I don't know who that guy is but it sounds interesting.tragabigzanda wrote:https://www.compactmag.com/article/propaganda-and-the-postmodern-mind/Propaganda and the Postmodern Mind
Glenn Ellmers
Yes, we'll need something else. Not to sound like a broken record, but Nietzsche's entire project was dealing with this problem: The death of God.tragabigzanda wrote:
Two important insights from the influential French thinker Michel Foucault (with an assist from Leo Strauss) can help us understand the mass psychosis and totalitarian hysteria of the left in our time. Foucault’s account of the the merger of “power/knowledge” helps explain why so many people across the West are descending into a kind of irrational tribalism or premodernism. Once the foundations of knowledge—God, nature, and history—have been destroyed, and truth is nothing but a function of power, it becomes almost impossible to make reasonable judgments based on common sense.
The postmoderns did not invent the notion of knowledge as power. The modern project launched in the 16th century by Machiavelli, Bacon, and Descartes reconceived science as mastery over nature “for the relief of man’s estate.” The most important knowledge became practical; philosophy or wisdom was no longer pursued for its own sake, but rather to command the physical laws of nature for human ends. But science thus conceived could never explain what this liberation or freedom was for; and thus the logical consequence of the modern scientific project was the control of human nature detached from any rational and enduring conception of the good.
I think the current left's ideology is a mix of utilitarian scientism and christian socialism, and it falls apart under the weight of its own bullshit, so sure?tragabigzanda wrote:
What appears to be a contradiction—the left’s ostentatious defense of “science” and its simultaneous embrace of quasi-religious superstitions—is the predictable result of science’s transformation into an ideology.
This is the kind of circular French philosophy that makes my eyes roll into the back of my head.tragabigzanda wrote: Foucault expanded on this point in Power/Knowledge: “We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.” We become, as it were, coopted into the production of truth. “Power,” he said, “never ceases its interrogation, its inquisition, its registration of truth: it institutionalizes, professionalizes, and rewards its pursuit.”
Thing is, the left is right -- er, I mean "correct" -- about this, and there is no going back.tragabigzanda wrote:
Most thinkers on the right still affirm objectivity, the power of reason, and a non-arbitrary basis for justice and the human good. Their left-wing counterparts, however, argue for the contingency of all beliefs, and seek to unmask the power dynamics behind every assertion of objective truth. Their inability to hold fast to any idea of nature or divinity leaves them subject to ideological fashion and at the mercy of official propaganda.
Sadly, this seems to be the case, but I have a belief (or at least a theory), that with the proper conditioning, an individual can still free himself.tragabigzanda wrote: In an essay titled “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault showed that the attempt to conquer nature begins with the hope of liberating man, but ends with man’s enslavement. “Even in the greatly expanded form it assumes today, the will to knowledge does not achieve a universal truth; man is not given an exact and serene mastery of nature.” Rather, the attempt to conquer nature “ceaselessly multiplies the risks, creates dangers in every area; it breaks down illusory defenses; it dissolves the unity of the subject; it releases those elements of itself that are devoted to its subversion and destruction.”
Abso-fuckin'-lutely. There are lots of names for it. "Deep state" works for me.tragabigzanda wrote:
Foucault’s other great insight reveals how modern power structures operate systemically and anonymously, implicating both rulers and ruled to the point where it becomes hard to distinguish them: “Power must be analyzed as something which circulates,” he wrote, or rather as something which only functions in the form of a chain. It is never localized here or there, never in anybody’s hands, never appropriated as a commodity or piece of wealth. Power is employed and exercised through a net-like organization. [Individuals] are always in the position of simultaneously undergoing and exercising this power [as] the vehicles of power, not its points of application.
What this means is that rules “are empty in themselves” and so the exercise of power falls arbitrarily on whoever is “capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them.”
This insight has direct application to the current mode of liberal rule. Barack Obama may have been the last Democratic president to exercise authority on his own behalf. With Joe Biden, we see more clearly how the power network actually prefers an empty suit. The fact that Biden turned out to be mentally incompetent for much, perhaps most, of his presidency was a feature, not a bug. (Although the establishment acknowledged his debilitation in order to replace him with Kamala Harris, he nevertheless remains the commander in chief until January.) If Harris—who appears to have no fixed beliefs, but simply follows the consensus of her party—assumes the Oval Office, we will have reached the apotheosis of the presidency as a purely symbolic figurehead. My friend Roger Kimball refers to this shadow-establishment as “the Committee.”
Yes, though he's probably not enough of a problem to really do some damage to it.tragabigzanda wrote: All of this helps clarify the threat posed by Donald Trump, who in addition to his disdain for woke dogmas, insists (for better or worse) on making his own decisions, and thus denies the authority of the anonymous power network.
I haven't read Strauss so I don't know what his argument is, but I'm too much of a Nietzschean to think Socrates is a solution to anything (and I think he's a big problem), so I'd have to agree with Foucault. But just because truth and justice can only be subjective, that's no reason to despair!tragabigzanda wrote: Foucault saw how unsatisfying this all is, yet had no solution because, as a historicist, he accepted that all truths and all conceptions of justice are groundless. In one interview, he noted that social justice movements “need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is....” Asked by the interviewer: “Do you think that the Greeks offer an attractive and plausible alternative?” he replied: “No! I am not looking for an alternative; you can’t find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people.”
If Foucault offers us the most incisive analysis of the problem but no solutions, Leo Strauss saw, even more deeply than Foucault, the roots of our present crisis. While Foucault never really addressed the content of the power/knowledge narrative (because he agreed that all truths and all ethics are ultimately arbitrary), Strauss’s profound understanding of classical political philosophy offers us an important insight into the positive—if deranged—ideology of the contemporary left.
Strauss devoted his life to the study of “the problem of Socrates,” or the question of natural right. Socrates was the first to apply the distinction between nature and convention to the human things, to ask whether there is anything just or noble by nature. Like Heidegger and Foucault, Strauss saw the self-destruction of modern philosophy—the rejection of natural right—as a return to pre-Socratic conventionalism. What Strauss saw far more clearly was that politics, or the city, is always prior to political philosophy. Political philosophy only emerges through, and in tension with, law—a broadly conceived moral-political framework of the human good, including man’s relationship to God and the cosmos. Morality and decent politics can certainly exist without philosophy; but they cannot exist without law, or rather good law. Foucault never followed through on his insight that there must always be some kind of ethics, because the power/knowledge structure cannot exist in a moral vacuum.
Today’s reigning left-wing ideology had to emerge because even the most powerful propaganda must offer some conception of justice, a way for the political community to understand itself in terms of good and evil. But having rejected God, tradition, and nature, this moral-metaphysical theology, as we might call it, recognizes no source of authority other than modern science, which, as Foucault showed, cannot defend itself and ends in irrational nihilism. This attempt to fulfill man’s deep psychic need for moral authority or law, while rejecting human nature, cannot succeed because it is necessarily incoherent—which goes a long way to explaining why the contemporary left has become angry, punitive, implacable, and paranoid.
Strauss argued that as long as there are human beings there will be a human nature, and thus some basis for recovering the Socratic insight into natural right. But the problem of how to translate this theoretical insight into a practical solution is something Strauss did not or could not solve for us. It remains the great challenge of our times.
Ultimately, conservatives think they can just go back or pretend that there is some fixed star to guide us, so I think they are doomed to fail. But the left is going the wrong way, too, and have hopelessly lost themselves in the void because of their destructive and resentful collectivism.
(note: I haven't read much Heidegger or Foucault either, but when I try to, I think to myself "Why am I reading a Nietzschean when I could just be reading Nietzsche? It's all right there in his books!" Plus he's more clear, more ruthlessly honest, and more vulnerable than any of his acolytes, not to mention a beautiful and powerful writer. Just read Nietzsche!)
