knight, The Chomsky/Epstein Puzzle

He helped Epstein to launder his reputation after his horrendous crimes were revealed. That is to say Chomsky gave advice on how to manufacture consent, by managing his public image. In return, Epstein gave Chomsky financial advice, along with paying for his flights and hotel rooms, and basically funding a life of luxury. Chomsky even flew on the infamous Lolita Express.

To the very end of Epstein’s life, Chomsky continued to defend him in the press. But he forgot to mention his financial ties to Epstein.

Sadly, cynical as I’ve become, I was unsurprised. I knew there was something off about Chomsky long ago, if it required more careful analysis to figure it out back then. But now it’s become obvious how corrupted and complicit he has been. This is why we should avoid hero worship.

“He gave a confirmed rapist advice on how to dodge the latest allegations against him.”
~Anna Kasparian

More importantly, this demonstrates how bad things have gotten when even many of the leading critics of the system of power are themselves implicated in what they criticized. It’s a broader problem. There is a reason to speak of it being systemic, as it’s not only about individual bad actors.

But we also must come to more than a mere intellectual understanding.

Chomsky is one of the greatest living leftist intellectuals. Yet his keen mind and vast knowledge didn’t protect him. That’s likely because he lacked social science understanding, in spite of being an expert in linguistics. Though talking about systems, and though somewhat understanding how the system invades the mind through media rhetoric, apparently he didn’t fully grasp how this operated psychologically, couldn’t see it happening to himself.

Self-awareness is often a weak point in human nature. That is all the more reason to carefully study the so-called soft sciences.

There are some leftist critics, though, who have maintained their moral commitment and principles. Another Jewish public intellectual, Norman Finkelstein, was also personally invited into Epstein’s social circle. But he refused and basically told them to fuck off. He is one of the harshest voices against Zionist Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

Maybe that is what allowed Finkelstein to see the Epstein group for what it was. Then again, he didn’t have any knowledge that wasn’t also possessed by Chomsky, as the latter was likewise anti-Zionist. But in the end, one has to want to see.

[As a side note, there is another earlier piece (Anarchists Not In Universities) where I wrote about Chomsky and academia, specifically in terms of power and compromise. I used the anarchist David Graeber as a contrast.

That analysis was from 8 years ago. My other writings on the topic mentioned above were even earlier from 2010 and 2016. So, off and on, this has been on my mind long before any known connections to Epstein. Just some things kept bothering me about Chomsky.]

“My guess is, if Epstein put your daughter at age 15 in such a position, you wouldn’t publicly describe him as a ‘friend’ and person of ‘integrity’. In fact, I would hope that you’d promptly throttle both Epstein and Dershowitz.”
~Norman Finkelstein

As a citizenry, we need to learn to discern between the likes of Chomsky and the likes of Finkelstein. Outwardly, they may appear to be similar as public intellectuals. But we should always be wary when someone like Chomsky, though a boring intellectual as a supposed anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, was a guest on corporate MSM more often than one would expect.

There probably is good reason Finkelstein, on the other hand, has remained largely unseen in the legacy media and been kept unknown to most Americans. He has refused to play nicely with the powerful, has refused to tone down his harsh message of righteous denunciation.

We need to recognize such people as Chomsky for who they are without requiring a massive conspiracy reveal like the Epstein files. All the evidence was available long ago to mistrust Chomsky for those who wanted to understand. We must develop the moral courage to look at what’s uncomfortable, including and especially about those we perceive as being on our side.

This requires, though, to have that aforementioned self-awareness. It’s not only Chomsky who can fool himself. We all have that capacity.

With all the craziness going on right now, it’s hard to feel excited that so much is being forced to the surface. It shouldn’t ever have been allowed to go so far, to get this bad.

Democrats could’ve stopped it. Any number of political leaders, government figures, bureaucratic officials, and influential elites could’ve stopped it. But they all knew what was happening, knew where it was going, and complicitly did nothing (A Deep Dive Into the Deep State; & Who Are the Distractors and Who Is the Distraction?); or sometimes actively did the worst, such as Democrats always willing to vote in support of the next GOP bill to fund ICE, Israel, etc.

It’s tiresome to be one of the individuals to see it all coming and yet unable to stop it or even get many others to pay attention.

“But the Epstein files reveal more than personal loyalty between him and Noam Chomsky. They expose political coordination.

“In emails with Epstein, Chomsky discussed the war in Syria, specifically the use of armed Salafi and Wahhabi groups to overthrow the Syrian government. Chomsky acknowledged that US and allied efforts against President Bashar al-Assad relied heavily on extremist factions including al-Muser front and ISIS.

“Rather than rejecting the strategy outright, Chomsky framed the rise of these groups as an unfortunate but tolerable consequence of a broader campaign for regime change. Privately expressing views that sharply contrasted with his public opposition to US interventionism.”
~Mnar Adley

If I made complaints of Chomsky even a month ago, many (most?) leftists would’ve ignored it or defended him. Why did it take the partial release — maybe 1% —  of the Epstein files for more people to be capable of demanding and hard-hitting critical thought? Why do we have to let things turn so dark and destructive before we no longer can ignore them?

If democracy is ever to be possible, we’re going to have to become better as a people. Sadly, in many ways, we do get the leaders we deserve in that we get what we accept and allow. Too many Americans want to be lied to, want to be told a nice story.

As such, it was easier to listen to Chomsky’s words than to look at his history of actions, to research and study his background. What is not spoken may say more.

“If Chomsky’s defining intellectual contribution was the naming of structural violence — the unseen forms of harm produced by political and economic systems — then what we see here is its fraternal twin: structural silence.”
~Richard S. Pinner, Structural Silence: Chomsky, Epstein, and the Architecture of Elite Immunity

It’s a welcome change that this situation is forcing awake more Americans, left and right. But it doesn’t change the basic problem. The moment it slips out of public awareness again, as new scandals and catastrophes replace it, what will stop Americans from forgetting about it and falling back to sleep?

That has been my worry.

Trump will eventually be forced out of office. He’ll be voted out, he’ll get impeached, he’ll die, or dementia will finally catch up with him. Then what? Will we go back to the lesser evil voting that constantly brought us to greater evil? As a cartoonish supervillain for the public to organize against, Trump may represent our last opportunity to finally and fully destroy the corrupt system.

We can’t let big money Democrats step in to normalize it again, as they’ve done in the past. That is what happened with Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Democrats helped to establish George W. Bush’s imperial presidency as a precedent and so set the stage for Trump’s MAGA fascism by, after twice having regained the presidency, having refused to enact democratic reforms.

The answer to fascism isn’t to make it kinder and gentler, more hidden so that creeping authoritarianism can operate unseen. Then the rot will have set in, the cancer would be terminal.

That would be the worst outcome possible. If we don’t deal with the problem now, the next wannabe dictator is likely to be far worse than Trump and far more successful. We the American citizenry have a narrow window in which to do the right thing, finally.

* * * *

Further sources about Chomsky and Epstein:

“He was not fooled by Epstein. He was seduced. His association with Epstein is a terrible and, to many, unforgivable stain. It irreparably tarnishes his legacy.”
~Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Epstein and the Politics of Betrayal

“Since Noam cannot speak or write and explain his relationship with Epstein, the matter is fraught. There is nothing to say on his behalf. When the photos and emails appeared, I was immediately disgusted by Epstein’s paedophilia, and so by Noam’s friendship with him. There is no defence for this, in my view, no context that can explain this outrage.”
~Vijay Prashad, On the Emails Between Jeffrey Epstein and Noam Chomsky

Beyond the Clickbait: Epstein, Chomsky, Trump & Hero Worship in the Age of Digital Disinfo
by Fiorella Isabel & Vanessa Belley

A Note on Chomsky and Epstein
by Jeffrey St. Clair

Jeffrey Epstein thought he was mostly innocent. So did Noam Chomsky.
by P. Z. Myers

Noam Chomsky involved in dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.
by Tendance Coatsey

Noam Chomsky’s Epstein Problem
by Deniz Karabacak

When a Critic of Empire Sits at the Table of an Abuser of Power
by Emily

Unravelling the connection of Noam Chomsky with convicted pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein
by Robin Westenra

Noam Chomsky Was Devoted To Epstein To The End
from Violet News

“By staying at MIT, Chomsky chose to maintain his career, in relative proximity to the centers of power he would later become an icon for denouncing. However, it shows that Chomsky, from this time onward, began to make some choices that undermined his radicalism to an extent. Chomsky may have rationalized his decision to stay at MIT in the 1960s because it gave him a better platform from which to espouse his political and anti-war views. It is not unheard of for prominent public figures to make such compromises. However, in light of the recent Epstein revelations and what they appear to signal, it seems that Chomsky, particularly in his later years, may have become too comfortable and too willing to make these types of compromises – ones that a much younger Chomsky would have surely rejected.“
~Whitney Webb, Unraveling the Epstein-Chomsky Relationship

“A crucial principle I learned from Chomsky: to understand power, you have to follow the money. And that’s still true. Except — what Chomsky fails to consider — is that he himself is part of the system of power that he claims to unravel. In assuming academic objectivity, he took himself out of the system without any justification.

“Because, if you do follow the money, some pathways run through him, whether in his prestigious and privileged position at MIT, or, a $1,400-a-night suite in Manhattan, paid for by Epstein. That’s where he stays. And that’s where we are. […]

“What did Chomsky give in exchange for Epstein’s favors? Was it his position disfavoring BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against Israel while it commits apartheid and genocide in Palestine? Or is it his loyal support for a “two-state solution” 20 years after Israel has paved over that idea’s grave with the Apartheid Wall? Don’t we have a right to ask?”
~Ramsey Hanhan, Epstein Academy

A New Year, a New Era

It’s not only a new year but a new era.

We’ve survived a quarter of a century into the first century of the third millennia of the Common Era. This is approximately the two-thousandth anniversary of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection that supposedly brought salvation to all of humanity. Praise be! More prosaically, it’s Donald Trump’s second (and final?) term and the fascist takeover or techno-feudalist butterfly revolution is well on its way, whatever that portends.

Certainly, all the MAGA evangelicals and other fundies are worked up about the End Times, the Rapture, the Tribulation, the Second Coming, and, of course, the Anti-Christ. It doesn’t occur to them that the demiurgic Anti-Christ — The Beast, Man of Sin, Son of Perdition, Lawless One, The Adversary, The Wicked One — might already be here and in power of the largest empire on earth, as the present president of the United States or rather the god-emperor of the American Empire.

Then there are other visions.

If misunderstanding the Star Trek philosophy and worldview, tech oligarchs like Elon Musk claim admiration for Star Trek seem to be pushing us into the Star Trek timeline of a future history that is rapidly becoming the future present and tumbling into future past (Star Trek Over Time & Snow Crash vs Star Trek). This is the year, by the way, when World War III is narratized as beginning with it’s predicted culmination being in 2053. It’s supposed to involve nuclear apocalypse, ecological destruction, and a final death toll at 600 million.

One worries that these deranged and Machiavellian tech overlords, with the full support of their fundy authoritarian followers, are pushing events in that direction on purpose as part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are doom-mongering accelerationists, after all.

Various other thinkers — Neil Howe (The Fourth Turning Is Here), Peter Turchin (End Times), Walter Scheidel (The Great Leveler), etc — have their own theories of what’s happening, what’s causing it, and what’s to come. In any case, the dire state of omni-crisis we find ourselves in is undeniable. It does get one thinking and puts one’s life in perspective.

Almost anyone alive right now is likely wondering about how the present might relate to the future, about where ongoing events are leading us, assuming there will be a future for humanity at all. As it’s been put, the light up ahead is either the end of the tunnel or an oncoming freight train. One way or another, we’ll soon find out.

* * * *

That leaves us ordinary folk in a quagmire.

Most of us are just trying to get by. We don’t have the capacity to affect major events. But we are forced to face them, no matter what we think about it all. Up to this point, it seems the average person was hoping to make it to the end of their life before the shit hit the fan — probably no such luck, unless you plan on dying immediately.

We’ve all sensed bad things coming and most would rather not think about it, just pass the buck down to the next generation. Now it seems the buck stops here. We the living are that last generations in the cycle (death spiral?). We are forced to suffer the consequences and, if we can, to clean up the mess (pull up from the impending crash at the last moment?).

So, what does one hope to achieve in a world that is threatening catastrophe, chaos, and collapse? What is the point of doing anything at all? What kind of future, individual and collective, do we dare to hope for?

Or for some people, “What, me worry?”

For all my pontificating, I’m often in that latter camp. I spent decades in crippling depression. I’ve been waiting for the end of the world my whole life, having grown up on post-apocalyptic movies. In elementary school, back in the late 1980s, my class was given an assignment to write a story. My choice was to describe a post-apocalyptic earth where a few survivors wandered the ruins. The narrative was internalized.

It was plausible and realistic at the time, with the Cold War posing threats of doom. But so far, that outcome has not come to pass. Nor have I had to deal with quicksand, as was a scenario in nearly every television show of my childhood. So much for fiction predicting reality. But then again, there is still plenty of time for predictions to be proved to have been prescient.

It’s just all the fear-mongering at some point becomes numbing, a defense mechanism of PTSD. At this point, maybe I just have fewer shits left to give.

Even with possible apocalypse once again at our doorstep, such as a third world war, my psychological response is often: Meh. Whatever will be will be. But I’m not so detached as to not care about life, my own and that of others. It’s just my concerns have been narrowed down, as the larger world is just a bit too much at the moment. The anxieties of life, even when overwhelming, can become dulled down after awhile. It’s like working in a noisy factory that causes hearing loss.

Yet it’s not that I don’t plenty obsess over the fate of humanity, if my preferred frame tends to go in other directions, such as what the social sciences tell us about the meaning of humanity. Concerning myself about whether Trump or some other idiot decides to launch nuclear missiles, whether climate change brings on a new ice age, or whatever else — it’s a fruitless activity. I want to keep my focus on what matters most, specifically in terms of what’s in my power to influence.

The immediate world is bad enough as it is. And each of us has our personal challenges that will keep us preoccupied for the rest of our lives.

* * * *

I don’t normally do New Year’s resolutions.

It’s not because I never resolve to do or not do something, philosophical debates of free will aside (Robert Sapolsky, Determined). Nor is it that I fear I won’t be able to commit to and maintain my resolutions. I’m typically fine with making changes and sticking to them when such seems needed and desirable, attainable and worthwhile.

My unconcern, though, is just that the New Year is an arbitrary time. There is nothing about an artificial point on a calendar that inspires me to reassess my entire life and aspire to change things, to do better.

But as often happens, a friend asked if I had a New Year’s resolution. I did not and said so.

Nonetheless, there have been niggling thoughts on my mind about the state of my life and of society. It’s not like there aren’t endless opportunities for improvement all around.

And as my birthday is at the end of the year, it’s hard to ignore the fact that I’ve now reached 50 years old, the half century mark; with the two halves of my life split between two separate centuries, two separate millennia. So, I do have to decide how to spend the rest of my life, although that’s always the case. For hunter-gatherers, the average individual hits their physical peak in their fifties. But for modern Westerners, most are already showing major decline by that point, or often much earlier — healthspan being a different issue than lifespan.

Admittedly, if far better off than typical, I am feeling my age. And I can’t deny that my choices, actions, and behaviors affect not only my physical health but, as important, my mental health.

With that in mind, maybe I do have a New Year’s resolutions of sorts, if something I’ve already been long struggling with. As has caused much public concern and debate, there is the effect had by the new media and its corresponding technology, specifically with a tech oligarchy having taken over the United States with aspirations of globalizing techno-feudalism, maybe akin to the dystopian future of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

It gives one pause.

If I can’t stop this weird breed of authoritarian accelerationism that hopes to bring on an End Times to give birth to the Second Coming of a strange AI dark lord (with Jesus replaced with a Sauron-like figure), I can at the very least make decisions and commitments about how to relate to it all. So, I resolve to be more aware, intentional, and discerning in my media usage.

* * * *

I’ve long realized this is important and I’ve acted on that realization. So, it’s not exactly a resolution to start something entirely new. Just to bring an old concern to the forefront and to recommit to this change.

For the past decade or so, I’ve steadily broadened my curtailment of social media, along with having boycotted tech behemoths like Amazon. I’ve also unsubscribed from the streaming service companies that bowed down to MAGA fascism by paying bribes or tributes to Trump. At the very least, I don’t have to give these evil corporations my money, time, and attention.

Yet the allure of the online world, especially YouTube (a weakness of mine), keeps drawing me back in. I need to go the route of Alcoholics Anonymous — once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. These media platforms are designed to be addictive and manipulative. I need to go cold turkey. As one drink leads to another for the alcoholic, the same is true with one click on a video or whatnot.

I need to double or triple down on my resolve.

I had to learn that with my decades of sugar addiction, having developed it in childhood. I have enough self-control to not take that first bite of candy, potato chips, or whatever other kind of junk food. But once that first bite is taken, once the taste is in my mouth and the sugar is flowing through my veins with my serotonin spiking, I very well might not have enough strength within me to resist the second bite and the third, fourth, etc. Then a binge will likely follow, possibly along with regret and misery, shame and self-blame.

But the thing is that it’s not a matter of being personally weak. And so we have to be more intelligent and wise by understanding where resolve matters and how it can work, as opposed to when it’s a counterproductive, unnecessary, and futile struggle. That is to say one needs to locate points of leverage, rather than bashing one’s head into a wall.

As with tech media, ultra-processed ‘food’ products (UPFs) are carefully designed by corporate-hired scientific researchers to be extremely addictive, such as being more intensely tasty than any natural food with that sought-after mouthfeel and the triggering of the reward system (Robert Lustig, The Hacking of the American Mind). This stuff isn’t ‘food’ in the normal sense. It’s closer to a drug.

Your biology, your brain is no match against the trillions of dollars plutocrats have invested in the knowledge of how to pull your strings like a puppet.

It’s good to be a bit paranoid in such a scenario. They really are out to get you, to use and abuse you. You can’t directly fight against that. It’s more about awareness, knowledge, and insight than self-control. Just don’t put yourself into situations where you know the table is tilted in their favor, where the game is rigged against you. In recognizing you’re outmatched and disadvantaged, don’t meet them on the battlefield of their choice. The house always wins.

Don’t take that first bite. Reclaim authority over your own life. Take control of that initial decision of where and how to engage. If you’re not in control, then it’s likely you’re being controlled by tools and systems of control. This is capital ‘C’ Control, as William S. Burroughs described it.

* * * *

That is where my own resolution comes in.

I find myself irritated and frustrated, emotionally jerked around whenever I’m on these corporate media platforms, at least the popular ones. They mostly or entirely disallow personal autonomy and control. The algorithms determine your feed as a ‘user’, the content you’re recommended, and the advertising you see. The bots monitor everything you do, determine what others can see of what you do (along with what you can of what others do), and control how you’re allowed to interact: filtering search results, disappearing comments, shadow banning, deplatforming, etc.

It generally operates in the background and so goes unseen, which makes it all the more nefarious and insidious. All that they allow is an illusion of free choice in a public-like space. But in reality, it’s all shaped and influenced by monied and powerful interests; with endless propaganda of capitalist realism, American imperialism, Zionism, etc. And they do their best to trap you in an echo chamber, to keep you ignorant, disinformed, and clueless, or else irate and reactionary; to keep us all at odds with divide and conquer.

If you think you’re smarter than these forces of perception management and social control, then you are stupid and a fool. Intellectual humility is in order.

I’ve seen too many people fall prey. The tactics of manipulation are always several, if not dozens, of steps ahead of public media literacy. It could take generations for we the citizenry to catch up to where big tech is right now and so to catch on to how the game is played, although we are gaining insight. But public knowledge that is actionable will be too late for almost anyone alive right now.

[As a side note, this manipulation happens in many ways.

As shown by research based on cultivation theory, repeatedly viewing media portrayals of violence will elicit mean world syndrome, that is to say exaggerated threat perception and punitiveness, social conservatism and right-wing authoritarianism. This is true even for exposed liberals. One study found that, after watching continuous footage of the 9/11 attacks on tv, liberals later became more supportive of right-wing policies: Homeland Security, Iraq War, etc.

Similarly, I’ve known of leftists who explored reactionary alt-right literature out of curiosity. Then they begin to exhibit reactionary attitudes and express reactionary thought. These were highly intelligent and informed people who thought they were above the power of such rhetoric. They went into it knowing what it was and yet, as mind viruses, it still slipped past their intellectual defenses and infected them.

Choose your media consumption carefully as it might consume you. None of us is above being vulnerable. Always be on guard by developing intellectual self-defense (Normand Baillargeon, A Short Course in Intellectual Self Defense: Find Your Inner Chomsky).]

Furthermore, it’s also how these tech companies intentionally promote what elicits engagement, what incites and riles emotion, at any cost. That usually means the worst demons of our nature: fear, anxiety, alienation, anger, hatred, bigotry, scapegoating, and worse still like cruelty, vengeance, schadenfreude, and on and on. This is how we’re led down a dark path of doomscrolling, idiotic online pseudo-arguments, trollish antisocial behavior, and superficial ingroup bias of polarized partisanship, identity politics, victimhood Olympics, etc.

All of this is exacerbated by how electronic media elicits and antagonizes the destabilizing and deranging conditions of a post-literary culture. This is seen with both the tribalism of Marshall McLuhan’s global village and the agonism of Walter J. Ong’s secondary orality.  The literary-based culture, as it’s operated for centuries, no longer fully applies (Jeff Jarvis, The Gutenberg Parenthesis).

And so the whole world is thrown up into the air, with an accompanying sense of weightlessness until we hit back down again. With no way to get our bearings, no chance to catch our breath, it makes everyone feel on edge, constantly agitated and exhausted, as we brace ourselves for the coming impact.

* * * *

One doesn’t need to intellectually understand all that, if the context helps. Nor does one have to sit around worrying about the larger implications and long-term consequences. But one should take seriously that one is up against forces that are outside of individual control. There is a vaster field of action far beyond you and, to those in power, you’re just another pawn, a data point, a user profile.

That is all the more reason to prioritize what we do control, while avoiding as much as possible what we don’t.

Personally, this means that I’m picking my media usage with great wariness and care, weighing the pros and cons with each option. I don’t want to become a luddite and hermit, hiding from the big bad world. As I’m a writer, I need or rather desire a platform on which to publish and hopefully to gain an audience. But I want to stay away from any platform that doesn’t allow me to control all major aspects of my experience.

That is why I got off Medium and returned to WordPress, even if the latter might be a dying platform. I’m going back to what I know, at least for the moment while I reassess my situation and determine my options.

WordPress, if nothing else, offers much direct control, in terms of what matters to me. I can set all my pieces or a single piece to no comments, moderated comments, or open commenting. Also, I can entirely block individuals from leaving comments at all. This allows me to proactively cultivate my audience and hence my experience. I don’t need to ever engage with trolls, the mentally disturbed, bad actors, or simply people who irritate me and offer nothing of value.

It’s a rare breath of fresh air, as compared to most elsewhere on the internet.

It reinforces the sense of my writing space as being my own personal space. I’m given the tools to determine for myself how I wish to engage with the online world. Fewer platforms do that anymore. Hence, I prefer the old school design of WordPress that, as far as I can tell, hasn’t yet fallen to enshittification (Corey Doctorow).

In addition, WordPress brings me straight to my own page, not the main WordPress page. Without any extra steps (e.g., signing out), I can see my page as others see it, which isn’t an easy option on Medium. When I go to Medium, I’m first confronted with recommendations, mostly of articles from people I don’t follow. Medium is telling me what they think I should read, not what I want to read. In that, it’s more similar to social media like Facebook, Twitter/X, and YouTube.

I want the freedom and demand the right to curate my own experience. And I’ll accept nothing less. I’m not going to lower my standards to turn myself into a mere product of big biz, as part of their scheme to control the internet and hence control the public mind. I’ll only deal with businesses that treat me with basic respect, that seem to hold true to the old vision and ethos of the internet as an equalizing force.

* * * *

But also I require dependability.

I’ve been on WordPress a little less than two decades. In all that time, they’ve never once jerked me around or caused me problems. WordPress simply works almost seamlessly. It’s simple and perfunctorial. It just works. Apparently, WordPress management and designers see it as their job to make my life easier and to incentivize my participation. Whereas some other major platforms act as if they’re doing us peons a favor by allowing us to produce free content for them to profit by.

That is because, specifically on social media, we the users are the product being sold. I have no interest in being a product placed on the mind-slave block. I’m the human here. Corporations should serve me, not the other way around. That is true of the system in general, from a leftist perspective of freedom and liberty. Humans should always be front and center.

That is what, after initial positive experience, finally sent me jumping the Medium ship. Out of the blue without any warning, they one day suspended my account. I no longer could publish articles or comment. I made a formal complaint and my account was quickly reinstated. But with opaque bureaucracy, they never gave me a verbal response, never explained, never apologized. I have no way of knowing what happened or why. And worse, I have no way of preventing it from happening to again.

The Medium staff acted like arbitrary gods from up high, an impersonal and faceless force that will-nilly determines your fate. They owe you nothing and make sure you realize you’re inferiority, your utter dependence on them. Make the wrong move and you’re done. There is no fellow human to appeal to, as could be done with a local brick-and-mortar business.

I had no desire to have that hanging over my head, to be in that kind of non-relationship of power disparity. So, I left Medium and don’t regret it. I demand to be treated with basic human decency. That’s non-negotiable.

Now I’m back on WordPress. But as I explained, it’s not about just this one issue. I’m in the process of curating my entire online experience. I’ve decided to be more careful of where and how I spend my time, to guard jealously my personal autonomy in this attention economy, ruthless and manipulative as it is.

On a simpler note, it’s partly just no longer wanting to waste my time. And as anyone knows these days, that’s easy to do. One post, tweet, video, link, etc leads to another, often as part of an endless feed that mindlessly leads one along. Before you know it, hours of your life may have disappeared and you hardly remember what you did.

It’s demoralizing. Just whittering away your precious moments of life.

* * * *

Even when not mere pointless and mind-numbing distraction, something like a long intellectual discussion on a YouTube video can, nonetheless, feel like empty calories. During that same time, I could’ve been reading a book or finishing one of my thousands of drafts.

It’s not only the quality of the content but the quality of the engagement. It’s what it’s doing to me. A video is passive and so it instills in one a sense of passivity, of just letting life slip by. With endless opportunities of preoccupation, there never needs to be a moment for boredom, contemplation, people-watching, or whatever. The online world can absorb one’s entire awareness and there will never be an end to the content on display.

We need moments of downtime when nothing is happening, when the mind wanders and daydreams.

That is what turns on the default mode network. It’s in this state that the mind can process and gain perspective. It’s why there are so many anecdotes of scientists, inventors, and such coming to some great insight while going for a walk or taking a bath. Research has found something as simply 15 minutes of doing nothing causes people to come up with more creative solutions.

That’s the thing. As a GenXer, I remember the world before the internet. I know what it feels like to be motivated into creativity because I had nothing better to do — for example, sitting in front of a blank piece of paper waiting for inspiration or just writing down whatever came to mind. I haven’t done that kind of writing in a long time, truly emergent creativity.

And it will never happen as long as I let the tech lords own and possess my mind.

I can come to the end of a video that may have had some value and yet still wonder why I watched it. It’s the unfocused nature of simply clicking on something that captures my attention but without any conscious intention on my part. One loses the sense of making a choice. Indeed, the algorithm has us all figured out. Even for us intellectuals, it knows how to grab hold of us, and then it can be so hard to pull back out. The claws pierce deep into our psyches.

Besides the severe alienation of it all, the demoralization and depersonalization, mediated reality can swamp an individual in so many ways. It’s a race to the bottom where the the lowest common denominator rules. It will drag you down with it and keep you mired.

The more time I spend online the more I realize that the best people likely spend the least amount of time online. Those actually accomplishing something meaningful and worthy, generally speaking, aren’t to be found on social media and in comments sections. That creates the sorry state where those who have the least maturity, depth, intelligence, understanding, knowledge, insight, creativity, humility, compassion, and moral concern are those with the greatest presence and the loudest voices. It’s mostly, if not entirely, the dregs of society with the time to dedicate their entire lives to non-stop opinionating, sparring, trolling, and shitposting online.

This includes troll farms and mercenary paid trolls. Not to mention the growing tide of bots and AI content; a significant portion of it being pushed as part of propaganda campaigns serving diverse nefarious interests. It’s a fucking nightmare. We are entering what many describe according to the dead internet theory.

Actual humans interacting normally with other humans is becoming a thing of the past. Our very humanity is disappearing into the morass.

One comes across entire comments sections that very likely were produced entirely by non-human entities spamming and spewing out advertisements, talking points, or whatever other bullshit. Data analysis has already found that, in some countries, most of the internet activity is no longer human. I’ve seen arguments in threads where I suspect both sides were bots, or else people have become so influenced by bot talk that they’re starting to sound like them — the latter would be a truly dark turn.

To make matters worse, with deepfakes, it will get harder and harder to determine what is real and factual. We’re being buried alive in a post-truth world.

* * * *

It can make one feel defeated, as if the only option is to give up and retreat. But I don’t want to.

There is little point to writing without an audience. And, for good or ill, it’s hard for the average or even above average writer to find an audience these days while abstaining from online platforms. Sadly, it’s nearly impossible for most people to maintain their own websites, as everything has gotten too complex. And opportunities of publishing in physical venues are declining, as local newspapers and magazines close down.

There is another complaint I have about the internet in general and most writing platforms in particular. I developed my love of writing long before I got my own internet connection in 1998. The internet, though, has changed the equation and can cause me to forget why I came to enjoy writing so much in the first place. If it’s hard to imagine now, I used to write all the time without any audience in mind, as I had no audience other than close friends. There was a freedom in it, as one didn’t feel a compulsion to constantly tailor oneself according to the responses, demands, suggestions, and complaints of others; much less conform to algorithmic machinations that determine if you’re seen or buried.

That relates to another problem with Medium.

To get any major exposure, a writer had to get pieces accepted by a ‘publication’, each with its own focus, requirements, and style; all of which has been shaped by internet weirdness. I found that I had a talent for writing great pieces that could get published and sometimes drew in large audiences. Decades of experience have honed my skills in knowing how to shape an appealing piece, and the constraints in some ways brought out the best in me. I further learned what works in the online world, how to break up texts with subheadings, quotes, pull quotes, images, videos, and links.

To the credit of Medium, they do have an impressive platform in many ways that is user friendly. I don’t regret my time spent there. But in the end, I want to write on my own terms. That is what WordPress has allowed me. Last decade, I was averaging 80,000 clicks per year on WordPress with no need for any ‘publication’ to promote my work. I did my own thing in my own way and gained a large following.

I don’t know, however, if that’s possible now.

I’ve been inactive on WordPress for a while and so have lost most of my active followers. Plus, though WordPress used to be a heavy-hitter that was prominent, I have a suspicion that Google and other search engines now push WordPress articles further down in results. It has the stigma of being an old ‘blogging’ platform and that is no longer fashionable, if technically there isn’t any fundamental difference between it and the newer writing platforms.

I’m not sure what I want to do or how I should go about doing it. Many writers left Medium for Substack. All the cool kids, public intellectuals, and celebrities are on Substack now, at least until another new and popular platform comes along. I just have no interest in platform jumping with the eternal hope of catching some wave. Rather, I simply want to plunk down somewhere and have a solid, if not necessarily massive, following of interested readers — more emphasis on quality than quantity. Better yet, I’d like to be part of a community of writers, as I did find on Medium to its credit.

For the moment, I’m holing up here on WordPress and licking my wounds. Maybe I’ll eventually venture out to some other platforms. Even in that case, I think I’m going to keep WordPress as my home base, for as long as possible.

As such, here I am and here I will remain.

But how do I make the best of a bad situation? I want to be more proactive, selective, and discerning in how I spend my time. I want to get back to focusing on my own aspirations, in particular my vocation as a writer. I want to get shit done. And in what I do, I want it to matter. I write because I care about the world, about humanity. That is what I need to keep front and center, the whole reason that helps me remain motivated and inspired, curious and interested.

I’m an intellectual in a media environment where intellectuality is being downgraded in value. All I’m trying to do is find my niche, a place where I belong and possibly even can be respected. I have something unique and worthy to offer. That is what I need to stay focused on. All I can do is what I know how to do and do it to the best of my ability.

That is my New Year’s resolution. Or just call it a resolution. It’s my recommitting myself to what I’m already committed to but with renewed focus and intention.

* * * *

Resolution aside, much of last year was spent pondering how media affects me. To that end, I’ve been studying the history of media and research of its impact on mentality, behavior, and culture. This was the topic of one of my recent writings: The End of the Age of the Masses.

It’s with all of that on my mind that I felt like writing this piece. I do have many further thoughts on the matter. So, it’s probably safe to suggest more such pieces will be on the way.  But for now, I’ll end it here with a book recommendation list:

Public Opinion
by Walter Lippman

The Image
by Daniel J. Boorstin

The Gutenberg Galaxy
by Marshall McLuhan

The Sensus Communis, Synesthesia, and the Soul
by Eric McLuhan

Amusing Ourselves to Death
by Neil Postman

The Shallows
by Nicholas Car

Stolen Focus
by Johann Hari

The Gutenberg Parenthesis
by Jeff Jarvis

The Science of Reading
by Adrian Johns

The Alphabet Versus the Goddess
by Leonard Shlain

The Spell of the Sensuous
by David Abram

The Disappeared, the Invisible, and the Unknown

“As crimes pile up, they become invisible.”
-Bertold Brecht

“What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.”
~Holocaust Encyclopedia, Concentration Camps, 1933–39

With the MAGA Gestapo or SA on the prowl, while democracy is being DOGEd, random dark-skinned people are being nabbed off American streets by masked mercenaries. What is their crime? Not looking white enough, according to fascists. But as recent events have shown, even white native-born citizens can be killed with impunity when they don’t immediately bow down to authoritarian demands.

No one is safe under fascism, but the least safe of all will always be those with the fewest legal protections, not that law matters to those who wield brute power.

In many cases, those targeted includes immigrants with legal status or asylum claims, at or near immigration courts. These people are doing everything right according to United States law, whereas what agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as Trump’s personal secret police or Brownshirt thugs, are doing is criminal and unconstitutional. Even some documented citizens have been illegally detained and, in a few cases, deported; and sometimes tortured as well.

Still, even for undocumented immigrants, the U.S. Constitution applies equally to them (or rather it technically should). As carefully written, it’s intended to protect all people, no matter status as citizen or immigrant, resident or visitor, documented or undocumented.

Donald Trump’s entire administration, not only ICE, is unconstitutional and illegal. We’ve been in a constitutional crisis for a while and now we’re well beyond that. It’s now a constitutional catastrophe threatening constitutional collapse. We no longer have a functioning constitutional order, one of the defining features of republicanism.

With Trump as strongman aspiring to god-emperor, there is no due process and equal protection under the law, no transparency and accountability, and often no explanation or justification given. Certainly, there is no fairness and justice, much less compassion and moral concern.

As Garry Kasparov put it:

“As was done with Rosgvardiya in Russia by Trump’s role model, Putin, this is a military solution to a non-military problem. ICE’s authority will expand steadily, perhaps with the rare loss in court over jurisdiction. But that’s fine because the main goal is to create fear.

“The titular purpose of such an organization is largely irrelevant anyway, a red herring. The point is for everyone to understand that it’s the Leader’s personal army and that as such it has supreme discretion. It’s a tool of repression, but also of terror.”

* * * *

I had a friend, let’s call him Mohammad. He is a Libyan refugee who was rescued by Red Cross, spent time in an Egyptian refugee camp, and was eventually given refugee status here in the States under Barack Obama’s administration. Some years back, he happily and proudly attained his U.S. citizenship.

His first vote was for Joe Biden, but he felt betrayed by Democrats and their false promises. So, with the last election, he stated he was going to vote for Donald Trump. Good grief!

Voting for any other party — or not voting at all! — would be better than voting Republican. But in having assimilated into mainstream American politics, I suppose he bought into the idea that anything other than the hegemonic two-party system is a wasted vote, that third parties are not to be taken seriously. So, if he wanted to vote against Democrats, that left only one other option in his mind.

This is the dark side of lesser evil voting, specifically when the government continuously gets ever more evil with each supposed lesser evil election. It’s not only that Trump is worse than George W. Bush who, in turn, was worse than Ronald Reagan and all of them worse than Richard Nixon who himself was worse than Dwight Eisenhower, all of them having been worse than Theodore Roosevelt and, before that, Abraham Lincoln.

It applies to Democrats as well. Jimmy Carter was worse than Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama was worse than Bill Clinton, and Joe Biden was worse still. The DNC elite, their crony backers, and their partisan supporters long ago joined the GOP in a race to the bottom. That is how we’ve come to the place where one party is actively seeking to harm Americans while the other acts as controlled opposition in refusing to protect Americans.

All of us voters are still waiting for the less evil we were promised.

It’s a steady bipartisan decline of moral quality and political worthiness, while steadily rising has been inequality and corruption, plutocracy and the imperial presidency. Not to mention, as part of the ratchet effect, an endless rightward shift and authoritarian creep.

If Democrats are the ones who lock each turn of the ratchet into place, it’s Republicans who are the direct force cranking it further and further, until now we are at the breaking point. So, for all the real problems and unjustifiable failures of the corporate-backed DNC political machine, Republicans always stay several steps ahead in the competition for greatest of political evil. But anyway, both party machines are part of the same political apparatus that keeps the broad, majoritarian left powerless and silenced (American Leftist Supermajority; & Fox News: Americans are the ‘Left-Wing’ Enemy Threatening America) while maintaining minority rule (Polarization Between the Majority and Minority) with the backing of the craziest and extremist of useful idiots (Poll Answers, Stated Beliefs, Ideological Labels).

Still, the answer to the failure of lesser evil isn’t to vote for the greater evil. That part seems to have gone over Mohammad’s head. But to be fair, he hadn’t been in the United States long enough to have much historical background. And besides, so many (most?) other Americans are ignorant of American history as well.

Still, he should’ve known better than to vote for Trump, even if he simply paid attention to the present reality of politics. More than two-thirds of Americans, after all, didn’t go MAGA for the presidential election; if sadly, our electoral system isn’t determined by any actual democratic process — so, to give Americans credit, they seem to have recognized Trump as batshit crazy and dangerous. It’s not like MAGA’s dark side was hidden from scrutiny. Many of the MAGA leaders, influencers, and followers openly stated admiration for Nazis and Adolf Hitler, along with Zionist genocide, Christian nationalism, white supremacy, eugenics, misogyny, etc. That includes Trump himself.

Few people could be so clueless and obtuse as to not realize the Nazis were the bad guys.

To support an openly neo-Nazi party like the MAGA GOP is to not only be complicit but to, effectively, be a neo-Nazi oneself. There is no getting around that. But there are many people, though they are drawn to nearly everything about fascism (strongman leadership, moral panic, law-and-order, anti-immigration, ingroup bias, scapegoating the weak and innocent, etc), who aren’t prepared to admit it through self-identifying as such. They want to maintain the illusion of still being good people.

* * * *

Keep in mind, this Libyan guy isn’t only a refugee but a dark-skinned African, and an Arab-identified Muslim to boot — nearly everything that is the opposite of the American right-wing ideal of a ‘Real American’. As such, he is the full package, perfectly fitting MAGA’s ultimate scapegoat of fear-mongering and primary target of hateful bigotry. If this fascist regime could get away with it, those like Mohammad would be among the first to be eliminated in one way or another, or else otherwise abused and victimized. Yet to his mind, he was one of the good ones in having gained legal status and so all the authoritarian evil supposedly wouldn’t apply to him.

Like some other minorities, he strangely bought into Trump’s (pseudo-)populist rhetoric without understanding the implications of fascism nor taking seriously the real world consequences, not even as it applied to himself. Yet another victimized voter of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

The insanity of MAGAts and their fellow travelers is that they’re so disconnected from reality that their willingness to sacrifice others and destroy the public good isn’t even being done for real world self-interest, just symbolic identity politics, hateful bigotry, and paranoid fantasies. Besides superficial pride of a demented honor culture, they seem driven largely by the schadenfreude of others suffering, even if it means their own suffering increases as well.

It’s the most bizarre form of victimhood politics featuring self-victimization. In their inability to imagine a world without victims, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that victimizes everyone, including most of the victimizers.

It turns out that, if you do unto others as you would not have others do unto you, you very well might eventually get the same treatment in return. Apparently, Jesus’ teachings weren’t just pretty words. And as a Muslim, Mohammad’s religion considers Jesus to be one of the main prophets. So, even while he refused to listen to me as a close friend and heed my warnings as a secular liberal, why couldn’t he have at least followed the advice as commanded in his own holy book, the Koran?

Ironically, the MAGA theocracy that he was drawn into is anti-Islamic. He had to have noticed that little detail, right? But it didn’t dissuade or discourage him. For whatever reason, authoritarians of different feathers so often still flock together, no matter how their views contradict and collide. They somehow manage to find a way to agree on the enemy to be feared and destroyed. Then after that, they might turn on each other in their struggle for power and control.

Whatever strange logic operated in his broken brain and sick soul, it was sad to hear a minority and refugee naively rationalize his support of a corrupt, Machiavellian demagogue who openly attacked the powerless and, as stated in his campaign promises, who aspired to become a dangerous tyrant. Having spent most of his life in Libya, he simply had no deep understanding of American politics and society. Or else he understood and just didn’t care. Or else it was precisely what he wanted.

Maybe there was some sense to it, within his unhappy life experience. Trump, after all, was the closest equivalent to the strongman Muammar Gaddafi with his secret police and torture prisons.

In Libya, Mohammad was raised under a theocratic dictatorship. Most of his life has been traumatic and, while escaping during the 2011 Libyan civil war, he had an overtly traumatizing event that he believed triggered his schizophrenia. That followed after his parents had kicked him out of the house while he was still young. He was then forced him to move in with his uncle who only offered temporary stability, as he died in a car accident shortly before the conflict began.

So,  Mohammad suddenly found himself desperately alone in the middle of a violence-torn country. With what little money he had saved, he barely escaped with his life, but lost all his possessions and all contact info to anyone he ever knew. To make matters worse, nothing in his early tribal life prepared him for being an isolated individual, first as a refugee and then later in a foreign land.

The sense of threat, danger, and abandonment haunts his psyche. Authoritarian-based trauma and fear is all he has known for decades. And so maybe Trumpian MAGA felt just like home. This pattern seems akin to the victim who returns to their abusive spouse because the social dynamic is familiar and, oddly, comforting. A known harm can be attractive to those, in an authoritarian mindset, who fear the unknown even more.

* * * *

To make matters worse, Mohammad is obviously cognitively stunted and low intelligence. But of course, it’s no fault of his own.

This is from a less than optimal early life of severe poverty, chronic stress, abuse and bullying, malnourishment, likely high parasite load, lack of healthcare, and practically no education. It is a sad fact that low IQ (no matter the cause), as negatively correlated to ‘openness to experience’ (i.e., liberal-mindedness, intellectuality, curiosity, etc), does make one prone to right-wing authoritarianism, social conservatism, and religious fundamentalism, as well as motivated reasoning.

[This is the reason leftist politics supports the public good, specifically public health and public education. It’s our only hope of a good society, a liberal society, a free society.]

Mohammad thinks very slowly, can’t comprehend complexities, has almost no critical thinking skills, is barely literate, is prone to fundamentalism and conspiracy theory, and is vulnerable to manipulative apologists, demagogues, and social influencers. One time, after watching a movie about vampires in France, he asked me if it was true. He has nearly zero capacity to differentiate fact from fiction, possibly contributed to by his schizophrenia. Almost everything — be it a story, history, news, propaganda, or apologetics — is equally plausible in his mind.

That is to say he has no intellectual discernment, no capacity of reality testing. That would be a frightening mentality to be in. And overwhelming fearfulness just further strengthens the conservative and authoritarian response as a defense against uncertainty. A strong answer, even if wrong, can feel more comforting.

Without intellectual self-defense and without media literacy, someone like Mohammad is helpless in the modern political landscape. In recent years, he started spending more time online, since he only works a few hours a week and so has lots of free time. Going down YouTube rabbit holes, he got pulled into an echo chamber and fell under the influence of bad actors who targeted him as an easy mark.

Plus, without much literacy, he was particularly vulnerable to Marshall McLuhan’s global village and Walter J. Ong’s secondary orality with its culture of tribalistic groupthink, identitarian rhetoric, emotional persuasion, antagonistic polarization, etc. Too few of us recognize the power and necessity of mass literacy and reading comprehension as pillars of liberal democracy (Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death).

About the only reading Mohammad ever did — besides comic books as a child — was that of the Koran, but as guided by fundamentalist apologetics delivered through video. If you’ve ever visited the ideological market of the religious right on YouTube, you’d have a sense of the world that slowly closed in on him until he no longer could see outside of it.

Interestingly, he initially watched a lot of material from Christian fundamentalists. So, that was his gateway drug into the alt-right pipeline. The religious rhetoric of MAGA evangelicals, in the end, isn’t all that different from Islamic fundies. It has the exact same appeal and often identical theology. In addition, my old friend oddly returned to Islamic fundamentalism by associating with Christian evangelicals in the local area, as a congregation had welcomed him in. If it wasn’t their intention to turn him into an Islamic extremist, they confirmed his biases, strengthened his fears, and rationalized his paranoia.

Repeat that kind of story millions of times over and you have the entire MAGA political base.

For a time, I tried to argue him away from this dark path, but it only entrenched and polarized him further, while having reinforced his sense of being isolated and alienated. It was impossible to pull him out of the harsh and demented worldview that he grew up in, as made salient in his present lived experience within a powerful right-wing propaganda system. He didn’t think I could understand and, to a large degree, he was right. *sigh*

Worse still, the reactionary and right-wing media of paranoid fear-mongering and conspiratorial narratives has fed into his schizophrenia-fueled delusions, which of course feel real to him, more real than reality itself. Yet with a semi-egalitarian bent from his Islamic upbringing (the Koranic message is overtly anti-plutocratic and inconsistently pacifist), he also sort of believed Trump’s pseudo-progressive rhetoric: no more war, bring back jobs, etc. Sure, some of it superficially sounded nice, if one didn’t pay close attention to the history of Trump and his backers in the right-wing shadow network (Anne Nelson), such as the Heritage Foundation.

I tried to convince Mohammad that it was all lies. When I explained that Trump would destroy the United States, he responded that would be a good thing because of the harm the U.S. did to his own country of birth. If that happened, he said he’d just go back to Libya, the very country that he escaped because his life had been in danger, such as when a roving gang pointed a gun at his head. It remains a dangerous and despotic place. His returning there might very well mean death, homelessness, or enslavement. But his nostalgic longing for home obscures any of that.

I just couldn’t persuade him that, even though I too am opposed to American imperialism, what Trump would replace it with could be so much worse. Besides, even if Trump could succeed in crippling and eventually destroying the American Empire, it wouldn’t happen easily and quickly. Dying empires can be brutally oppressive and violent, sometimes clutching to power for generations in slow torturous decline as they set the world aflame all around them.

[As self-declared god-emperor of the world, Trump is making a good go of it, at this very moment with his attacks on Venezuela and such that might incite a third world war. So much for being the anti-war president who should be given a Nobel Peace Prize.]

There has to be a better way, I argued to my old friend, than voting to worsen and accelerate the decline and destruction, while destabilizing the entire global order. My appeal had no impact on him at the time, as he continued to spiral downward.

* * * *

I was starting to get the sense that, under the influence of religious extremists he met online, Mohammad was being filled with dreams of vengeful reckoning to be brought upon the West, like the fist of Allah that would bring back the Islamic greatness of the Arab world, as once existed under the Ottoman Empire. Or something like that. Secular democracy, to say the least, is not a natural part of his worldview.

Like those who fell for the rhetoric of Make America Great Again, he too was driven by deranged nostalgia that further disconnected him from reality. In having come to the U.S., though he gained safety and security, he lost the clear identity and certain status of having belonged within a close-knit tribal society. He is a nobody here, a low-class loser, or so I suspect that is how he feels. Ironically, to the MAGA he joined, they too would see him as undesirable, just another unAmerican refugee sucking on the government teat.

He is drawn to side with the very people who hate him the most, maybe because hate is at least something he can understand and sympathize with. Whatever the motivation, it was just plain sad to have to watch him go down that path of self-defeat and self-destruction, and in voting for Trump forcing the rest of us to go along.

But it’s not that I don’t grasp, on a basic level, what had brought Mohammad to this point of despair and desperation. He came to America, the land of immigrant dreams where anyone supposedly can get ahead. Once settled into his new life, all he wanted was to get his GED, find a decent job, get married, and have kids. That is what defines a worthy man, both in Libya and on the American right-wing. Anything less is shameful.

The reality of his situation, however, is that he isn’t smart and literate enough to even get a GED. [Nor does he have any qualities — not  money, house, health, stability, etc; or even good looks — to likely attract a wife.] The part-time work given to him by the local university was more done as a charity case because of his severe disability and mental illness; after he he had a stint in the university-operated psychiatric ward (it’s a medical school with a teaching hospital). He was never going to succeed within the private sector of American social Darwinism. He’d already tried working other jobs such as at an Amazon warehouse, but he didn’t even have enough ability for that most basic of entry level employment.

He is low functioning in most ways. It takes him a long time to figure out the most meager of challenges. Even ordering a meal can be an excruciatingly slow process. Not only his mind but also his body is sluggish. Though steady, he does physical tasks at a snail’s pace, as if he just doesn’t have the energy in him to work at any other speed. He isn’t capable of more than the simplest of tasks and even then he needs someone with authority to constantly tell him exactly what to do.

There is no normal work for such a person. Even a fast food job would be too much for him, as he’d never be able to keep up with the pace of work nor have the cognitive complexity and self-initiative to multi-task.

That is extremely low level functioning, but I couldn’t explain that to him nor did I want to try. Sadly, he is too unintelligent to recognize how unintelligent he is. And it would be plain cruel to point it out to him. It would only add frustration on top of frustration, to the point of hopelessness. What he needs is help, but it’s precisely Republicans who have defunded or outright eliminated the very programs and services that would help him.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t judge people for what they have no control over, and so much of Mohammad’s life has been out of his control. Certainly, I’m not saying any of this to insult him, as I initially liked much about him, before his authoritarianism and paranoia flared up. He is an extremely nice guy and, on a personal level, highly moral. He really does take his faith seriously. And he’d do anything to help out a friend, myself included in the past. But that doesn’t change all the rest.

* * * *

It’s just harsh reality that Mohammad has only two basic options in life:

  1. continuing to be a ward of the American state on welfare or else somehow institutionalized; or
  2. turning into a victim with a sad fate, such as becoming homeless or coming to an even more unhappy ending.

Indeed, schizophrenics have a high suicide rate. But their compromised state also commonly makes them targets of harm and manipulation from others. I know of one schizophrenic who was pulled into the Moonies’ cult, until her mental illness got too bad and they threw her to the streets.

In his severely stunted neurocognition and mental illness, there is no possibility of his being able to take care of himself, living a ‘normal’ life (as portrayed and idealized on tv), and getting ahead in the world. But he can’t accept his limited means and abilities, as his right-wing ideology tells him that his condition is to be condemned as a failure, that his life is to be deemed as useless and worthless. This is the internalized judgment of a cruel society, of which he projects onto others in the form of hatred and ressentiment.

Overwhelming and unbearable shame can turn people dark like almost nothing else. It underlies much of the reactionary mind and politics that particularly draws in the precariat.

This is why right-wingers are obsessed with status and pride, along with demeaning, oppressing, and subjugating others so as to prove that they’re better than some perceived outgroup. Such people embrace victimhood by attacking those perceived as the victimizers, but in reality this typically means one lower class group attacking another even lower class group. It’s classic divide and conquer, with how the elite offer up a scapegoat.

Like so many others left behind in this society, Mohammad is frustrated about being stuck in his situation, having no route of escape, and hence no source of hope in his own mind. It doesn’t matter that all of his needs are (or were) being taken care of by the paternalistic state, that he had nothing to worry or fear about, that he was living the good life in a liberal city in a way that never would’ve been possible under the right-wing authoritarianism of Libya (or even a hardcore red state in the South). If he hadn’t escaped his birth country, he almost certainly would be dead by now.

Yet he has come to resent the hand that fed him, the country that provided for him. It makes him feel weak and vulnerable, as if he is being treated as a child, as if a foreign government had trapped him with evil intent. He was willing to put Trump in power, even if it meant destroying his adoptive country that took him in at his greatest time of need, saved his life, and gave him subsidized housing and food (i.e., welfare).

He didn’t understand how bad that ingratitude sounded from an outside perspective, how misguided and pitiful. Then again, it’s not like he was thinking rationally.

* * * *

I suspect Mohammad was beginning to slip back into a schizophrenic episode, possibly with a recurrence of verbal hallucinations. On multiple occasions, when I shared information that disagreed with his beliefs and biases, he’d tell me that what I said came from the CIA and he wasn’t joking. He was going deeper and deeper into that reactionary worldview and the darkest fears presented to him were very much real in his mind.

I couldn’t take it anymore and told him I no longer wanted to hear any of it, not the conspiracy theories, fundamentalist apologetics, or the right-wing politics. That ended our friendship. It was a great relief, as I had become as irritated by him as I was surely irritating him in return. Our relationship had reached its terminus. The easygoing, open-minded, and curious person I had known when I first met him had disappeared, to be replaced by someone I no longer enjoyed being around. I wasn’t able or willing to join him in the worldview that had since overtaken him. So, we parted ways.

Until quite recently, I’d still see him around town, if we no longer talked. He lived one block from where I work and so I’d notice him passing by multiple times a week. But I haven’t come across him the past few months.

I must admit to being concerned, as I didn’t stop caring about him. We were friends for many years. To emphasize the point already stated, he really does have zero capacity to take care of himself beyond the most minimal level. Far more intelligent and capable people have been ground up by this merciless system and heartless society. He didn’t appreciate the good life he had and, as a radical left-liberal, I support my tax money paying for his basic needs.

I hope nothing bad has happened to him. Maybe he simply got new subsidized housing and is doing fine — that’s the best case scenario. But it’s possible he got picked up by ICE and deported back to Libya, in spite of having U.S. citizenship; or else might’ve been sent to some other random country, as the Supreme Court decided was allowable. Presumably, that wouldn’t be the homecoming he was dreaming of.

There is no way of knowing what happened to someone when they simply disappear one day. And other than maybe an overworked social worker, there is no one who would notice and could advocate for him. It’s anyone’s guess how many people, including citizens, the Trump administration has disappeared. My ex-friend might have been one of the many casualties lost in the noise and chaos.

* * * *

Even before my former friend’s disappearance, I’d been wondering about this kind of thing over the past year.

If ICE kidnapped someone and there were no witnesses nor any nearby cameras recording the event, it could be like it never happened. If the individual were alone without family and friends around to care about them, and if they were poor, unemployed, or homeless, there might be no one to realize they’re missing, no one to look for and inquire about them, no one to report it to the police and FBI — not that Trump’s FBI, even if a missing case of an immigrant were reported, would likely take it seriously.

We don’t know that ICE is keeping full and accurate records of detainees and deportees, much less deaths. It’s anyone’s guess what’s actually happening and the full extent of it.

The known number of detainees was 68,400 by mid-December of last year, along with a final tally of 31 documented deaths while in detainment, some of them suspicious. Though that’s not including injuries and deaths caused during ICE altercations (e.g., Jonathan Ross’ cold-blooded murder of Renee Good with malicious intent: “Fucking bitch!”). It’s ICE’s deadliest year since 2004 when 32 ICE detainees died, but at least the Bush administration had the excuse of being in the middle of the War On Terror, if a bad excuse.

More generally, in 2025, the U.S. saw about 600,000 missing person reports filed with the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (an increase from 533,936 in 2024), with over 25-26,000 cases still open as of January. There is no way to determine how many of those might be victims of ICE raids and roundups, or else other government agencies enacting Trump’s policies.

But if we can’t prove who might be the culprit, it’s concerning that there is at least 76,000 more missing people the year Trump took office. That is higher than any year under President Joe Biden. In fact, Biden accomplished dropping the numbers to a greater degree than any president since data was kept. Therefore, it’s worthy of note that the number of missing people was also higher under the previous Trump administration that came before Biden. A pattern, methinks.

[That said, the Biden administration was horrific in terms of how immigrants were treated at the border (e.g., heavy death toll of immigrant crossings), if the DNC were quiet about it and if for some reason Republicans only glorify violence when they are the perpetrators. No recent president of either party has been a friend to immigrants (e.g., President Barack Obama as the Deporter-In-Chief), just some relatively less evil than others.]

Officially missing people aside, there are even missing people within the ICE system itself: Misplaced and forgotten? Deported to never be heard from again? Rotting in foreign concentration camps and torture prisons? Buried in mass graves?

Last year’s data indicates a significant issue with keeping track of detainees. There are reports of thousands of individuals who have been difficult to locate or are completely missing from public databases. More than 5,000 ICE victims have been made unfindable, effectively erased from existence and hence no evidence of what additional crimes may have been committed against them: abuse, torture, starvation, rape, solitary confinement, murder, etc.

We have enough evidence, proven cases, and witness accounts to know bad things are happening all the time. We just don’t know the full extent of it.

* * * *

Limiting ourselves to what we do know, the extreme illegality and unconstitutionality of this is audacious.

But none of this is entirely surprising. ICE has been accused of many crimes over the decades. International humanitarian agencies have been regularly putting out reports on them. It’s one of the many contributing factors for why various other international organizations have downgraded U.S. democracy to weak, compromised, partial, or failed; and long before Trump came to power.

The operation of criminality and corruption is extensive at this point. From the full data available this past September, ICE detained people in 528 facilities but acknowledged using just 189. So, entire facilities — several hundred of them, in fact — filled with victims have been disappeared, in being operated covertly and without documentation. It’s as if there were hundreds of secret GITMOs, if an open secret.

Of course, there is no public data about how many people and incidents were never in official records in the first place, the unknown unknowns. It’s easy to disappear the invisible.

In a society without much of a social safety net or civil rights protections, people slip through the cracks all the time. The lack of democratic transparency and accountability has made it challenging or impossible for families and attorneys to find information on detainees or occasionally even to determine that someone has been formally detained, as opposed to mysteriously disappeared some other way that has nothing to do with ICE (ran away, murdered, sold into sex slavery, etc).

Of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits, third-party analyses highlighted that official ICE data releases were often delayed, incomplete, and contained errors. That is to say the government isn’t being helpful. Quite the opposite. The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to be obstructive. Hiding evidence, specifically of crimes against humanity, is usually an admission of guilt.

The public data we have access to only represents what the Trump administration has been forced to admit to by the courts, that is when on the rare occasion when they comply with court demands. The full picture might only be revealed if and when the present fascist regime is overthrown. As soon as possible, assuming we can resurrect a semblance of democratic rule of law, we need to enact a truth-and-reconciliation commision that implements a thorough investigation.

* * * *

For greater context, this is part of the larger immigrant policy, such as the cruel xenophobia of border policy with so-called ‘deterrence’. Between 10,000 and 80,000 people have died at the border, with thousands more missing. Many were asylum seekers. They followed U.S. law by having showed up at the border and announced their presence via call to the proper authorities, with many having died while waiting for days to get a response.

Large swaths of them are refugees fleeing countries that have been the targets of U.S. covert operations and state terrorism, U.S. support of despotic regimes and paramilitary groups, and other U.S. actions to destabilize the region. If not for the generations of political evil and crimes against humanity committed by the U.S. government, if not for weak regulations that ensure U.S.-manufactured guns flood black markets and flow south of the border, then there wouldn’t be so many people fleeing Latin America in the first place.

Since right-wingers hate refugees so much, why do they support the very policies that create so many of them at our border? One begins to think that right-wingers either aren’t very smart and rational or that they’re downright evil — then again, it could be a both/and scenario.

To emphasize that point, the Trump administration has committed an illegal and unconstitutional war of aggression against Venezuela. Now he has kidnapped their president, against international law, and possibly pushing us closer to an international conflict or even another world war.

But it never ends, of course, with harm to poor brown people far away in other countries. The abusive practices committed against foreigners has been turned back on Americans of all sorts, if disproportionately minorities. As history shows, imperial atrocities never remain limited to distant colonies and territories — the chickens come home to roost. Trump has openly stated he plans to go after U.S. citizens: “Homegrown criminals are next.”

Instead of solving the crisis, Trump uses the crisis to heighten the terror, which then increases the authoritarian response from his diehard followers. He thinks he is so clever with his smarmy smile. With fawning yes-men and earnest knob-gobblers, he convinces himself he is a genius, rather than a weak and pathetic imitation of Vladimir Putin. But before he crashes and burns, he is potentially setting us on a disastrous course for an even worse and more vicious social dominator to take control.

Beginning at least with the 1933 Business Plot, that has been the active ambition and scheme of the right-wing shadow network. But authoritarian governance was the plan of the American ultra-right from the beginning (Federalist’s “Vigorous Executive” and Project 2025’s Imperial Presidency), and it’s what fueled the American Civil War when Southern aristocrats sought to defeat the federal government and seize power for themselves. Having learned from those past defeats, we’re just now finally seeing the culmination of a long-term strategy of weakening democracy, eliminating regulations, stacking courts with activist judges, promoting inequality, and so much else.

As a people, we Americans are being pushed toward a forced choice, either submission to totalitarianism or fighting back, be it mass protest movement, riots, civil war, or revolution. All of that is unnecessary, of course. We could return America to its centuries-old tradition of being a welcoming destination for immigrants and, if imperfectly, aspiring to democracy. We can hope this nightmare will end soon and without the necessity of intervening violence to stop it.

Let’s hope more of those duped by MAGA rhetoric will learn a lesson from their mistakes and finally wake up before it’s too late, along with those Americans who have up to this point not taken seriously how bad it’s gotten. We need Americans to be fully Woke in its original sense, that of an awareness and understanding about systemic oppression, persecution, and violence. But also in the sense that the world need not be this way.

We need a real Morning in America. Sunlight clears the eyes and sanitizes the infection, brightens the world and lights the way. May this crisis be the darkness before the dawn.

“None of this means that we will automatically win. I’m not asking you to be an optimist here, but I am demanding that you have hope. Hope is a discipline: it requires that you tirelessly seek out the best ways to climb up that gradient toward a better world, trusting that as you attain higher elevation, you will find new paths up that slope.

“The door is open a crack. Now isn’t the time to complain that it isn’t open wider — now’s the time to throw your shoulder against it.”
~Cory Doctorow, How the Light Gets In

“Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!””
~Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

* * * *

Intentions and aspirations made undeniably clear:

Amid Talk of Fascism, Trump’s Threats and Language Evoke a Grim Past
by Peter Baker

He fashioned a foreign policy around the themes of isolationism and nationalism. When told by New York Times reporters that it sounded as if he were talking about an “America First” approach, he happily appropriated the term. The fact that it was a term discredited by history because of its association before World War II with isolationists, including some Nazi sympathizers, did not matter to him.

Nor did he mind citing fascists like Benito Mussolini. When Mr. Trump retweeted a quote that “it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep,” NBC’s Chuck Todd told him that it was from Mussolini. “I know who said it,” Mr. Trump replied. “But what difference does it make whether it’s Mussolini or somebody else?” He also came to use language familiar to victims of Joseph Stalin when he declared journalists who angered him to be “enemies of the people,” a phrase used to send Russians to the gulag.

Mr. Trump has long expressed interest in the most notorious dictator of the past century, Adolf Hitler, whose Nazis also used that phrase. In a 1990 interview, Mr. Trump said he had a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” although his first wife Ivana Trump and the friend who gave him the book said it was actually “My New Order,” a collection of Hitler speeches.

Mr. Trump’s onetime chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, thought there was a comparison. When he saw Mr. Trump descend the Trump Tower escalator with strongman imagery on that day in 2015, Mr. Bannon later told a Times reporter that he thought, “That’s Hitler!” He meant it as a compliment.

While he was president, Mr. Trump told staff members that “Hitler did a lot of good things.” At another point, he complained to Mr. Kelly, “Why can’t you be like the German generals,” meaning those who reported to Hitler. In interviews with The Times and The Atlantic in recent days, Mr. Kelly confirmed those anecdotes, first reported in several books over the last few years. Mr. Trump denied this past week that he ever said them, and last year he denied ever reading “Mein Kampf.”

Mr. Trump has associated with people who praise Hitler. In 2022, he hosted dinner at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who is a Holocaust denier, and the rap star Kanye West. Mr. West, now going by the name Ye, said shortly after the dinner that “I like Hitler” and that “Hitler has a lot of redeeming qualities.” Twice this past summer, Mr. Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, N.J., hosted speeches by a Nazi sympathizer who has said “Hitler should have finished the job.”

The former president has likewise affiliated himself with the modern world’s autocrats. He has praised some of today’s most authoritarian and, in some cases, murderous leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia (“genius”), President Xi Jinping of China (“a brilliant man”), Kim Jong-un, the leader of North Korea (“very honorable”), President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt (“my favorite dictator”), Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (“a great guy”), former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (“what a great job you are doing”), President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey (“a hell of a leader”) and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary (“one of the most respected men”).

On the other hand, the leaders who earn his scorn are the democrats, like former Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany (“stupid”), former Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain (“a fool”), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada (“two-faced”) and President Emmanuel Macron of France (“very, very nasty”).

* * * *

Sources:

Supreme Court rules Trump can rapidly deport immigrants to Libya, South Sudan and other countries they aren’t from
by Eleanor Paynter

U.S. wants to send deportees to Libya, site of migrant mass graves and brutal detention centres
by Chris Iorfida

ICE Detention Trends
from Vera

Detained Immigrants Detail Physical Abuse and Inhumane Conditions at Largest Immigration Detention Center in the U.S.
by Haddy Gassam

Grave human rights violations following mass expulsions from the United States
from International Detention Coalition

USA: New Findings Reveal Human Rights Violations at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” and Krome Detention Centers
from Amnesty International

95 Percent of Deaths in ICE Detention Could Likely Have Been Prevented With Adequate Medical Care: Report
from ACLU

2025 was ICE’s deadliest year in two decades. Here are the 31 people who died in custody
by Maanvi Singh, Coral Murphy Marcos, & Charlotte Simmonds

Four ICE detainee deaths in four days spark alarm as arrests grow
by Marianne LeVine & Douglas MacMillan

Trump Administration Deadlier for ICE Detainees Than COVID-19 Pandemic
by Molly Gibson

2025 Is ICE’s Deadliest Year In 20 Years
by Gabe Ortiz & Yuna Oh

It’s the deadliest year for people in ICE custody in decades; next year could be worse
by Ximena Bustillo & Rahul Mukherjee

Enforced Disappearances on a Mass Scale”: Thousands of Migrants Vanish from U.S. Tracking Systems in 2025 Trump Deportation Blitz, Human Rights Groups Charge
by David Woodham

Detainees Missing from ICE Database after Entering Alligator Alcatraz
from Project Censored

Could ICE have ‘lost’ 3,000 immigrant arrestees in Chicago?
by Chuck Goudie, Lisa Capitanini, Katy Smyser and Nathan Halder

ICE Hasn’t Published New Detention Data in Over Three Weeks – and It’s a Problem
by Austin Kocher

Military Cover-Up? 100s of Migrants Feared Dead in Mass Grave at AZ’s Barry Goldwater Bombing Range
Interview by Amy Goodman of John Carlos Frey

The Border Patrol Calls Itself a Humanitarian Organization. A New Report Says That’s a Lie.
by Ryan Devereaux

Disappeared: How the US Border Enforcement Agencies Are Fueling a Missing Persons Crisis
from La Coalicion de Derechos Humanos & No More Deaths

American Concentration Camps
by Chris Hedges

Human Rights Watch declaration on prison conditions in El Salvador for the J.G.G. v. Trump case
from Human Rights Watch

“We Were Kidnapped”
by Noah Lanard & Isabela Dias

Outcry as White House Admits to Sending Maryland Man to El Salvador Prison ‘In Error’
by Julia Conley

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was tortured in El Salvador’s CECOT prison
by Chase Lawrence

Trump’s Offshore Gulag
by Editors, Commonweal Magazine

Trump and Bukele’s Concentration Camp
by Andrea Pitzer

It’s Not Hyperbole to Call CECOT a Concentration Camp
by Zeb Larson

A Look Inside the Mass Torture Chamber in El Salvador Being Celebrated by Trump
by Steven Donziger

From Bergen-Belsen to El Salvador
by Daniel Lawson

You could be the next one unlawfully imprisoned in Trump’s Salvadoran gulag
by Max Burns

President Trump said, “home-growns are next.” Here’s our response.
from Prison Policy Initiative

What ‘Law and Order’ Really Costs Democracy
by Jeff Schechtman