I started posting other people's twitter threads in part because twitter was (is) threatening to self-destruct, but also because there are some incredible gems that could disappear into the ether even if twitter remains. It's not set up to easily find that one post you read weeks ago - ever again. But it's curious to me how many people prefer to read things in little bite-sized chunks. I sometimes copy/paste long threads into a doc just to read them without being jarringly broken up into bits mid-sentence. Perhaps I'm old and stodgy like that and have just grown too accustomed to paragraphs. Anyway, check this one out, and I bring in Chomsky and his ilk at the end.
This is a fantastic thread by Dr. Henry Madison, professor of... history? anthropology? political science? The name's too popular to be able to find his credentials or location for certain, but his analysis feels spot on.
"POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food and water and were usually not tortured.
In fact prisoners were often rewarded with sweets and cigarettes. Nobody tried to escape, despite the absence of barbed wire or often even armed guards. But prisoners would often sit in their huts with a blanket over their heads, and just die. After liberation, very few prisoners even wanted to do the basic act of calling family at home. And there was little camaraderie amongst survivors. The overwhelming culture of the camps and in survivors was one of hopelessness.
That hopelessness was deliberately engineered.
For example, prisoners were observed interacting, and the small number among them (about 5%) who other prisoners looked up to, the socially popular leaders of the group, were then removed and killed. The Koreans also targeted the rewards (sweets and cigarettes) to those who informed on other prisoners. Snitches. Also encouraged was extreme self criticism amongst prisoners, of the wrongs they had done and the good they hadn’t done. Confession, to erode self respect and personal worth. There were a variety of other techniques used to undermine self-worth, and to sever any collective ties between prisoners and their loved ones and country back home (some summarized here).
The relevance to Covid? Twitter for example is awash with the same feeling of hopelessness, every day. Focused not just on the authorities who are doing nothing to lead a fight against the virus, but also against fellow members of the public who are perceived (often rightly) to be doing nothing to fight the disaster either. The core message for me is one I tweet about a lot: That all of society functions by social rules, not political rules.
What we call the economy, and capitalism, and power, are really all just manifestations of some basic underlying social dynamics. Conformity is the glue that holds all societies together, of any belief system. Conformity is not the universal negative libertarians would have us believe either. To emulate others is a great way to learn and build upon progress in human affairs. The evil here comes from how conformity is led, because as the Korean camps show, it’s what that 5% do that drives what everybody else does. Not because the 95% are sheep, but because nobody can do everything. We all ‘follow the lead’ in everything we do, there’s always a hierarchy of expertise and value that we draw upon, whether it’s playing guitar, cooking or voting.
The total Covid capitulation was and is led. Just as inaction on climate change is led. And for both, just like those US POWs, the majority of us feel hopeless, like there’s nothing that could be done, and we even turn on the public more generally, shocked at their apparent stupidity. It’s all part of eroding the social dynamics that might lead to resistance to what’s going on. Government-friendly Covid experts are given the sweets and cigarettes (media attention, plum postings in advisory bodies etc.), to snitch on the rest of us, to police the acceptable beliefs.
Constant ‘freedom’ narratives saturate all media, but it’s not freedom from Covid or even from government, it’s freedom to conform to something once libertarian politics has removed as many of the hierarchies of basic social life as possible. Clearing the jungle of complex, sophisticated due process of democratic society, with its overlapping hierarchies of expertise, and replacing it with a handful of simple rallying slogans: ‘Live with the virus,’ ‘Just like the flu,’ removing that 5% that guide in every tiny part of life, in everything we do, and replacing them with these rallying slogans.
If you feel helpless and hopeless right now, it’s because that was always the plan, so that you’d hopefully then grasp the first slogan that came along, to ease these feelings.The politics of hopelessness, or neoliberalism or libertarianism, whatever you want to call it, is entirely about taking control of that 5% space, so that social conformity will then do the rest for it. Telling everybody they’ll be free if they get infected, because then not only can you avoid doing any public health work at all, but people will actually celebrate that absence as freedom. Millions die, and people do nothing, because conformity has been used to weaponise helplessness."
Chomsky talks about this when he said the neoliberal machine just needs to manufacture the consent of the elites, and that will all filter down to the masses. He advocates for better critical thinking of citizens and more reading of complex ideas from alternative media. He puts a lot of faith in the desire to learn in the average person. Having taught for a long time under a variety of different experimental systems, willing to try out anything, I've found that about 10% of any class really wants to learn and think outside the box. Most just want to do what's necessary to satisfy the criteria - and many of them blow through it quickly or avoid it in order to be passively entertained. I'm afraid most don't learn from a desire to know but only because we hold up a reward of some kind.
Charles Taylor talks about this with reference to social imaginaries, the narratives that we live by that, if we can acknowledge them (like this post does), then we can change them. But our capacity for change is limited by these stories in our culture; if we can't imagine it, then we can't make it happen and end up in a "zone of arrested power." We need a critical mass of people who are able to work together enough to shift the narrative. For instance, there was a time and place in history that it wasn't possible to not believe in God . . . until it was. That shift was slow but deliberate, and now most of us (in my parts) can't even imagine being so immersed in religion that we don't ever question it. Some narratives are slipping as we speak, like "anyone can get rich if they work hard enough." That story didn't ever hold water, but now a tipping point of people seem to understand that, and a shift might be on the horizon.
And Michael Sandel talks about the word "deserve," how it's attached to the rise of neoliberal politics (so the rich can get super rich with low taxes, deregulation that allows open exploitation, and privatization of essential services), and how many people struggling to make ends meet will still argue that the rich deserve their wealth. We won't have any change until we re-write these narratives, but our current society is so individualistic that we're not open to work together to change things on a cultural level.
And Timothy Snyder is another one to look at. It really takes talking to neighbours and meeting people around a kitchen table to make any change in how we see the world enough to change the world. We need to pay attention to what's happening and how it's happening, and talk about it together.
Even Alain de Botton gets this (in one of my favourite books that I've never written about): how different our lives would be, and how much better for the environment, if we all followed the lead of minimalists instead of the purveyors of conspicuous consumption. We can choose who to follow, and we need more Thoreau, less Kardashians. We need to take Nick Carraway's journey to the realization that these leaders are all careless people who retreat back into their money after smashing things up for the rest of us.
Big changes in how we think have happened before. Friends of mine who really believe in God can understand why I don't, and that shift is just a few hundred years old. Much more recently, we accept a variety of types of families. We even all sort our garbage now, which was unheard of to the extent that one of my old roommates thought it was disgusting in just the mid 1980s. Change is possible. But we've pitted ourselves against one another - actively seeking out "otherness" to superficially decide if we're aligned or enemies.
Racism and sexism are taboo, so we've moved on to harsh divisions by age such that many of my students argue that nobody in politics should be over 50 because they can't possibly understand what's going on in the world if they're that old. I ask them, "What will happen to you in the next thirty years that you'll stop understanding things or learning about things happening around you?" But it won't happen to them, of course! Standard prejudicial fair. And we've lined ourselves up on the left and right. But here's the thing: we don't have to divide ourselves at all. We can keep seeing one another as individuals rather than parts of a group, but it is an effort. We have to fight against this alleged "freedom" to stop thinking!
This doesn't mean always agreeing with people, but talking and listening and reading complex ideas and learning and teaching science and logic more fluently so we can better understand one another. I get that the people working hard to stop masks in class are like me in that they also really want to protect children. Our difference is in what we're protecting them from: masks or viruses. It's possible to get people on the same page on this, but we have to override the narrative coming down from high that Covid is over; pay no attention to the excess deaths on that graph! It's possible to get people to follow different leaders despite the power of the triple entente of politicians, corporations, and media. Maybe we just need to get behind activists, co-ops, and libraries!
Unfortunately, this kind of change necessitates reading and thinking, which is a lot of work, and can require unwavering certainty in some of the least powerful, our scientists and thinkers, and can take centuries, and we don't have that kind of time.
Vive la révolution??
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