Political-ideological discourse in the English-speaking world is visibly debased. A few reactionary thinkers have speculated that this is a function of mass literacy. They are not far from the truth. But the problem is not mass literacy as such, rather it is the illusion, thereof hiding the reality of our endemic subliteracy. Great swathes of the apparently universally literate population are just literate enough to be able to process and generate text only at a surface level – but not literate enough to be able to perceive the emergent metatext lying beyond the words on the page. Endemic subliteracy is why we see such great numbers of people confuse slogans for substance and fall for manipulative marketing tactics.
Subliteracy is exploited by secretive cadres pursuing private agendas using disingenuous rhetorical tricks to justify and legitimize themselves to the public. Examples abound, you encounter them all throughout the social medias.
Example 1. “Antifascism means opposing Fascism – if you are against Fascism you are Antifascist.” But it should be obvious that there is more to being Antifa than assaulting your local Hugo Boss and Mauser aficionado. Antifa is a complete century old political-ideological agenda with a well-documented history of succeeding in only one thing: popularizing fascism.
Example 2. “You either agree Black Lives Matter, or you think they don’t.” Here too, we know that Black Lives Matter does not merely express the sentiment that the lives of black people are meaningful and valuable. Black Lives Matter too is a political-ideological position whose name belies its true agenda.
These tricks only genuinely work on subliterate people. But they are adopted by the literate too. The support of naive subliterates is necessary in furtherance of their desired agenda. Subliterates have money and love to purchase products (who doesn’t?) as well — so literate agents take this as an opportunity to offer products catering to the subliterate. Marketing groups make a lot of money spreading these catch-phrases, buzzwords and talking points specifically to people without the requisite metatextual prowess to see why such are mere advert content empty of substance. Political-ideological junk food.
Example 3. “It’s human rights, not politics,” / “It’s human rights, not ideology.” This is the purest marketing of these examples in that it is tautologically empty of meaning.
Let’s break down why this is. “Politics” is the procedural means by which rights are distributed among humans within and between communities. “Ideology” is the normative standard which determines how rights ought to be distributed among humans within and between communities. Human-rights is a concept emergent from the intersection of ideology and politics. Politics + Ideology = Human Rights. The semantics of this slogan could be translated in both variants as – “It’s Ideology-politics, not politics” and “It’s Ideology-politics, not ideology,” The meaning and function is the same as in the commercial slogan “It’s not delivery – it’s Digiorno.” Instead of selling you a brand of frozen pizza, it sells you a brand of political organization in which you have no say in the interpretation of the phrase “human rights.”
Brand names very rarely signify what they appear to signify. A simple example: Puma is a sportswear brand and not a cougar. But Puma is its name and Puma is also another name for Cougar! By the logic of Antifa being antifascist, Puma must be a cougar – and if Puma is a cougar its agenda is to live in the deserts and mountains, hunt rodents and terrorize suburbs. But if you can understand that Puma is nothing like a cougar and its agenda bears no resemblance to that of a cougar, you can understand why Antifa does not necessarily represent the agenda of opposition to fascism, and Black Lives Matter does not necessarily represent the agenda of improving the quality of the lives of black people, and that “human rights is not politics/ideology” is an expression which means nothing. Brand names are empty signifiers – their purpose is for your recognition and your purchase, and nothing more. What does the word Nestle, Sprite or Adidas mean to you? They all mean “product.” So what’s the product being sold by the above trickery? Politics in the interpretation of which you play no role, supporting the agenda of its distributors.
All this is good marketing – marketing justifying the price paid for it many times over. It still is mere sale and spin. And if it’s being marketed, it means someone is directing the marketing strategy and paying the costs. Grassroots donors and activists are not in charge of that aspect of the operation. Which slogans filter into mass-media or are adopted and repeated by the rich and famous (those who retain PR firms and media agents with maximal influence) is determined by very small cadres of people. Grassroots actors participate in this process in the same way as one participates in the marketing of Puma by hanging up Puma posters, being an extra in a commercial, or rocking Puma gear telling all your friends how much you love Puma. But it is officers of the corporate entity which owns the Puma brand who determine how and why the marketing is conducted the way it is. The agenda of the Puma-Guy spreading the good word of Puma for free is in another universe from the agenda of the corporate entity manufacturing and distributing the product.
Studying the history of mass movements reveals that none of them were directed, organized or defined by the spontaneous actions of the masses. The driving forces have always been cadres of a political vanguard or a clique with shared commercial interest, and so on. Studying the history of mass movements reveals that there have never been any mass movements whatsoever, only multitudes of conspiracies where those in-the-know instrumentalized those out-of-the-know. In order to have assets to instrumentalize you want the cooperation and loyalty of people who will become those assets. To keep their loyalty, you want them out-of-the-know on any information which may jeopardize their usefulness as an asset. If your cadre’s true agenda is at odds with its public agenda, then all information jeopardizes the loyalty of the asset. In this event, it’s better to control how your assets process information, rather than what information is available. Control of how your asset understands information makes what information is available irrelevant. Indoctrination into a cult – religion, ideology, or any social arrangement prescribing an ego-justifying moral code rendering impossible any notion of an esoteric agenda at odds with the exoteric one. The controlling cadre enjoys total freedom, while its assets live happily under the illusion of moral certitude.
In Ancient Greece, ‘Idiot’ was the name of the class of person who did not participate in political affairs. Today, such a class does not and cannot exist. Industrialization, mass production, the increased rate of travel of both people and information saturated the atmosphere with politics-ideology, becoming an omnipresent smog which suffocated the apolitical idiot into extinction (around the same time the class known as the “peasant” disappeared, curiously). The surviving descendants of the apolitical idiot transmogfried into Useful Idiots, who are not apolitical at all but adapted to survive in a hyperpolitical atmosphere. The Useful idiot is hyperpolitical — but is as subliterate as his ancestor was illiterate.
So we return to that endemic subliteracy, the debasement of language and the degradation of discourse. If we ask why has the discourse become degraded, we can simply point to where it is learned. The simple and easy answer is at school. It is precisely there that children are enculturated into a political clown show. The failure of American political discourse, and everything that flows from that, is in school. School is where our ways of thought are shaped while our cognition is still pliable and powerless to resist suggestion. The discourse is not decaying due to lack of funding for education – the exact opposite! If we funnel more money toward education, we will only get more of that which we already have too much of: endemic hyperpolitical subliteracy. Schools are not failing to achieve their purpose as they graduate thousands upon thousands of subliterate and innumerate half-morons and mid-wits every year. They fulfill their purposes adequately, if not perfectly. Those purposes include redistribution of public money toward the agenda of the controlling cadres (and their pockets), containment and monitoring the youth population to expand the increasingly desperate adult labor pool, and enculturation of the youth into politics-ideology which is susceptible to marketing and social pressure. Education in math, science and literature is a tertiary goal at best, as only a tiny minority of the population is required to master them for the system to have a sufficient number of specialists and ability to maintain its function. Only a minority of people will get through their education and come out of it literate — these in fact, are the ones “slipping through the cracks” as the effectiveness of marketing and social pressure is significantly limited in directing their behavior. But the average person will graduate grade 12 with the reading ability of a 7th grader. The system does not require any better than that, it could maintain itself with even less.
Insidiously, subliteracy isn’t easy to measure, and such measurement not in the interest of those at the levers of power. The literacy rates in the developed world are standard at 98%. But what proportion is literate just enough to read and write and regurgitate, to those literate in the sense that they have mastery of written language? We cannot ever truly know who can read not just lines of text, but between and beyond them. We cannot know who merely parses text, and who parses metatext. When you couple surface level literacy with mass media marketing and the influence of social, professional and libidinal pressures, the result is the circumstances in which we live. Here, style mistaken for substance, marketing for product. Words lose their definitions as euphemisms, platitudes and slogans bloom, flourish, die and are replaced by others just like them except completely different. Schizophrenia becomes camouflaged as ideological clarity. Slowly but surely the social fabric rots along with the quality of life. Cadres of those in-the-know profit, their oligarchy is strengthened – the masses are sold endless brands of moral self-satisfaction, and battles with other brands of convenient false dialectics, punctuated occasionally with a half-assed satisfaction of minor complaints. This order is maintained so long as schools educate people just enough to be socialized, that is, desirous to fit in with assortment of temporary peers which seldom develop into permanent bonds, and able to read, write and repeat from a text, but never enough that a majority could interpret and synthesize metatext emergent therefrom.
With a limited amount of text, there can only be a limited amount of interpretations – education would not be the effective means of mass social control. Even a subliterate person would with time have understanding of his surrounding political metatext and become indistinguishable from a fully literate person in terms of political-ideological autonomy. For a historical example see how translating the Bible into local languages sparked so many political-ideological conflicts between those whose scriptural interpretation differed from that prescribed by the Catholic Church. With a potentially infinite amount of text, top-down marketing directs the social pressures toward which texts and which interpretations predominate within society. By analogy, imagine if the Catholic Bible had an infinity of books rather than 73, with an infinity of pages and the Catholic Church was the only entity which could access that infinity of content. The social unrest from translating scripture into common languages wouldn’t emerge at all! The Church could determine which verses, pages and books would be available for translation and which would remain untranslated or unknown. This would allow the Church to control interpretation regardless of who can read or understand the text by simply distributing only those pages that convenience its power and not those which do not.
For us, it’s not the Catholic Church, but another sort of cathedral that influences and directs the interpretation of infinite information, by means of mass-propaganda and social pressures. The mass-propaganda funneling us toward specific texts, the social pressures of our enculturation pulling us away from coloring outside of the orthodox lines with heterodox colors. If we stray from the path we are expected to follow, if we become truly literate but do not buy in, not only must we suffer alienation, but the infinite quantities of data coupled with our finite time and resources lead us to the paralysis of ambivalence, as well as the self-sabotage of misdirected action. The metatext of the controlling interests and of ultimate truths – potentially accessible- is obscured by infinities of word salad and disinformation, thus rendered practically all but forbidden. So many are left to admit defeat – too literate for their own good – their choice to either drown in content, or to return to the cathedral’s prescribed context.
The simple goal of improving the quality of public discourse and the reconstruction of sensible semantics requires from us the formation of yet another conspiratorial cadre with yet another totalizing agenda. All this just to teach a metatextual literacy. It turns out that in order to build a school house, we must first build a grand cathedral. Perhaps we’re better off focusing on abolishing school instead.
-Orcbrand