Losing Alignment: Some Further Thoughts

"Friend of the pod" Eugyppius recently wrote a piece discussing why it is that the regime seems incapable of maintaining its control of popular opinion. I have some further thoughts on this.

88. Losing Alignment: Some Further Thoughts

In a recent piece,

eugyppius

discussed why the regime is losing control of popular opinion. He notes that the fact of populist movements is itself noteworthy, as the regime broadly considered has an almost universal stranglehold on messaging. He uses a very helpful term, “alignment,” to discuss the phenomenon and why it is happening. You should read the piece, it’s excellent (it’s for paid subscribers, but perhaps this is the excuse you need to treat yourself to his writing):

Losing Alignment: Why have establishment politics become so destructive, immoderate and self-defeating?

As my readers will know, I am deep into a multi-piece look at Jacques Ellul’s Propaganda: the Formation of Men’s Attitudes, and Eugyppius’ piece brought to mind one of Ellul’s insights that I have yet to share in regards to the nature of propaganda and the propagandist. This will be both an introduction and a teaser for the fuller treatment to come.

As I have discussed at length already in regards to propaganda, we must properly understand it as an integral part of the technological society. Its real purpose is to integrate you into this way of life it generates. A big part of what happened in the growth of the technological society was the transition to a mass society with the accompanying transition to mass media, mass markets and mass politics. The problem is that mass society is deeply alienating. It cuts you off from your religious moorings, from natural relationships with others in organic communities, and even from yourself. The primary role of propaganda is to integrate you into the realities of mass society. Part of what what happened in this transition to the mass, technological society, was a shift in thinking. We would stop asking metaphysical questions like, “why? and, “should?” towards more practical questions like, “how does it work?” and, “is it effective?” We are a society that just “does what works.” We no longer concern ourselves with higher order meanings. We are all about fixing things here and now and making the world work for us. And by setting aside the questions of metaphysics and religion, we told ourselves that we could satisfy any needs we have materially. Propaganda’s prime purpose, argues Ellul, is to keep everyone on board and “aligned” with this project. This is why Eugyppius’ term was so well suited to help unpack what is happening.

This is where things get interesting. Ellul argues that “tactics” are more important than political ends. The deeper meaning and purpose of propaganda is more important than any one set of messages or any one particular political end towards which it might be put. This is similar to Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message.” It is more important that propaganda keeps people aligned with the project of modernity than it is to get people on board with, say, the civil rights movement. Pick any current regime message. The goal of propaganda is not to convince you that infinite immigrants is a good thing, that transgenderism is a good thing, that the war in Ukraine is a good thing or that Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates were a good thing. The goal of propaganda is the maintenance of the system itself. The goal of propaganda is to keep you aligned with the project of modernity.

The role of the propagandist is to believe in propaganda, not in the content of propaganda. Again, the point is the technological system, keeping people well adjusted and participating actively. Ideology is an obstacle to good propaganda. Commercial advertising is a good example here. It is after all propaganda. A good ad agency should be able to develop successful campaigns that attempt to induce you to smoke cigarettes while at the same time developing an equally successful campaign to convince you to stop smoking. The point is the advertising. This may seem completely mercenary and soulless. Yes. And this is the point of propaganda. At its “best” it is completely without soul. It is about effectiveness. Like product advertising, it is about “selling” and not about what is being sold. As long you keep buying, it does not matter what is being sold. Like propaganda, commercial advertising’s primary message is all about buying things that are being sold. The product is irrelevant. The real goal is form you into the kind of person who buys the things the advertisers tell him to buy. In the same way, the propagandist is trying to form you into the kind of person who is happily adjusted and aligned with mass society.

Ideology, then, is an obstacle to good propaganda. Today, there is much debate about the “rational players” and “woke ideology.” Because of the nature of the technological society, the managers who do the work of propaganda are supposed to be the most rational of all rational players, entirely fixed and focused on effectiveness and not on any particular message, any particular ideological content. The true driver is supposed to be a ruthless “focus on product.” In fact we are starting to see this kind of language coming back among a handful of tech billionaires like Elon Musk or Marc Andreesen. In propaganda terms, the goal is keeping people “aligned” without regard to the content of ideology. In this regard, the way that World War 2 played out has really hindered the propagandist. The true propagandist does not care if he is putting out fascist messages or messages centered around woke liberal progressivism. In fact, he should not get so committed to any one message that it undermines his ability to pivot as needed to any new message as needed to retain propaganda’s effectiveness at integrating people into mass society, into the technological society. If today he must be a progressive, he is good with this. If tomorrow he must be a fascist, then he is completely fine with that. The point is to keep you buying into the system itself.

There is a problem, though, that the propagandist does face. We have built up this idea that by stripping the away the metaphysical and the religious and just focusing on how things work and then on making them work, that utility and effectiveness is somehow now free from ideology. The problem is that the technological society itself is an ideology. It is a belief system which argues that we as human beings are the central actors in this thing we call “history.” As the central actors within history, if we set aside religious belief and even ideology and just focus on doing what works, that we can step by step create incremental improvements that will in the end perfect society and lead to the end of history. There are corollaries to this in science, that step by step we can learn progressively more about how the world works, eventually unlocking all of its secrets, thus enabling us to more effectively manage and control the world around us. We see this in our democratic institutions built around the marketplace of ideas, that through continual free discussion we can progressively, as a society, move towards the truth. We tend to think of “the system” as being an empty vessel into which we pour political content, but the system itself is built around the ideology of human progress. The administrative state is no different. It is established with the idea that we can progressively manage society step by step, perfecting it through better management.

There are three big problems with this. First is that the attempts to manage society at scale, whether politically or for the markets, is that with the move to a mass technological society focused on “effectiveness,” society will start to lack real meaning. What happens when you cannot replace the satisfaction that people had in a life that was deeply embedded in the local community and integrated into a religious framework that gave the world meaning? What if buying consumer goods and the building of an effective social machine leave people empty, alienated and feeling like their lives lack meaning? The one thing you cannot do is pivot away from the technological society itself. The propagandist is now trapped. He is committed to “effectiveness.” This commitment, rather than being neutral, is itself ideological. He must now give the people meaning. But he cannot do it the old way, through religion and community, because the technological society, and with it propaganda, must undermine both to create the technological society that has put them in this place. The propagandist is forced then to openly embrace, not just the structural ideology of the system itself, but must now fill the vessel with openly ideological content. You can now only sell one kind of product, watch one kind of show on the tele, and drive to one location in your automobile. Once he does this, he becomes a bad propagandist because he now focused on the ends and not the tactics. He can no longer pivot without losing credibility. He has promised that ideology will fill the void. But what if the ideology is disastrous in terms of its effectiveness?

Second, when managing at scale, the thing that enables these managerial systems to work across the whole system is that people have to believe in what they are doing. Ideological alignment allows you to keep the managerial system more or less on the same page across the system. Ideology, written into policy, enacted by bureaucrats and other administrators and functionaries, is the secret sauce that makes it all work. There are those will want to push the system towards just focusing on making great products. Get rid of all the ideology and just get back to the business of making things work. But what if your product is not inspiring? What if effectiveness is not enough? What if you don’t know how to make things work?

And this gets us to our final point, the problem with complex systems themselves. As Joseph Tainter argued in The Collapse of Complex Societies, societies that survive over time are able to solve the problems that they are confronted with in the world around them. These solutions generally involve adding some measure of new complexity to the society. As a society begins to solve its problems by becoming more complex, these solutions will themselves need to be managed and they also themselves produce problems that require new solutions and new complexity. Initially, the benefits of complexity outstrip the costs. Even though the additions of new complexity do make the system less efficient because of the management costs, they bring benefits that outweigh the costs. Even if the total pie is little less efficient, overall the pie is larger. But, argues Tainter, eventually there is a limit to how big you can make the pie, at which point the costs of managing the complex system at scale begins to overwhelm the system itself. At this point you begin to create the conditions where some form of societal collapse happens. Either, society retreats back to a scale where it can be managed with lesser, more local resources, or there is a total catastrophic collapse, or the society breaks up into smaller, more manageable pieces. We are reaching those limits.

The managers have put themselves in a position where they have committed themselves to an ideology to overcome the problem of meaning within the technological society. That ideology is obviously ineffective, overly extractive and increasingly ridiculous in appearance. In the main, committed as they are to ideology to give themselves and the system meaning and direction, they cannot easily pivot without admitting that their ideology was nothing more than a tactic, that the system truly is manipulative and meaningless. Even though some are attempting to focus on “making things work” in opposition to the current managers, this too will only go so far, because it does not answer the fundamental problem of the alienating, meaningless nature of the system. Once you are committed to “making things work,” you are largely committed to delivering on utopia. You might not accept that this is what you have signed up for, but this is the implicit ideology of the system itself. This is what “just making things work” means. “We are going to dispense with all that religion and ideology nonsense and just make things work.” The problem is that this is itself an ideology.

And this gets us back to the older way of understanding the world before the advent of “history.” There was a time in the west when we accepted that “history” was not a thing for humans. God was in charge of that. Every time that human beings have grasped at “history” — Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and then those foolish tower builders at Babel — it generally ends disastrously. So we do the best we can in a world where evil exists, recognizing that we can’t “fix” anything and there are no “solutions.” We do the best we can and we recognize that we have worked out some ways of doing things, that while they have trade offs do generally work. They don’t fix the problems, but they do seem to restrain them. But within this larger framework, we direct our attention to God and put our trust in him, that he has “history” safely within his grasp. Having this faith gives us a measure of “consolation.” When the king doesn’t know how to “fix” an intractable problem, at the very least he can lead his people in prayer, in public ritual, aligned together, to place their situation into the hands of God. Today, we have replaced “consolation” with a need for “solutions.” The state has taken on the role of god in society, promising to deliver all the things that people used to for from God. They promise to give it not in a life to come or after a Day of Judgement, but right now, in history, through technology. And what we are discovering is that the state isn’t god and it can’t deliver and so they are no longer believing what they are being told. Its not just the propaganda they don’t believe in, it is the system itself. You can see this in the skepticism many have towards Elon Musk. But what happens when people no longer believe, when they lose their faith in “Progress” and “The State?” What we are experiencing now is just the beginning of this.