[from a dkos comment...]

the primary problem with conspiracy theory, insofar as a site like this goes, is that it undercuts the fundamental premise of election-focused activism. conspiracy theories place the real fulcrum of power outside the agreed upon political system. once you stop believing that the agreed upon system is in fact the system in power – or put another way, that the agreed upon system is operating in the agreed upon ways – then the purpose in organizing politically to articulate a vision and win elections is profoundly compromised. to acknowledge conspiracy is to acknowledge that the system is being critically gamed by people acting in a criminal manner. that the system, in other words, is being run by secret means, responding to private directives and not the public will. so, even though conspiracy is the historically demonstrated norm of those in power, it remains an outrageous claim relative to our own country.

why is this? we have no problem seeing the conspiratorial character of aggressive, imperial, governments historically and worldwide. we have no problem accepting it as a fictional description of events in our own country. why not take the reasonable step of suspecting that the historical norm applies to America?

it’s another instance where rationality is trumped by faith in American exceptionalism. though of course, as is normal, rationality is prevented from knowing that it’s been trumped by a sense of emotional outrage implicitly certain of its justification. an emotional sense, that is, that the premise being asserted or suggested is outrageous. This, incidentally, is why charging Glenn Beck with being motivated by racism is an apt counter to the news that Van Jones signed on to a petition questioning the integrity of the official 9/11 Report. By fighting outrage with outrage we might avoid violating our own sacred premises while still protecting Obama’s appointment.

political reality, ultimately, is not determined by facts, but by emotional adherence to a particular story of national identity. it is because of this that Chomsky only gets on television outside of America. not because he’s not rational, informed and insightful – which he abundantly and obviously is – but because he articulates a worldview that denies American exceptionalism… including the exceptionally non-conspiratorial nature of American political power.

if this were actually a reality based community, the concept of American exceptionalism, in all its forms, would be rationally disassembled as yet another imperial myth. but this isn’t science, it’s politics; and in the political world, reality is determined by strategy, not by facts. facts are everywhere fixed around policies driven by cryptic reasons. driven within government by conspiracies of special interests acting in secret and veiling their activities by a sham public process of representative democracy; and driven within the public mind by unconscious processes of personal and collective narcissism.

as Reinhold Niebuhr remarked, “perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.”

but, again, people who have widely lost faith in the process are bound to exclude themselves from the process. so, it is essential, from a political perspective, to preserve your party’s sense of faith in itself and the process – and thus, to enforce a sense of disdain toward enervating conspiracy theory. theory, that is, that undercuts the potential value, and so the strategic possibilities, of the process.

the rejection of ‘conspiracy theory’ is part of the more general protection of faith in American exceptionalism – whether that exceptionalism is viewed as an historical reality or an historical opportunity to change (at last!) the dismal norms of history. reflexively labelling it, to put it kindly, crazy is just another instance of a characteristic emotionally self-protective behavior of social groups. by using emotional abuse to defend sacred premises those premises are kept free from rational examination and the survival and self-image of the group is preserved. just as GWB had a vested interest in declaring that we must never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories, so too does the Daily Kos community. conspiracy theory threatens the whole edifice of motivational identity. we cannot be the people we’ve been waiting for if the system is a farce covering for a criminal syndicate. in order to believe that we are them, we have to believe that the system is either essentially representative or that we are in a position to make it so by the commonly accepted means of ‘more and better Democrats.’ theories of government by criminal conspiracy undercut either form of this necessary faith.

of course in this sense the conspiracy theorist has already reached the complete cynicism as regards government that is likely near a majority opinion in this country. the conspiracy theorists, however challenged by fact, have been emotionally prescient in their complete disbelief.

and herein lies the root of the secondary problem with conspiracy theory: thinking conspiratorially can really drive you crazy. it is psychologically perilous for an individual to entirely lose faith in the dominant narrative of his or her society. to be alienated from this worldview brings a crisis in sanity. one becomes open, then, to truth – to actual reality as opposed to the storybook strategic realities of politics – but also to all manner of crackpot anxieties. even Hamlet, among history’s wisest minds, was driven near to madness by the awful truth communicated by his father’s ghost.

i’m having a hard time shaking the desire to respond to Ben’s idea (such as i construe it) that i ought (if i were, you know, to actually do something) to create some sort of public blog to facillitate a grassroots effort to map effective models for productive activism. as i’ve sarcastically expressed before, the fundamental flaw in this program is that it’s not mine. i’m not the one frustrated with liberals getting upset about the way our society operates but not being able to do shit about it. yeah, it sucks… but

a. that’s not my particular frustration, and
b. it seems to me that there are plenty of liberal blogs out there wrestling day in and out with the issue of effective action, and
c. i have no sense of how to moderate such a community, or even establish it in some way that it doesn’t become another political blog of the well-established form.

my frustration – which is something other than Ben’s frustration with me and other liberals who feel outrage but can’t effectively act on it – is with the general level of understanding, the worldview, within which politics is commonly framed. i want to find a middle way between raving conspiracy theory and the semi-conscious credulousness of the political mainstream online.

now, you can regard that as a sort of Ender’s Game fantasy of accomplishment. i think that’s an ill-informed read. while my particular writing may never be of consequence beyond the few people who come here, there are plenty of bloggers who influence our society simply by blogging. mass blogs are not the only way. and anyway, popular success does not conclusively measure the worth of activity.

which gets to the problem of being diagnosed by someone who has a portion of truth that they can’t separate from their own presumptions and hang-ups. point being: my problem is not that i’m not endeavoring to set up a mass blog (or donating money to someone else’s mass blog) but that i’m not diligent in the work that i’m already doing. yes, the format of Androids in Love isn’t focused enough. it’s a sandbox. the developed version of it simply isn’t a mass blog… necessarily.

truth is, i haven’t entirely ruled it out. i just don’t see how it relates to doing the work i feel needs doing. not the work that ‘the world’ needs, but the work i feel as if i’m slacking from. i’ve no idea how any of it translates into historical action. i’m not out to write propaganda but to formulate a worldview.

here’s a video which suggests the multi-generational effort to reduce Americans to a state of semi-functional idiocy has been frighteningly successful. personally, i’m praying for an alien intervention… a monolith on the moon… something.

“If our nation can issue a dollar bond, it can issue a dollar bill. The element that makes the bond good, makes the bill good, also. The difference between the bond and the bill is that the bond lets money brokers collect twice the amount of the bond and an additional 20%, whereas the currency pays nobody but those who contribute directly in some useful way. It is absurd to say that our country can issue $30 million in bonds and not $30 million in currency. Both are promises to pay, but one promise fattens the usurers and the other helps the people.”

-Thomas Edison

[the following is pretty rough, as is usual...]

Let’s put the cart back behind the horse for a moment and consider the nature of mass blog culture, as an instance of the nature of mass culture as a whole.

The basic structure of any mass culture is a set of rules, a symbolic set as Herbert defined it, substituted for reality. It is a paradigmatic narrative, like the jobs/gates fable, or the official story of 9/11. Written into this narrative, as Engels understood and Lenin reminded, is a fundamental inequality, whereby the interests of one class are defined as superior to the interest of some other. Or better put, where the interest of the whole are understood through the interest lens of the dominant class:

The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it “the reality of the ethical idea,” “the image and reality of reason,” as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms and classes with conflicting economic interests might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power seemingly standing above society that would alleviate the conflict, and keep it within the bounds of “order” [in Dkos terms, the Admins and FAQ] ; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.

Herbert refers to this fundamental inequality when he writes:

In the maintenance of such a power structure [a power structure, that is, which has accomplished a substitution of some symbolic set ... i.e. a lens of class interest enshrined in taboo], certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity

The Blog Wars

I look upon the assertion that most people banned from blogs are done so as a result of their own emotional incapacity as half the story at best… at least insofar as DailyKos is concerned. Critically absent from that picture is an understanding of how authority is achieved by establishing the primacy of some symbolic narrative. The essence of law, again, is not the abolition of some behavior, but rather the restricting of that act to the preferred class. The narrative is the means whereby this authorization (however unaccountably… the more, the better!) is rationalized and conflated with necessity.

[The complex of ideas to be explored here is addressed in the in-progress Orthodoxy and the Reality Based Community.]

This conflation occurs pre-rationally, and forms the template for a partisan understanding of the world. According to this understanding, the same act is intepreted in radically different ways, depending upon who is identified as its author. Thus, the proposition that bannings are primarily a result of emotional incapacity of the banned does nothing to explain the numerous instances of the same behavior from accepted members.

By taking into account the basic preferential nature of the State (the established power) and the nature of partisan thinking, on the other hand, we arrive at a more complete picture of what actually occurs on blogs. Emotional abuse is a power reserved for the dominant class. It is rationalized, euphemized and only in extremity (to prevent, that is, the immune system from killing the organism it means to protect) curbed. It is never, however, relinquished as a tool… never truly taken off the table, because power is exactly the right to do what is denied others.

The primary sin on Daily Kos, as a political blog, is worldview… though you can believe whatever you wish, just so long as you don’t tell anyone. Emotional inapprorpriateness is secondary. As Barry Goldwater said back in 1964, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

i don’t mean to say that a culture’s notion of virtue is nothing more than the glorified self-interest of the dominant class. that, i think, certainly is one possibility – what you might call the road more travelled. i believe, however, in the existence of the road less traveled. however, it seems to me that the two roads have a tendency to turn into one another. tyranny can come out of good intentions, and aggrandized self-interest can be a progressive force.

the development of Capitalism provides an excellent example of the intercourse of these two sorts of virtue. as i read Lao Tzu, whose wisdom i trust more than most any other, the Way is exactly a vital exchange between Good and Evil. Hence, the Fall from Grace (i.e. the Fall from the Way) is exactly a disruption of this intercourse of self-interest and integrated survival (what is called imperialism). for radical ecologists, this Fall is nothing other than civilization as we know it. this is the essential Christian view as well, though it is much distorted by integration into a system of worldly power. Islam, too.

Judgment Day

the Day of Judgment that is an article of faith in the Christian and Islamic traditions expresses the understanding of Imperial Civilization as founded upon a Fall from Grace; Grace being the State in which Good and Evil (compassion and self-interest) engage in a vital living intercourse. This, incidentally, is the Real foundation of the more or less fictional transgressive morality (the special rules for special people) that is inherent to all systems of the self-selected Elect. That is: all of those transgressive moralities (from the Jewish slaughter of the inhabitants of Canaan on down) are rooted in the dynamic Reality of the Way, which mixes up the categories of Good and Evil as part of an integrated Ecology.

The Key element of society, as Confucious said, is jen, humanity. Same thing Socrates called Virtue. This being the sentient action that links social forms to the vital, trans-conceptual, dynamic Way that the entire universe depends upon and expresses. The Human Endeavor is to marry Nature and Culture; or from the opposite perspective, Heaven and Earth. it’s not easy. all you need is Love, but there’s nothing harder to find and keep.

Cheney and Ritual Existence

I don’t think Cheney would describe his actions as immoral. I take Cheney for one of those guys who firmly believes himself engaged in the higher morality, the transgressive morality, of a self-selecting Elect. There are of course real consequences to embracing such a morality, but all high officials use these sorts of denial mechanisms to one degree or another. The wise, as Lao Tzu said, treat people like straw dogs – which is to say, as instruments in the great ceremony of civilized existence.

Ethics and Shame

i agree with your basic sense of ethics. it sounds like you think i don’t, but i’m not sure why. i’ve previously described accountability as a developmental tool. what i’ve said is that i don’t know, personally, what amounts to true accountability. i think the key is to satisfy one’s own sense of accountability, which is complicated by the imposition of what we might call false shame.

as i see it, we live in a society governed by false, imposed, shame. hence the pandemic hypocrisy of every institution from bank to church to state to marriage. the world as i see it is full of people embracing standards with some degree of deception, just as a means of survival. being confused is one way to comprehend the dissonance.

i, personally, am not a paragon of virtue. you ask what makes me ineffective? it’s that, in a nutshell. so, yeah, i’m working on it. right now, i’m working through The 7 Habits book. it’s actually quite fantastic, if you’ve never read it. i got it from Audible.com for free, as an audiobook. i highly recommend it. (an open door right there, jake) i’ve been listening to it as i work. i’m also getting more serious about meditation and physical practice again. and becoming more financially stable. oh, and re-engaging music as a practice. all in all, the Human Endeavor, on the microcosmic level.

Virtue

i agree with Socrates, and i’ve paid for that belief. my sympathies lie with the idealists, but the real issue is not what one believes, but whether or not one embodies that belief… which is to say, whether or not one truly understands. i don’t. but i definitely feel the necessity of becoming better at making an effort to. i always have felt that necessity, probably too much, too soon. as has been said: foolishness consists of arriving too early and waiting too late. thus, as Hamlet says, losing the name of action.

An interview by Rachel Maddow of author Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, a well-connected yet obscure religious and political group that rationalizes transgression of common morality in terms of a revised Christianity.

It’s been interesting to consider to what extent the recent semi-revolt in Iran has been a CIA-sponsored “color revolution.” Without a doubt, the American government has been pumping millions upon millions of dollars into destabilizing the Iranian regime; but then on the other hand, the dissatisfaction expressed seems genuine and widely held. Whatever the full story, it’s another opportunity to consider the formula of Time, Place and People.

The idea that Time has a quality can be appreciated in a number of ways. Obviously there is some quality to day, night and seasons that is of biological and hence psychological consequence. Beyond, and other than, that, there are many traditions of astrological interpretation – though it should be noted that these differ from one another, so that the quality of the Time as understood by one will not agree with the quality of the Time as understood by another. Without considering any of that, it might be sufficient to consider Time as an ambient state or atmosphere, not confined to a locality but influencing that locality. From this perspective, the historical engineers of the CIA can be viewed as agents of the Time. Or better put, the essence of historical engineering is to somehow influence or assume control of the Time.

I’ve been thinking of the Place as the established structure of any locale, and in particular as regards Iran, as the established power structure. As the influence of the historical engineers is covert and in a sense slight, the Time must wait on suitable conditions. In this case, those suitable conditions are internal divisions within the elite, as between Khameni/Ahmadinijad and Rafsanjani/Mousavi.

Anyway, these are all thoughts in process, as usual… and meant as preface for this interesting video from The Real News, discussing what’s really behind the unrest in Iran:

Many years ago i co-edited the sports section of my senior yearbook. How i ended in that position i can’t recall, other than that all of the other editors were friends of mine. We created something we thought was amusing and it offended many people – at least relative to most yearbooks, which in their bland acceptability only offend any sense of originality and wit. Though there were eight editors, at least, three of us – myself and two friends named Jeff – were selected for a harsh reprimand from the principal, and to make a general apology over the shool’s PA. I forget which one of us actually read it. Probably one of the Jeffs.

The scope of things people took offense at was wider than i ever imagined. One girl’s mother, for example, never spoke to my mother again because i’d captioned a picture of her daugher: “Laurie, David’s sister.” i still don’t know why – and i can say for certain that i had nothing but affection for this particular girl, who was the object of my first deliriously innocent crush, in elementary school. I was particularly surprised to find the principal incensed that i’d placed the following quote from DUNE in a vacant ad slot in the back of the book:

In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding — symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.

-Lecture to the Arrakeen War College

It was, he hollered, subversive.

To me, it’s been a touchstone for understanding the nature of control in social systems; and i’ve been reminded of it again in considering the last post, on the nature of trolls.

In particular, the bit about keeping the local definition of sanity out of the reach of common understanding. Which is to say, in terms of dkos, that the autocratic ban on certain topics renders any discussion of those topics as insane, regardless of how sanely it is carried on. The definition occurs on a level untouched by the specifics of the discussion.