MORE HONEST LIARS

A while back an acquaintance put together a remarkable effort to address the meaning crisis—an organization called Consilience Project. The aims were righteous enough: to lend epistemic clarity in a “post-fact” world; to notch down the culture wars; to provide a common problem-solving language to the various echo-chambers of humanity. The publication was very well written, well-researched, and backed by the excessive genius of Daniel Schmactenberger and company. But the last post from Consilience was in February—and I don’t hold my breath for another. My sense is that the project did not generate enough interest to make the sort of dent it had been designed to make. I have thoughts...

When Schmactenberger told me they were going to do a series on propaganda in the information age, I excitedly advised not to exclude Consilience from the analysis; to not only address the issue of truth-doubt head on, but to admit, upfront, to being susceptible to ideology—and to define its ideological heritage explicitly. Honesty about one’s dishonesty is the only reliable generator of trust in a post-truth world, I explained.

Instead they ended up doing the worst of all possible options in terms of trust generation: they addressed the ubiquitous issue of ideological propaganda—and then implied that they themselves were a rare exception to its influence due to x, y, and z factors (distinctions between propaganda and ideology which I found entirely unconvincing). They made that fatal mistake of attempting to carve out an intellectual territory free and clear of it all. But such a territory does not exist in an age of mistrust.

So what to do? How do we build trust at scale?

We must make uncomfortable admissions of our lies—at scale.

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One thing most nobody does much of in regular life is admit to being ideologically captured, under the sway of propaganda, or untrustworthy. Least of all, those in power. But the failure of such admittance just isn’t sustainable in the post-truth era. Not at the levels of power—and not in our personal lives, either.

Instead of attempting to fix the external epistemic stack with a collection of “truths” about “facts”, perhaps we should turn inwards—not with the intention of emancipating ourselves from a given ideology, but with the intention to confront that which makes us compulsive ideologues to begin with. 

What’s the foundational under-layer of ideology?

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IMO ideology is about our unconscious relationship to death.

TLDR: Ideologies make our world views more fixed and thereby make us seem to change less, lending a sense of permanence to the subject, insulating them from the impermanence and flux of mortal life.

In more detail: 

A static ideology is, first and foremost, abstract—and thus not subject to physical decay. So long as we continue to designate it as such, it lives on unchanged, unmolested by time, eternal. “I am American”, where America is an infinitive abstraction projecting a static image over a land and a people. This projected layer of inert abstraction is something into which we may, in turn, project ourselves and “live” within—in permanent, inert form. And here is the important part: by projecting our flux selves into a static image, we fillet our mortal body from our abstract identity, placing the latter into eternal inertia. This is the state of the ideological identity.  

The attraction is obvious:  Ideology projects a static image over the flux terrain of life, making the world seem more stable than it actually is, and making us feel less impermanent than we really are. It calms our neurotic fears of death with a tacit sense of… permanence.

And so we become lushed with a sense of transcendence; our mortal lives are made servants to our immortal (static and inert) identities. What a gift!  What love we would naturally have toward these permanent images into which we project ourselves. Pledge allegiance!  

…Indeed. Such allegiance that we become willing to die for it—and to kill for it. So enrapt in static, non-dynamic safety that anything which threatens to force our beloved stasis into terrible flux, we become enraged by.  So fearful of being dislodged from our inanimate freeze that we are made zealots, mad ones, frothing like dogged waves, lapsing and relapsing within our beloved limitation! 

All the madness of the human world is a desperate clutching to such imagined eternities. 

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Back to the solution.

The drive to barricade ourselves against flux is not something we can avoid altogether. But it is something we can get a pretty good handle on. 

By simple acknowledgment, we do the heaviest lifting, drawing our compulsive desire for stasis out from its shadowy perch atop the throne of our unconscious. Into the light of admittance it withers from its imaginary, immortal glory into a small and frail thing, a golem which we would do better to care for as a childly creature than to make the king of our minds.  

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I suppose what you just read was anti-anti-death propaganda.

Cheers.