Orwellian Times

      The Putin regime, the Chinese Communist Party under Xi, the followers of Erdogan in Turkey or Orban in Hungary, the pop-fascist movements in France and America (Trump followers who reject election results and the courts i.e. the rule of law) – their controllers have all achieved something that even Goebbels did not dare in his conduct of Nazi propaganda. The absolute standard of patriotism, of loyalty, and thus of humanity, of goodness, is to embrace uncritically . . . not just embrace but passionately espouse and propagate whatever construction of “reality” their fearless leaders determine serves the interests of their “movement” (i.e. their controllers). Anyone who insists on comparing a propagated belief with the hard facts is a “traitor” by definition. Truth is simply irrelevant, of no importance. Important is commitment, and whatever world version heightens commitment is by definition “true”. (Seems the logical outcome of Sartrian existentialism: being before essence, commitment before truth.)

       Goebbels, by contrast, when confronted with some fact that could not be plausibly denied without destroying credibility did what propagandists have always done: accept the fact that could not be plausibly denied, and spin it in ways that served the Party, or frame it in ways that disarmed its potential to harm the Party. He couldn't just put it out that the Wehrmacht won the battle for Stalingrad - as Trump would have, I guess - but framed the defeat as a glorious triumph of German heroism, etc. 

       I find this new power to create reality for a mass of people amazing and depressing. I find the utter tenuousness of our hold on reality (truth) shocking and depressing. “Reality” and “truth” – it’s not just weaponizing false constructs of reality, influencing people’s perceptions of reality in the service of power. The atomic bomb here is that truth and reality themselves have been made radically indeterminate, and thus in their very essence negated. It is a making true of Nietzsche’s idea that all claims to truth are masks for a will-to-power such that the only choice is what makes me more powerful.

    Power: I remember a definition from course in government: the ability to enforce one’s will over others, even against resistance. But Trump’s power over the minds and hearts of his “base” is more than that. Resistance is precluded from the outset. Trump’s kind of power, like Hitler’s, is Orwellian. Orwellian power: when the insurrectionist believes Trump’s lie in the face of all contrary evidence; when, therefore, every source of information or judgment that even at the margin’s casts doubt on the Trumpian fantasy version of the world is automatically rejected as “fake news” coming from the enemy (who are “vermin”). He is immune from truth. He invents his own “truth.” Trump says x; therefore, x is true. He once bragged: “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Well, not really bragging: he really is untouchable: corruption on a massive scale, sexual assault, the Hollywood tapes, a coup attempt – nothing touches him. He determines what is to be believed and his base demands that he determine what is to be believed. Many of his inner circle wanted him to distance himself from the attack on the Capital. He understood better than they that would have meant the end. His base wanted the Big Lie and would never have forgiven Trump had he not given it to them. They are one, Trump and his base.

      Recall the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith really believed 2+2=5 because Big Brother said it did. That was after extreme torture. Trump’s people believe it because they want to believe it, no torture necessary. And if truth is nothing but whatever the powerful say it is, why not? (If the Nazi’s had won, the history of WWII would be very different – so the line of thought. No it wouldn’t. Only people would be prevented from knowing that history.) Through him those who felt powerless feel powerful. That is his trick. That is all he cares about; that is all they care about in their hearts: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Never mind that he is using the suckers; a Jim Bakker of politics.)

    We see the same thing in individual personalities on a small scale – the narcissistic personality of our times tends toward the same deconstruction of the distinction between truth and lie. Nietzsche preached the superman who determines for himself what is good and evil, what is true and false. Seems we have a whole country of little supermen and superwomen now. 

     What a fragile and utterly precious and essential thing is truth for our humanity! How easy it is to lose the love for it.

 

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Alternative  facts, or the reduction to absurdity of the notion that reality is essentially socially constructed. Trying to control what people think about something horrible Trump did, his propaganda minister used some technical jargon from the trade: ‘we need to come up with some alternative facts,’ which of course is logically absurd, since a fact is by definition ‘what is the case’ and what we agree on or can be brought to agree on. The limits of what we can think and feel, the determinant of our thoughts, actions, and responses to our lives and all that happens in our world is ultimately a function of what we take to be real (or true) and good. But the Trumpian 'alternative facts' reveals something philosophically interesting. The subversion of truth doesn't happen at the level of facts. 'Alternative facts' already imply a different conceptualization of things. Define your terms differently, and you get 'alternative facts.' It's actually a quite sophisticated propaganda tool that plays on the radical lack of determination of meaning in language. 

     You can see this clearly in the current Putin "special military operation." Putin largely controls what those who are in his bubble think is real, factually and conceptually - his base only, not all or even most Russians, I have read; no more than Trump controls all Americans.  Russians are not supposed to believe there is a war. Well, depends on what you mean by 'war,' doesn’t it? And the ‘special military operation’ that is not a war has the purpose of ‘de-nazifying’ Ukraine – for example, of their Jewish president – and ‘liberating’ the Ukrainians, who perhaps don’t realize yet they are being liberated. In an alternative reality, words like ‘war’, ‘propaganda’, ‘liberate’, and ‘Nazi’ mean different things, things that have only the most tenuous connection to reality if they have any at all. They are like bad interpretations of a poem nobody knows directly. 

     This is just an example of how reality is not constructed by changing the facts; what is a fact at all depends on how reality is conceptualized, and this happens at a deeper level than facts. If any form of Ukrainian nationalism is defined as 'Nazi,' and given that Ukrainian nationalism is part of the resistance to Putin's designs for the country, then it is a 'fact' that the 'special military operation' seeks to 'de-nazify' Ukraine. Translated: seeks to remove Ukrainian nationalism in all its forms. Facts are only facts when one agrees on concepts. People who think it is absurd to think of the current Ukraine government as Nazis simply don't share Putin's implicit definition of 'Nazi' to include Ukrainian nationalists. 

     (Of course, there were some Ukrainian nationalists who embraced the Nazis during WWII, a very bad lot to be sure, probably full of fanatical hatred because of the mass starvation in the 30's caused by Stalin's destruction of traditional agriculture. To get revenge on Stalin they slaughtered Jewish women and children, because in the Nazi conceptualization the Stalin regime was a tool of the whole Jewish race. Well, if this is the concept you believe in, then it would be perfectly rational to murder every single man, woman, child of Jewish heritage. When concepts get so detached from the world, anything goes.)

        Facts depend on concepts, and concepts depend on seeing the world as a whole in one way rather than another. And like Orwell’s 1984, Putin or Trump have enormous power based on their ability to determine what is real – partly in a dance with the resentments of large sections of the population that want to live in a different reality and through the fearless leaders can, in their own minds, live in an alternative reality. They would revolt against Trump in a heartbeat if he started speaking truth.  It’s not that it is forced on them at gunpoint – that’s what makes it so powerful. 

      I suppose the Catholic totalitarians of the 17th century feared the loss of their power to define reality when they persecuted Galileo and others - they needed the stake to enforce belief, unlike Trump. They cared more about the power to say what the cosmos was than any particular model of the cosmos. They didn't give a hoot about science; they were interested in the power to define reality, to define what universe we live in. What power! God-like! To stipulate what the cosmos must be like for everybody, authoritatively.  In the desire for that kind of power I think may lay the deepest essence of evil.