Reality by fiat:

Or, my first Substack post

We are living in an era of cultural decline defined by growing authoritarianism, warring ‘mimetic tribes’, a collapse of shared meaning, and a corporate-state that is increasingly immune to the democratic process. We are being governed, as Giorgio Agamben observes, by a rolling ‘state of exception’ in which civil liberties are suspended in the name of ‘risk’, ‘safety’, ‘hygiene’, ‘the science’ and, the latest hyperbolic catastrophe. At the cultural level, new real and manufactured divisions are appearing between formerly united groups who are increasingly splintering and occupying different media ecosystems and therefore different social realities.

A confluence of intersecting crises are coming together — ecological, political, technological, economic, social, cultural, even spiritual — with the meaning crisis at the centre of all of them. How do we make sense of our world?

The print-based public sphere, for all its problems with gatekeeping and audience capture, was nonetheless a shared social reality built on a tangible material culture. Similarly, analogue TV with its reputable public broadcaster and four or so commercial channels also generated a shared social reality. Remember when we all read the same newspapers and watched the same TV shows and films? It’s a low bar for ‘reality’, to be sure, but there was a certain comfort in it, and a sense that at work and in social life, you were more or less ‘on the same page’ (literally and figuratively) as those around you. This centre — and thus civil society itself — has been torn asunder and now we live in a digitally simulated ‘war of all against all’.

As human culture migrates to the internet, these symbolic wars, with real life consequences, are stoked and curated by nefarious agents (bots, shadow banning and bumping, debunking and pre-bunking, ready-made reputation destruction etc.) all made possible through the ‘censorship industrial complex’ and exacerbated by the human tendency toward in-group conformity and ‘virtue signaling’. Once the dominant narrative is set, few are willing to go against it, even when it is absurd. This produces both systemic ‘tribalism’ (in-group/out-group dynamics) and systemic confusion. Underneath the ‘mass formation’ invariably lies fear, disconnection and disorientation.

‘Misleading Signage’ - Leunig

What is a fact when the ‘fact-checkers’ are bought and paid for and when the replication crisis in science means many seemingly ‘hard facts’ are context specific and impermanent, if not, outright lies)?  Beyond this, what is a fact separate from the context and worldview in which it was ‘dis-covered’?  And, what is knowledge that is so specialised it cannot address the meaning crisis?   Are all these hard boiled ‘facts’ we are mandated to live by not in fact destroying our lives even as they purport to save them? And how do we make this critique without collapsing into partiality, hyperbole and conspiracy? These are some of the questions I’ll be asking in this Substack.

I have come to see the new culture wars as far beyond the ‘bread and saucers’ of the latest media and social media cycles and into the realm of epistemology and metaphysics. As I said in a recent piece, regarding the ‘category of woman’ — curiously, the vector for the meaning crisis par excellence — the two sides are arguing from different premises, each with different philosophical ‘priors’. One side assumes the materiality and irreducibility of the category of sex; the other assumes sex is an identity (or subjective feeling) that can be opted in and out of. These two positions are irreconcilable and thus constitute a zero-sum game. All we can do is ‘agree to disagree’.

The problem is, answers to questions like, ‘What is a woman?’ or ‘Is Covid a sound basis on which to suspend civil liberties and shut down society?’ are shaping the social order, infusing it with a new modus operandi, imposed upon yet anathema to most (although, once imposed, few will go against it).[1] This is not a mere difference of opinion within an overarching worldview; rather, each position is values-based and seeks a particular way of life (law, policy etc.). We know which side is ‘rolling out’ in a nation-state, county, local council, school, health service and municipal office near you.

The current meaning crisis is about the very nature of reality itself and our implicit theories of being and knowing. In other words, we have moved from ‘manufacturing consent’ — Chomsky’s brilliant and insightful formulation — to reality by fiat. It is no longer (just) consent that is manufactured, but reality itself. As the dissident voice cleaves off from the mainstream — notably in relation to pandemic public health policy, but in many other areas too, e.g., sex and gender — and embarks on a separate ‘road less travelled’, we have at least two divergent realities emerging; and, internal to these, many more.  

I want to enter this epistemologically illegible terrain and attempt, through my writing, to make sense of it. As I understand it, the extant hall of mirrors is a result of two forces that invite a third. First, political power imposes reality by fiat. This is the explicit curation of a digitally mediated ‘reality’ through a totalising assertion of ‘the facts’ backed by rigorous censorship, ‘visibility filtering’ and the reputation destruction of dissidents. In hyperreality all bets are off, which is why propaganda has moved from being a weapon of war to the normal, albeit weaponised, state-of-affairs. The truth is out there somewhere; it’s just not likely on your heavily curated and surveilled newsfeed…

Second, reality by fiat pushes a group of people — the dissidents — outside mainstream society, i.e., the realm of professional work, educational institutions, the legacy media, the culture industries; and, in extreme cases — such as during the lockdown of the unvaccinated — employment, schools, hospitals, shops, and banks. These abjectly draconian measures killed democracy (or liberal democracy) and free speech and created a new social contract where individual sovereignty and bodily autonomy were no longer part of the deal.

This produces a third dynamic among the cast out and disaffected: the creation of their own show (quite literally). Hello: YouTube, Patreon, Substack, Rumble, Locals, Odyssey, Telegram, Signal, Crypto, Cash, Podcasts, Dumbphones, counter-cultural conferences, and dissident meet-ups.  This is the land of the de-bunked, pre-bunked, ‘anti-vaxxer’, ‘conspiracy theorist’, ‘far-Right extremist’, ‘neo-Nazi,’ ‘reactionary radical’, redneck from ‘Dumbfuckistan’.

There has always been a place beyond the cultural pale where dissidents, artists, shamans, poets and the mad went to fulminate, create, cure and convalesce; however, Covidian propaganda, and the gross destruction of civil liberties that ensued (and persist) in its wake, drastically rearranged and expanded this group. There are now loads of respectable, credentialed people among the dissidents, not only a few ‘cranks’ easy to discredit and dismiss.

The Covid consensus turned the old categories of Left and Right upside down. Former radicals — i.e. Noam Chomsky — morphed into mouthpieces for the establishment and said things like, ‘the unvaccinated should be isolated’ and finding food is ‘their problem’, while ‘the deplorables’ including tradies and truckers stood firm against the mandates and militarised police. Citizen journalists like an unknown Sri Lankan-Australian wedding photographer Rukshan Fernando — aka the ‘Real Rukshan’ — held a camera of truth to power filming the Melbourne anti lockdown protests while the mainstream media systemically misrepresented them. Fernando was himself called ‘right wing’ and, more surprisingly, a ‘racist’, despite coming from a black, immigrant family who had always voted Labour!

Similarly, women’s rights activists are now called ‘bigots’; or, more absurdly, ‘neo-Nazis’ for suggesting that convicted rapists shouldn’t be in women’s prisons or biological males in women’s sports or that children should not be subjected to activist propaganda (something I have also written about here and here). Nowadays any opposition gets you ousted and smeared or, as Matt Taibbi recently put it, ‘we’re all deplorable now’.

Inversion prevails in orthodox culture, but on the reality ark, left and right don’t matter so much anymore. After all, these were terms derived from the French Revolution: in support, sitting on the left; against, sitting on the right. What matters now is the willingness to preserve what is human and to resist the mechanistic, technocratic and fascist worldview that is not just encroaching, but already here. Perhaps less obviously there is also a lot of right brain (or intuitive, interpretive) thinking on this side of the aisle. Agreement on principals and priors is what matters. As CJ Hopkins said in an interview with James Delingpole, “I look forward to getting back to a time when we can have a disagreement about the welfare state, but until then, we have work to do” (not the exact quote, but it’ll do).

This is a strange and discombobulating situation for heterodox dissidents across the right and left; however, it is more acute for those on the left, since it is ‘our side’ who have become censorious, dogmatic, identitarian, fanatical and militant. As Toby Rogers adroitly observes, the academic left completely failed when the very thing they had spent two centuries studying – state and corporate power – arrived at the door.   The institutionalised left are indeed the contemporary face of GloboCap.

Matt Orfalea’s video ‘Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign’ captures this well. The vilification of ‘the unvaccinated’ – a new category of non-person invented in the corona crisis – was as pervasive and brutal as it was deluded.

Having said that, there are problems in heterodoxy too, mostly the mad hatter problems that come from a lack of meaningful dialogue with opponents. There is vulnerability to hyperbole, and paranoia; seeing everything as a ‘psyop’ and everyone who breaks through the sound barrier as ‘controlled opposition’ (in Delingpole’s inimitable words, ‘if you know the name, they’re in the game’); a rejection of science altogether rather than critique of its corporate capture or positivist excesses; a concomitant rejection of liberalism and modernity for unrealised – and arguably, unrealisable – utopian ideals; reactionary conservatism – okay in theory, but pretty crappy in practice; New Age confection; a vulnerability to snake oil salesman promising health and wellbeing in a ludicrously expensive bottle (of supplements); becoming mentally ill from the trauma and isolation of being vilified, discriminated against and cast out (including by friends and family); and, last but not least, suffering from the pitfalls of unhinged ‘conspiracy’, and this too is loaded, since the word is itself a tool of the corporate-state to silence dissent. We’re not keen to use it. Ever. But there you go, I just did. [1]

The problem is neither group is in dialogue with the other within a sanctioned public sphere because this sphere has been sold off like every other public institution and utility. The public sphere has been in slow neo-liberal decline for decades and, in my view, died with the corona crisis. Though others such as the gloomy German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck place this death a few years earlier.

“Before capitalism will go to hell, it will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around, as nobody will have the power to move its decaying body out of the way.”

Wolfgang Streeck - How Will Capitalism End? (2016)

The public sphere, which began as a literal town centre – for the ancients, the polis – and moved to a print-based culture where men (and occasionally women), ‘of letters’ defined, described, analysed, debated and discoursed on the pressing matters of the day, in turn recreating that day, has died. Rather than a heavy carcass however what we have is an ultra light simulation — or, reality by fiat — one that can be changed at a moment’s notice to suit the circumstances.

This ‘bourgeois public sphere’,[2] to use Jürgen Habermas’s apt term, is now a largely simulated and controlled space defined by unaccountable and increasingly nefarious private interests. The private-citizen is no longer able to oppose, challenge, refine, fictionalise or parody power except (sometimes) at the margins – and thus he or she is not able to co-create the society s/he lives in. The citizen no longer has sanctioned liberty, only a set of contingent privileges that rely on his or her fidelity to corporate-state diktat. This is the digital passport to participation, not quite but already, here.

Thus, while Substack, Rumble, Locals et. al., are great, they are also a ‘preaching to the converted’ cul-de-sac. That’s why they’re tolerated. Just. Anyone who breaks through the sound barrier into the bona fide centre however is summarily dismissed and destroyed (i.e., loses their job and/or reputation). Hence the interest and suspicion by dissidents in those who are allowed to stay on saying the same things that get most others deleted. Reality by fiat ensures compliance and the last resort is always that a dissident can be ‘Assanged’ (God bless one of our greatest Australians).

Returning to my point. Groupthink is the end result as truth is no longer finessed through opposition and critique within a set of cultural norms sanctioning open debate. We are all – including dissidents – diminished by this. Critically, opposition is not simply marginal it is banned, rendered either mad or mute, while the underlying paradigms are increasingly irreconcilable (e.g., the example of sex versus gender ID above).  Both groups are thereafter vulnerable to the truth corroding effects of in-group bias; hence, the mutually constitutive enmity.

I’m not a relativist. These are not equal sides: one side has power (financial, cultural as well as the all-important monopoly on violence); the other side has truth. From my extant and future writing, it should be clear where my political and philosophical affinities lie. Nonetheless, there is still a separate or meta case to be made for an open society that is value-neutral, since this is how truth is best arrived at.  Here all can speak — ‘Covidians’ and ‘Covidiots’ alike, ‘Transactivists’ and ‘Transphobics’, ‘Climate Doomsdayers’ and ‘Climate Deniers’ — and it is superior argument not superior force that prevails. This neutral public sphere is the lifeblood of the modern West, its greatest strength and source of its immense cultural vitality. It has been dying for decades and arguably took its last breath in March 2020. All art and letters are now in service of the machine unless explicitly dissident. The ‘censorship industrial complex’, or collusion between the state and big tech companies to censor speech, is of grave concern (see here and here for recent developments).

This is where the third unfolding, what dissident philosopher Charles Eisenstein calls ‘the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible’, comes into play. This emergent world needs to be – and is being – created on the other side of corporate-state fascism and absurdist hyper-reality. What does this world look like? It is worth reading Eisenstein in full, but in my own limited account, it involves a return to simplicity,[3] recognition and respect for natural limits (nobody is ‘born into the wrong body’), tackling ubiquitous smart phone/internet addiction and, concomitantly, returning to face-to-face connection, quiet and stillness. It means returning to human scale politics, culture and society, even as the internet connects us to niche interests and the globally dispersed like-minded. It means revivifying our connection to nature and culture. The task for those left on the ‘reality-ark’ is to try to make sense of, and to build alternatives to, ‘the fourth industrial revolution’ where YOU are the product: mined, farmed, surveilled, tracked, mandated and jabbed.  

There is an epistemological component to this ‘more beautiful world’ too. Perhaps the distinguishing feature is the re-integration of that which was split off from science, politics, society, and psyche in the Enlightenment, namely: subjectivity, spirituality, intuition, nature, ‘the feminine’, cultural specificity, the archaic etc. These aspects of knowledge and being were split off and sequestered to the private, particular, supposedly inconsequential, apolitical realm; here they withered to a small whisper.

The public sphere became hyper-rational and mechanistic. Although this re-integration has had numerous iterations from the Romantic poets and philosophers, feminism, the re-introduction of indigenous wisdom and Eastern philosophy, Rupert Sheldrake’s work on ‘morphic resonance’ and the ‘science delusion’, quantum physics, psychedelics, Iain McGilchrist’s theory of ‘the master and his emissary’, the integralists and so on, it seems to have finally arrived insofar as a critical mass have embraced re-integration.  The end of the hyper-rational, de-ontological, materialist paradigm involves a knitting back together of facts and values, reason and emotion, sacred and secular, matter and spirit, masculinity and femininity, albeit not in a soup of sameness, but rather, in a coming together after differentiation.

There is more, but for now I’m signing off. Thanks for reading my first post and getting all the way to the end!

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Notes [okay my notes are scrambled but this is my first post and I’m still figuring things out!]

[1] I will be writing about conspiracy – theories and theorists -- as well as the unique historical moment – the assassination of JFK – when this term was coined in a subsequent post. For now, suffice it to say, I am conscious that the term is weaponised against dissidents and that dissidents are vulnerable to its lure.  

[2] A brief history lesson via Jürgen Habermas. The ‘public sphere’ was protected by, but also cordoned off from, the state. This last point is what made it historically unique and very special. More special that most people today realise. This was the space where private citizens assembled in public to express themselves. It requires the unique flip ushered in by classical liberalism that ‘the Right’ (or individual liberty) is placed before ‘the Good’ (societal conceptions of what is best) and thus the private liberty of the citizen is, paradoxically, secured by the state. In simple terms the individual is place above the collective and at the same time protected by it. Private citizens can thereafter express sanctioned opposition to the state and, in turn, they can remake it to reflect their interests. This is what gives the modern west its unique liberty and cultural dynamism. This died in 2020 after suffering terminal decline under forty years of rabid neoliberalism.

Notes:

[1] I shall also, in a subsequent post, have more to say about ‘common sense’ or the ‘majority view’ which is a good barometer of sensibility in some instances, and a very poor one in others. Every innovator from Jesus to the suffragettes has met with powerful opposition from the ‘common sense’ or mass view that they were crazy and wrong. Dissidents need to be careful drawing on the logic and culture of ‘common sense’ to justify opposition to the ‘new normal’.

[2] Liberal neutrality was never in fact neutral; it sat atop a Greco-Roman, Christian base with a unique emphasis on secular truth and sacred liberty. However, this matrix of specific values, paradoxically values objectivity and reason as well as placing inordinate value on the individual.

[3] Thus, I reject the ‘post-liberal traditionalists’ and ‘reactionary radicals’ who propose a return to old gender roles and forms of inequality in the name of tradition. My own pitch is somewhere between the suffragists and the postmodernists! I will develop this in subsequent posts. Suffice it to say, my own exit from the machine does not involve a glorification of traditional forms of hierarchy, injustice or brutality.