Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What ordinary people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. —C. Wright Mills
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” —O’Brien, from George Orwell’s Nineteenth Eighty-Four
“It is my contention that however imposing their power, and however acquiescent may seem the power over whom they exercise it, the eyes of the ruling classes reflect no surety and confident, but apprehension and anxiety. What is it that they see? What is it that they recognize. What is it that they know?” —Isaac Deutscher
Media outlets and political elites have told you to be careful with social media—and to be wary of those who consume a lot of it—because it can send you down a rabbit hole. The algorithms, they warn, put you in touch with the realm of extremism; if you’re not careful, you’ll be “radicalized” by the experience (elites have endeavored to make extremism and radicalism synonyms).
As the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) warned just last month, “An individual’s online interactions with others may increase their risk of exposure to hateful or potentially radicalizing content.” The NIJ cite research (a NIJ report by Costello et al.) that “shows that individuals (especially youths) who spend more time online and use certain websites (e.g., YouTube) may face an increased likelihood of being exposed to or engaging with hateful or potentially radicalizing content.” (Note: the document I am referencing uses the construction “ideological crimes.”)
This is propagandistic framing designed to misrepresent the effect of social media access to the world of individuals motivated to share their experiences in a way that, before social media, would have been entirely localized. Truth is concrete, and the monopoly over control of information by legacy media has allowed for the manufacture of one-sided abstractions about the world, often depictions of “reality” for which there are no empirical referents. Without access to the recorded experiences of others that contradict the media narrative, one cannot confirm his suspicions about the world, and is left to wonder whether his grasp of reality is sound.
It’s the sharing of recorded experience and the confirmation of one’s suspicions that the corporate state characterizes as the production of “online extremism.” The use of the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” is designed to characterize the sharing of consciousness-raising information as an illegitimate (and even criminal). The individual receiving online confirmation of his experiences has been “radicalized” in order to discredit the production of mutual knowledge—for with the production of mutual knowledge comes the potential for collective action.
The ruling class has an advantage; they are in a position to access and generate the wealth of information that forms the hegemonic narrative—control over the means of intellectual production presupposing the power to form prevailing narratives—and therefore they are also in a position to see the world more comprehensively. (This is true for at least the Inner Party members. Those in the Outer Party are among the most deeply indoctrinated people in the system). In contrast, until recently, the proletariat has been largely isolated from the world beyond the worker’s immediate milieu. But social media gives the working man access to the experiences of others whose common experience doesn’t merely affirm his own in words, but in the hard evidence of audiography, photography, and videography.
To be sure, the value of popular access to hard evidence is rapidly becoming upended by the sophistication and scope of simulation; but, for now, the proletariat is able not only to document his experience, but to share the documents he records with those who do not live in his immediate milieu yet share with him his circumstance. Put simply, for now, at least, the experiences people share on social media let others see that what’s happening to them is also happening to others. Their fear that the knock at their door is a man or men who would rob them at point of a gun or knife is confirmed by the access to a body of security camera video that social media makes possible. The alleged prejudice that finds black men overrepresented among those who would be at their door for this reason is refuted by facts they can now see with their lying eyes. (These are the reasons gun sales are skyrocketing.) The world has now moved from doubting stereotypes to grasping the truth that what is dismissed as such is sound generalizations, a warning signal emanating from repeated instantiation.
Perhaps America’s greatest sociologist, C. Wright Mills, a self-described “plain Marxist” (translation: left-libertarian), is renowned for his concept of the “sociological imagination,” which he introduced to the world in 1959. “The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals,” he writes. “It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.”
At the heart of Mills’ idea is the radical act of bridging the gap between one’s biography and the historical circumstance and structural forces that shape his biography. This approach encourages individuals to develop the critical capacity to connect their personal challenges to wider societal problems, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the social forces at play.
Power and social structure were central themes in Mills’ work (see his 1951 White Collar and 1956 The Power Elite, as well as his 1953 Character and Social Structure, coauthored with Hans Gerth). His analyses considers the distribution of power in society and how it shapes social interaction. Mills argues that sociologists should be attuned to power dynamics, and encourages them to investigate how power influences individuals and institutions alike.
In the Power Elite, he presents a thesis that challenges the comfortable and ideological notions of democracy in the United States, arguing that power is concentrated in the hands of a small, interconnected group of individuals who occupy key positions in the economic, political, and military apparatuses. This power elite, according to Mills, operates as a cohesive network, sharing common interests and influencing major societal decisions. His thesis emphasizes the interplay between corporate leaders, high-ranking politicians (the administrative state), and influential military figures (the military-industrial complex), forming a powerful network that shapes national policies. Mills is critical of the idea that formal democratic processes, such as elections, genuinely empower the masses, asserting that the power elite’s influence extends beyond formal democratic processes—and in many ways supplants them.
Mills’ thesis on the power elite offers a critical perspective on the distribution of power in society, challenging assumptions about the democratic nature of decision-making processes and highlighting the concentration of influence among a select few. Crucially, then, the methodology of the sociological imagination involves not only understanding the intricate interplay between an individual’s biography and historical and social structures, but also emphasizes the necessity of grasping the system of power those structures generate that, in turn, perpetuates those structures. By examining these intersections, one might unravel how personal lives are intricately woven into the fabric of broader societal forces and shaped by power cultural, economic, and political forces.
Social media makes the sociological imagination easy to cultivate. When a man understands the actual nature of the problem, and understands further that the solution to the problem is going to take collective action, then you can see that the real threat facing the powerful is mutual knowledge. It’s becoming aware that crime is not some abstraction out there, but that crime is in his neighborhood is just like the crime in my neighborhood. He can see who is responsible for perpetrating crime in his neighborhood. He can understand that it’s not just his experience, but that people everywhere are experiencing what he is experiencing. He sees patterns. And rather than being accused of stereotyping because he judges individuals based on an idea he may have about them, he begins to build valid generalizations from the patterns (humans are pattern recognition machines).
Social media is not legacy media pointing the camera at something they want you to see and leaving out everything they don’t want you to see. Social media is your fellow citizens, your brothers and sisters, your comrades, pointing out the reality of their experiences. When you see that you share those experiences, this can be an incredibly empowering experience.
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It is a very old trick to hypostatize an aggressive and proselytizing ideology by taking action against imaginary injustices and manufactured threats. The Inquisition made real demons and witches by organizing the campaign against them. Where’s there’s smoke there’s fire, the peasants figured, and so cowards in fear or turned on their neighbors. This is what DEI is all about. Setting off smoke alarms when there’s no real fire. It’s the New Inquisition, designed to ferret out the demons and witches (the “racists,” “transphobes,” “xenophobes,” etc.) and entrench the Church of Woke.
Some might think that DEI is on the run. But we see the establishment of Cornell University’s Center for Racial Justice and Equitable Futures, committed to enforcing DEI across the faculty, administration and student body, that some folks are prepared to lean into discriminatory practice. The center at Cornell is designed to be “a permanent, institutionally-supported unit” to tackle “the anti-Black racism” that is “raging” at Cornell, in America, and across the world. I am here closely paraphrasing an article by Christopher Bedford published by Fox News.
“Far from looking toward the future, as the name suggests,” Bedford writes, “the center is geared toward cartoonish interpretations of the past, rooting out the ‘ongoing effects of a settler colonialism underwritten by principles of white supremacy.’” Bedford continues: “Some proposed initiatives include pushing ideological allies into positions ‘in all academic units and decision-making bodies,’ money for DEI grants, required DEI classes, and programs for Ivy League students DEI deems marginalized (based on their skin color, not their income or actual life stories).”
The New Inquisition means to crush the resistance to it. I’m already known as a heretic for speaking out against the illiberal character and totalitarian ambition of DEI. While I have reached that age where it’s hard to scare me (in my sixties, I have no more fucks to give, as they say), there are many younger administrators, staff, and teachers who are terrified to speak up for fear of being branded a witch and forced to undergo the struggle sessions, get passed over for promotion, and perhaps even be fired for speaking truth to power. But the struggle sessions and the less competent promoted before you will happen whether you object or not (depending of course on your tribal affiliations). To be sure, termination is a scary proposition, but I figure that if the elders speak up, maybe it will encourage the juniors to fight back, even if it’s in a subversive manner.
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If the Supreme Court does the right thing, and reverses its 1984 opinion in Chevron USA v National Resources Defense Council, and if Trump can win reelection and implement the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, the nation may be set upon a path towards reclaiming the American Republic from the corporate state and the bureaucratic machinery that is crushing us beneath its gears. It is vitally important for us, as citizens of this republic, to be plugged into the debate, as deconstructing the administrative states is, alongside ending and unwinding transnationalization (of which globalization and mass immigration are major components), the most important task facing our constitutional democracy.
Decades ago, the state was captured by corporate power, which, mainly through the work of Democratic Party operatives, has used the administrative apparatus to dismantle or otherwise render ineffective democratic institutions. This power elite has turned the apparatus of government against its own citizens, systematically disempowering them. DEI and all the rest of it flow from these arrangements. The progressives have won the long march through the institutions and imposed an ideology on the public that is antithetical to the foundation of American republicanism. That foundation? Autonomy, liberty, and privacy. Progressives now enjoy the institutional power to command our children to believe in their warped ideology. They have turned the youth against the elders—just as Mao did during the Cultural Revolution.
It is no exaggeration to say that we are in the last stages of the managed decline of the republic and on the threshold of its replacement with a form of neo-feudalism, in which our children and grandchildren will become serfs managed on high-tech estates. The European continent is facing the same end. We are facing a totalitarian situation, and the Court is the only institution that can rectify the situation. Now you understand why Democrats strive every election to spread moral panic about the composition of the Court. Now you see why they’re trying to discredit the Supremes. Now you know why the corruption of court packing is routinely floated by progressives. Now you see why Roe was never codified into law—because Democrats needed the threat of its overturning to draw millions of dollars into their coffers and bring to the polls the powerless and the terrified.
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Update (Wednesday, January 17, 2024): The text below is from my Facebook page. Because my Facebook profile is not public, I will share the X (Twitter) thread about this video clip in place of the Facebook thread. But I wanted readers to read my Facebook post.
I saw this clip and Twitter and shared it on Facebook a while ago, but Facebook makes it difficult to see what Twitter content is being shared, so I appreciate it that this has now shown up on Facebook. Watch this. Take it in. Share it.
The man is Graham Linehan. He was canceled by trans activists who didn’t like his truth-based approach to the current debate regarding sex/gender matters. He has lost a fuck-ton of money standing with a handful of others in the desert of the real. Linehan is a very courageous individual.
What Linehan presents to the fellows on Triggernometry (which you should definitely check out) is proof of the importance of mutual knowledge. Ever wonder how an elite that does not share your interests and values came to rule over you? Because you don’t know who the werewolves are. But the werewolves know about you, and they use that knowledge to prey on you. And you know about you. I wrote about this recently on my blog [the one you have just been reading].
It is vitally important for you to work from a comprehensive reality-based theory about the world so you can identify and begin to specify the structure of power over you—then socialize that understanding with others so you can begin to build a platform for collective action.
Be like Linehan. Unless and until we work from a common understanding of the world, we will continue to be like the players of a game who hold a card that tells them who they are but are not allowed to know who anybody else is. The trick is to keep you in the dark.
freedom and reason 