The Deep State vs. The Deep Right - The American Mind

Power has to figure out what it wants. We can say, "power wants what will help it stay in power," but that just rephrases the question. How does power know *that*? Does power want to hold onto or increase its power right here and now, or is it capable of thinking in terms of maintaining itself over a long period of time? There must be differences within Power--even the sovereign can change his mind, and the sources of information and organizers of social consensus can certainly change theirs. Transitioning from one state of rule to another is always tricky--it's always possible that mediations that were expected to smooth the transition accelerate it or drive it off the rails. If we imagine a situation in which the dominant power center has reduced itself to increasingly incoherent centralization (such as "everyone has to recognize the 200 genders within us"), then it makes sense to assume some power centers would stand back and hesitate before taking this plunge. If we ask, what would enable this "dissident" elite to step into an increasingly violent power vortex and create a new order, I think "a very powerful representation of reality that dissolves the lies we have been living with" is a good answer.

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If everything you say here is true, we'd be wasting our time, wouldn't we? (Wouldn't that serve the interests of Power very well?) In fact, it's hard to see how we could even be here--most of us seem to think we're getting at some of the "objective truth," and as our inquiries progress I'm not sure that we're being progressively more surveilled and harried by the CIA. Maybe the CIA isn't equipped to discover what might be an idea that 30 years from now would lead to the abolition of the CIA.

I assume that human action is always intentional, and therefore never automatic or "natural." There is the inertia of tradition, and the weight of actions already taken that narrow down your options, but order needs to be maintained, decisions have to made--and the inertia inherited from the past always needs to be interpreted. Otherwise, what would be the point of distinguishing "secure" from "unsecured" power? If we didn't have a model of the use of power commensurate to its purpose and object, we wouldn't be able to analyze power gone awry. And we do have such models of power, even if imperfect: even the CIA must have some functional chains of command, otherwise they wouldn't be able to operate subversively and destructively; beyond that, families do get raised, some traditions, even flawed ones, get transmitted, production takes place, technology is invented and implemented, there are functional institutions. Sometimes countries even win wars and achieve their aims--even if the aims are perverse, their attainment is a sign of functionality. And maybe they're not always perverse. So I also don't think it's true that our "consensus reality" bears no resemblance to objective truth. People say things that are true all the time. You think you're doing so in making these claims. And I would agree there is a lot of truth in what you say.

The question of our concrete circumstances is obviously more complex than these general considerations. We have a lot of thinking to do regarding the relation between internal and external influences and sources of power. It doesn't seem to me that an American aesthetic movement inspired, say, by French postmodern theory, would therefore necessarily mean the elites "awed" by those aesthetic representations are therefore just a branch of French political development. For one thing, French theory has its own American roots, inspirations, antecedents, along with some CIA and other funding, I would assume. But no country is an island (figuratively speaking) and lots of ideas ultimately have shared sources.

If power is in disarray (as you indicate), there will always be the possibility of dissident elites. If you delegate to subordinates in an incoherent way, for example, by commanding them to do things one of which subverts the others, you virtually command them to be dissident in at least some respect. You give them an anomaly to resolve, and sometimes the only way to resolve an anomaly is to change the terms of the problem that generated it. And I take the implication of Yarvin's argument to be that powerful aesthetic representations are better at changing the terms of the problem than a more "logical" or "scientific" analysis would be. Maybe it's true, maybe not--but it's worth considering. But I, at least, have been thinking that some kind of alliance between a dissident middle and dissident elites is the most likely path towards change. And producing aesthetic representations, and even searching the world (past and present) for inspiration for such representations would then be an important part of what part of that middle would be doing.

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To put it in very simple terms, we need to be able to distinguish between better and worse forms of power. This would mean that there are better and worse ways of "subsuming," better and worse ways of expanding, and it may also be the case that power doesn't always have to expand. In fact, if it has to expand because of obstacles to coherent "subsumption," then if power can subsume coherently it doesn't need to expand. There's nothing wrong with power as such, as power is closely related to relationships like "guidance," "influence," "leadership" and so on. We shouldn't, therefore, speak about power as a kind of out of control monster. If there can be disarray, there can be "array." And if there's disarray, it's as a result of attempts to "array" things.

The question of what's involved in power ruling "absolutely" also has to be considered carefully. Everyone can do exactly what I say because I have guys with guns watching their every move (why are the guys with the guns doing what I say, though?); or, they can do what I say because I know what I'm doing and they want to accomplish the same thing I do. In this latter case, I'll probably say a lot less, but they may follow what I say just as "absolutely." There's a normative dimension to this kind of analysis, and if we're not aware of it we can start to sound either like slaves looking for the right boots to lick or, weirdly, like anarchists.

There is even objective truth regarding people's understanding of the "individual"--notwithstanding the doctrinal individualism we are perpetually bombarded with, not all talk of individuals detaches "individuals" form social contexts and traditions. And people with more power and responsibility will on balance be better at seeing through the ideology, because their power depends on it. There is a basis on which falsifications can be exposed. Power could shut it down, but incoherent power will sponsor a lot of things that might go wrong.