“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”
These words are from a brief but memorable conversation the journalist Ron Suskind had with Karl Rove, the chief political adviser and Machiavellian ‘teacher of tricks’ to the Bush dynasty. Rove was senior adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George W Bush administration, as well as heading the Offices of Political Affairs, Public Liaison, and Strategic Initiatives. The public knew him jocularly as ‘Bush’s Brain’.
Rove had a way with words, and these particular ones were spoken in a low-key aside, not exactly an unguarded moment but one which acknowledges — in carefully chosen words — what both parties know.
The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality.’
I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.
He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” He continued, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.(Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, The New York Times Magazine)
Suskind published his article in 2004, leaving the speaker unnamed in the original article but later identifying him as Rove. It’s a revealing little conversation, and we are indebted to Suskind for passing it on. An empire which starts to believe that it creates reality sounds like Ozymandian hubris to me, but perhaps that’s taking Rove too literally. To ‘create reality’, in the political sense, means of course to simulate it, in such a way that a majority of people accept their first impressions as real. The fearful majority can then be used to hound and vilify doubters and ultimately force acquiescence in the deception, intimidating them into believing or pretending to believe, or keeping silent. This is the ‘engineering’ or ‘manufacture of consent’, as Edward Bernays called it — his definition of the role of mass media in a modern ‘democracy’.
When we act, we create our own reality.
Or as Baudrillard would say, The simulacrum is true.
Which is both a post-modern paradox and the ultimate example of Orwellian‘doublethink’. The power to create reality rests on the mass’s conditioning to resist ‘thoughtcrime’, and the population’s inability to perceive contradiction under conditions of fear.
As for his ‘reality-based’ designation, it’s somewhat respectful — a refreshing change at least from being called a ‘conspiracy theorist’, a ‘truther’, ‘denier’ ‘anti-vaxxer’ or whatever. Respectful too in comparison with the way people like us are viewed by our families, colleagues and the general public at large.
And yet, so far has the relationship between map and territory already travelled towards the ‘death of reality’, it is simultaneously a put-down. Under modern conditions, those who stake their beliefs on the reality principle are quaintly irrelevant, failing to understand the true reach of power. You’re not delusional, merely ‘reality-based’.
But that’s not what they’ll say to the world.
People like us, now, falling prey in ever greater numbers to Baudrillard’s ‘false desire’ to know, were predicted and modelled and arrangements were made well in advance. The ‘reality-based community’ is no threat to the Empire. To believe that ‘solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality’ is laughable in the Straussian-Platonic world of the noble, imperial lie. ‘Reality-based’, then, becomes a term of mild contempt.
Rove believed that these enemies of the lie need not be feared, because the lies are so layered and extensive that they create a trap. The ‘conspiracy theorists’ become so fascinated by the studious discernment of reality that it incapacitates them. Their conclusions are academic; they make no difference in the world created by the lie. Mesmerised by visions of the abyss, they are baffled as to how knowledge can be translated into political power. The weight of the new reality is enough to induce a defeatist paralysis, and the gazers into the abyss become isolated in a society they cannot affect. No matter how strongly based their knowledge is, their problems of communication, exacerbated by media stratagems and political theatre, makes getting through to the inhabitants of the enchanted land virtually impossible. How do you teach chess to a beginner so absolute that he believes no such game could even exist?
For Rove as for Baudrillard, the concept of ‘reality’ is obsolete; it is a bitter clinging to territory that no longer survives the map, or even precedes it any more.
And that, you should understand, is the desert you will to wander in, forever, if you succumb to the false desire to know.
“Ours is a problem in which deception has become organized and strong; where truth is poisoned at its source; one in which the skill of the shrewdest brains is devoted to misleading a bewildered people.” [Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, 1913]
And what about a general public which rejects and derides those who ‘believe that solutions emerge from a judicious study of discernible reality’? There has been increased discussion of late, among the said community, about appropriate terms to use for the undiscerning masses. We tend to call them, ‘normies’, ‘sheep’, or ‘the sheeple’ — those easy to lead, the natural followers, too timid to break ranks and too dumbed-down to be able to articulate a question or notice a contradiction. Or ‘NPC’s — Non-Playable Characters — ie, characters who are not avatars for players but programmed artefacts of the simulation itself. Some think such nomenclature unhelpful, not reflecting the proper attitude of an educator, which is what we should be. Even the ‘awake/asleep’ antithesis is felt by some to be disrespectful, even hubristic.
Politicians will of course flatter the masses in public as ‘the great American people’ or whatever, but behind closed doors? I have heard that Rove coined his own phrase: The sucker brigades.
The public, the people, the workers, the electorate who think it is they who put governments in power — ‘sucker brigades’.
It’s a witty insult, with a kind of poetic economy about it. We are the suckers; one of us is born every minute, and we must never, ever be given an even break. For so it is written.
But why ‘brigades’? It seems counterintuitive, because too structured, too active… It’s hard to imagine a passive, directionless populace drilling in rigid ranks: Walter Lippmann’s ‘the bewildered herd’ might seem more accurate. But this oxymoronic quality is what makes it such a witty phrase. In two words it perfectly captures the reality: the ease with which the suckers can be induced to give their consent to atrocity, triggered to hate, marched off to kill and die — or simply, as now, to die.
In coining the phrase, Rove was not saying anything new, just putting an old idea in a punchy new form. A hundred years ago, it was already apparent that the new mass media would be consciously used to manage perception, shape attitudes, and fundamentally alter the nature of democracy. The scientific study of the human mind would be key to their effective deployment. Edward Bernays, generally acknowledged as the progenitor of the modern public relations industry, was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, and the theory and practice of modern public relations, advertising and propaganda was founded on Freudian psychology.
Bernays argued that the scientific manipulation of public opinion was necessary to overcome chaos and conflict in society. At a time when the mass media consisted merely of radio, newspapers, printed posters and silent movies, he already envisioned – and went on to prove – that these tools could be used to ‘stereotype the public mind’.
National Socialism embraced these ideas and techniques enthusiastically and to world-changing effect. While it may be a figure of speech to say that Goebbels designed his propaganda campaigns with Bernays’ book open on his desk, it is not an exaggeration: the Nazis were deeply impressed by American propaganda, which they believed had won the Great War.
The theme was no less avidly taken up by progressive scholars and theorists in the USA. Journalist and media guru Walter Lippmann explored theories of perception to show how a media system could be used to standardise, control and regiment the group mind. Lippmann was a public relations consultant to the Government and a colleague of Bernays on the Creel Commission, which generated the propaganda to mobilise American public opinion behind entering the First World War, proving that war could be sold in the same way as Coca Cola or Lucky Strikes. He argued that in a properly functioning democracy a specialised class must run things, analysing and executing, making decisions and exerting control through the political, economic and ideological systems. Specialists do the thinking and planning, and ‘manufacture consent’ (Bernays’ phrase, not Chomsky’s) for their plans through the mass media. In his highly readable 1922 book, Public Opinion, Lippmann develops a sophisticated theory of stereotypes as the foundation – and means of control – of human perception.
And so the 20th century became the century of propaganda. The guru of the neoconservative movement, Professor Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, argued that ordinary people are not strong enough to look into the abyss, and must therefore be protected from reality by the construction of a ‘system of delusion’. In this he was specifically arguing from Plato: in his vision, the majority of the population are confined to a modern version of the Cave, where the mass media projects a wall of Platonic ‘noble lies’.
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