Plutocracies
exist because they pay mercenaries and buy politicians and, more
importantly, because they decide what people think. Thought control
goes back to the earliest forms of speech, when words, tales and
legends were modelling minds to a social norm. And thought control
was a tool of power for theocracies such as the Ancient Egyptian
dynasties, who inscribed steles and obelisks, and plastered their
pyramids to use them as billboards. And secular Roman emperors would
have their statues and their triumphal arches erected everywhere. And
when Constantine revived theocratic rule, he adopted the Christian
thought control that had shown its effectiveness. Thinking depends on
language and vocabulary. If the words do not exist, the thought
cannot take shape. Orwell’s description of Newspeak is all about
reducing and reshaping vocabulary, while Klemperer’s LTI is an
account of the real-life phenomenon in Nazi Germany (1). Minority
rule has always done its best to restrain its subjects from thinking.
It is only when people govern themselves that words and the
imagination they induce expand freely. The rest of the time they
undergo a standard discourse infinitely repeated, and alternatives
are marginalised or criminalised.
Concentrated
power relies on force and thought control. People must believe that
their rulers are just, that god is on their side, that there is no
alternative. And these convictions must be acquired as early as
possible, in childhood. Schooling is the foundation of servility to
force and ideology. For most of the day, week and year, children are
closed in a room with an adult who knows. They have no choice. They
must be there and listen to that. And what they are being taught has
little if anything to do with what they want to know, or even need to
know. But habits set in, and pupils are obliged to compete with one
another. This constraint and the struggle to keep up are presented as
natural and unavoidable. So that rebellion is judged as depraved or
criminal, which are the two possibilities left open. However, most do
comply and accept the rule and the story. Rules that keep them in
their place and stories that make them feel superior.
Throughout
recorded history, monarchs, tyrants and emperors, oligarchs,
plutocrats and aristocrats have held power with the sword and the
pen, and the latter is the mightier. The process is timeless but
technology is in constant evolution. Weapons and information have not
always been easy to control. Guns and print made a breach that put an
end to feudalism and let in the Renaissance and the Reformation. The
reaction was absolutism, which was brought down by Enlightenment.
Printing circulated old and new ideas, of democracy and republic, of
cosmology, physics and chemistry. And fighting with muskets and pikes
did not need the arduous elitist training of jousting and
swordsmanship. But, when the rule of aristocratic landowners was
replaced by the government of merchant bankers, industrial
entrepreneurs and media magnates, the mass production of force and
information was overwhelming.
The
20th century saw a vast centralisation of ideas. The
rotary press was printing identical pages by the millions. Movies
were showing the same images across the nation and beyond. Radio
emissions were diffusing a solitary narrative throughout the ether.
Finally, television brought it all into every household. The
centralised control of a nation’s thinking helped the advent of
totalitarian regimes and has insured the dominion of just a few over
the multitude. In the 1960s a counterculture took shape around the
Civil Rights movements and the mobilisation against the war in
Vietnam, with an underground press and pirate radios. But it did not
survive the drugs and violence of the 1970s and the conservative
revival that followed.
Newspapers,
movies, radio and television need a lot of financial backing, and are
hence part of the dominant system. They cannot stray far from
standard ideas. The internet broke that absolute hold of wealth on
information and ideology. On the web, even the most radical notions
and concepts could be expressed for free and reach a potentially
global audience. The new millennium saw the usage of internet expand
considerably, and the introduction of smart phones has made it a
constant universal habit, and most of the world’s population is
connected. This vast space of liberated speech took governments and
corporations by surprise, but they have reacted quickly with mass
surveillance, censorship, and robotic interventions, and by occupying
as much room as they can. Subversive and rebellious ideas have been
marginalised, but they have not been silenced. Internet has opened
the forum to countless voices, and the result is a cacophony in which
the corporate media and government are reassuringly conservative. But
internet exists and its effects can only be measured with time. The
only comparable precedent was the movable-type printing press
developed by Gutenberg five and a half centuries ago. The upheavals
it fuelled in religion, politics and science were momentous and would
not have happened without the new medium. Civil and religious
authorities tried to stem the flow, printers were arrested, fined,
incarcerated or worse and presses were destroyed, to no avail. This
led them to compete and stand up to comparison. But clerical morality
contradicted the Gospel narrative, and papal bulls lacked the
reasoning power of Descartes and Newton. And monarchs were confronted
with the resuscitated stories of the Maccabees and the Gracchus who
rebelled against oppression. Printing circulated information from
multiple sources on an unprecedented scale and transformed points of
view beyond recall. And the might of religious and secular
repressions could not turn the clock back. The cat was out of the
bag.
Printing
set off a spiral of chaos and Christendom was plunged into rebellion,
religious and civil wars, violence and misery. It broke the absolute
hold of power on thought. People came to realise that other ways of
thinking were possible. And that put them automatically in
opposition. Thinking differently is the pre-eminent schismatic
activity. However, the late 19th century saw a return of
centralised control of print and, in the 20th century, of
the new video and audio media. This was because they needed large
investments and depended on the ruling system, hence the uniformity
of the ideas on offer. That has not changed, but the internet has
blown a huge hole in the edifice. It has disrupted central control of
thinking, and rulers everywhere are doing all they can to take it
back. China may have succeeded, but then so did Spanish kings back in
the 16th century thanks to the Inquisition. Elsewhere some
basic rights are hindering the process, notably in the old industrial
nations where the notions of democracy and commonwealth, of freedom
of enterprise and speech still exist. Notions that may not resist the
chaos of ideas set off by internet. For those who have not structured
or reasoned their own beliefs, there is an overload of information
with a multiplicity of contradictory messages. They no longer know
what is “faked” and what is “real”, because the mainstream
uniform discourse has been shattered. People are left clutching at
straws, and celebrity has become the most credible source of news.
The old pre-digital world is crumbling away and these are dangerous
times. The nations of the world are caught in a maelstrom of
information, and they are desperately seeking leaders to show them
the way out of their predicament. But desperation is not the best
state for making such choices.
1.
LTI is the acronym of Lingua Tertii Imperii, The Language of the
Third Reich.
