Half a year into Obama’s second term, it has become clear what has been done under his watch. He brought to the world massive banking fraud, drone attacks, indefinite detention, assassination of US citizens and an unprecedented war on whistleblowers. The rhetoric of hope and change has finally and undeniably revealed its true colors. Prominent dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky has remarked how Obama’s assault on civil liberties has progressed beyond anything he could have imagined. All of these tell-tale signs mark the slippery slide toward totalitarianism that seems to now be escalating.
Edward Snowden’s NSA files
unveiled to the world mass global surveillance and the fact that
the USA has become
the United Stasi of America. The decay of democracy
in the United States is now undeniable, as all branches of the
federal government have begun to betray the very ideals this
country was founded on. The exposed NSA stories have had a
serious global impact, challenging the credibility of the US on
all levels. Under a relentless secrecy regime, the
criminalization of journalism and any true dissent has become
the new norm.
In recent months, a
pattern of attacks on journalism has unfolded. Examples include
the APA scandal of the Department of Justice’s seizure of
telephone records, the tapping of Fox News reporter James
Rosen’s private emails and the British government’s detention of
David Miranda, partner of the Glenn Greenwald, the primary
journalist breaking the NSA story. On top of these recent
developments, a media shield law has moved forward in
Washington. The Senate Judiciary Committee
passed a bill that narrowly defines what a journalist can
be, thus taking away First Amendment protections from new forms
of media. All of this points not only towards deep threats to
press freedom, but to a general trend toward excessive state
control and a centralization of power.
The American corporate
media takes all this in stride with a business-as-usual attitude
that carries the meme of “Keep Calm and Carry On”. After the NSA
revelations, author Ted Rall
posed the question on everyone’s lips: “Why are Americans so
passive”? Obama’s blatant violations of the Fourth Amendment
have reached far beyond Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal in
1974 that led him to resign under threat of impeachment. In the
midst of Obama’s aggressive persecution of those who shine light
on government crimes, where are all the courageous Americans?
How have the people allowed such egregious acts by the
government against the Constitution?
As scandals of the NSA
continue to shed light on a further subversion of basic privacy
within the internet, the drumbeat of war — as Obama prepared for
an attack on Syria — seemed to be no coincidence. Although
Snowden’s revelations began to stir up debate and efforts for
reform across the country, compared with mass protests breaking
out in countries like Turkey and Brazil, the scale of the
response has been relatively small and hasn’t reached the full
swing needed for meaningful change. One can ask: do Americans
even care or are they so defeated and disempowered by a
corporatized war machine they feel there is nothing they can do
at all?
The Slowly Boiling Frog
and the ‘Good American’
One of the reasons for
public passivity is the normalization over time of radical
politics. The metaphor of the slowly boiling
frog comes to mind. A frog would not jump out of a hot pot if
the temperature slowly rises over time. The frog’s instinctual
reaction to boiling water can be compared to an innate sense
within us that detects dangerous, radical or controlling agendas
and blatant unconstitutional and illegal actions of governments
or corporations. Our sense to feel the changes of temperature in
the habitat of this supposedly democratic society has been
rendered dull and has eventually been incapacitated altogether
by subversion and perception management.
This control of perception
is seen most blatantly in US politics, with the manufactured
pendulum between a faux right and left. For instance,
the handling of the issue of raising the federal debt ceiling in
2011 illustrates this machination of perception control. Michael
Hudson, President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term
Economic Trends,
spoke of how the rhetoric of crisis is used to rush through
profoundly unpopular and otherwise impossible agendas:
Just like after 9/11, the Pentagon pulled out a plan for Iraq’s oil fields, Wall Street has a plan to really clean up now, to really put the class war back in business … They’re pushing for a crisis to let Mr. Obama rush through the Republican plan. Now, in order for him to do it, the Republicans have to play good cop, bad cop. They have to have the Tea Party move so far to the right, take so crazy a position, that Mr. Obama seems reasonable by comparison. And, of course, he is not reasonable. He’s a Wall Street Democrat, which we used to call Republicans.
The definition of liberal
can move as opponents shift views. There is a false partisanship
that slowly makes the public feel comfortable with what are
actually quite radical and inhumane ideas and actions. This
subversive form of perception management appears to have reached
its height with the current presidency. This administration,
with its crafted image of the ‘progressive Obama’, has
successfully co-opted the left and marched it into supporting
neoconservative policies that they once claimed to reject.
Glenn Greenwald, for
instance,
has described Obama as much more effective in
institutionalizing abusive and exploitative policies than any
Republican president could ever dream of being. He
points out, for instance, how “Mitt Romney never would have
been able to cut Social Security or target Medicare, because
there would have been an enormous eruption of anger and intense,
sustained opposition by Democrats and progressives accusing him
of all sorts of things.” On the contrary, Greenwald continues,
Obama would “bring Democrats and progressives along with him and
to lead them to support and get on board with things that they
have sworn they would never, ever be able to support.”
In his
Death of the Liberal Class, Chris Hedges called the
election of Obama a “triumph of illusion over substance”, and “a
skillful manipulation and betrayal of the public by a corporate
power elite.” Hedges points out how Obama was chosen as the
Advertising Age’s marketer of the year in 2008 and that “the
goal of a branded Obama, as with all brands, was to make passive
consumers mistake a brand for an experience.”
This subversive form of
control seems to have evolved beyond the political tactics of
the past. During the Bush era, manipulation was much more blunt.
Naomi Klein, author of
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,
outlined the state’s use of public disorientation during crises
and catastrophes for purposes of manipulation. Klein shows how,
from natural disasters to terrorists attacks, the state exploits
crises by taking advantage of the public’s psychologically
vulnerable state to push through its own radical pro-market
agenda.
A prime example of this
Shock Doctrine was the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. After
the 9/11 implosions of the Twin Towers, a climate of fear was
manufactured using the rhetoric of a “war on terror”,
accompanied by the repeated images of those towers collapsing.
This, in turn, was followed by Secretary of State Colin Powell’s
shameful performance of deceit at the UN Security Council about
Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Before the public
recovered from the horrendous tragedy, the nation was
rail-roaded into an illegal war.
Obama’s manufactured brand
has until now been quite effective in hiding its real intentions
and those of its corporate overlords. The late comedian George
Carlin
pointed to the emergence of creeping total government
control, saying that “when fascism comes to America, it will not
be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with Jack-boots. It
will be with Nike sneakers and smiley shirts.” Under this guise
of a liberal president, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and
constitutional scholar, Obama seems able to get away with
policies unheard of since the last attempt at building up an
imperial totalitarian state. The pretense of liberalism
normalizes the most extreme policies with glib rhetoric of
national security, thus neutralizing any oppositional force. In
responding to recent NSA leaks, Obama
justified the state’s espionage campaign as a vital part of
the government’s counter-terrorism efforts, remarking that
privacy is a necessary sacrifice for assuring security.
What has unfolded in the
US political and social landscape is a kind of numbing of the
senses. The machinations of public relations, tawdry
distractions and manufactured desires create an artificial
social fabric. It is as if a layer of skin has been added around
the body that prevents us from having direct contact with the
real fabric of our immediate environment. Entertainment and
corporate ads desensitize us. They create a lukewarm feel-good
political bath replacing authentic human experience with
pseudo-reality. This artificially installed skin intermediates
our experience of actual events. It misinforms those inside the
boiling pan, and prevents them from getting to know the world
through direct experience.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
once
said that “history will have to record that the greatest
tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident
clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of good
people.” History has shown how many people remain silent while
witnessing the most egregious crimes against humanity. During
the rise of Hitler in Germany, it was the ‘Good Germans’ who
became bystanders, supporting by default the horrendous acts of
one man and allowing him to dictate life and death within an
entire nation.
At the ceremony of the
prestigious German whistleblower prize in Germany, the
acceptance speech from Edward Snowden
was read by security researcher and activist Jacob
Appelbaum. Appelbaum
spoke to the audience of how he now lives in Berlin because
in his home country of the United States, true journalism has
become a dangerous trade. He conveyed the importance of not
forgetting history and asked all Germans to share with Americans
their history and experience with totalitarianism.
Numbed people of nations
in the grip of fear easily lose connection with reality. Once we
are divorced from our own senses, we come to rely on these
signals from outside and regard them as our own. This creates a
blind obedience to perceived outside authority, and in face of
abuses and injustice it is all too easy to become passive and
silent. No one person or nation is immune from this and the
American people are far from an exception. As Snowden
put it, we now live in a global turnkey tyranny. The key to
overt fascism has not yet been turned, but smiley faces are
everywhere. In the slowly boiling water of the United States of
Amnesia, it may be that many are now becoming the ‘Good
Americans’ who won’t speak up before it’s too late.
The Empty Self and
Representation As a New Authority
How have the American
people lost touch with reality? What made them so vulnerable to
manipulation and political and media misinformation? No doubt
the corporate media played a large role in the controlling of
perception, yet there is something deeper at work. The root
causes of the passivity and apathy of the populace can be better
understood by looking into a particular configuration of self
that has emerged in Western history.
In
Constructing the Self, Constructing America,
psychoanalyst Phillip Cushman analyzed how in the post-WWII
United States, modern industrialization broke down the
traditional social bonds and restructured the reality of
community. Out of this, he argues, a specific configuration of
self emerged. Cushman called it “the empty self” — “the bounded,
masterful self” — and described how this empty self “has
specific psychological boundaries, a sense of personal agency
that is located within, and a wish to manipulate the external
world for its own personal ends”. Cushman further characterized
this empty self as one that “experiences a significant absence
of community, tradition and shared meaning — a self that
experiences these social absences and their consequences
‘interiority’ as a lack of personal conviction and worth; a self
that embodies the absences, loneliness, and disappointments of
life as a chronic, undifferentiated emotional hunger.”
Cushman argued how this
new configuration of self and its emotional hunger was
indispensable to the development of US consumer culture. Stuart
Ewen, in his classic,
Captains of Consciousness, explored how modern
advertising was used as a direct response to the needs of
industrial capitalism through its functioning as an instrument
for the “the creation of desires and habits”: “The vision of
freedom which was being offered to Americans was one which
continually relegated people to consumption, passivity and
spectatorship.” Ewen saw this in the economic shift from
production to consumption and in the personal identity shift
from citizens to consumers.
It did not take long for
this covert manipulation of desires to be widely used for
advancing certain economic or political agendas. Through
unpacking his uncle Freud’s study of the unconscious, the father
of modern corporate advertising — Edward Bernays — gained
insight into the power of subterranean desires as a tool for
manipulation. In
Propaganda, Bernays put forth the idea that “the
conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society
constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling
power of our country.” This deliberate work of controlling
perception came to be understood as propaganda, and has been
identified as “the executive arm of the invisible government.”
How does this invisible
force of governance work? How is such an effective manipulation
of desires on such a mass scale accomplished? It has to do with
mechanisms of the unconscious; desires and drives that most
people don’t even know exist. Psychoanalyst Carl Jung took
Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and examined the phenomena
he identified as projection. Jung described how one meets one’s
repressed materials in the form of projections outside and that
this projecting is carried out unconsciously.
The marketing and PR
industries channel our psychological needs, then convert them
into specific desires for certain products or political
candidates. This manipulation of desires relies on the ability
to craft effective images of products that would induce the
involuntary process of projection from the individual. Whether
it is images of elected officials or celebrities, the latest
laundry soap or high definition TV screens, images outside
present themselves as something that speaks to internal desires.
They quickly appear before us as desirable objects and the
representation of unconscious desires. Representation thus
becomes simply an externalization of those unconscious and
internal desires and emotions that are mostly unknown to us.
The manipulation of
desires in a form of representation squashes our capacity to
create images. Instead, images are imposed upon us from the
outside. We lose connection with our own desires and, not
knowing the real roots of our emotions and drives, we are
cheated in the act of determining our own actions. Activity of
imagining is interrupted and short-circuited to a finished
product as multiple ways of manifesting our desires are narrowed
down to the simple act of consuming. We become passive and end
up carrying out the will of others.
Representation places the
source of legitimacy outside of oneself. Whether it is a
corporate brand name, political party, an ideology or slogan,
one looks for objects of representation through which something
inside can be projected out onto the world. A good example is
seen in the US political system, in the so-called representative
form of government: the system of electing officials to whom
power is delegated to enact changes on behalf of the people.
Another example can be found in the operation of corporations,
where individuals, through the purchase of company stock, become
shareholders and supposedly indirectly influence the direction
of the corporation. The theory is that the corporation as an
entity could represent their economic interests.
Many began to regard these
outer forms as possessing intrinsic authority, giving them power
to govern and influence their own lives, when in reality what
underlies both cases is simply something that represents what
lives in us unconsciously. The mechanism of representation
harvests a mindset that makes people believe real solutions to
problems can only come from somewhere outside, often from those
very people who are divorced from and not really affected by any
of those problems.
With the advent of
consumer culture and the apparatus of image manufacturing that
further reinforced the conditions of the empty self, the notion
of representation has come to form a new authority. Unlike the
traditional authority of churches and the nuclear family, in
representation an authority is internalized and its force of
control becomes more unrecognizable to those under its
governance. Cushman
noted that “Tte only way corporate capitalism and the state
could influence and control the population was by making their
control invisible, that is, by making it appear as
though various feelings and opinions originate solely from
within the individual.”
This is seen most clearly
in electoral politics, where candidates are pre-approved and
outcomes are manipulated, yet we are made to believe we are
actually making rational, independent and individual decisions
about who best represents our common interest — when in reality
there is no real choice and we often end up voting against our
own self-interest.
Beneath the universally
celebrated idea of freedom lies the false freedom of an
illusion of choice. We no longer connect with the source of
our desires. Our human needs have become intermediated and
manipulated by corporate interests. What is engineered in the
guise of individualism is actually a new form of conformity.
When the forces of control became invisible through the merging
with the self, it became much more difficult for us to challenge
the legitimacy of unequal power relations, or even to recognize
them for what they are.
Crisis of Representation
and Autonomy of Self
The centralized control
and coercive power of the state and corporations lies in their
ability to sustain the image of representation through careful
manipulation, by creating a strong emotional bond within
individuals. This bond of representation gives those in power
access to unconscious desires. Those who control the image of
representation can then generate motives and impulses and govern
the will of a mass of people seemingly without exercising direct
control over them. The media have played a crucial role in the
control and distortion of these images of representation, hiding
the real actions of those who claim to represent us. TV
commercials allure us with images of perfect products and
suitable political candidates — products and politicians are
sold as a solution to everyday problems.
Yet some signs of deep
change are arising. Images of representation are no longer so
easily held. Many who use social media and who are used to
sharing information are suddenly beginning to challenge the
monopolized image and single-message echo chamber of the
consolidated media. When one is surrounded by a multiplicity of
images that are not produced by or mediated through outside
powers, the projection that once mesmerized us can no longer
exercise its traditional power. As a result, the legitimacy of
these external forms of authority is now being challenged. Waves
of whistleblowing
have emerged in recent years, from Chelsea Manning to Edward
Snowden, combined with the power of social media and courageous
journalist like those at WikiLeaks, who continue to counteract
the propaganda.
Recent protest movements
around the world have been challenging the perception of
authority of the nation state and its governance models as well.
The year 2011 marked the beginning of worldwide uprisings.
Movements from abroad found resonance in North America. Inspired
by people’s struggles overseas, the disfranchised American rose
up, taking to the streets at the centers of wealth and
corruption. Occupy Wall Street, which began in the fall of 2011,
captured the imagination of the public. From Brazil to Turkey,
Egypt to Bosnia and Bulgaria, new insurgencies are still rolling
in, challenging the legitimacy of “representative” governments
worldwide. What these movements from below reveal is how in
virtually every corner of the globe, democracy — as we have
known it so far — is in crisis.
Jerome Roos, a PhD
researcher at the European University Institute,
synthesized the waves of revolutions since the Arab Spring
of 2011 and sees them as a symptom of the global legitimation
crisis of representative institutions. Pointing out a number of
characteristics commonly shared in those seemingly isolated
events — such as disengagement from the existing power
structures and the end of political parties — he suggests that
“only radical autonomy from the state can take the revolution
forward.”
People are moving more and
more outside of electoral politics. A call is arising for a new
type of governance, for a real democracy where each person
participates directly and manifests their own voice. This is a
political act, but it is also much more. The current crisis of
democracy is a crisis of representation. Images that perpetuate
illusions about ourselves can no longer sustain our humanity.
From Mubarak to Morsi, from Bush to Obama, the false images and
masks of leadership are beginning to fall away as people begin
to disengage with the charlatan faces of recycled puppet
leaders. The mirror that has for too long reflected back false
promises is now being shattered. What happens when people’s
faith in institutions crumble? We are seeing chaos and
destruction as never before.
In this crisis of
representation, for the first time we are left with ourselves,
empty and hollow, yet truly with ourselves. In this nakedness
lies the possibility for true freedom. Only when our emptiness
is fully confronted and accepted can we find our true autonomy.
Only with emotions and desires that are truly our own can we
guide the world into a future that springs from the depth of our
imagination. Who am I? Who are we? What do we want? The
rejection of false representation is a rejection of artificially
imposed identity. Around the world, the message is loud and
clear. People are saying we are no longer to be mere consumers,
passively accepting the commercialized visions of a future
handed down to us, with corporate values and political
candidates sold to us like many brands of toothpaste. This is a
voice resonating in all these movements around the world and
calling for deep systemic change.
The thirst for real
democracy is a thirst to be free. It is the spirit that drives
us to find our true aspirations within. Our self is empty. When
society loses its grip and leaders become devoid of morals and
compassion for humanity, we need to declare autonomy from all
those outside who try to allure us and who promise to fulfill
our dreams. By connecting back with our own desires and passions
we can fulfill the void of the empty self and transform empty
slogans into real action. Only then will it be possible for us
to become the authors of our own lives, transform history and
take charge of our common destiny.
Nozomi Hayase is a
contributing writer to Culture Unplugged. She brings out deeper
dimensions of socio-cultural events at the intersection between
politics and psychology to share insight on future social
evolution. Her Twitter is @nozomimagine.
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