Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the fourteenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts.
For over 20 years, a British filmmaker named Adam Curtis has been producing an odd series of breathless films, mostly under contract to the BBC, consisting of a blizzard of collages of news headlines, speeches, stills and short video clips, with Adam’s background narration of ‘what it all means’.
And what it all means, he claims, is:
- For decades, western leaders, unable to present a coherent explanation of the state of the world (both because they don’t understand it, and because they lack the language and other competencies needed to articulate it), have been managing their societies by describing a “fake”, hyper-simplified world.
- These leaders, the administrations they front, and the compliant media their corporate sponsors have bought, now issue an endless barrage of conflicting statements, contradictory policies, and incoherent rhetorical claims, that are designed to confound any understanding and hence any rational response to what these administrations are doing.
- The citizenry is hence controlled by the paralysis this confusion produces, by fear of what ‘really’ might be going on beneath all the confusion, and by the manufacture of deliberately overstated, ambiguous and oversimplified threats they feel compelled to try, hopelessly, to counter.
- So the utter incoherence of what is coming from our leaders is not ‘just’ incompetence and inarticulateness, but rather a deliberate strategy of obfuscation and disorientation to maintain a dysfunctional, desperate and corrupt status quo; it is a ‘feature’ and not a ‘bug’ of our current political system.
Hanlon’s Razor tells us that we should never attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity.
So what are we to make of this? The staggering level of incompetence evinced by our current crop of ‘leaders’ is pretty hard to deny. Is Adam seeing an (admittedly uncoordinated) conspiracy where there isn’t one?
Looking at the complete state of disarray of citizen opposition to the growing political chaos and irrationality of those with the wealth and power to drastically affect our lives (invariably for the worse), this ‘strategy’ of incoherence, if there is one, would seem to be working remarkably well.
After all, suppose you’re the elected ‘leader’ of a western government as the world accelerates into an increasing state of anxiety, instability, and ‘permanent’ economic and ecological decline into collapse. You want to stay in power, because you quite fervently believe that the opposition parties, with platforms driven by stirring up anger, hate and fear at seeing everything falling apart, will ‘manage’ your country even more incompetently than you, the incumbent, has.
But how do you stay in power when all you have to tell the dumbed-down, scared electorate is bad news they don’t want to hear, and when your opposition is stirring up that fear, angrily promising simplistic, impossible, ‘if you can’t fix it smash it’ (or privatize it) solutions to Make Your Country Great Again?
If you pull a Biden-Harris and claim things are actually going well when any fool can see that for most citizens they aren’t, you’ll get what you deserve. But what’s the alternative?
Most people, brainwashed with the myths of exceptionalism, progress. and endless unlimited opportunity for the hard-working, are simply not ready to hear the truth of the inevitability of accelerating chaos and inevitable collapse, and the misery that will accompany it.
So instead we get lies, meaningless promises, ‘performative’ politics and elections that mostly resemble beauty pageants, and fear-mongering of the opposition parties, regardless of who is in power and what the equally bewildered opposition is. Because there is no platform to address collapse. All we can do is wait and see how it unfolds, and deal with it as best we can. There’s no planning for it. Nothing any ‘central’ authority can prepare for (especially since these ‘central’ authorities will be the first to fall).
This is what chaos looks like, the last, astonishing, awful chapter of human ‘civilization’ before its final and total collapse. And how could our response to chaos be anything other than incoherent?
Thanks to Graham Stewart for provoking this post.
image by AI; my own prompt
