John Rawls’s Blind Storytelling

The political Left is it in disarray. We could blame it on the establishment, on the privatization of education that has robbed it of its popular intellectual core, we could blame it on espionage perpetrated by “internal security” agencies like CIA’s COINTELPRO program, or we could blame it on the political disenfranchisement of criminals in the world largest prison-state. We could say all of these things and be correct. But despite these obstacles it has always been the nature of the Left to stand up to oppression and exploitation, and in times of crisis it should gain, rather than lose strength. The Left presents an alternative to an unjust world, and while injustice can be carried out under its banner, under conditions such as ours- with inequality rarely so pronounced– it should be flourishing.

Yet it is not, and while external forces are one factor, internal forces within the Left have done their part in paralyzing the movement’s broad appeal and, consequently, broad action. Though much theoretical work is still being done, it has been along lines of particular identity rather than theoretical or class motivations that now drive a majority of people to oppose the “system” as such. When one is oppressed in America, one is oppressed as a racial or religious minority, as an LGBT citizens, as a woman or along another vector of identity outside of the white, male, heteronormative capitalist establishment. Storytelling has come to the fore as a method of critique, where experiences of injustice at the hands of any number of social institutions (the police not least among them) are shared from a first-person perspective.

On the one hand this is a very good thing, because we’re collating more and more experiences “straight from the tap” so to speak, which should allow us to identify (and respond) to problems more quickly and intelligently. But, on the other hand, this method has paradoxically re-essentialized factors of identity like race and gender as they are the foundation for the source of the critique. So when I (a white, male heterosexual myself) read a first-person account of injustice, the effect is twofold: on the one hand I now feel I have a better grasp of the issue than if I had merely read academic articles, yet I am also hesitant to act on this understanding because it may not be my place.

But this doesn’t merely apply to white males. White women have sometimes experienced this in relation their non-white peers, non-white men with their female peers and straight non-white women sometimes will sometimes experience it with non-hetero peers (or the other way around, considering that some in the feminist community do not believe trans subjects can be properly called “women”). The pattern continues in many permutations. The point is that we are playing a complicated game of political Twister, all of us bending over backwards to try and accommodate each others identities into the society in which we live currently. We speak of micro-aggression endlessly without giving concrete alternatives to the macro-aggressive structures that engender it. Though storytelling has enhanced the richness of our critique, without the unifying force of a clear alternative it has also narrowed our perspective. This focus on micro-aggression and immediate experience has given rise to a Left culture of blame, where instead of imagining political solutions to radically change society, we deliver hyper-personal moral prescriptions in the hopes of establishing equality under such systems as we currently have.

Perhaps this feature of dissent mirrors the attitude of the politicians who have sculpted our political mindset: Politicians in our era have become the caretakers of capital rather than leaders with concrete ideas for society’s progress. The most dangerous ideas Democrats have are not ideas that will change society or bring it forward, but that might simply halt the advance of Capital’s encroaching power.

The problem here is not storytelling itself as a method of critique- it is the lack of a broader context for these stories to form building blocks for positive, universal social movement, a story for our stories so to speak. To achieve that we must acquire the theoretical tools necessary for proposing an alternative vision of society; tools that do not deny storytelling, but transmute the raw psychological material of our narratives into a force for change.

The Veil of Ignorance

It may seem counterintuitive at this point to introduce an old dead white guy as a figure of sympathy but John Rawls, an American political philosopher of the 20^th century, merits our attention. Rawls has by no means been abandoned by the political establishment- his writings still find traction among the more liberal members of the supreme court, and he even used to dine with President Clinton regularly to discuss (one assumes, though perhaps they were both Friends enthusiasts) matters of policy. However, though his thought remained important to the liberal establishment, that establishment’s interpretation of it has typically been quite narrow.

Rawls’s signature thought experiment is known as “the original position,” a conception of the political subject outside of society as such, where one considers the structure of society behind a “veil of ignorance,” removed from personal conditions of class, race or gender among other things (like natural talents). From this position, Rawls says, we should imagine that we are going to enter the world, but without any knowledge of where or as whom. As the “pure” political subject we should be trying to stack the odds in our favor by stacking the odds in everybody’s favor, as the conditions into which we are born are essentially random. Nobody is capable of pressing for advantages for a particular faction of the citizenry because they cannot know the identity they will receive.

Now, let’s take a step back because I realize that this may seem like a way of pushing identity aside as an issue to make way for “politics proper.” Far from it. Though Rawls encourages us to see society as subjects detached from a particular identity, this is only necessary because in the concrete world everybody is attached to a particular identity that determines their role in society. The point of the original position is not to deny the importance of identity, but rather argue that discrimination (or favoritism) on the basis of identity is categorically unjust, and to give opponents of discrimination a method for shared critique. When we face statistics regarding the racially determined nature of stop and frisk (LINK), or police killings, or employment, or merely the hugely skewed distribution of wealth we know they are unjust, but the original position gives us a method for articulating exactly why it is so. They are unjust because, if we consider every subject of a society to have equal political importance, then systemic discrimination amounts to exactly the sort of stance it is insane to defend from the original position. If we consider it possible that we ourselves might have been born belonging to a different race or class, then we take slights against members of those communities as being in some way slights against ourselves, as the distinction between our identities is essentially arbitrary, not a matter of choice.

Also important to note here is that Rawls himself was acquainted with oppression. Though he was a straight white dude, he was born in 1921 in Baltimore and witnessed first hand the unjust nature of his society, including his hometown’s endemic crime and poverty. He was likewise afflicted by the horrors of WWII, which he fought in, and as a statistician in addition to being a philosopher, realized all too well the irrelevance of the American rags-to-riches story in most people’s lives. Rawls meant to counter the radical injustice that permeated American liberalism by giving egalitarianism the tools to argue within it. For my own part I am doubtful if liberalism itself can be saved by his influence, but the egalitarian tools are useful in their own right.

The general idea of the “original position” is to prioritize equality. It reflects the fact that the conditions of our birth are random- that we are endowed with equal significance as conscious individuals despite our arbitrary fates. The current distribution of wealth in the US reflects exactly the sort of conditions the experiment is meant to critique. Inequality has taken root partially through many Americans belief that they will one day “make it” and so have no need for a social safety net, but statistics show they will occupy the same relative position in their lives (which in turn will be similar to the lives of their parents) more often than not. The real strength of the critique is that it allows us to radically reconsider our position in the society we occupy, but to do so intelligently we need the stories of those who have seen things from a different point of view. Our re-imagining must be informed to construct a coherent story for a parallel life.

Blind Storytelling

To be sure, the interpretation of Rawls I’m giving you is hardly the mainstream opinion, nowadays at least. However, Rawls was a man who grew up in the age of FDR, who had no absolute faith in capital, who didn’t think that strong social programs had no future in America. Most “centrists” or even liberals today would see Rawls egalitarian criterion for justice as being radical, and comparatively it is. One could technically use the original position to argue against a principle like affirmative action as it provides a specific “advantage” for non-whites, but this is to miss the forest through the tress. Using Rawls to argue against the “reverse racism” that paranoid conservatism proposes is to ignore the much larger structural inequalities that make a program like affirmative action necessary.

Rawls must be contextualized within the bigger picture of American society, where historical, political, and economic forces have worked in concert to disenfranchise large sections of the population. Employed as a method for proposing a new society the original position would only work for Gilligan and the islanders, but employed as a method of critique, for declaring injustice, it is much more useful. But we have to know what injustice looks like, feels like, before we can point it out.

And this is the point of putting ourselves in each other’s shoes, insofar as such a thing is possible: it gives us the experience of injustice, not just the facts surrounding it. Such experiences can only be translated to others, not had directly, but it is a process of making society more conscious rather than waiting for it to erupt into perfect consciousness. From a distance, it may be possible for me to think (from police reports) that the high number of police killings is merely an unfortunate side effect of a just system, wherein black and white alike are both subject to punishment. Yet if I am willing to expose myself to the stories of those who have witnessed police oppression first hand, then when I put myself behind “the veil,” so to speak, and make my considerations of justice, I approach the subject with that new, critical knowledge that informs the potential life I could/could’ve been given. My conception of abstract justice is informed by the concrete experiences of injustice to which I am opposed.

In some ways none of this is new information indeed for many its the basic theory behind, well, not being a racist. By considering others’ experiences. The reason I think its valuable to integrate this idea with the Rawlsian conception of justice is that it allows us to unify these critiques by setting a universal standard for what injustice entails. This standard is not meant to undo the work of others, but to strengthen a whole spectrum of critiques, not limited to critiques founded in identity but also along lines of class as well as critiques of an increasingly authoritarian state, the power base of which rests in massive disparities of economic and political power. When we talk about synthesizing perspectives to create a unified vision of resistance, it seems to me that a unified conception of justice is critical to that, and the Rawlsian conception supports the dialogue that is already occurring, while also providing a vision of what a just, and equal, world could look like.

Because the thing is that an occurrence or individual that may signify progress towards equality for some will signify exploitation for others. Take Hillary Clinton, for instance. Mainstream feminists have made of Ms. Clinton a sort of wonder-woman politico, like Margaret Thatcher moved about three inches to the left, interpreting her success as indicative of the enormous social progress made by and for woman in the last couple of decades. Even as late as the 1980s a female Secretary of State would have been unthinkable, but then again, the same might be said for mass surveillance and drone strikes, both of which have happened on her watch. People forget that Ms. Clinton was also on the board of directors for Wal-Mart, which carries similar political sway but at the opposite end of the spectrum. Yet, on the left, fractured as we are by a multiplicity of deeply differing perspectives lacking a common vision, we have become all too ready to take whatever little victories we can. In this way Hillary Clinton, a woman arguably guilty of war crimes and a willful participant in the worst of capitalism’s exploitation, has somehow become an idol.

So is it any surprise that Hill-dog is grooming herself for the 2016 candidacy? No, as the President’s role has been reduced to the figure of “national celebrity” the candidates’ symbolic, rather than practical or political, significance has become their most important figure. Obama’s candidacy was framed within the mythos of the “first black president”- but its become clear that this hasn’t translated into the messianic progressive figure the Left was hoping for to salvage the American political landscape. Obama’s being black has not made his policies any better or worse like every candidate he failed to deliver on his promises because he is merely part of a larger establishment antithetical to actual progress. Racial tensions, far from being alleviated, have reached a crescendo due to police violence that he has consistently deflected criticism of with calls for “understanding.” Yet he remains a sort of ideological linchpin for many black citizens in America, proof that on occasion the system can work. In a way they are right, the system does work not even being black can make a politician deal frankly with the American people to provide meaningful change.

What I have said of course does not apply to the whole of the Left, and really I am including liberals who are deterred from radicalism by symbolic victories within the establishment. The hope invested in figures like Obama and Clinton comes from a place of real political dissatisfaction with the white male establishment, but as we avoid confronting the system of power that has secured this caste and instead grapple with the skin-deep significations by which we know the oppressor, we end up putting band-aids on gaping wounds. The illusion of progress allows concrete injustice to flourish. The culture of political celebrity has proved a powerful opiate for the masses because it appeals to the direct sense of injustice we experience as we experience it. It will require a principle beyond our individual experiences to break the addiction.

Radical Rawls

Rawls also notes another principle, the maximin principle, which says that some inequality is acceptable if it raises the well-being of the many, so that the least well-off are not harmed. This may seem like a gateway to troubling economic propositions after all, what idea was behind the trickle-down theory if not “give more wealth to those on the top so that they might raise those on the bottom”? The same could be said of corporate bailouts. But this fear should be alleviated for two reasons: A) top-down economics have proven demonstrably not to help those at the bottom because those at the top will inevitably horde surplus wealth for themselves, and B) it fails to account for the fact that a disparity of power is itself a public harm. Such a disparity inevitable leads to those on the top attempting to consolidate their power and retain it at the expense of those they hold power over, as in point A.

The centralization of power- economic or political- into the hands of the few by its very nature leads to exploitation as power is never voluntarily given up to those who criticize it, it is instead exercised against them to enforce consent. It leads to philosophical, intellectual harms that can not be negate through surplus material wealth- harms like censorship, imprisonment (a loss even under good conditions), and humiliation. This is not to mention the physical brutalities that inevitably follow.

Instead we should keep to the democratic core of Rawls’s thought, and use the maximin principle to point out how inequality remains unjustified in our society, how our laws and systems of economic distribution serve to aid the powerful at the expense of the least well off. How better to do this than by sharing the concrete stories of injustice that substantiate the grievance?

Far from dividing us, the force of storytelling the left has equipped itself with provides a necessary part of imagining equality. The veil of ignorance can serve as a way to remove us from ourselves, and reconsider ourselves at a variety of different coordinates in our society. Of course this imagining is imperfect, but if we are waiting for perfect consensus before moving forward than we will be waiting a very long time. Most likely it will never be perfect, but it can be made better by exposing ourselves to honest accounts of injustice and inequality by those who have been most painfully subject to it. In seeing these negatives as though we ourselves might suffer them, we realize the positive goal of expanding equality and well-being to the greatest possible number of people. The fear the experiment provokes must result in a respect for the significance of each subject within our society. This respect for individual experience, rooted in a belief that human lives are universally worthwhile, could prove a transformative force for articulating claims for a more just, and thereby more equal, society.

American Sniper’s Noble Lie

Hi all, had an article posted by salon.com the other day. You can find it here and I’ve reprinted it on the blog:

“American Sniper” is a difficult movie to criticize, partly because of the pro-war jingoism that’s long been a staple of post-9/11 society and partly because the movie itself is competently made, but mostly because of the dogmatic belief among supporters that “American Sniper” is a “human story” and not a political one. And that’s exactly the problem. Taking a conflict in which there are deep historical, economic, social and political roots, and then atomizing it as a single man’s story, robs the conflict of context, and this is a political act in itself. The act of de-politicization serves to obscure the ideological framework within which the story operates, coating it with a human face. In studying this “face” however, the experiences of sniper Chris Kyle that constitute the film, we can see how beneath the obviously “human” story is a troubling philosophical thesis that speaks to the rise of neoconservatism among the U.S. political and military elite.

This intersection of the personal and political can be seen as early as the first scene, where the titular sniper aims at a man described as a “military-aged male” (borrowing from the language of drone strike casualties) on a cell phone. Of course he is reporting the troop movements below, and from the house he stands atop emerge a woman and her son, who attempts to throw a grenade at the oncoming soldiers. When we return to this scene after a flashback, Chris Kyle shoots both.

What are we supposed to take from this? We’re meant to see the “horrors of war” that the protagonist must commit out of a sense of duty — it is a “necessary evil” and Chris is deeply affected by the experience. What distinguishes Chris Kyle from a simple child-killer is that he holds the moral upper hand above the jihadis, who slaughter children to advance their political agenda.

But let’s take a second to look at that moral upper hand Chris holds, and the moral theory it operates under, because in this “human” story morality functions as a surrogate for political theory. The scene of sniping the child is broken up by a flashback detailing Chris’s childhood/training in rural somewhere-or-other where hunting and church-going are the order of the day (and the transition is impressive — we switch from the adult Chris hesitating to shoot the child to a child Chris eagerly shooting a deer). The sequence culminates in a moral lecture from the authoritarian father after Chris defends his younger brother in a schoolyard brawl. I’ll cite the whole thing because it’s philosophically quite dense:

“There are three types of people in this world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs. Some people prefer to believe evil doesn’t exist in the world. And if it ever darkened their doorstep they wouldn’t know how to protect themselves. Those are the sheep. And then you got predators. They use violence to prey on people. They’re the wolves. Then there are those blessed with the gift of aggression and an overpowering need to protect the flock. They are a rare breed who live to confront the wolf. They are the sheepdog. We’re not raising any sheep in this family.”

At first glance this theory seems merely stupid, a sort of Saturday-morning-cartoon morality of heroes and villains and the civilians they fight over. When extended not merely to a family, but an entire society, however, it gives us quite a lot of insight into neo-conservative ideology of the “War on Terror.” Because the thing is, this speech is critically important to understanding the rest of the movie, and the slaughter of children within it. It is only after we have this moral thesis that we understand why Chris had to do what he did and flash back to the shooting. The political context is replaced and substituted with this familial moral context that shapes his ascent to manhood. In the movie this classification plays out clearly: His wife, Taya, with her obtuse moral concerns and inability to protect herself from “bad men” is the civilian sheep, the insurgents are wolves, and Chris himself is the sheepdog, “blessed with the gift of aggression” who slays the wolves and protects the sheep. Funny to note here the “conspiracy theorist” cries of Americans being “sheep” when this terminology is being co-opted by the very people they accuse of manipulating the citizenry. More on this later.

What should strike us immediately about this terminology is that it does not cast the hyper-equipped, expertly trained and invading army as the predatory wolves. No. The invaders are, paradoxically, the defenders, the sheepdogs, and the native resistance fighters against them are somehow cast as the predatory wolves. Sheep can seemingly be found in Iraq and the U.S.

The linchpin of this moral theory is the almost cartoonish evil of the native Iraqis. What the instances of child killing in the movie are meant to highlight are the moral complexities of the war, but these moral complexities are smoothed over again and again to cast the U.S. soldiers as heroes whose fault is, if anything, trusting too much. During every instance in which moral complexity arises, the Iraqis are shown to be trying to deceive the troops into letting them carry out terrorist activities. This is shown first in Chris’s dismissal of the “military-aged male” with the phone as not being a threat, and again when he brutally occupies the house of a man and his child whom he learns after scream-interrogating them that — surprise, surprise — are sheep being forced by threat of death into working for a terrorist mastermind named “The Butcher” who murders people with a drill. And yet again, when the soldiers are invited to dinner by a man whose home they are occupying, and Chris sneaks off to sleuth around and finds an enormous pile of weapons stashed beneath a stack of rugs. (Those sneaky A-rabs!) These instances of seeming “moral complexity” simplify more than they complicate, as if to say that the appearance of complexity is actually one more trick of the wolves to make us feel guilty. And we can never feel guilt. Not even if we shoot 250 people.

Let’s look again at the killing of children in the movie. After Chris shoots a child, though he is in the right, he is wracked by a guilty uncertainty about what he has done. Later a fellow soldier comforts him, explaining that the child he shot could have killed “like ten fucking Marines,” which provides some solace. The second murder of a child is a murder by the villainous “Butcher” with his drill of oppression, who (and the audience is shown this) drills a child’s brains out in a public square to send a message that collaboration is a death sentence. The scene is tasteless in the extreme, but more than that it seems to answer for Chris’s earlier crime. We are shown what it looks like when a “bad guy” kills children, and in seeing his cruelty we are redeemed for the clean, efficient murder of the child that took place before. Never mind that the “Butcher” is a total contrivance. (The “Butcher of Fallujah” was an insurgent who killed four mercenaries by burning them, dragging them through the streets and hanging them from a bridge. No children and no drills. He was also captured after Chris Kyle left the SEALs.) His purpose is to show us the dark, predatory nature of the enemy, and how his atrocities lack the moral rectitude of our own.

The trilogy of child-murders ends with a scene wherein a child picks up an RPG dropped by one of Chris’s targets. After a moment of superb tension where he fumbles with the weapon, the boy drops the rocket and runs off, giving Chris and the audience a huge sigh of relief. “Thank god!” we think, “It won’t happen again!” The catharsis is thrilling. Yet nothing has changed. There is no reason the same event could not occur the very next day, or next hour, with opposite results. The lucky break is construed as divine judgment.

The Strauss Connection

When we talk about neo-conservative ideology, we have to talk about a man named Leo Strauss. Strauss was an American political philosopher in the mid-20th century who most famously taught at the University of Chicago, where he acquired a following of young non-leftist intellectuals. Central to Strauss’s thought was a belief that liberalism would inevitably devolve into a nihilistic loss of values, either a brutal nihilism as evidenced by the Nazis who he himself had fled, or a gentle nihilism that he saw evidenced in American society, which manifested itself in a hedonistic and permissive belief in equality.

To counter these strains of nihilism, Strauss saw the need for an intellectual and political elite capable of convincing the general population of “myths” that they could believe in. Much of his writing was influenced by classical political philosophy, and critically by the theory of Plato’s “noble lie.” The “noble lie” was a myth which it was thought necessary to convince the population of, specifically that land belongs to the state even though it is always acquired coercively, and that citizenship is a matter of justice and not an accident of birth. Strauss, while not denying these two virtues, extended the idea to function as a protection against the nihilism that Western liberal rationalism must inevitably reach. In short, “the people” must be led by myths created by the elites so that they will not fall prey to nihilism in its brutal or gentle varieties.

Among intellectuals unsympathetic toward Marxism (which was, relatively speaking, flourishing in universities at the time) and rocked by the catastrophes of ideological zealots across the political spectrum, this philosophy flourished. Strauss acquired a following at the University of Chicago composed of people who would go on to become leading figures in American politics, among them Paul Wolfowitz, Susan Sontag and Abram Shulsky. Neocons who were unable to find posts in leftist politics departments, the “Straussians” often went directly into the intelligence or political communities, where their ideas regarding the necessary secrecy of a political elite found purchase, and continue to influence policy to this day.

The point is that we cannot understate the influence of Strauss among the political class, so often allergic to critical thinkers but staunch in their support for this particular philosopher. And when we look back to the moral theory under which “American Sniper” operates it isn’t hard to see. The classification of “sheep-wolves-sheepdogs,” in martial terms, mirrors the political outlook of Strauss’s stratified class system. The “sheep”— the weak/stupid general population — maintains the same place of vulnerability, protected by the aggressive/cunning elite of “sheepdogs/philosophers.” The character of “the wolf” is most interesting though, because “political Islam” (a complicated term which I use for expediency’s sake) is exactly the sort of radical ideology that Strauss saw as a manifestation of nihilism in its brutal form. Or, rather, this is how it is represented in the film. Characters like “The Butcher” and “Mustafa” — the mysterious and exotic sniper, always portrayed with an Arab choir chanting faintly to reinforce his place as the mystical “Other” — are necessary to substantiate the idea that what we are fighting is not the resistance to a complicated interplay of historical forces (which would call into question the history of our own “sheepdogs,” the military and intelligence communities), but the outburst of a nihilistic and essential force that will always prey on the sheep. As Chris Kyle’s father puts it in the film, the “evil” that exists in the world.

This overblown sense of brutality permeates the entire film. Remember when Chris is consoled by the marine who tells him the child he sniped could have killed “like ten fucking Marines”? If we look at the actual scene there are not even ten soldiers within range of the bomb — there are four and then a tank, which, if it is an A-1 Abrams, has at maximum a crew of four. Even within the context of the film itself the blatant, contradictory nature of this fear is apparent. But Chris Kyle is a soldier, and while under his father’s theory he is a “sheepdog,” according to Straussians he stands well outside of the actual elite — indeed his religious convictions and organic morality are evidence that he has internalized their myths. Soldiers are the same intellectual sheep as civilians, and must also be led by fear.

This is the film’s ultimate ideological maneuver as a form of propaganda: Even as it explains the conflict it obfuscates the higher framework that the policymakers who got us into it — and whom the film has attracted so much criticism for omitting — hold to. The moral truth the audience is delivered is a stunted version of the “real” truth which the elites hold. When we watch “American Sniper,” we are literally watching the “noble lie” in the act of being told. This is the myth the sheep need to save them from the nihilistic reality.

Strauss’s Poverty

“American Sniper” is not a political movie because it was never meant to be. Politics is an arena reserved for the elite policymakers who can handle the brutal realities of the world and safeguard the infantile populace. Instead, “American Sniper” acts as a myth, where the specifics of whether “The Butcher” actually murdered children with drills or if “Mustafa” really was ever Chris Kyle’s rival are less important than the essential truth they reveal: That only by dirtying our own hands in protection of the weak can we resist the essential evil that permeates the world. For the elites and the masses this lesson holds radically different significance, but the authoritarian structure remains.

For Chris Kyle, the conflict is his personal war with the supervillains of the insurgency; for the elites it is the greater “War on Terror.” The “War on Terror” has attracted criticism for its seeming “un-win-ability,” but if we consider the conflict under Strauss’s framework then this should not surprise us — indeed, the very appeal of the war to elites of military, intelligence and political institutions is that it can go on forever. “Terrorism” can be defined as any ideologically motivated violence against the  state, and so to proclaim an “end” to terrorism in its minimal definition is to proclaim an “end” to the political movement of history. For Strauss, terrorism is the brutal manifestation of a nihilism that can never actually be overcome because “nothingness” can, definitionally, never be extinguished. It is inherent and essential.

And if we are willing to look frankly at the situation, we can see that this form of “brutal nihilism” has already come to power — not for our enemies, but for us. In witnessing the horror of nihilism and becoming convinced of the necessity to prevent it by whatever means necessary — to become allergic to doubt in its purest form — we have authorized the most disgusting acts of inhumanity imaginable. Who can read the CIA torture report and not realize that we have employed rape, beatings, mental cruelties of exhaustion and profound humiliation in an attempt to prevent evil. And this is to say nothing of drone strikes, which can incinerate entire households of dubiously affiliated “military-aged males” and their families, and which, coupled with the program of assassination carried out under the Obama administration, has been termed one of the worst terror campaigns in history.

Our paranoia toward nihilism has made us nihilistic ourselves. In trying to create values for our society we expose the poverty of the philosophical foundation that guides them. Strauss had no real answer for nihilism, and neither do his followers, save for the lies that they can tell to obscure it. The greatest of these lies are not lies of fact, however, but of philosophy. Of the idea that the world is against us, that people are weak, that only the strong can ever truly triumph, and that even then the victory is hollow. This outlook construes bullies as heroes, war as peace and ignorance as strength. To overcome it the “sheep” must withdraw their consent and discover their strength. But they will not find it living a lie, even a “noble” one.

You, Me and the GDP: On Growth and Happiness

Economics, under modern statistically-powered capitalism, occupies an almost quasi-religious role. A science torn by fierce debate (much of it over whether it is a science at all), it functions as an institution now much as oracles did in ancient times. Though the machinations are highly complex (as with some ancient astrology), the foretelling of futures and a deeper understanding of our fortune serves much the same purpose as determining GDP, which is interpreted to the public as “growth.” We need to know whether it will be feast or famine.

Growth is a funny way to term GDP because it isn’t wrong so much as it is misleading. “Growth” sounds, and can be, good. Gross Domestic Product is a measure of how much a society is producing monetarily, and that means anything. Doors, jam, doorjambs, cars, action movies, prisons, guns, lanterns, bear costumes…Free associate and leave in anything you don’t buy on the black market, it all goes in. What GDP tracks is the “value added” of every firm, meaning the value of its output minus the value of things that are used in producing it. If you ran a door factory for example, you would take the value of the doors after they were sold minus the value of the materials and labor used to make them. When GDP goes up, it means that either the value of the goods has gone up (or there are more goods) or the “intermediary costs” of goods and labor have gone down.

The thing is this really only works if you’re assuming that all goods have appropriate values assigned to them and that all of these goods are working in concert to improve society. Robert Kennedy, speaking on the subject in 1968, noted that:

“Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product…counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder n chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.”

In playing oracle, the GDP tries to impose a rational system on an irrational world, and ends up seeming irrational itself. GDP is measuring a sort of growth, it is measuring production– but to what end? Wouldn’t we rather not need locks or jails? The contradictions of the economy that arise from the much-despised “human element” mean that even rising production can mask a net loss of well-being.

So why do we still use it? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that when economists graduate, many of them go to work for businesses. The use of GDP is not just an errant failing of economics, but a result of class interests. If the whole society is agreeing that general welfare is driven by increased production (or cutting costs for goods and labor), then it’s the people directly profiting from that production (the owners of the means of production, i.e. capitalists) who are suddenly the most important people in the room. In a society run by businessmen, academics shouting “More more!” flourish. It isn’t telling us how well “we” are doing, but how “they” are doing.

The United States topped every list for GDP for 2013 and 2014, but it also led many others in inequality and poverty, not mention a host of other social ills which arise from them (like imprisonment). Though it remains a treasure almost as vaunted as “jobs” among our political and economic elite, GDP has nonetheless failed to indicate the level of general prosperity it attempts to signify.

What to Want?

If we abandon GDP, however, we are forced to confront the issue of how to measure general well-being. It’s an interesting intersection, one of the few places where economics and philosophy meet, and where the notion of “value” takes on its full meaning. To measure well-being we must determine what it is, and to do that we need a theory to explain the humans that are “doing well.”

Certainly the notion of prosperity overlaps with happiness people whose physical needs are met tend to be happier than those whose physical needs are not met. This idea lends itself to the somewhat novel measure of Gross National Happiness, put to great effect in Bhutan, who use the measure rather than GDP to track economic success. The GNH in its current iteration has seven wellness indicators tracked by direct survey and statistical measurement, which are:

• Economic Wellness: Indicated via measurement of economic metrics such as consumer debt, average income to consumer price index ratio and income distribution
• Environmental Wellness: Indicated via measurement of environmental metrics such as pollution, noise and traffic
• Physical Wellness: Indicated via of physical health metrics such as severe illnesses
• Mental Wellness: Indicated via measurement of mental health metrics such as usage of antidepressants and rise or decline of psychotherapy patients
• Workplace Wellness: Indicated via labor metrics such as jobless claims job change, workplace complaints and lawsuits
• Social Wellness: Indicated via measurement social metrics such as discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts and family lawsuits, public lawsuits, crime rates
• Political Wellness: Indicated via measurement of political metrics such as the quality of local democracy, individual freedom, and foreign conflicts.

These measurements, at least, seem better equipped to determine the well-being of a country than GDP, as GNH puts the human beings that compose a nation/society/state center-stage in discussions of the economy. Returning to Robert Kennedy’s remarks on the GDP, he notes further that:

“…the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”

While GNH certainly strikes closer to evaluating these immaterial goods, it too must ultimately fall short. Concepts such as “beauty” “intelligence” or “courage” resist statisticization because they are values rather than objects and ultimately cannot be tracked. The only way to ensure a robust culture is to provide opportunities for it to flourish through education, public discourse (which requires plentiful public space), and the assurance of leisure time for the working population, so that they can indulge in the luxuries of art and politics. An economy, even one centered towards the happiness of human beings, can only do so much.

Rather than seeing this limitation as a defeat, however, we should greet it as liberating. In the ruthlessly market-driven value system of the United States (and evident to a lesser extent in other capitalist countries), that which cannot produce monetary value is seen as lacking in a value beyond the monetary. It is a strange ideological maneuver wherein that enterprise which does not flourish financially (like poetry, to borrow from RFK) is thought to be inherently worthless. This idea is rooted in the near-metaphysical faith we hold in the market to distinguish good from bad and let the cream rise to the top. It’s why I compare the GDP to the role of the oracle, but in reality the interpretation is reversed, because the ideological logic of capitalism claims that it must inherently produce the best of all possible worlds through competition. But can a world without poetry, without intelligence, courage and beauty possibly be the best?

A Fundamental Limit

The GNH certainly overcomes many limitations that narrow the vision of the GDP, but as I’ve said it can’t track everything. Partly because unhappiness is part of the human condition. Lovers betray one another, children are born unwanted, friends leave us and pets die. This isn’t all there is to life but its part of it, and we really shouldn’t want private or public officials stepping in to change that. GNP works when employed negatively, addressing societal ills on a systemic level and attempting to rectify them. But it isn’t hard to imagine a world where GNP’s positive interpretation might turn out somewhat dystopic. We don’t want “enforced happiness;” people being constantly surveyed and, say, fed psychoactive drugs to “improve” their moods. Though this notion is certainly fanciful, it denotes a limitation to GNH that distinguishes the role of the economy in human happiness: it can’t provide everything, and we shouldn’t want it to.

And this is my real critique of the GDP, independent of other systems: it assumes that all human activity can be subordinated to monetary value. This seems to be RFK’s critique as well. Its true there are physical things we do need that can have a monetary value attributed to them. We need schools, we need housing, we need universities and we need healthcare and food and water. We need, in the modern era, to have transport and communications infrastructure to keep our society connected. But we also need to express ourselves through artistic endeavor, or to master a skill so that we can take pride in our abilities. We need love, too, but beyond the surrogates of prostitution and therapy this is our own, human, endeavor.

The minimal definition of an economy given by wikipedia is that of a system which “consists of the production, distribution or trade and consumption of limited goods and services by different agents in a given geographical location.” I am not against the notion of economics itself because that would be tantamount to imagining a society without goods or services. Rather, what I am arguing is that we must re-interpret the notion of an economy in light of what it can account for. Innovation is always possible, but needs are not unlimited. There is a goal to be met whereby what can be provided materially for a population is provided, and beyond that happiness is the result of human interactions too complicated and personal to be properly reduced to statistics.

Fringe Benefits

Lastly, I want to note that this recognition of economics’ limited impact on happiness produces real contingent benefits, and that satisfying material needs can produce positive immaterial benefits without enforcing them from the top down. The notion of a limited-happiness-impact-economy (which I will for expediency’s sake term LHIE) lends itself to economic equality in that it takes satisfaction of any individual’s needs as being inherent equal. While (some) liberal defenders of GDP will support the mass accumulation of wealth (and, by their own logic, happiness) among an upper crust of producers, not so with LHIE. Production is not a limitless endeavor under this system, but a means towards an ends of general happiness.

The legal benefits are most telling. RFK wasn’t kidding when he said that “[GDP] counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them”- both sides of the equation of crime are incentivized by GDP, and more than that, GDP’s totally abstract notion of welfare enables crime to flourish as poverty and inequality flourishes. Across any metric these two forces are the strongest determinants of crime, and while crime provides some excess production, the system of policing and imprisonment is one that, as a punitive system, necessarily produces larger amounts of unhappiness.

Furthermore, the political benefits cannot be ignored. It is no secret that economic and political inequality go hand-in-hand; looking to the United States (a world leader in inequality), it should be no surprise that our electoral system has become a satire of itself. Now more than ever our political parties are insulated from popular influence through the “pay-to-play” structure of politics, where appeals to the capitalist class to solicit donations shape political platforms far more fundamentally than theoretical debate or the real needs of our country. Abandoning GDP means robbing the bourgeoisie of one of their most effective tools for cementing their importance. If it is not mere production, but the results of production on human beings that direct our economic policies, then the case for broadened public services becomes much more weighty. And if a more egalitarian distribution of wealth is achieved then the corresponding influence upon the political class will be felt. Perhaps so much so that we eventually abandon the absurdity of private donations altogether. We can dream, at least.

The benefits towards social democracy cannot be discounted, either. Social cleavages such as those of race become most acute when inequality is high. Partially this is because racial minorities often receive disproportionate attention from police forces and experience higher incarceration rates, and as incarceration increases overall so does this disparity. However, consider the effect of predatory housing markets on black citizens throughout the United States, a direct result of housing considered as a commodity. “Redlining,” as it is called, is a practice which continues to this day and is (again to borrow wikipedia’s definition) “the practice of…denying, or charging more for, services such as banking, insurance, access to healthcare, or even supermarkets, or denying jobs to residents in particular, often racially determined, areas.” The term comes from an old practice of marking on a map with a red line to determine where banks would not invest. Most frequently this discrimination was practiced against black inner city neighborhoods. Black citizens who attempted to move out of these neighborhoods faced not only organic resistance from racist restrictive covenants of white homeowners, but also from banks, as mentioned, who would deny home loans for customers moving out of “their” area. The effect of redlining was not merely keeping black neighborhoods in perpetual poverty (and denying social mobility to black families attempting to move into white communities), but also insulating the social, economic and political strife in black communities from wider perception. Basically, these neighborhoods were made so racially and economically static that whites can/could live their whole lives hearing only rumors of what went on within.

What redlining illustrates is how when certain necessary resources like housing or medicine or food are distributed by private actors, they become subject to the same biases those private actors may hold, and these biases are informed in turn by their social position as owners. On a large enough scale, this private control among a group of like-minded owners can produce systems of concrete racial oppression. One could not look at the process of redlining and believe that it’s purpose was to increase general happiness. Social insulation and endemic poverty do not produce happiness. Only by leaving the distribution of wealth to an unregulated capitalist class (one always hesitates to say conspiracy) could a process like redlining persist. That such a process produces legal (where banks will not invest money, police will invest labor) and political (a community insulated from the public consciousness cannot demand much political sway) evils as well should be self-evident.

Finally, abandoning the GDP produces an interesting ideological good, in that it strikes at the core justification for capitalism’s endless creation of new needs, and the crucial mistaking of want as need. As I said earlier, the GDP’s focus on endless growth is decidedly in the interest of the capitalist class, but to substantiate the myth that growth produces happiness a constant flow of new and shinier wants must be developed. Consider the advent of planned obsolescence that has infected the software, automobile, and consumer electronics industry, among others. Under planned obsolescence, products are made to intentionally fail after a certain time so that consumers will buy “updated” replacements whose improvements may be solely aesthetic, universally providing little in the way of increased functionality. Interestingly, the process only works when producers are assured that the replacement product will be bought from the same company, making it highly lucrative under the corporate dominance of the US. Its effect is not merely economic, however, but psychological. Consumers must be trained through advertising to want a new iPhone or Android or Audi or MP3 player regardless of how much utility they will gain. There must be a ceaseless creation of wants which people do not even know they have yet. Is the purpose of such a system to produce endless happiness? No, the purpose is to foster an innate unhappiness that can be sated, temporarily, through the act of upgrading.

More could be said on the subject, specifically on the ecological benefits, but as this article already has turned out much longer than I intended that can be saved for another post. If nothing else, what I wish to say to you, reader, is that growth is not good. Not necessarily. Growth is a means towards an ends, not an end in itself, and we must remember that the focus on economic development must be the human beings an economic system serves. We live in a time where feeding the planet is not far-fetched utopianism, but a matter of distribution, and the same is largely true of medicine and housing. Our technological advances have been enormous, but if we cannot remember our humanity alongside progress then we will become slaves to our own power. And that’s no power at all.

Let The Robot Do It

“No more of such vague formulas as ‘The Right to Work’ or ‘To each the whole result of his labor.’ What we proclaim is the Right to Well-Being: Well-Being for All!” -Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

When it comes to economic prosperity, the word on everyone’s mind is jobs. Jobs will bring us prosperity, jobs will get things back to the way they were (or at least the way we imagine them to have been) back when America was great. Republicans want jobs. Democrats want jobs. You want a job (or maybe just a better one). I want a job. Jobs have become an even more valued, more mythic goal than growth when we talk about our economy. Sometimes we cut taxes to try and create them, sometimes we hike them up. Sometimes we slash social programs so that people are forced to find jobs, sometimes we expand them so that people have the tools to get the jobs. Every politician seems to be trying their damnedest to create jobs, so why don’t we have them? When we are going to dig deep enough within our reserves of political innovation to finally strike gold and have them all come tumbling out- glorious jobs!- onto a struggling populace thirsty for work?

And what if they don’t? What if the jobs just aren’t there anymore?

What I think this whole concept of job-creation fails to account for are the historical and technological conditions under which labor operates in our era. We’re constantly looking over our shoulders in the US to a more prosperous and equal time when employment was high, everybody seemed to have a place in society and we didn’t feel as though our whole world was going to be yanked out from under us at the whim of a downsizing employer. It’s strange to think that for all the progress we’ve made in the past few decades- progress in industrial production, in communications, and in medicine to name only a few areas- we seem to be less sure than ever about our personal futures. Why? If our lives are on the whole becoming more difficult as technology marches on then what has been the point of this progress?

Nowhere is the contradiction more apparent than in the mechanization of industrial and manual labor. There was a time, when the process was still nascent, when the idea of mechanized labor was a good thing, a triumph of technological progress that could free humanity from the need for brute labor, and allow us to pursue more edifying activities like artistic or intellectual expression. The idea seems far-fetched now, to say the least. Mechanization has changed from being a utopic trend to a dystopic trend, where large swaths of humanity who have lost their place in a changing society are left to suffer and, ultimately, expire, as they are incapable of “contributing their fair share.” A Social Darwinian ethic has taken root which rationalizes the suffering of the unemployed as the natural outcome of technological progress.

Ultimately, this change from a positive view of mechanization to a negative one is not the result of technological progress itself, but the social relationships that those technological achievements serve. Critical to the utopic view of mechanization was its contextualization within a concept of society as a whole, that it was possible for these tools to bring everyone forward. And critical to this view of a connected and cooperative society was the inherent worth of every individual, and their consequent well-being. The only reason that mechanization should scare us is if we think that those who do not work (not can not or will not, but do not) do not deserve to live fulfilling lives with their basic physical necessities accounted for.

To be certain, mass manual labor hasn’t been driven out by mechanization alone. Outsourcing by multinational industries to underdeveloped economies where laborers have less bargaining power to assert their right to decent working conditions and a just wage has done significant damage to the American workforce, who accrued power through unionization, primarily on the factory floor. A lot of work is still being done by hand, its just being done elsewhere for the time being.

Still, while much has changed since the era where mass manual labor in America was a reality, much has also stayed the same. People still go hungry without food and thirsty without water; they freeze without shelter and without medicine their sicknesses will kill them. Our capacity to provide for these necessities in pure physical terms has increased manifold, but due to the methods of distribution dictated by capitalism we still face widespread malnutrition, homelessness, and disease as these issues are left to the whims of the market.

The “C” Word

The fetishization of jobs is a contradiction that actually demonizes technological progress as edging out the human element of our workforce and, more, generally, our society. And make no mistake, this contradiction is a contradiction of capital. The original thesis of capitalist development has been inverted. Where we once believed that the competition inherent to capitalism would produce the optimal results for the human beings that compose a society, we now believe that the results produced by capitalism are inherently optimal and that society must change to accommodate them. If capitalism robs people of their livelihood by rendering their labor irrelevant, then this is not a failure on the part of capital, but of human beings. People deserve to suffer and fail within the system if they cannot prove themselves worthy contributors.

This ethic is dehumanizing in the fullest sense of the world. No longer is the focal point of our social relations the well-being of the individual subject or society as a whole, but the success of the logic of capital in and of itself to produce “growth,” which we are assured will, through obtuse channels of wealth, result in the best of all possible worlds. How did we come to a point where concrete human experience is secondary to the logic of abstract economic relationships?

Phobia towards the “free rider” is a long-documented phenomena within the American psyche, and it has likewise long been a tool to rob people of a feeling of inherent self-worth by sublimating them to a society which places a near-religious value on growth and efficiency. Furthermore, trapping people into this mode of thinking relies on appeals to the most vile and bigoted impulses of the exploited class. The idea of the “welfare queen” used to terrify middle- and lower-class voters into supporting, philosophically, the end of broad social programs and the necessary taxation to fund them, is rooted in racial divisions preyed upon initially by Republicans but now more generally by all economic conservatives, including the “fiscally responsible” Democrats. In this article from Salon, writer Ian Haney-Lopez documents the terminology of Reagan’s neo-conservative revolution, which could no longer rely on explicit race-baiting after the successes of the civil rights movement in the 60s and 70s. Instead, Reagan and his advisors (notably Lee Atwater) utilized a coded otherfication of black, latino and other “minority” citizens as being irresponsible and lazy non-contributors to society. Alien figures who could not be trusted to wisely utilize the resources given them by the state, but would instead exploit the state (and thereby the white establishment) through falsifying documents and creating new identities.

Here we find a critical link established between working-class and racial politics, with racial bigotry being activated by politicians as a scapegoat to cast the welfare recipient as a lazy, alien, and (ironically) exploitative figure suckling off the teat of society without any intention of contributing. Human beings are treated as investments, whom the state should only provide for on the condition that they can expect a proper return once they’re “back on their feet.” And this is being generous. The conservative opposition to the welfare state is based more generally on the idea that “shit sinks,” and if individuals should suffer from a lack of basic necessities, then this is merely a from of societal self-regulation, the necessary friction of our order, and to step in would be to upset the balance of nature.

And this is perhaps the keystone of Darwinian capitalism that has caused us to fear mechanization and technological progress more generally: the idea that the logic of capitalism is purely “natural.” That it has no agency or interest, but is an expression of the absolute logic of human development, “pure” and unrestrained from ideological considerations like those inherent to socialism, which we are told must inevitably lead to collapse.

It’s Just Not Natural!

This idea that capitalism provides us with the best of all possible worlds without indulging in dangerous ideological considerations is a seductive one, forged in the fires of the Cold War and grown fat on the successes of neo-conservatism worming its way into the public consciousness. The essential contradiction in it, however, is a presupposed notion of the “best world” as being the one capitalism produces. We have given up imagining a better world for ourselves and instead take the evident order as naturally being the best.

But the truth of the matter is that the idea of the best world cannot be answered objectively- it requires a positive statement of values, and though values are informed by our observations regarding the world around us, they are rooted in human experience, which is subjective. If we accept a world where the value of actually existing human beings is secondary to their potential worth as a financial investment in a system then that is a choice we have made. Capitalism is arbitrary. It produces the most profitable results, and only sometimes (more and more rarely as time goes on) are those results the ones that provide the greatest utility for society as a whole.

What has marched on, regardless of social relationships, is technology, the mastery of human beings over the world around them. We are, on the whole, much less subject to the whims of nature- of famine and starvation, of exposure to the elements and disease- than we were a century ago. America is much more advanced (technologically and industrially) than Russia in the early 20^th century, or China in that same period. We are living in a world where providing food, medicine, and shelter to every member of our society is not a problem of production, but of distribution. The efficiency of mechanization has made it easier in practical terms to fulfill basic human needs, so why should we be afraid of progress?

We’re afraid because the problem isn’t with technology, its with us. Why, if our society should be becoming more generally efficient and capable of satisfying physical needs through technological progress, are we being forced to work longer hours, with fewer vacation days, under more strenuous conditions, and for less real income than a generation ago? Is it because human beings have changed so radically and acquired such strange needs that this is the only possible outcome? While surely capitalism manufactures needs to keep workers in a cycle of constant debt and toil, we are basically the same animals our parents were, and our parents parents before them. By and large we need the same things- and not just in physical terms. We need leisure so that we can explore ourselves, what is important to us, and spend time with those we love. We need to feel that we are part of a society which values us, so that we can feel safe enough to exercise our freedoms in meaningful ways without fear that the life we know will evaporate if we are somehow judged “inefficient.”

So we return to the question: Why fear the robot? Because we fear each other. More than that, because we have been trained to fear each other, and to believe that those we count as “different” along lines of race or religion or class or other vectors of identity do not share our values and will exploit the systems we set up to give dignity and sustenance to those whom the logic of capital leaves behind. A “job” has become a proof of worth for existence under capitalism, a sign that, yes, we are invested in the general well-being as evidenced by our work. The notion is understandable, but it does not hold for our era. Jobs are disappearing, and whether this fact proves liberating or oppressive depends upon how we relate to our fellow human beings, and more basically if we consider their lives inherently worthwhile. Ultimately, such a belief is the only thing that stands between socio-economic equality and the nihilistic faith of market outcomes. If we cannot find a reason to make the robots serve us, then we will end up serving the robots, who in turn serve the logic of a market divorced from human necessity.

Defining Fascism Part 2: Fascism in America

In my last article (see below), I attempted to provide a working definition of a Fascist model of politics, drawing on former definitions and examples of Fascist governments, citing Germnay under Hitler, Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, Francoist Spain, and Indonesia under the rule of president Suharto. I concluded with a minimal definition of a Fascist system, which I will apply here, and is as follows: A creation of political and economic centralization into the hands of a class of elites heading an authoritarian system, who maintain power through ideological appeals to nationalist, racist and/or xenophobic feelings of an underclass whose power as workers is suppressed. It is differentiated from Left dictatorships in that it’s authority need not be framed as progressive towards a classless society.

Such a definition is important, I believe, for gauging the changing nature of the American government in the Age of Terror. In our post-9/11 state where war is less a temporary crisis than a state of mind, it seems clear that “democratic” is no longer the best label for our government. Some of the most powerful entities within our government, namely the intelligence-defense apparatus consisting of the CIA, NSA, and US military, have begun to wield disproportionate political power unbeholden to democratic oversight.

Despite the role of America as a leader in the establishment of Human Rights as a concept of international law (indeed, it was an American lawyer who led the prosecution at the Nuremburg Trials of Nazi leaders, which ultimately branded them “War Criminals” for their actions, a novel term in history at the time), American intelligence, military and “defense” organizations have violated human rights conventions (the Geneva Conventions among them) as a matter of course. These violations have continued despite the supposed “public oversight” of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, while it has produced valuable reports of the CIA’s torture program, has proven incapable of (or uninterested in) stopping them.

Many of these same criticisms could also be aimed at our civil defense institution- the police- who have avoided trial for the murders of innocent civilians through grand jury dismissals, all the while accruing more powerful tools of force (both physical and legal) through a process of encroaching militarization.

As well, the National Security Agency’s clandestine surveillance of American citizens has remained free from public scrutiny, with discretion being given to FISA courts that operate entirely in private. The FISA judge will hear only the government’s arguments prior to deciding the case, and the rulings are immune to appeal or review by the public. The records cannot even be checked.

Even a cursory glance at the process of surveillance (by the NSA) and enforcement (by the CIA and police agencies) reveals a system of extraordinary power insulated from influence by the public, a system capable of parsing through every form of a suspect’s electronic communications, deciding on guilt behind closed doors, and then “interrogating” them via practices which fly in the face of international law, and, frankly, basic moral sensibilities. That these interrogations are also largely believed to be “ineffective” I count as a secondary criticism.

In the face of such a clearly undemocratic system couched within the US Government it is both interesting and useful to contrast the present situation with the historical example of Fascism to better understand in what way and towards what ends such a system operates.

The Waning of Democracy

My critics might say that to assume the intelligence-defense apparatus is significant enough to alter the basic structure of our political system is to overestimate its importance. After all, every American schoolkid knows that the balance of power is maintained through the necessary distinction of Executive, Legislate, and Judicial power into three branches of government that check each others’ influence. The organizations I’ve detailed- they may say- are Executive powers, that are in actuality challenged by actors within the Legislature and Judiciary.

Far from checking the Executive branch, however, the Legislature has been all too happy to support it. In this insightful article from Salon.com documenting the rise of “American Militarism,” writer Tom Engelhardt details the culture of permanent war that has settled on a House and Senate who compete in pseudo-patriotic one-upmanship to provide ever greater resources for the ill-defined War on Terror. This process can become so extravagant that even the military objects to it’s own reckless rewards, like the absurd spectacle of over-funded M1 Abrams tanks sitting unused in bases. Not only is the congressional psyche fixed upon a culture of war towards the horizon, but even if their constituents object then little, apparently, can be done to remedy the situation. We are living in an era where congress as a whole has never been more unpopular, yet the elected officials comprising it retain startling job security. Admittedly the legislature has been fighting the president, a member of the Executive, tooth and nail to derail any sort of progress on environmental issues, healthcare, and corporate regulation, but this has not been an effort to balance the powers of government. Instead, under the gridlocked two party system a conservative congress has been trying to cement corporate power against the last years of an initially (and only then, relatively) progressive president.

Furthermore, the Judiciary, in the character of the conservative Supreme Court has proven in to be decisively on the side of corporate power. While lip-service progress has been made on gay rights through the repeal of DOMA, its far more systemically significant decisions regarding limits on campaign finance (McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission) and the rights of corporations to exercise the religious beliefs of owners over their employees (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby) have cemented its character as a guardian of corporate power. And this is to say nothing of the Citizen’s United decision itself which set the whole madness off.

Of all three branches only the Legislature is mostly constituted by elected officials, but these elections themselves are subject to the power of elites, and not just marginally. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich (who you may know as “real-life Tyrion Lannister”) recently wrote an article detailing the corruption of American democracy through the growth of powerful financial-political entities and the withering of popular representative groups, such as unions. In it he cites a paper from Princeton’s Martin Gilens and Northwestern University’s Benjamin Page on the influence of elites, business groups, interest groups and average citizens. Gilens and Page found that average citizen has a (to quote Reich’s article and the study itself) “miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Their influence was virtually nothing compared to well-funded lobbying organizations.

Centralizing Power

For those of you keeping score at home, this waning of democratic fluidity and public oversight should be troubling considering our definition of Fascism as a “centralization of political and economic power into the hands of elites.” Its important to note here that the concept of an “elite” can take many forms: one can be part of a racial or religious “elite” that keeps power over one or more oppressed minority populations, it can be a purely economic distinction marking enormous wealth, or it can represent membership in a socially well-connected and nepotistic political class. It can also be any combination of these definitions put together (racial, religious, economic, and political all at once for instance). As well, a class of “elites” can also exist in a society that is not expressly Fascist.

Given the vast disparities in wealth that have emerged in recent years, it could definitely be said that such a class has taken shape in the States- indeed this gap of wealth and power hasn’t reached such a startling magnitude since the Great Depression (when a Fascist coup, concocted by powerful figures in business and the military, was actually contemplated circa 1933. It has since become known as the “Business Plot”). While the rise of vast personal wealth at the expense of an impoverished public is in itself unsettling, it becomes truly chilling when one considers the consequent political power it has engendered. I don’t mention the Supreme Court’s gusto for corporate power idly- by abolishing the cap on campaign contributions (and considering that increased campaign spending correlates directly with favorable election results), a direct link is established between economic and political influence, without even the trappings of a supposedly universal democracy to dilute it. If money has been made speech, our Judicial branch seems to believe the rich have much more to say.

And this is where things really become unpleasant, because it isn’t as though the elites in our society are arguing for all sorts of things- it’s not as though some multimilloinaires are radical Communists while others are classical conservatives, as though plenty of them support an overhaul of the racial structure of our society while a few old fogeys want things the way they are. The elites share certain interests- namely, the preservation of the status quo that allows them to exist as elites. Put more simply, they have a class interest. Hyper-wealthy capitalists will generally want to preserve the form of capitalism that will allow them to hold onto their large reserves of moolah in the same way that working-class citizens will generally want to expand social programs to provide themselves with a sort of “safety net.”

Of course in America that last clause isn’t quite true, because plenty of working-class Americans have no problem voting for reduced public spending or privatization of public industries like schools and hospitals, and this is where the lynchpin of ideology comes in. Objectively, expanded social programs will help the least well-off in a society, and the creation of public housing, schools, hospitals and other necessities have their roots in working-class political movements. Despite this, in a well-documented phenomenon of American democracy, poor, uneducated (and usually white) voters will support the repeal of these programs at the suggestion of charismatic, socially conservative politicians funded by almost comically wealthy donors.

To be frank the process is so wide-spread at this point a list of examples would be redundant. How did George Bush get elected? Was it his intelligent economic policies or his strong stance on defending civil liberties, two causes for which classical conservatives would be ecstatic? No, it was a persona, a character of a simple, tough, determined individualist- a straight, white, christian, married, father- who would defend our civilization, our culture, from threats both internal and external, at home and abroad. Sarah Palin was, unbelievably, elected by popular vote to office in her home state of Alaska- was this because she was thought to be a well-studied expert in public policy? A woman the extent of whose education is a Bachelor’s degree in Communications from the University of Idaho? Or did it have something more to do with the fact that she was a lifetime NRA member, an opponent of gay rights and abortion, and thought that creationism had a place in biology classes alongside the “theory” of evolution?

It’s difficult to convince anyone of that doesn’t want to hear it, but American politics have become, well…stupider. And why? Again I point to campaign financing, and the ballooning of advertising budgets that have resulted. The answers provided by town hall meetings and public debates matter less than appeals to irrational, emotional impulses among an uneducated electorate, and with the financial segregation of education through privatization of schools (a process which, infuriatingly, these same voting blocs support), this means that the poor have become easy prey for unscrupulous politicians. Truly it does not matter if Sarah Palin produces irrational answers in the same way that (as I mentioned in my last article) it did not matter if Mussolini’s voice actually cured a child of his deafness at a rally. By making elections a process of advertising rather than debate, candidates have been made more “personalities” rather than officials with informed opinions on the issues at their discretion.

It shouldn’t surprise us, either, because if we find a disparity of power in either the economic or political realm, we can expect the other sphere to become disrupted. If economic power becomes truly unbalanced, then the hyper-wealthy can be expected to subvert the political sphere for their own aims, to decrease regulation and privatize industries so they can rake in the profit. And the same is true of political power- if it becomes undemocratic and unchecked it will allow corrupt officials to monopolize wealth ostensibly owned by the state. One could see this unfold during the Soviet Union, when a powerful political class secured all manner of economic privileges for itself and padded statistics to accrue more funding for the industries they headed. Without freedom there is no equality, and without equality freedom is untenable.

In our society not only does this lack of education does damage democratic discourse, but we can also see the same appeals to a patriotic, nationalistic identity as a tool to unify the working class in the interests of the elite, and the use of “boogeymen” external threats to control them through fear that occur in Fascist societies. The threat of the “terrorist” and the necessity of “patriotism” hang over us in equal measure: the first is used to curtail the rights of citizens, the second is to get them to be happy about it. Need we look any farther than the CIA torture report itself to appreciate the disproportionate fear that the threat of terror invokes in us, and the cruelty that that fear justifies?

Because the fact of the matter is that since 9/11 we haven’t had suffered an attack of anywhere near the magnitude which these programs take as justification. For more than thirteen years we have accepted the encroaching militarism and rolling back of civil rights as a matter of course, the whole process suspended within the narrative of a cataclysmic evil ready to strike at any moment, in any place, and rob us of the world we love. Not only that, but we are told that this evil is so insidious, so perverse, that the public cannot be involved in the battle, cannot know its true parameters, lest they endanger our stalwart forces fighting a war of shadows. Americans are only now emerging from a deep slumber of mass consciousness to argue this narrative, and the temptation to rest and forgo answering the important questions remains strong.

A Tally

My goal in writing these two articles was, as I said, to provide an ideological measuring stick by which to gauge the progress of our country in recent years. I will not (do not wish to) defiantly proclaim that we are living in a Fascist society. We are not. Not yet. We are not a Fascist nation, but we have suffered for a while now from an infection of fear and authoritarianism which is begin to show strong symptoms of Fascism. We are hearing cries regarding police brutality that “This cannot continue,” regarding torture that “This has to end.” They are both right, “this” cannot go on, and “this” must end. For progressives the “this” is a system of hatred and brutality at odds with a just society, but it is not hard to imagine that neoconservatives might use the same language, only referring to “this” as “democracy.” Torture, oppression and secrecy cannot go on in a democratic society where the public holds power, but a democratic society can be overthrown. We are not going to find any government officials willing to go toe to toe with the CIA and end its torture program- no popularly elected official has near that much power, Obama included. We face a crisis of identity when we consider the irreconcilability of a secret torture program with the responsibilities of a democratic society, but the crisis has two answers: End the torture, or end the democracy.

For my part, it should be clear, I believe we must end the torture, and then wonder if we really had democracy in the first place; discuss if democracy could have produced these results in the first place. For a long time the American identity took democracy as its keystone, and beyond that the idea of equality before law which made democracy possible. We must retake this identity without attempting to return to the past, where offenses of power along vectors of class, race and religion have been routinely overlooked. We must abolish private campaign financing and radically overhaul our institutions of defense. We must give up our tools of dominance over other nations before these tools are turned against our own citizens (or rather, given the number of innocent Arab American citizens tortured by their own government, I should say turned against us en masse). We must lay down the sword and the rectal feeding tube, because the first begets the second.

The reigns of our society are held by a class of wealthy and politically-connected elites that have subverted the very institution of democracy to retain their privileges. We live in constant fear of an abstract threat whose conjurers produce concrete injustice. We have come to a moment of crisis, not economic, but political. We are not yet a Fascist nation, and we must not become one.

Fascism in America Part 1: Defining Fascism

“The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power” -Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1936 democratic convention

The recent torture report released by the CIA detailing the practices of “enhanced interrogation” employed during the presidencies of George Bush and Barack Obama has proved troubling, to say the least. A far cry from the emphatic denunciation of accusations of torture on the part of American intelligence services by Bush, it seems as if the actions of the CIA, despite internal and external regulation from the Senate Committee on Intelligence, have violated all manner of human rights agreements (the Geneva conventions among them) and constitutional statutes. Despite assurances of accountability and restraint, the CIA has systemically and intentionally obscured the truth of its practices for fear of reprisal.

Despite public knowledge of international “black sites” and skeletal details of the practices themselves, the public is still rocked by these revelations. Rocked because it seems as though every day the gap between American citizens and their political and economic leaders widens, and as we approach a crisis of faith regarding American democracy, these reports seem to confirm a repressed suspicion regarding our role in the War on Terror. If we have already consented to clandestine actions by our military and intelligence forces, if we have cast off the need for evidence and transparency in legal proceedings, if we have disregarded even the most basic human rights of our own citizens, then what “Terror” are we trying to prevent that we have not ourselves inflicted?

The post-9/11 era has seen a severe suspension of civil liberties and public engagement with politics. The philosophy that the struggle our nation faces is too difficult and secretive to be left to democratic whims has led to a rise of autocratic executive powers, like those held by CIA, that are not accountable to the public. In a nation that has long trumpeted the virtues of public accountability and an inherent belief in the democratic process, these actions seem not merely illegal but carried out according to a logic totally opposed to that championed by our public representatives, the president among them. Faced with such gruesome and arbitrary violence, we are forced to ask: what ideology are we dealing with here?

An ideology resting upon political opacity, concentrated political power and increased militancy would suggest Fascism, but before we go tossing around the “f-word” it would be wise to develop an independent definition of the term so that we can intelligently contrast it with present-day affairs. In this post I’ll be putting forward such a definition, based on the work of previous writers, and in my next post contrast it with the American political situation.

What is Fascism?

The question of what, precisely, a Fascist government entails has many answers. Arguably too many, as the term is often used by leftist movements to decry any party they feel violates their principles of legitimacy. As well, communist governments have used the term to defame dissidents of many stripes, sometimes contradictorily so; many subversives in the Soviet Union were labeled “Fascists” and “Trotskyites” in the same breath.

Despite this, scholarship on the issue has agreed on several points. Politically, fascism is a reactionary movement focused on the centralization of power into the hands of elites. Democratic mechanisms may exist, but they are rendered irrelevant to decisions on the part of the government through judicial mechanisms or exclusionary voting practices. In Indonesia under the rule of President Suharto, for example, a legislature remained, though it was totally subsidiary to the president’s power. This system was deemed “Guided Democracy.” Fascist elections will often withhold universal suffrage, instead granting voting rights to members of a specific ethnic or social group, and in extreme cases voting rights are only granted to male heads of households (see Francoist Spain). The focus on an “organic” (traditional) society makes the will of the patriarch dominant over children and women.

This centralization of power can take many forms: it is principally ideological, with officials being members of a single ruling party; sometimes other political parties are allowed but their influence is limited by legal mechanisms and factionalism (again, Suharto’s Indonesia illustrates this, as both Islamist and Socialist parties remained, though with negligible political import). While ultimately benefiting a caste of elites, by appealing to xenophobic, nationalist impulses in the populace the most powerful faction cements their power through a vision of an “organic society” based on traditional values.

Another point of consensus on Fascist rule is that it requires an economic centralization through consolidating wealth into a group of corporate oligarchs, who may or may not directly hold government posts. Even if the oligarchs do not hold these posts directly, the opaque nature of their government permits them to reach clandestine deals with leaders free from public scrutiny. Not only is there academic agreement on this issue, but explicit endorsement from Fascist rulers themselves. As Benito Mussolini writes in Capitalism and the Corporate State: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” The purpose of this is in part to destroy the power of labor, where left-leaning movements can arise to challenge the ruling party’s authority. As well, rewards within a system of factionalism are often conferred through placement within these corporate structures, who are not subject to any form of oversight, save from more powerful rival elites.

This process of political and economic centralization (and cooperation between the two powers) is central to the form of Fascist government. Admittedly it is central to most authoritarian structures, but while Left dictatorships frame it towards the historical goal of a classless society, under Fascism a disparity between the weak and the strong is justified as a necessary outcome of the aforementioned “organic society.”

The lynchpin which maintains this form of government and negates political upheaval is a strong, efficient propaganda apparatus which manufactures popular consent. This is done partly through control of mass media institutions (themselves often corporate entities), that may either be tightly regulated by the government or, if independent, sympathetic to the ruling party. The actions of the elite are consistently cast in a positive light, and failures on the part of the government, as well as social unrest, are frequently under-reported or mischaracterized. Another aspect of the propaganda apparatus is nationalism, which is seeded through slogans, symbols and public displays of military supremacy or some other aspect of national greatness. The work of Joseph Goebbels and Leni Reifenstahl (Triumph of the Will) fulfilled this role in Nazi Germany. A cult of personality is also an important characteristic, such as in Francoist Spain or Italy under Mussolini under Italy, where both leader’s (supposedly) awesome capabilities were given semi-religious overtones. In Italian textbooks at the time, Mussolini was implied to have cured a boy’s deafness who had been listening to one of his speeches. This propaganda serves to transfer hostilities towards enemies of the state as a method of maintaining control, while offering the state a redemptive, almost godlike disposition that occupies a symbolic-magical space of Unity, racial and/or ideological.

It is internal violence, however, which marks the ideological keystone of such a system. It is always racist and/or political, and often of incredible intensity. This is most powerfully represented by the Holocaust under Nazi Germany, but is also evidenced by the massacre of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, as well as pogroms of supposed “Communists” and their sympathizers in nearly every case of fascist revolution/coup. This violence is even evident in Fascist movements that have yet to achieve power, such as Golden Dawn in Greece where attacks on Roma, illegal immigrants and LGBT members among others have taken place, or the Ku Klax Klan in the United States that has repeatedly attacked black citizens, among others, during the 150 years of it’s existence. This work is done towards the creation of a more “pure” and unified country, devoid of ethnic and political distinctions.

To summarize, we may give Fascist governments the minimal definition of creating political and economic centralization into the hands of a class of elites heading an authoritarian system, who maintain power through ideological appeals to nationalist, racist and/or xenophobic feelings of an underclass whose power as workers is suppressed. It is differentiated from Left dictatorships in that it’s authority need not be framed as progressive towards a classless society.

In addition to this minimal definition, it should also be noted that Fascist governments will make a concerted effort to build up their military strength, though the project is not always practically effective. While Fascist militaries may not be successful in their conquests, typically their armed forces will either be used to conquer or agitate weaker neighbors, or to quell separatist and ideological uprisings.

In the next post I’ll be utilizing this definition of Fascism as a sort of ideological “measuring stick” for the United State’s political environment and structure. Stay tuned.

Goodbye Vidja

Re-Branding

As you might have noticed I haven’t updated this blog in a while. Partly that’s because I’ve been busy- I moved out of the States to come teach English in Barcelona, I’ve had other projects to work on, etc. etc. Part of it is I haven’t had time.

The other part is I haven’t had the inclination, because to be frank during my time as a video game blogger I became well-fed up with the structure of video game journalism. The orientation of this blog is now more expressly political (and radically left-wing, more on that later), but before I begin writing on political issues in the US, I wanted to take a moment to explain why I left videogame journalism, and what I think it says about the nature of larger media institutions in our society.

Gamergate and Why We Can’t Have Just Things

Where to begin in talking about Gamergate? Nearly everything has been said that could be about this hellish downward spiral of events. The people who stood accused of corruption have been protected by the same institutions which should hold them accountable; the people campaigning for ethics in gaming journalism have proven themselves to be violently bigoted trolls of the most unethical sort.

I don’t think that transparency in media outlets in any world means scaling back progress in social justice. There is deeply ingrained misogyny, homophobia, and racism within what has become a toxic (and largely male) fandom whose pointless, yet increasingly bitter, debates between PC and console gaming, between Sony vs. Microsoft vs. Nintendo have rendered them easy prey for corporate interests. The issue of Gamergate has become so unsalveagable that I think it would at this point be irresponsible to defend whatever kernel of truth lay on the outskirts of the movement’s defenders’ arguments.

And it really is a pity what happened, because there’s no reason, theoretically, why an accountable media institution and a progressive media institution need to be mutually exclusive. So I want to critique the ethics of games journalism myself, having formerly aspired to be a professional in the field, but I want to go at it from a much different angle, and to show a bit of insight that I gleaned from my time as a (semi-professional) journalist.

(I should note here I was never paid a dime for any of my work, so take it for what you will)

Private Media and Corporate Sponsors

In the United States we’ve become witness to a very unique form of propaganda, a sort of voluntary propaganda. I think its rare that, behind closed doors, any one of the “Big Three” networks actually receives a memo from a shady government official telling them specifically what or what not to report. Sadly, that fact isn’t in defense of their credibility, but an admission that such explicit interference is no longer necessary. Instead, major media institutions have become so adept at selling themselves out that obscuring the truth has become inherently profitable, and, therefore, beneficial. No shady government agent tells Fox executives to cast Michael Brown as a thuggish no-good youth; they do it themselves because they make more money off a politically ignorant viewership by pandering to their basest, most bigoted impulses. No one (probably) tells CNN not to report on fast food workers striking for decent pay, en masse, in major metropolitan centers: they don’t report on it because, as a leviathan-like corporate entity, their executives have an interest all their own in under-reporting stirrings of discontent within the working class. And the inane liberalism of MSNBC (which always stops just short of an analysis of class structures) is a disconcerting beast all its own. If I start talking about how a handful of well-connected individuals own most of these outlets and that this alone might lethally influence journalistic integrity people will call me a conspiracy theorist, so I’ll leave it at structural analysis.

In games journalism the problems of this new self-censorship are exacerbated because the field is only accountable to their specific viewership, not “the public,” and so the grievances become more acute. I’m not talking about sex-scandals here. What I’m talking about is the way that journalists are spoon-fed “leads” by the same businesses that own the products they are supposed to review in a kafka-esque series of conflicts of interest so essential to the system that they’re rarely even discussed, let alone critiqued within these same institutions.

Let me be more exact: I was writing for a blog called That Video Game Blog for a bit. I did a couple of reviews, a couple of short news stories, and before I go any further I wanna take a moment to say that the people who worked there were not scheming masters of the corporate media- they were nice. They never censored me. Actually, they seemed to respect my work enough that I was given a pretty long leash to say what I liked. My problem was not with the individuals, but with the system. Because the system was this: every day, a series of press releases was sent out and writers would select which stories to write up- the same was true of reviews. It might be a trailer release for Tropico or an announcement for a new World of Warcraft expansion, but never did it stray far from what felt like simple advertising. It was not that the writers were trying to cast these things in a positive light, but that the very content of what they were reporting on was largely positive. If a company releases an announcement for a new game that consists of a feature list and a couple of flattering screenshots there’s only so much you can do to make it sound objective. No company is going to send out a press release detailing the problems or doubts consumers should have with their products.

Perhaps you still think I’m exaggerating, so take a minute and check out gamespress.com (billed as a resource for game journalists- and ONLY game journalists). Most writers for sites like TVGB, which rely on unpaid contributors, will literally scour this list, choose a “story” they like, and write it up for their site. The stories they don’t get this way are mailed directly to staff from the companies that make these games, or those company’s PR agencies. This is not reporting, it is regurgitation. A large portion of the stories you will read on gaming “news” sites can be found right on gamespress, straight from the tap.

And the rest of the “news”? Well there are the “inside peeks” within studios, triple-A or indie, where journalists are given a walking tour of the production process, always accompanied by owners or employees of the same company hyping their products. There are the reviews for which, to make sure that advance copies can be procured, an incessant buddy-buddy nepotism between critics and business owners is assured, and then there are the trade shows, which by now have become far more fan-spectacle than an exchange of informed opinions for the benefit of the industry. In fact, for a more thorough rundown of the history and practice of review embargos and corporate alliances, check out this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwD2GgWKIrs) video published in 2012 (long before Gamergate began, so it can be watched guiltlessly). He covers far more ground on the issue than I could here.

All that’s left are the editorials, which most people realize by now are hopelessly inane.

Self-Censorship and the Commodification of Information

Gaming journalism has been reduced to little more than an extension of advertising for powerful studios who know that they’re holding all the cards. Advance copies are withheld if their last offering was poorly received by such-and-such outlet. People (like Jeff Gertsmann) can even be fired for upsetting the wrong corporation.

And why? Because the way these outlets make money is from page views. I cannot stress to you how important page views are. The better your page views, the more valuable you are to advertisers, and advertising is where the money comes from because these outlets rarely charge for subscription. I also wrote for The New York Video Games Critics Circle for a while. This was a collection of leading game critics who would come together for the purpose of discussion or to arrange events, like an awards show. I, being an intern, was somewhat out of place among them. I won’t name names (I can’t, really, I’ve forgotten most of them though they can be found here http://nygamecritics.com/members/) but when they talked business, the talk was always about page views- that was what they strove for, that was the criteria to which practices and articles were held.

Its an interesting mutation of the “profit motive” that we hear so much about when learning the virtues of capitalism in school. Under the original version of the “profit motive” a producer will try and create the products that they think are the best so that the market will favor them and they will make a profit (I will make the best chair so that I can make the most money). Now, however, with their “profit” coming from advertising, journalistic outlets (and I’m not just talking about games journalism here) do not attempt to write/produce (in the case of video coverage) the best or most informative articles and let the “market” of the audience decide. Instead, they attempt to write the most exciting or inflammatory articles, which don’t have to be responsible or true necessarily, because it is the attention itself, not the approval of the content, which is profitable (I will make an interesting-looking chair because I make money every time someone sits on it- whether the chair is good or not is irrelevant). Advertisers do not care if your reporting is honest- they care how many people stare at it.

Remember, these news outlets are themselves businesses, and a business has one primary goal for which all other goals are a means towards an end- profit. That is the condition of whether a business survives and if it thrives. Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, a business has to make money. A couple decades ago, this was accepted as an objectively good thing, as profit was the result of the production of a quality product. That standard no longer holds, and I hope that by now you can start to see the parallels between the ethical problems plaguing gaming journalism and those afflicting the mass media. While the major private media networks still broadcast on television, the majority of their viewership is now digital, and that means that success comes from page views; CNN operates according to essentially the same criteria as Kotaku or IGN, though sporting vastly different content and on a much larger scale. Of course, the problem of advertising plagued television as well, but with the digital format it has become so much more acute.

The Bigger Picture

What I’m trying to do here is not to indict any individual journalist, video-game or otherwise, as ruining the media- that would be an exercise in futility. What I want instead is to show that media outlets, operating not as individuals with individual goals, but as institutions with institutional goals (i.e. profit) have subverted such “truth” as they were once capable of presenting. Yes, perfect objectivity is impossible, but I would much rather read articles from people at least attempting to retain professional distance rather than fixing page views as the criteria for whether or not their writing is worthwhile.

But I won’t fix it, because I can’t. And its a shame, because I truly love interesting, original video games, and when the media outlets that are supposed to be taking companies to task for the quality of their products abandon their responsibility to consumers then the whole industry goes to pot. More money is being spent on riling up an insatiable hype machine that gaming media outlets are all too happy to foster as it creates the sort of frenzied interest they need to maintain their business models. More money is being spent on trailers, and advertising campaigns, and hip “first looks” that give the impression of innocuous “chats” from impassioned individuals that share their audiences concerns and desires, and slowly but surely the quality of mainstream titles is declining. More sequels, more safe-bets, more reliance on presentation which is becoming more distant from the content of the experiences themselves. Does the community not remember how great the trailers were for Dead Island and Star Wars: The Old Republic? Two games that are now by-words within the industry for abject disappointment? To my mind there could be no more perfect allegory for the increasing celebritization of political campaigns within the United States, where the corporate media has been complicit in endorsing ever-grander spectacles of political candidates campaigns, thought the candidates themselves are proving increasingly incapable of leading the nation. The spectacle, which produces profit, is secondary to the result, which is valuable only to the consumers/voters and not the media institutions that are supposed to inform them.

So I’m not going to write on video games anymore, save for the occasions when they intersect with political discourse. I am of the mind that truth itself is threatened by the relentless quest for profit, and the result is not so much lying as simple inanity. A neutrality, rather than hostility, towards truth. The commodification of information in the digital age means that profit-driven institutions no longer have an interest in reporting the truth, they have an interest in reporting what will grab people’s attention. The clickbait approach has crept into digital media institutions and systemically undermined their role in fostering the intelligent discourse necessary for a democratic society. I don’t want to beat my head against a wall for the sake of video games anymore; if I’m going to beat my head against a wall I at least want it to be the most morally repulsive and terrifying wall possible, and that means American politics. I fear for this future of truth in this country because people, not just institutions, seem content to consume entertainment instead.

So What Instead?

Instead, I’m going to try and update this blog weekly with at least one well-developed article on an important national issue, or a philosophic dissection of some aspect of (primarily American) political life. I meant it when I said that I fear for the truth, and seeing as how no one is going to be paying me to write any time soon I’m in the unique position of being able to say what I like without any pressing special interests influencing me. This makes me feel a bit like a street-corner doomsayer wearing a sandwich board with “THE END IS NIGH” scrawled on it in feces, but to be honest I’ve always had a sort of respect for those individuals.

I’m going to be an internet crank, like Diogenes but with less masturbating in the marketplace (less, not none). I think mainstream commentary in the States is failing the public at a time of what could be great political upheaval if we’re willing to look at the situation broadly and frankly. The powerful bloc of allied corporate and government interests is tightening its grip on the facade on democracy and people are losing faith, yet despite this few strong new political options have emerged. I don’t expect my every reader to be a social libertarian by the time they’ve finished an article, but I hope to at least ask questions that people can appreciate, and that can prompt meaningful discussion about the society that we live in.

Cultured Wars: Modern Warfare and Propaganda

Vladmir Makarov. Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Ask most young men and women hovering around the age of military enlistment which name they know better and see what they tell you. One is a consistent antagonist of the Modern Warfare series. The other is the current leader of Al-Qaeda. Chances are it will be the former.

The Face of Evil

Of course, these same young people would probably be able to name Link, Master Chief or Kratos before Al-Zawahiri as well. That’s to be expected considering that gaming is the highest-grossing entertainment industry of our era; it’s going to shape our culture. However, unlike Link, Mario or Kratos, Makarov is somehow less fictional. His figure rests in that political uncanny valley that Call of Duty operates so subtly within. He is not an actual terrorist, but he has taken structural and operational cues from the world of terror his writers live within. While Makarov in particular is fake, the political position he occupies is real, even if his real-world counterparts that inhabit it do not adhere to a russian nationalist ideology. There is no Makarov, but, so the series’ writers would like us to believe, such men do exist. The conflict in Call of Duty strives to be one that is actually happening, only with different names, places, countries, and ideologies. These, the game seems to say, are mere details.

And so Call of Duty distills these facts to present the conflict, realer-than-real, as art. And we play it. Millions of us. Oftentimes we bypass the single-player entirely and head straight to Team Deathmatch. Well-balanced and addictive, even those who might take issue with the game’s  political leanings (clearly pro-interventionist and sponsored by the US military) indulge in the multiplayer, the “pure” game, because, hey, it’s just fun right? And it is. But that’s the tricky thing about propaganda.

The Greatest Trick The Devil Ever Pulled

Tricky because, like the ideology it furthers, propaganda is at its most effective when it doesn’t announce itself. Great propaganda is not always funded directly by the government and displayed in theaters as such. Rather, it is merely taken for granted. What makes it dangerous is that it does so while still changing our thinking.

It would be difficult to make a case for the single-player story of Modern Warfare not being propaganda. The protagonists are exclusively english-speaking special-forces agents (or defectors in support of the protagonistic powers) intervening to secure worldwide peace against terrorists spreading nationalist-religious ideology or furthering international drug trade. America’s two most-touted philosophical wars, against terror and against drugs, frame the series’ largest antagonists. Furthermore, the protagonists achieve their goals employing surveillance and “interrogation” techniques that violate any number of international treaties and human rights conventions. This, however, is old ground. One can simply “take a side” on these issues and say, “It may very well be a political game, yet, I see what the writers are saying and support their positions.”

However, I feel that the plot itself is a trojan horse. So obviously political, it seems “real”, as though, like it or not, this is war, and if the game makes war seem bad, well, that’s simply because it is. But if Modern Warfare makes war seem “bad” (which even the most vicious war hawks would admit to it being) it’s fault lies in portraying it as bad in the wrong way. Here is where things get interesting because gaming, as a young medium, is an even younger form of propaganda, and it is specifically because it is a game that Modern Warfare is such effective propaganda.

Artistic competence can be a dangerous thing

So, not forgetting the plot, lets look at the gameplay. In Modern Warfare, you shoot people who shoot back at you. The people you shoot are bad guys because you are the good guy, meaning that in the context of the game, they are second/third-world terrorists while you are a special ops agent of a first-world government. Right off the bat we have established what the conflict is “about”, and that’s military force. One military force must crush the other to establish supremacy and, if the player is successful, peace. To challenge the player in this show of military force, the opposition takes up ever-greater arms and vehicles, forcing the player to rise to the occasion. The player proceeds through various locales (villages, compounds, ruined city-scapes) in pursuit of the arch-villain while encountering enemy combatants. Stop.

As we said earlier, Modern Warfare is a distillation of the real conflict the US and its allies are embroiled in now. So the conflict described above, though sensationalized, should still strike at the heart of what the war is “about.” But it doesn’t. The greatest challenge to the American military is not the military supremacy of their opponents; Al-Qaeda does not have access to juggernaut armor or a wide supply of WMDs, or even advanced small arms (militants with money can do better than AK-47s). Even if they did suddenly acquire a windfall of money and weapons, in terms of training, manpower, spending and technological progress we completely outrank any militant movement that would target us. Private clandestine patrons or destabilised second-world regimes are totally eclipsed by the national funding of a superpower. The threat is not, and has never been, that the terrorists will “win” and that we will surrender.

Furthermore, even the use of force that the player possesses is presented “at a slant,” to cite Emily Dickinson. It is right, but not quite right in the ways that matter. Consider the use of drone strikes by the player. Always these strikes are used to target enemy forces, often in a sort of escort mission by which the forces on the ground are protected from an onslaught of incoming foes. Always they target armed enemies with the intent to kill, and the only difference between ground warfare and that of the drone is that in the latter the player is both deadlier and more protected. However, with up to 98% of suspected victims of drone strikes being civilians rather than military , can we really accept this view of drones as being anywhere near reality? Here, more than just facts are being changed, the effects of the conflict are twisted themselves. This is no longer mere distillation, this is rewriting history.

Unknown Knowns, Known Unknowns

The same could be said of ground combat, however. When players are breaching military compounds or stealthing their way through villages always their opponents are morally “vulnerable” enough that they can be disposed of without regret (as any act of aggression against them can be reasonably seen as proactive self-defense). But is this the reality of our war? Even when Seal Team Six faced the arch-villain of our war narrative, Osama Bin Laden, in combat, wasn’t the most important consideration not shooting the civilians he was surrounded by?

I’m not trying to argue that Modern Warfare is at fault simply for forgetting to include civilian npcs or meditations on human rights, what I’m arguing is that Modern Warfare ignores these features which form the actual crux of the conflict. In the war we fight now, our martial superiority is unquestionable; the outcome of actual combat is a given in our favor. The trouble, rather, lies specifically in the fact that we don’t always know who we are fighting, and that homegrown resistance movements borne out of popular discontent are comprised of people who blur the line between combatant and civilian. This fact in turn lends itself to the criticism our military has come under for human rights abuses because the conflict “necessitates” civilian casualties, which in turn leads to the military’s increased secrecy and changing of objectives (first WMDs, then stabilising democracy worldwide, now defending our own country against terrorist invasion…) This war has dragged on for more than a decade not because we cannot succeed in armed conflict, but because we are not fighting the purely martial war that we would like, which is exactly the conflict that Modern Warfare attempts to portray.

Final Boss

If my earlier comments regarding multiplayer seemed cryptic, here’s why. The multiplayer portion of the game, in maintaining such apolitical appeal, is actually the most propagandistic part, specifically because it appears apolitical. In the multiplayer portion of the game, the player is free to trick out their gear loadouts to their hearts content with a staggering number of hi-tech options. Afterwards they are dropped into a level which could conceivable frame an armed conflict between a terrorist and military/police faction in which to kill each other. Though they choose their armaments, their loyalties are randomly determined.

The multiplayer acts as sort of a mini-narrative, a conceivable conflict that, even if they surely do not happen as frequently as online matches are played, could occur itself. This is the crucial ideological move, because a conflict between equally armed opponents on either side of this political divide doesn’t happen. The crux of the international war on drugs/terror is that the sides are disproportionate. Could we imagine a terrorist group operating drones with frequency or efficiency as the US government? The same could be said for helicopter attacks, military strikes, rx-cds or even the advanced small arms players employ themselves. Central to the conflict is the fact that one side does possess this technology while the other does not. This material distinction is not a “detail” of the conflict, it is the point.

This is why the multiplayer in Modern Warfare is the most propagandistic facet. Because in removing what the developer’s consider the conflict’s “details” they actual distort its essence. When we accept a conflict between equally powerfully enemies on either side of this struggle as feasible, we have already lost touch with reality.

War…War Never Changes

This line above, a famous quote from the Fallout series, is here as right as it is wrong. The people that want wars fought never want to fight them themselves, and they will always find ways to get other people to fight for them. They will vilify their targets, and they will give those capable of fighting a story to fulfill.

Logistics, however, do change, and they have changed so radically that they now shape the politics of the conflict. We fight a war in which victory or defeat is not a matter of mere casualties or gained ground, but of navigating treachorous terrain political (comprised of laws which aremeant to stop exactly the sort of clandestine operations that the player is executes) and of dealing with the fact that our enemies aren’t purely soldiers.

And culture changes too. While posters and war-reels may have sufficed for superpowers in the 20th century, in the 21st video games, already massively popular among military  recruiters’ prime demographic (high school to college age males), form our main cultural input. We should expect them to have a political agenda. We get less and less actual reporting and viewing of the war(s) and more and more stories about it. Our perception of the war(s) is now shaped more by cultural re-telling than actual fact. The danger of video game propaganda is the same fact that makes games such an interesting story-telling medium: the story is more than just what’s said or represented, but fundamentally about how we shape the player’s engagement. In Modern Warfare we engage with the war on terror as an equitable military conflict between two forces distinguished only by ideology. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Blog

Hiya dear reader, my name is Robert Gordon and I’m a writer and critic working out of New York. The purpose of this blog is to have a place to collect writings I have either published elsewhere and like or couldn’t publish elsewhere but nevertheless like. Professionally I write about games. Personally I write about killer robots, globalization, existentialism, revolutions (current, theoretical, practical and abstract) and all things eldritch/arcane. This blog will be a bit of all of the above.

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Where we’re going, we don’t need Alderaan