Via Notes From Disgracedland’s Bjarne Knausgaard
Actual belief is socially self-destructive, it has to remain virtual to be effective and socially acceptable — there is something monstrous about people who are true believers.
Lies have gotten a new lease on life. They are now presented as a new frontier, an untapped market with limitless potential. Nothing is binding and nothing sets the limits and barriers.
The United States is one of the most advanced countries. But, at the same time, it is the only developed country where scientific discoveries are not reported, but debated. The war on facts is programmatic. Science explains about 10% of observable phenomena. One would think that science and scientific method would be challenged in the vast area of the unknown and unexplained. No! Religious nut-jobs and right-wing propagandists do not go for the low-hanging fruit, they debate exactly those points that science knows with absolute certainty. This reveals the programmatic aspect of the war on facts. It is the core of the American Cultural Revolution. The primary purpose of this program is to prepare the terrain, to desensitize the public to nonsense and, in the long-run, create aversion and mistrust towards scientific method and raise anti-intellectual sentiment. This is an integral part of that same Reagan-Trump continuum: A systematic effort to discredit critical ways of thinking, to replace probable truths with palpable falsehoods, in order to prepare the ground for the new age of designer illusions.
Ignorance must be cultivated as a precious commodity, and demand for nonsense should never go away. These are the two pillars of the post-truth politics.
There is a true revolution going on. It is a cathartic ritual of collective denial of reality. In the absence of practical solutions (because the system resists change) life-serving illusions are the best surrogate and the only viable alternative. The efficaciousness of lies is being transplanted from social reality to reality in general.
Believers are back! They are a force now. This is the tragedy of the predicament of freedom of choice. Denial of a lie presents an insult to those who believe and the subsequent reaction to that insult reinforces the power of the original lie. So, lies get a life of their own as symbolic virtual — everyone pretends they believe not to disappoint the disillusioned ones.
The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss [1]
Political reality has become incompatible with truth and facts; it cannot tolerate, let alone incorporate, them. At this point, the question is really: Why bother with the truth at all? Why wait for the truth to renormalize spontaneously through social discourse? Why leave this process to chance? Instead, why not abolish facts altogether and design reality to conform to our tastes and desires? Why not take full control of the process and manufacture “facts”, opinions and ultimately consensus? In fact, why allow ourselves to be constrained by the facts when lies have no limits? This is the genius of the post-truth politics.
Facts and truth cannot find their place — there is no room for them — in the post-truth political life. We are approaching the vanishing point[2] where everything disappears. Beyond that point, the human race leaves reality and history behind, where any distinction between the true and the false disappears, where facts will fail because of fictions and successful fictions will become facts of the future.
In a perverse way, America is reinventing itself as the new primitive society of the future. It is reconnecting with its ancestral territory, planting an anchor of a sort, while at the same time staying the course of the American dream — become all it can imagine to be. This is the biggest biopolitical mindfuck of the 2016 Presidential elections. This odd mixture of continuing to dance ahead to the rhythms of its ancestral grooves while ignoring their regressive gravitational pull is predicated on an unlimited capacity for reality denial. The only way to reconcile the two opposing forces is to create images of the future through designer illusions and in that process further detach imagination from reality and reality check, not just past, but future as well. In this way, and only in this way, can America continue to refer to its dream while sticking to its true identity.
In a bad dream we are not protected by the lies of the real world. That is why we always wake up from a bad dream — we cannot take the bare truth that the dreams carry. The American dream has turned into a bad dream, a very bad one. And it is precisely because the dream must go on that we have to construct a protective layer of illusion around it. Without it, the dream could not continue. It is the dream from which America cannot afford to wake up, at least not without losing itself.
[1] Douglas Adams
[2] Elias Canetti, The Human Province
Where’s that asteroid?