The Medium of Change
The Spectacle of the Real and the Society of Control in Transition through Donald Trump’s election victory
Trump Hatred as a Vehicle of a Society of Control
Earlier this year, Donald Trump was shot in an assassination attempt. At that time, I wrote an essay called The Spectacle of Trump Hatred.
Trump hatred is a mass hysteria phenomenon that is an expression of a society of control. I am non-partisan and apolitical. Yet, when I spoke with some people about Trump in the terms that I’ll describe below, I was accused of being a Trump fanatic, insane, and an enemy of democracy. The control mechanism is Trump hatred. It rationalizes all sorts of false claims and serves as the perfect vehicle for the implementation of other mechanisms of control. …
I am not a Trump hater or lover. He does not live rent-free in my head. I see him for what he is as a New York City businessman, property developer, and media personality. His election in 2016 is a remarkable accomplishment. He took on the political establishment of both parties. He defeated 16 Republican candidates for president and then defeated Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton for the presidency. He did so as groups within the federal government weaponized their agencies against him.
The tactics of a society of control are those of the establishment. Who is the establishment? The Democrat Party is the establishment. The mainstream media is the establishment. The Republican Party of George Bush and Dick Cheney is the establishment. The Democrat coalition led by Barrack Obama and Joe Biden have been the establishment over the past 16 years. They represent a shift in governance that Gilles Deleuze in Postscript on the Societies of Control identified over thirty years ago as moving from a society of discipline to a society of control.
Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. …
Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. … But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.
We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environment of enclosure - prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors - scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. … These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing the disciplinary societies.
This long description identifies how the establishment has moved from a disciplinary focus to a control one. Institutional structures no longer exist as separate enclosures but as extensions of the establishment’s system of control. The control mechanism is the spectacle of the real, a simulacra that is just real enough to be believable but hyper-real enough to never become a place of normalcy.
The significance of Donald Trump and the MAGA coalition’s rise is their defeat of the forces of a society of control. All the attacks on Trump from the Russian hoax, the two impeachments, the various lawsuits and criminal charges, two attempted assassinations, and the charges of fascism, racism, and misogyny, ultimately had no effect on thwarting his rise to a second term as president.
Obviously, many people understood what was happening. They voted accordingly because they too had experienced the imposition of a society of control during the COVID pandemic. Many started listening, observing, and seeking alternative sources of information. The establishment calls those sources of perspective conspiracy theories and misinformation. The validation of their claims requires a control mechanism to succeed. The mainstream media has served that purpose since its inception.
The Donald Trump election is remarkable in its own right. But it happened because new forces of communication and technology breached the enclosure of establishment media to create a new society that is presently emerging.
As a result, it raises a question that we should be asking.
Is Donald Trump an anomalous character in the history of American society
or
did we witness a new medium for messaging emerge to replace the society of control?
Propaganda as the Vehicle of the Establishment
As I wrote in July, I view these series of events through the lens of The Spectacle of the Real. Guy Debord, a French theorist who first described The Society of the Spectacle, wrote,
The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
Televised media, including social media, is designed as a spectacle. As it is currently programmed, it is not capable of presenting perspectives in their totality. Instead, they are the contemporary vehicles for propaganda. The structure of modern mass communication can be none other than propaganda because it is impossible to present a complete and whole representation of a person or a political party in messages restricted to a few seconds or a few minutes.
Marshall McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message” means that the medium or vehicle for communicating political messages is the message. In this instance, the mainstream political parties use mainstream media as their primary medium for communicating their perspective.
The medium of mainstream media is the presentation of the establishment’s perspective as expert opinion.
In The Spectacle of the Real, I wrote,
Fueled by a 24/7 news cycle, actual news - a statement of "facts" that an event, an accident, a death, an agreement, a visit or something has taken place, described in the traditional journalistic parlance of "who, what, when and where" - is transformed into a spectacle of opinion and virtual reality driven by the images of faces speaking words of crisis, fear, and self-righteous anger. Televised analysis - more important than the "facts" of the story- drives the news through the ambiguity of the visual image and is its source of validation. …
These televised events aren't conversations seeking truth, but, rather, people talking at and past one another in a game of leveraging images for social and political influence. We are drawn to the image on the screen of these "experts" having something to say that is meaningful, hoping that at some point some sense of the moment will be revealed, bringing reality into view.
The power of these images creates a psychological connection born of agreement and fear. FOMO, “the fear of missing out”, is a version of this psychological mass formation. The Cleveland Clinic describes FOMO as,
the feeling or perception that other people are having fun, experiencing new things or living a better life than you. And while it most often pops up when you see or perceive these characteristics in people you love and you’re close with, it can also occur with parasocial relationships. When you see people you don’t know but follow on social media doing really cool things you wish you were doing, it can have a lasting impact on how you feel about yourself.
The political version of this psychological condition is the fear of being in violation of establishment political correctness. By fostering fear of being politically incorrect, the society of control has invaded the freedom of the person to make their own decisions. As a result, feelings of ostracization from mainstream social life govern our relationship to society.
In 2020, a month before the presidential election, I spent a day with a friend as I was traveling across the country. My friend expressed a list of accusations about Donald Trump that I had heard before. He said them in the correct order presented through the mainstream media, almost as if it was a court indictment. I heard the same list from other people that I knew who did not know my friend.
I am apolitical. I have not been a member of a political party in thirty years. I see modern politics as a spectacle of the real because I am not constrained by partisan political positions. I did not join my friend in his Trump Hatred that afternoon. The result was a verbal attack on me where he told me that I was “insane and a danger to democracy.”
This is how The Spectacle of the Real works. We are fed content that we accept because it comes from a trusted source in the mainstream media. We internalize its truth as defining who we are.
Edward Bernays, an expert on propaganda, “described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways.”
Bernays, author of the book Propaganda, believed
“that "invisible" people who create knowledge and propaganda rule over the masses, with a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and citizen response. "Engineering consent" of the masses would be vital for the survival of democracy. …
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." “
No amount of rational presentation of my perspective could cause my friend to back down from his attack on me. At that moment, our relationship ended. I drove away and never spoke to him again. We were both victims of the propaganda of Trump Hatred.
This is how political propaganda operates in our world today. The Spectacle of Trump Hatred is a coordinated attempt to coerce obedience to the political narrative that Trump is evil, fascist, an enemy of democracy, and will take away all our human rights.
I know many people who believe this to be true. It is not my purpose to argue a case for Donald Trump. His political campaign operated in the same context yet without the support of establishment media.
I watch very little mainstream press, whether liberal or conservative because I don’t like being manipulated emotionally or intellectually. The most sophisticated lies are the partial truths wrapped in a false characterization.
When The Spectacle of the Real succeeds, it shows weakness and decline. The simulated reality, which is the spectacle, is not intended to mirror reality but to present an alternative reality. This is the core problem that we face in a culture of mass access to information and perspective. We never know the truth of any statement or presentation.
The Medium is a Vehicle of Change
Marshall McLuhan’s perspective that “the medium is the message” is relevant to what we saw take place in the US elections over the past several months. In a way, we are witnessing the passing of the torch from an old establishment culture to a new emerging one.
McLuhan writes in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
A new extension of human communication entered into the political campaign landscape during last months before the election. This medium is the long-form podcast.
Over the past decade, podcasts emerged as a new medium for communication. When I began my podcast, The Eddy Network, I knew what I wanted to do because I had been a guest on podcasts in the past. I was not interested in using the podcast form as a promotional vehicle. Rather, I wanted to use it as a medium for human conversation.
As my podcast developed, one guest described it as an unscripted conversation and another as an empty room. As I now realize, my simple choice to find people to talk with me was also a breach of the walls of the society of control. I do find it remarkable as I find our conversations not just interesting, but free and open.
The vehicle of the podcast conversation is a change in the medium of communication. Of course, mainstream media has been filled with interview shows for decades. However, a long-form podcast conversation is different from an interview. It is a genuine exchange between two people. Both contribute. Both ask questions. They both lead and follow the conversation at the same time.
Other than the failed assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pa, the emergence of Trump as a guest on podcasts with Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Shawn Ryan, and Patrick Bet-David changed the game of campaigning. The establishment media no longer could simply make an accusation. Here is the candidate sitting for two to three hours in an open exchange about the country, the campaign, and the candidate’s life.
The effect of this innovation in mass communication was to diminish the value of the short news report, the 10-second soundbite, and the hours of panel discussions with paid experts. The society of control is losing control of the communication medium of control.
The other point to make here is that long-form presentation, whether in conversation on a podcast or, like many of my essays here on Substack, is increasingly desired. I want you to know that I am still editing everything that I do. It is all my work, even my mistakes. The day is coming when I’ll need help. However, here you find thought that is not reactive, but responsive in a developed context of understanding.
What kind of change does the emergence of podcast conversations point us toward?
The Medium of Leadership
My observations above have two sources.
One is my experience in life.
Over the past ten years, I have visited 17 countries in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Many of these journeys, I have traveled alone. As a result, my interaction is largely with local people.
I find a remarkable set of similarities between world cultures. The most troubling similarity is the presence of the mechanism of a society of control throughout the world
The most hopeful similarity is what I discovered also in large organizations. I see a culture of shared values and purpose. I describe it as,
A persistent, residual culture of values that persists because it resides in the relationships of the people.
Listen to people talk about the elections in their communities and countries, and you hear them speak about how they want to be rid of the divisiveness and conflict. This is an indication to me that even where the society of control exists, that people want the freedom to live their lives and care for the people who matter to them.
The other source is my study and writing.
The overwhelming picture that I have is the Spectacle of the Real. In order to create the conditions for control, a simulacrum of confusion must be created. If you have watched The Matrix, you have an understanding of the difference between reality and a simulated one. In the case of this election, the mainstream messaging of both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris was intended to present an alternative picture of both.
My Two Global Forces perspective adds another dimension to what we understand as an election administered through a society of control.
From this perspective, the political and media establishment represented the Global network of institutions. The Trump/MAGA campaign represented the Local networks of people and their communities. The most basic of those networks are families.
From this perspective, the society of control is a function of a global network of institutions.
The changes that Gilles Deleuze described that led us from a disciplinary society to a society of control also happened as a parallel change was taking place.
The perspective presented by Edward Shils in the early 1960s called Center & Periphery described a society where the Center and its leadership represented the whole of society and its values. However, over the past 60 years, we have seen the Center abandon the value system shared with the Periphery in favor of a value system that primarily served their interests. The result has been a splintering of society into smaller tribal Peripheral Centers. The values of society remain alive and present in communities throughout the world. The Center, in its present state, corresponds to the Global network of institutions and the Periphery to Local communities in every country.
The last perspective that informs my understanding of what has transpired during this election season is the importance of our Networks of Relationships for providing us contact to the real world beyond the spectacles of control. My conversations through The Eddy Network Podcast have provided me insight and clarity for my thinking. It is an invaluable resource of thought and perspective.
Each of these concepts points toward
a growing decentralization of organizations,
a disintermediation of mass media,
a growing importance of local needs over global ones,
an increasing value of direct relationships in conversation over social media connections with check marks, and
the networking of networks focused on peripheral local interests.
All of these trends are products of change in how we communicate with one another. With communication, other changes will begin to emerge.
What is the next society to be like?
I don’t believe anyone knows.
All we have to go by is what we have experienced and what we observe each day.
What will the outcome of the Trump administration be like?
I don’t believe anyone can predict.
The forces of the society of control will not give up their power and privilege without a fight.
The challenge between two opposing forces of control will tend to cancel out each other’s worst proposals.
So be quick to listen,
slow to respond,
be not afraid, but be courageous in giving yourself in service to your community.
Remember that leadership is not a role or a title, but the impact of the lives that we live.
Seek to be a leader of impact in your local community
as you take personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.
For you are the medium of change for the future.
.
Enjoyed this Ed. BTW - the second paragraph of the second block quote beginning "Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure.." seems to have lost its ending...
Allow me to retort: https://tempo.substack.com/p/anti-diss-the-establishment-arianism