Reactionary politics in a chaotic world

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 20^th 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 19^th century saw a return of centralised control of print and, in the 20^th 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 16^th 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.