Politics in America

My introduction to science fiction was somewhere around 1946. As one might imagine, the exact date has been forgotten over the years. A Sunday radio program presented Robert Heinlein's story, "Universe". As best as can be remembered, it presented a story about a regimented race living on vague physical levels within an environment or society. People were restricted to their physical areas that were something the equivalent of living complexes separated by mysterious huge wall-like partitions making up chambers called levels. The top levels were forbidden to be entered for reason of there being something so frightening as to be dangerous to the society. It was rumored that the top level contained some sort of secret.

Two unaccountably dissatisfied men climbed the levels determined to end their ignorance and restrictions while being pursued by officials attempting to stop them. When they made their way to the top level they found themselves in a strange empty room with controls and windows. Looking out the windows, they could see stars and galaxies—the universe. It became clear that the society was traveling on a huge space ship and that the levels were compartments on the ship. Somehow, over generations of travel, the society had regressed into a type of complacent robot-like mentality in which acknowledgment of a larger universe would be a disturbing factor to the regimented introversion inside. The conclusion of the story that Sunday has remained with me for more than half a century. Upon further consideration, I realize one terrifying, possible truth in the story may have been that nobody was controlling, or nobody remained who knew the purpose and how to control, the ship.

I read science fiction on very, very rare occasions. I have no free time. I read extensively, but material of a different nature. Some science fiction, such as Brave New World and 1984, are among the most serious classic commentaries on political science and psychology that have ever been written. Science fiction writers occasionally ask very serious questions and make social critiques in story form. I am often relegated to seeing those works on the VCR.

One such work is the movie, The Matrix. The Matrix is about a future society where people live completely in virtual reality. Paradoxically, half the movie itself was made with computerized virtual reality. Much of it was shot with 35 mm still cameras. The images were computer scanned in minute detail, and computer programs extrapolated the images of the actors etc. into whatever form, speed, or plot the makers wanted. The movie does not look like a textureless computerized cartoon, but rather looks real.

The plot of the movie is a very complex story of the future. Somewhere during the 21st Century the human mentality was merged with a giant computer/machine complex for service to mankind. People were to live in the real world commanding the abilities of the computer/machine complex. But the resultant system took on human characteristics, and came to think like humans, with eventual independent thought and exclusive concern for its own growth and survival. It took over the human race instead of serving it. The computer/machine system found that the human body produced enough electricity and heat to generate power— so that millions of humans could be tapped as energy sources to run the computer/machine system and serve it.

To do this, human embryos are grown by the system. At some developmental point they have electrodes for transferring signals too and from the computer through cables inserted into their nervous systems, and the humans are installed in separate chambers where they live like plants in an altered state of synthetic consciousness in individual nutrient-filled glass tanks, and the energy to run the system is drawn off. When the humans in the chambers eventually die, robotic servicing units unplug their nervous systems, extract the humans from the tanks, then ran the bodies through recycling systems to recover their nutrient components for continuation servicing of the system.

In the story, permanent destruction of consciousness results in death of the human body. As a consequence, to keep the human bodies alive and docile, the computer system inputs a virtual reality into its human hosts through electronic interfaces in the back of their necks. The computer system then makes the immobilized humans believe they are living in 1999, which was the setting of the original human mentality model incorporated into the system. Through the computer, the humans in the separate tanks interact with each other as if they were living together in the real physical world of 1999. They carry on an interactive virtual reality life while actually being held unknowing prisoners in the tanks. However, somewhere around a thousand years has passed since the self-perpetuating virtual reality based system first ascended, and the real outside physical world that the humans believe they are living in has deteriorated into irrelevant ruins leaving little other than the computer/machine complex and the unknowing humans in the glass holding tanks. The entire system, and particularly the computer system synthesizing the coordinated interactive virtual reality the humans experience, is called The Matrix.

Death in virtual life means loss of consciousness and consequent death to the people in the tanks. Those few people who fail to conform in virtual life upload conflict or unwanted interactive disturbing ideas into the central controlling virtual life computer program. This threatens the complacency of the people in the tanks and threatens the system, and such people need to be eliminated. There are Matrix agents in virtual life to enforce compliance, and to chase and eliminate threats to the system.

Escape from the Matrix

Perhaps as an expression of the vestiges of independence or rebellion, the human mentality originally modeled into the Matrix occasionally generates small numbers of escapees from the Matrix who then live in the real physical world, but who are able to transfer themselves in and out of the virtual world using telephone lines and their own independent system of integrating their nervous systems into the Matrix. The story is about the small group of such people in real reality who are determined to extract the human race from control by the Matrix. The small group is pursued by the Matrix and its agents who are determined to destroy the group before it can expose the reality of the Matrix. One of the group turns out to be a traitor who is willing to betray the freedom movement to the agents in return for removal from the uncomfortable realities of the real physical world and re-installation into to the softness of virtual existence.

The initial leader of the resistance group is a man named Morpheus who is looking for "the one" who will have the mental power to confront and overpower the Matrix program. He finds someone, Neal, in Matrix virtual reality who is on the verge of being exterminated because of his troubling nonconformity. Neal is extracted from the Matrix by Morpheus and trained to confront the Matrix.

At first, Neal is confused over whether the new real physical reality he has been extracted into is real, or whether the virtual reality he has been living is real. He is asked if he has sensed there is something wrong with the virtual world. It is explained to him that you don't know what it is, but you feel it. Neal's answer is that he knew that he was sensing something vaguely wrong with the virtual world he had been living, which was why he was living in somewhat rebellious nonconformity.

Toward the end of the picture the dissenting group is on a stated course of telling the humans in the Matrix what they are not allowed to know. Apparently, the movie is the first one in an anticipated series that will document the success or failure of their efforts.

The entire plot is far too complex to describe in detail here. I strongly suggest you rent the movie. The movie makes a strong political statement the producers probably don't understand they are making. Subtle elements in the movies suggest to me that they are probably politically left of center and conceive of leftist rebellion as being parallel to the rebellion against the Matrix. In fact, while they have programmed each other to believe this romantic interpretation, and have been programmed by education and the media to believe this is true, it is exactly the opposite of reality.

The Fascist-Socialist Psychological Analog

In our present real world, the incipient Matrix equivalent is liberalism/socialism or industrial fascism. There is no real fully developed Matrix as yet, although the American psychological environment is becoming increasingly dominated by a distorted atmosphere that would have been considered science fiction 45 or 50 years ago. Americans to a great extent no longer interact with each other directly, but instead interact with each other indirectly through TV and other media—through which they develop a filtered artificial mutual experience, wherein each person separately reacts with a third party or presentation instead of directly and exclusively with the person next to him.

Intimacy has become similar reaction to the same TV channel, or mutual adoption of the values portrayed in the same magazines. Organizationally, what exists is the latest point of evolution in the mental coalition of people who believe a life of ease and irresponsibility at the expense of others can be formalized under an organized socialism with authority to distribute and impose that expense upon all. Within this society, each belongs to all, and independence by any threatens the singular subservient consciousness uniting the goal of a pacified and compliantly bland human race. Each belongs to all. All in turn belong to the social system. No one belong to himself.

In the old days, the intermediate and radical political left was a movement that was supposed to benefit the workers of the world. But, particularly since 1960, the left in America has become something entirely different—so much so that gruff old long-time labor leader George Meaney exploded at the 1972 Democratic convention: "The Democrats are concerned whether boys should marry boys and girls should marry girls while the economy of the country goes down the drain!" The perceptive George Meaney was correct. The direction and concerns of the Democratic party and the political left had changed into something he did not recognize or want.

The political left was being taken over by an involutional, self-preoccupied psychoanalytic implosion under which primary economic issues and issues of working people were becoming viewed as an archaic intrusional nuisance that could be exploited when advantageous to advance a far different agenda, but was actually receding in recognizable priority or concern. The voice of labor was displaced by an abrupt massive influx of strangely educated kids who had neither ever worked nor had intention of doing so, and also by the indirect presence of even stranger intellectuals. There was a new agenda, and labor was an uncomprehending obsolete expendable embarrassment. The new agenda was what Pat Buchanan was to call a cultural war in a 1992 speech before the Republican National Convention.

Matrix Subcultures

Within the present stage of historical condition there are several leftist subcultures:

There is a parasitic class including hedonists. Within this, there is an axis that believes it should be entitled to live for the moment without a sense of responsibility or seriousness—what is coming to be seen as a civil right to a life without realistic unpleasant consequences. This life is to be enabled by 1) a combination of rationalizations made up of "virtual thought" (whose acceptance is possible only in relation to an artificially distorted environment); and 2) the provision of guaranteed economic sustenance and survival (which is the supposed obligation of a nebulously defined social order). At the occupational and bureaucratic level is a class axis seeking a system inhabited by bland incompetence, where zestful creativity—because its disturbing contrast threatens to expose somnolescent mediocrity—is a systemic threat to be suppressed or made irrelevant to personal advancement.

Coordinate to this exists a large class of people who are looking for a place or system to hide in, or are looking for a place or system to hide in while they engage in irresponsible self-amusement. There is a type of escapism where people hide from life and responsibility by busying themselves in financially-supported positions promoting or administering social issues or supposed problems. People inhabiting this group create or perpetuate social issues, then exploit them to hide in positions created by those issues. The Peace Corps provides an escapist summer camp for the immature and directionless during the interim until they can find a soft spot of similar orientation and requirements elsewhere. University departments are filled with soft, politically—correct grants awarded and administered by bureaucrats in soft comfortable positions perpetuated by the awarding of those grants.

There is an unspoken, but instantly recognized, conspiratorial mutual evolution and protection of positions of genteel incompetence. Growth of the symbiotic enabling of subsidized positions of soft incompetence has become a major American industry, displacing and undermining the real economy of the country. It has become a disease approaching intractability because of the political power of the large numbers of people participating in it. On the social activist front, the forever grandstanding Jesse Jackson has not dirtied his hands with a lick of serious productive work in 35 years, and his kid is following in the trade. American politics has become a contest to determine who can best rationalize and feed the system.

There is an artistic alienated class. This is composed of a large group of perpetually angry spoiled artists, and people wishing they were intellectuals, who affect a constant attack upon society—both as an expression of diffuse unhappiness in their personal lives and because talentless destructive capacity is the only way they have of being important and bringing attention upon themselves.

Many of them are the cultural equivalent of having a rock inside your boot on a long walk. The rock may not have anything positive to contribute, but you will certainly know it's there, and it will be important. In this case the universities, the public broadcasting stations, the book stores, and the galleries are full of them. They have certified each other as intellectuals. They have become too socially and politically powerful to ignore.

There is a class of empty rebels. These are people filled with hate or resentment from various sources—ones who sublimate their anger into a constant destructive sadistic crusade. They are angry emotional porcupines who mew movements and causes into something to justify and channel their vindictiveness. They are nearly addicted to a pattern of compulsive opposition.

There is the narcissistic elite class. This is composed of two subclasses. The first subclass consists of the highly visible and powerful, beautiful people who flourish in the falseness, shallowness, and media of a superficial society. This incorporates everyone from the Kennedys, to performing newscasters, to various play actors and play actresses who bathe in power and adulation under the system. For many among the general population, this first subclass is the source of a vicarious life which people in the media-enthralled underclasses are somehow under the delusion they are living when they buy Cindy Crawford ear rings or Elizabeth Taylor perfume and fantasize to the pictures and articles in magazines.

The second subclass is that of leftist authoritarian intellectuals possessed by grandiose ambition to be the ultimate behind-the-scenes controllers and social architects by right of self-appraised superior mentality. They are the ones who see themselves as the clever super-elite background which is orchestrating the mind-engineering and manipulating the socialist matrix. The first subclass members (the beautiful people) believe they are members of the second supreme subclass (the intellectuals) when they echo the trickle-down fashionable ideas of the smirking second subclass. Within the second (intellectual) class, forces of academic arrogant self-worship—such as the late B. F. Skinner in his concept of a society "beyond freedom and dignity"—have become progressively intrigued with constructing a social order where the individual is little more than a marionette on strings, with information manipulation and psychological conditioning being the strings. And, of course, they also envision people such as themselves designing and pulling the strings with the strategic manipulative brilliance of distant master chess players positioning unknowing pawns, knights, bishops, and castles through the force of their ideas.

No Grand Design—Just Pathological Evolution

Certainly, there was a serious leftist strategy in America in the 30s, the 20s, and before. But, from the historical view of the period since 1950, much of the development of the American liberal/socialist matrix is not of a grand design, but rather of a too-tolerated evolution of pathology and softness, and evolution of the antitherapy of pathological protectionism enabled by a foppish culture in which there is an expanding too-soft environment that does not confront and correct such development. By the "antitherapy of pathological protectionism" is meant that increasing numbers of people have become inhabited by various forms of mental disorder and soft perversity, often as a relief or cure for personal boredom or as a substitute for mature personal development, and such people devise rationalizations protective of their condition. This has been expanded into a mutual defense of the implicit form: "You protect my pathology and softness, and I'll protect yours so that we can both remain safe from pleas for maturity or responsibility forever." Criticism of psychopathology in any form and directed toward any specific form of pathology is regarded as a potential threat that may be applied to any other pathological forms, and is to be extinguished through group effort. The protection of pathology also serves the purpose of being a sadistic attack upon society.

Essentially, beneath noble-sounding demands to mitigate all forms of unpleasant consequences in the name of compassion, liberalism/socialism has become the explosive proliferation of all forms of original sin, dishonesty, and degeneracy, resulting in the production of unpleasant consequences to be compassionately mitigated by the system. Thus, what is exponentially evolving is a corrupt social system which feeds back upon, and augments, itself. This occurs when those who are victims of people as irresponsibly calloused as themselves, or who are willing victims of themselves (through what has become a militant demand to participate in liberated, but ultimately destructive personal amusements and excesses), point to their condition of described victimhood, and demand more compassion while accelerating the protected and subsidized behavior creating their condition.

Like the Matrix in the movie, the resultant system has taken on independent thought and concern for its own growth and survival. It has developed its own supportive scholastic system. It has developed its own system of socially-reinforcing positive feedback conditioning together with fear of questioning its own existence. It has created millions who have become dependent upon it in one way or another for easy economic existence. It has created millions of people who are dependent upon it to create and maintain their condition of psychological denial and perpetuation of their soft condition. It has created millions who enjoy the irresponsible immediate pleasure that generates the consequences and conditions underwriting constant calls for enabling constant compassionate remedy. Warped systems produce warped mentalities that perpetuate the system that produced them.

The system has attracted unquestioning, committed, narcissistic elitist human minds at the top, establishing a system living independently of any purpose other than perpetuation of power accumulation and feelings of grandiosity. Instead of serving mankind, liberalism/socialism serves the pathology of mankind in addition to perpetuating itself independently and also serving the lust for power and narcissism in its leadership.

There are parallels to the old Soviet Union. The Soviet communist system existed only for its on continuation, while the people under that system existed for no other purpose except to serve it even if those people were miserable. Until Gorbachev, nobody was allowed to question why the system should continue or whether there was anything wrong with it. The Soviet system was decorated with almost orgasmic idealistic slogans/images that were perverted in application by the eternal human weaknesses and motivations that the rhetoric of idealism was designed to obscure. Individuality and individual life had no justifiable value, and was disposable if it did not conform to the system. Continuation of a political state described in the rhetoric of idealized purpose that never came true was all that mattered.

Enslavement Through Social Idealism

The rhetoric of idealized social purpose is the first step in immobilizing people for their enslavement. Authoritarian social idealism and idealistic rhetoric are the virtual reality concealing real world corruption, real world grasp for power, real world enablement of degeneracy, real world absolute constant scrutinized conformity, and real world enslavement. Bend a person's conscience with virtual-world idealistic rhetoric, then direct his bent conscience to blind him to reality. Rhetorically redefine objection to enslavement as objection to idealism, then impose enslavement and corruption as a moral virtue that is not to be contested. As in The Matrix—where the real outside physical world other than the computer/machine had deteriorated into irrelevant ruins—beneath the socially idealistic rhetoric of virtual reality and virtual thought, human life has become more regimented and subject to outside review for absolute compliance, while real reality is sacrificed or deteriorates.

With development of mass individual consciousness oriented toward a media that is inhabited and controlled by the effete artistically alienated and narcissistic elite, what has evolved is a media-centered and directed virtual reality with virtual thought, virtual logic, and virtually portrayed emotions. The virtual thought is superficial, prematurely terminated at arbitrary doctrinal convenience, and without serious content. The virtual logic is disconnected from continuity within itself and disconnected from real reality. The virtual emotionality modeled in magazines and sitcoms is not suitable for serious healthy real human life.Cosmopolitan and Playboy portray a virtual reality supported by virtual thought and virtual emotions that people in real reality cannot conform to, or survive attempts at conforming to.

Virtual reality news programs create virtual issues such as gun control, when in real reality most violence is not committed with firearms and the only consequence of gun control would be to leave victims defenseless and promote uninhibited increase in violent crime. Virtual persecution is the contorted interpretation employing virtual thought and virtual logic used by a contemptuous, immature, and corrupt American president— who cannot be trusted to be left alone in the Oval Office with a high school girl without tearing her clothes off. He argues he is unjustly the victim—and is supported in this by de facto approval inherent in silent absence of challenge from the media. Virtual thought, virtual issues, virtual emotions exist in simulation in an artificial world.

The Oozing of Fop

Certainly what would have once been considered the mentally deficient or borderline psychotic babbling of an Eleanor Clift on TV as a political and social commentator did not arise out of a initial grand design by brilliant background mentalities seeking world manipulation. It is merely the logical outcome of an exponentially expanding fop subculture that believes such things are cute, and that affects such thought as a demonstration of refined cleverness and membership in the fashionably foppishly sophisticated class. Like remoteness from participatory competence in sustained serious physical labor, foppish mental incompetence has become the mark of social class superiority. Hard logic and reality are viewed as intolerable intrusion by disturbing vulgarity and coarseness into a world of polished immaturity and self-delusion that wishes to be protected.

Effete mental incompetence has become the ultimate display of snobbish identification with a type of liberally-educated superior-class consciousness.

Just as importantly, the sadistic distortion in such babbling appeals to the remnants of atavistic repressed sadism in many of us.

The virtual realities of Playboy and Cosmopolitan magazines presented as unquestionably adopted national philosophy did not arise out of deliberative political design. They expanded and exploited weakness and deteriorating personal integrity in the American population. Deterioration of the educational system arose to great extent out of demand for remoteness from the uncomfortable realities of the real physical world, and for inhabitation in the ease and softness of a virtual existence without responsibility that validated and protected a soft, foppish rarefied life upon those at universities who engineer it and those who graduate from it.

The protection of such a condition requires total compromise and censorship for its continuance and in order to eliminate threat to its immaturity. Somewhere I read that when Judge Bork was being considered for appointment to a law school, it was considered that his added presence as the second conservative in a liberal 41-member department would unbalance protection of the precariously-defended psychosis and immaturity dominating the thought at the school. Such appointment would therefore constitute a serious disturbance and danger. The virtual reality of (today's) liberalism requires unchallenged protection by debilitated analytical skills within students or teachers, and also requires questioning that can be dismissed on the basis of quality or quantity—and that preferably can be made nonexistent if the empty formality of representation of any other serious views can be circumvented. In short, dissenting voices, whether in education or in the media, should be few in number and, better yet, those few that are allowed should be chosen in such a way as to present as much of an incompetent, ludicrous, and easily-overcome image of the opposition as is possible.

In the beginning, the idea of an absolutely controlled society built upon communication channeling, information restriction, coercion, and virtual reality manipulation was neither a technological possibility nor a sociopolitical possibility given the independence, integrity, and personal strengths within the American population. Hence, such societies existed primarily in the minds of science fiction writers or in the warped mental machinations of isolated festering theoreticians. But the form and utilizable tools of such a pathological social order have now evolved through human weakness and corruption, with the weak and corrupt demanding recognition as being virtuous, while simultaneously demanding protection of their pathology. The evolved pathological structure is demanding forced universal imposition of conformity to its agenda. The most pertinent empirically functioning elements inducing compliant pathological social conditions are now in place, observable, and subject to encouragement or purposeful adjustment. Upon seeing the results of restrictions and social manipulation under pathological evolution, there are those becoming intrigued with behind-the-scenes, organized institutionalized total manipulation by a self-appointed master class.

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from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 4, No 6, February 7, 2000