Ah, there is nothing quite like the confidence of an uninformed person. They are so easily seduced into believing in their righteous knowledge that no one can alter their confidence.
This is my reaction to reading posts, and even more, the comments of people left and right, about the conflict in Ukraine.
I know one person in Ukraine. He is a pastor and operates an orphanage near Donetsk. Here is Gennadiy Mokhnenko with his children. Three years ago he talked with me about living close to the border with Russia. He could see the military vehicles.
They are the victims of this conflict that no one wanted except world leaders. They could have avoided it if they are worthy of our trust. Now they want us to validate the righteousness of their purpose. These children, not my children or your children, will pay the price for our leaders playing war games.
To Comment is To Expose One’s Ignorance
The commentary about the conflict has nothing really to do with the war. It has to do with political influence. The commenter says to himself, “I need to be seen as an influencer. Maybe someone from one of the networks will see my brilliance and have me on for three minutes.” It is a game where no one wins.
It is really sad to see this. It has nothing to do with whether they are smart or well-educated. It has everything to do with taking a fragment of information, maybe not even information, but a piece of data, and blowing it up into a universal meme for complete, total, and universal understanding. They cannot see that they are being played. They cannot see that they are out of their depth. They cannot see that they are like parrots squawking words and opinions that are not theirs but ones planted in their minds. Pay close attention to the language. When media, politicians, and podcasts all use the exact same phrases, then you know they have been programmed.
The Spectacle of the Real
We live in an age of spectacles. Think about the past few months. We see the following events pass across our screens.
The spectacle of parents challenging school boards over Critical Race Theory.
The spectacle of mask-wearing and of the unvaccinated.
The spectacle of the Canadian truckers convoy protesting COVID mandates.
The spectacle of Justin Trudeau.
The spectacle of the potential of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The spectacle of the invasion.
And now the spectacle of Joe Biden as the defender of Western democracies against Vladimir Putin, dictator from the East over Ukraine the stage for this future defining conflict.
It is exhausting. Not because there is too much information to process. Rather, there is too little. You can know there is too little because nothing is clear. When it does become clear, then we know that we are getting closer to some real information.
There is way too much opinion. Opinion-making IS part of the spectacle. It feeds the spectacle.
Guy Debord in his The Society of the Spectacle writes,
“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is ostensibly the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.
The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.”
Nine years ago I wrote a post called The Spectacle of the Real that captured my sense of how we live in a world of serialized spectacles. There I wrote:
“Politics has degenerated into an unreal media-driven spectacle of dissimulation and simulation. What we are given is not a story about what is real because to do so, the experts and our politicians would have to admit to their own limitations of insight and foresight.
Rather, we are given a simulacrum, a virtual story whose narrative appearance conceals a different purpose, enveloping the listener, the viewer, in an alternative world of meaning. Politics is a game of deflected attention, a sleight of hand, an allusion to the real that is an illusion. Get the public to focus on what inflames their passions, isolating them into their defensive enclaves, then we can go about the real purpose for which we were elected, to secure the next election and pass legislation that the public would not approve if they really knew. This is what the modern practice of politics has become.
French theorist Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, describes how the portrayal of what is real has become the hyper-real.
To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn’t have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending. “Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms” (Littre’). Therefore, pretending or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the “true” and the “false,” the “real” and the “imaginary.” Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces “true” symptoms? (emphasis mine)
This is the game of appearances. In one instance, it is like the child pretending not to have the pilfered cookie that is in his pocket. Dissimulation is the lie that we learn as children where we hide what we have. It is a denial of reality, based on what everyone knows is true.
Simulation, on the other hand, is an imitation of the real. Some simulators, like those that train pilots, are meant to mirror the real world as closely as possible. Other simulations are intended for the exact opposite, to create an alternative reality.”
The difference between a decade ago and now is the intensification of the culture of simulated reality that is the basis for the spectacle. There seems to be so much more at stake in each spectacle. They become bigger, larger, more critical to the future of the human race. They demand our attention. If we decide that the spectacle is now boring, we’ll turn away from it to some sports event or celebrity marriage breakup as its replacement.
Seducing to Distract
We have been seduced. The images. The sounds. The authoritative expert pontificates with absolute certainty and self-righteousness about situations not even in his field of expertise. We move from one crisis to the next. Everything is BREAKING NEWS!!!!
We need to train ourselves to look for what is real and authentic. We don’t want the spectacle, but the spectacle wants us.
Its purpose is to hold our attention in order to convince us to join them in their crusade against whatever it is. In doing so, we don’t have time to think. We only have time to memorize the talking points to regurgitate them to everyone we meet.
It is an entirely negative process. It is not what you are for, but who you are against. Because to state what you are for requires that your life has meaning. The spectacle of negativity, expressed in attacks on people and organizations will ultimately come to destroy them.
This really is the triumph of mass marketing. We are marketed to be ourselves in our desires. But we can only become that by being like everyone else. Our minds and emotions are simultaneously in states of paralysis and turbulence. It isn’t healthy.
Guy Debord describes it this way.
“The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: ‘What appears is good; what is good appears.’ The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances … The first stage … brought about an evident degradation of being into having - human fulfillment was no longer equated with what one was, but with what one possessed. The present stage … is bringing about a general shift from having to appearing - all ‘having’ must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearance. At the same time all individual reality has become social, in the sense that it is shaped by social forces and is dependent on them. Individual reality is allowed to appear only insofar as it is not actually real. “
The Banality of Personal Opinion
The opinion that gets shared in comments and posts, videos from someone's car or back porch, has little effect. It is noise. Occasionally, a signal breaks through. We see an expert staying within his or her expertise. But generally, there is nothing of substance in most of what we view. Time to move on.
In an age of the spectacle, the point is not to know, but to appear as if we do know. It is a game of simulation.
If this is something that concerns you. If you see what I see and feel that most social media interaction is boring and misdirected, then there is something you can do about it. Just ask simple questions.
“How do you know this?
Who told you this?
Why does it matter?”
The Value of Direct Experience
One of those postmodern ideas that get paraded out at this moment says that nothing is real. No one knows anything. There is no meaning. Etc., etc., etc.
Of course, that person does not realize that they have undercut the whole basis for their position. They want you to believe that what they have to say is real, and true, and the only accurate and informed perspective there is. All others are shams.
Here’s what I know. Direct interaction with people and in situations provides a stronger basis for knowing something than our computer screens and our smartphone apps. It doesn’t mean that your cousin or neighbor is right. It doesn’t mean that you can’t find sound information online. It just means you have a better chance of verifying whether something is true or accurate. You, and you alone, have to be your own fact-checker. Don’t farm that out to anyone else.
There is a lot going on underneath the surface of these spectacles. If you just wait, observe, listen, and soon, it all becomes clear.
Last word. Remember that every time you write or say something publicly, you are either confirming or repudiating another person’s opinion of you. If you want to be trusted, measure your words well.