It is seldom considered advisable that everyone should know everything. When the 20th Soviet Congress denounced Stalin in 1956 and when the French Communist Party did its best to ignore it, fellow traveller J-P Sartre justified the attitude by declaring that Billancourt (a big Renault car factory on the outskirts of Paris) should not be driven to despair. A few years earlier Louis Fischer had written this:
The Soviets knew the hypnotic effect of the great dream, and as the promised future faded into past they strove to keep alive the trust in delayed benefits. Among other things, they ordered all writers, in the middle of the 1930s, to treat the present as though it did not exist and the future as if it had already arrived. This literary device became known as “Socialist realism”. (1)
Then there is the famous quote starting with the claim that some of the people can be fooled all of the time. How many are some? When Machiavelli published The Prince five hundred years ago, he firmly advised his patron to use secrecy and deception for the advancement of his political agenda. A council followed by most men and women of power before and since, and whose only inconvenience is that mystifications tend to be found out sooner or later. However, memories that are not repeatedly brought to mind are short lived.
Lying is not the same as not telling. The first can result in civil or criminal prosecutions, or even the threat of impeachment. The second is just a silence, omertà for organised crime and national security for governments. And there are those in the know.
For there are, in the present times, two opinions; not, as in former ages, the true and the false, but the outside and the inside; the opinion of the public voiced by the politicians and the newspapers, and the opinion of the politicians, the journalists and the civil servants, upstairs and backstairs and behind stairs, expressed in limited circles. (J.M. Keynes) (2)
Philandering French politicians, especially the alpha roosters who fight for the top job, must not despair the female majority of voters. A conspiracy of silence emanates from power. But the unsaid and the hidden are also inherent in commercial and family relations, where the principles of openness and transparency are equally proclaimed. And yet governments cannot be the mirror-images of the nations they rule over, if they are subjected to the principle of democratic oversight that applies neither to businesses nor to households. They own neither a corporation nor a patrimony, they are the administrators of a republic and, as such, they are accountable to the nation. In practise, governments work for the few who own the republic.
The art of war is all about secrecy, dissimulation and bluff. Information is as important as fire power, knowing the enemy’s intentions is as critical as hiding one’s own.
All warfare is based on deception.
Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder and crush him.
Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.
(Sun Tzu, Laying plans, 18, 20, 24)
The belligerent nations have been fighting hot and cold, colonial and post-colonial wars for such a long time that it has become a second nature. (Countless millions slave away to maintain the military-industrial production of deadly hardware and surveillance software, and this pointless consumption leaves half of humanity in a very precarious situation.) And permanent war has made secrecy a justifiable habit. All the people have to be fooled sometimes, for war. But when war is a continuum going back centuries and projected centuries into the future, then all the people must expect to be fooled all the time. The special circumstances of war propaganda, of hidden and false information, have become the common, ordinary way to govern. To hide from the enemy, the people are kept in the dark. To spy on the enemy, the people lose their privacy. Policies are chosen behind closed doors and thought police scrutinise all electronic flows without discrimination. All this is necessary because society, the nation and the Free World are in mortal danger.
War hysteria cannot reach the levels of the past for lack of sizable opponents. In the 1930s Japan and Germany, and in the 1950s China and the USSR represented significant threats, but to-day’s BRICS and EU do not. In fact, all the military powers are finding it increasingly difficult to control their own territories and dependencies. The menace is and always has been internal, but the usual projection outwards on external causes becomes nonsensical in a globalised world. The peril of dissident mountain tribes does not weigh much against recession, unemployment and extreme wealth inequality. Trying to bind the nation together, rich and poor, town and country, all colours and sizes, to fight a bunch of farmers and herdsmen armed with IEDs, RPGs and AK47s was preposterous, and the ensuing adventure in Iraq no less so. The post-colonial wars had been divisive, but the Cold War overshadowed them. Now that the unifying shadow has faded, overseas belligerence just adds more division to the social confrontation.
Empires are built, expand and perpetuate themselves with the extreme violence of war. And war needs duplicity and stealth, which in turn must corrode and corrupt society. No wonder that empires ultimately crumble and fall. Their material power may be invincible, but their ideological power rots away from the inside. No one believes anymore, because the common story is no longer credible. The middle class dream bursts like a real estate bubble, and the very rich suddenly appear to be an abnormality. When the intermediary steps of the social pyramid collapse, the upper class is left alone at the top of a tower, and any movement of the base can topple that slender edifice. As power and wealth concentrate in ever fewer hands, government becomes conspiratorial and dictatorial, and may resort to the rule of terror. The possessors of power may sacrifice the possessors of wealth, and dispossess them, because concentrating power signifies exclusion and the ultimate tyranny of one person. Occasionally, the affluent realise that their wealth stems from the people’s creative energy, and that tyranny dampens all energies and merely insures the unequal distribution of riches. They sometimes choose to have less of more rather than more of less. But it goes against the grain, so the decision is usually postponed until events are beyond their control, with everyone losing in the end.
The democratic ideal was conceived in Athens and was concomitant with literacy. Laws were carved in stone for all to read, past agreements in writing were produced as proof, graffiti spread rumours and invectives, and public officials were accountable for the orders they drafted. The passage from an oral to a written transmission of information means that the recorded past is more precise and can predate all living memory. It means that the same message is received by all, without the transformations of word of mouth and hearsay. It follows that equally informed citizens have concern for the polis and the common weal, and are engaged in politics. Information forms opinions and is the foundation of majority rule. An orator can sway a crowd with the rhythm and sound of words, whereas the writer must rely on reason and can be confronted with his past statements. The general literacy of Greeks and Romans developed with papyrus and numerous scribes, and disappeared in Western Europe until paper and printing brought it back progressively. The printed page brought a revival of spreading information that re-ignited the notions of republic and representation, and the opposing forces of secrecy and divulgation.
Reflections, founded on all the examples, have made me believe that, in a popular state, truth should always appear clear and naked. One should always say it, make it public, confide in all the people about everything that concerns their great interests. The discretions, the dissimulations, the a parte, between coteries of exclusive men, of so called regulators, serve only to deaden energy, to render opinion false, floating, uncertain and, thereby, care-free and servile, and to give tyranny the facilities to organise itself without obstacles. (Gracchus Babeuf 1760-1797) (3)
Literacy is accompanied by spreading information, public opinion and political involvement. It changes the power structures of society and allows the pen to compete with the sword/gun. So that controlling the flow of information becomes a major preoccupation of government. Over time, the level of control has depended more on technology than on the will of rulers, and its ups and downs have modelled the course of history. The numerous artisan printers of the 18th and 19th centuries produced subversive literature on a par with official productions, often in clandestine conditions. Then the rotary steam press (1843) introduced a capitalist control of the predominant sources of information. Books and newspapers were mass produced and diffused a uniform message to school children and the reading public. This was followed by photography, cinema, radio and finally television, the ultimate opinion maker transmitting the same continuing story to a hundred million minds. Mass media dominated the 20th century, with its nationalist hysteria and its lemming like destructiveness. Opinions were concocted by press barons and network moguls, by movies and advertising, by extremely centralised organisations employing the best and brightest to get their message across. The press had bullied a generation into making war in 1914, and radio had entranced the next one in 1939, television proved to be less effective. It turned out to be easier to encourage belligerence with words than with images. War is not photogenic, and post-colonial counterinsurgency was as ugly as a nuclear mushroom cloud.
Information control by corporations and governments produced a counterculture reaction. The movement bloomed in the late 1960s as the baby boom generation reached adulthood. Their parents and grandparents had been fooled, but they would not be. The satire of the samizdat and the underground press could not match the bludgeon of main stream media outlets, but the electrified sound of music could and did. Quite suddenly, some hairy troubadours were expressing and influencing the mind-set of a whole generation not just its intellectual minority. Briefly, it seemed that the old dusty world would be blasted away by the decibels of a guitar riff. There was also a return of colour. It began on screens and in magazines, spread to clothing and interiors and, as eyes got used to the idea, provoked a yearning for the rainbow splendours of nature as opposed to the drab greyness of cities. Flower power would overthrow the armies of the night. This cultural revolution shook the system, may have actually threatened it at some point, but the vacillating power structures regrouped and recouped as much and more than before. And the movement’s failure opened the way for futureless nihilism and narcotic abuse, a modern, more humane version of the deportations and executions that usually follow major social upheavals. Wealth makes repression subtle, and money convinced many that the status quo was the best of possible worlds.
Colours and electric guitars had blown minds and rocked the boat, and the people had shown they were not all fools, but nothing much changed. Warring continued, information control tightened and alternative media were capitalised, conglomerated and generally silenced. Music was smooth and mindless, colour was fashionably everywhere, the middle class turned from being hip to being yup, from dropping out to climbing up. And, as the Soviet empire fell apart, the triumph of capital signalled history’s last act. However, the motor of the human story is not the hegemonic struggle between nations and ideologies. Its driving force is the perpetual conflict opposing an oligarchy of wealth and the popular masses. It is a class war whose form is modified by technology and whose intensity ebbs and flows with balance of power, reaching an occasional paroxysm of rebellion and reaction. These peaks of social activity seem linked to information technology and the people’s capacity to make use of it themselves. Printing offered this possibility until it was swamped by capitalist mass diffusion and, in its way, so did the telephone notwithstanding police eavesdropping. As for Hertzian emissions, they were tightly controlled from the outset. Then the telephone network evolved into a world wide web and gave the people a new possibility to inform instead of being informed, to tell instead of being told. Now, the smartphone allows anyone anywhere to inform with words and images any number of people from one upwards, in a split second. The web is modifying social connections. Likes and dislikes form a bond that contends with the ties of the past to family, neighbourhood, class, party, ethnicity and nation. These cyber groups are sharing, a notion that had largely disappeared since the commons were fenced, and their connectivity means they can act together at short notice for a group action, an email flood, a flash mob and much more. However, this new reality only concerns those who have grown up with the technology. In the ageing industrial world they are still a minority, but elsewhere under-30s often make up more than half the population and their impact on events is that much greater.
The possessors of wealth and power hide their turpitudes behind a righteous mask. To justify their positions and privileges, they should be the nation’s best and most virtuous. The right to command action and spending should be deserved. But the split into haves and have-nots, patricians and plebeians, one and ninety-nine, and the patrimonial transmission that perpetuates class differences, contradict hierarchies based on merit. To cover this up a story is told. For ages supernatural forces were evoked to consecrate the next in line, and divine intervention remains a part of the narrative. The rest of the tale concentrates on the rags to riches, log-cabin to White House, favela to penthouse course run by the hero of the day, and on the superior qualifications and morality of the better off. Imbecile kings, depraved bishops and psychopathic barons have always cast doubts on the ruling class story, but for most of history rulers monopolised the telling. Now, as never before, that monopoly is broken by a web of alternatives. Instead of drowning out all else, it is picked apart by a multitude of soft voices.
The ideological machine has lost its channels of communication, and is frantically trying to re-establish them. This may not be possible, as the story is becoming increasingly difficult to believe and follow. Plan B is surveillance, interception, intimidation and rammed down doors in the middle of the night. When the narrative of power gets too far-fetched, when it disconnects from the general experience of reality, all other voices must be silenced. A “Capitalist realism”, with climate control, colonies on Mars and a prosthetic life expectancy of centuries, must be able to occupy the realm of information unchallenged by Cassandras foretelling ecological and financial dooms. But, should those prophesies turn out to be real, no amount of stem cells, high altitude tinkering and roving robots will be of any use. And the unprecedented possibilities of informing and being informed could break down because of extreme weather and lack of money, or be interrupted by government decision. The anthroposphere has become as complex as the biosphere, and as essential for human activities. Electricity, Hertzian signals and fuels are as important as air, water and food. But the latter are supplied by a very rare cornucopia called Earth, and the former are man-made. A part of human needs depends on a well-functioning planet, while the rest depends on human cooperation around the world. Both systems are supporting increasing pressures and both have breaking points. It seems there is a delay of some twenty years between carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere and their greenhouse effects. If this is so, the climatic disturbances of the present are the result of emissions prior to 1994 (+/-), when world oil consumption was less than 70Mbd. For the past ten years it has oscillated around 85Mbd (coal +60%, gas +40%). As for debts, they only present a problem when they have to be paid back or rolled over. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and bond markets are the inheritance of past emissions. Greenhouse gases and public debts could accumulate unnoticed because their consequences were not immediate. Climatologists and central bankers could maintain that all was well and ridicule those desert voices that predicted catastrophes. Even now, with warming perceptible and governments on the verge of bankruptcy, the lying discourse goes on and many people prefer to believe it. Many more feel powerless, ignore the subjects altogether and “give tyranny the facilities to organise itself without obstacles.”
Social media opened agora everywhere. The populace in all its diversity was able to speak, and the sound of those voices has unsettled the dungeons of power, momentarily. Their watchmen did not see it coming and were taken off guard. The reaction is repressive, but the level of acceptable violence, if production and commerce are to continue as usual, depends on a society’s wealth and development. The savagery of the Syrian civil war, or even Russia’s incursion in Crimea, would bring more sophisticated social structures to a standstill. Martial law is an impediment to the circulation of capital, labour and commodities, and has a heavy financial cost. It cannot be envisaged equally everywhere, so other strategies are being experimented, with covert surveillance of all communications on the one hand, and absolute control of media outlets on the other. Instead of their holders being physically threatened and eliminated, contrary discourses are bugged and drowned out by celebrity glitter. The web made dissidence vocal and visible, popular discontent was heard and seen worldwide. A summer of indignation swept one country after another. A few tyrants were ousted but plutocracy held firm, and the movement petered out from discouragement and the force of arms. It is reminiscent of rebellions in the late 1960s and is a similar cultural transformation carried by new generations, rather than a political or social revolution. Digital technology is changing the way reality is perceived. But it only affects those who have grown up with it and whose minds are supple enough to integrate the new modes of perception. Major technological jumps provoke a generational divide that ignores the other social antagonisms. The young feel they must push aside the old who cannot understand what is going on, “do you Mr Jones?” A sentiment founded on experience, today as never before. But the past is clutching on with its usual frenzy. It has its beliefs and certainties, its privileges of power and wealth, and its fear of oblivion. The past could accept the verdict of history and “f…f…fade away” genteelly, but it never does and this resistance constrains and infects the future’s construction, or stops it altogether. As old and new confront each other, the flow of information will determine the transition’s destructiveness and hiding the facts can only increase the ultimate upheaval.
1. The God that Failed (1949), Bantam Books p. 208
2. Essays in Persuasion, 4. The change of opinion (1921), Classic House Books p. 28
3. The Plebeian’s Manifesto, p.1
Quotes from Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a thin man” and The Who’s “My Generation”
