Narrative warfare, has taken a new turn, with western political parties, mass media and platforms not just abandoning argument, but in emulation of the Grand Inquisitors, firing-off volleys of charges (witchcraft, heresy, etc) without real basis.
The aim, as Lyndon Johnson taunted, of ‘making the sonsofbitches deny it’. Of course, then as now, it is impossible to prove the negative: Admit to woke heresy and be burnt alive, or deny it until every bone is cracked on the media ‘rack’.
The point is that de-platforming, boycotts and shaming of individuals or parties as supremacist or racist, in today’s climate, are seen to work.
They can be leveraged through the tech-platforms to such a degree that critical thinking can be not just suppressed, but individuals and parties shamed and ‘cancelled’; and swept off from the political ‘board’ entirely with a swipe from weaponized narrative.
History teaches us that such radical one-side-ness almost invariably tilts toward intolerance, repression and ultimately, violence.
Today, we are amidst a new aridity, a new desert. We are invited to ‘Re-set’ into ‘socially responsible’, techno-robotic capitalism.
Socially responsible capitalism isn’t some new notion. The idea harks back, as Joaquin Flores notes, to the centrist wing of fascism some 90 years ago.
It is to wit the embodiment of the last century’s corporatist and technocratic ideal, until about the 1970’s – when Friedmanism [neo-liberalism] became de rigueur”.
Now, social responsibility is again being trumpeted as the reason why socialism must be viewed as wholly inappropriate, since what is good for corporations, surely must be good for society, since we all yearn for stability.
This vision is both abstract, and devoid of any empathy for the human condition. The public must be trained and subjected to Covid-19 and lock-down disciplining firstly, and then to further ‘punishment’ required by the ‘climate emergency’.
Its ideologues use fear and deliberate narrative contradictory-chaos to anesthetize, and gain public acquiescence into this new techno-reality.
Nonetheless, the planned technocratic dystopia may yet be perceived by many to be a carry-forward of social-democracy. Centrist political parties will endorse it. They long for applause and praise of the MSM and tech-platforms.
And with the public no longer having any real political power, the costs of this re-set will be pushed down to the people, whilst wealth concomitantly gets funneled upwards towards a tight, controlling oligarchy.
The combined landscape of the Two Lands is one of ‘Paradise’ and ‘Hell’, at war with one another, yet united in precarious balance and reciprocity.
One thus symbolized the harmonious, creative unity of cultivation in the valley; and the other that of in-coherence, of chaos and death in the deserted areas.
Ancient Egyptians saw themselves held in this balance and interplay of polarities: life and death, abundance and scarcity, light and dark.
The very landscape teaches the principle of oscillating polarities. Maintaining balance was a succession of destruction’s and renaissances; allowing insidious, sapping barrenness to be overcome by Horus’s subsequent reviving inundations, was the central preoccupation of the Egyptian King: Seth and Horus were thus to be held in equilibrium.
We might understand this double movement – compounded in aspects that are always in polar tension; yet are co-constituent to each other – as being somehow a reflection, an analogy, and a consequence of a deep inner life-rhythm: the systole and diastole of human creativity itself.
So, the anger expressed earlier is understandable and appropriate. We are being surreptitiously slipped into the aridity of a ‘neo-Sethianism’ arid polarization.
Balance and reviving inundations are deemed heretic and will not be tolerated. Yet in the end Seth was exiled, and harmony returned to Egypt.
Strategic Culture / ABC Flash Point News 2021.
