Belmont Club: Waking Up

Totalitarianisms work by mass denial. Although living conditions can actually be bad, the public can be brainwashed through hypnotic sloganeering into willing reality away. The result is a kind of mass dishonesty called "preference falsification." But it is fragile. The danger for the hypnotist is if the public snaps out of it. Once the subject wakes up the problem for the hypnotist becomes reality itself. We all know the movie dialogue:

"Say, where am I?"

"Relax. Just look into my eyes. You are sleepy. Sleepy."

"I asked you where am I? Where. Am. I?"

Of course if the public really wakes up in a nice place it soon goes back to sleep reassured that all is well. But if it wakes up in a place where all the furniture is painted cardboard surrounded by strange, depraved, leering faces, the public's anxiety soon increases. That awakening from illusion was what happened to Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu in December, 1989. One moment he was king of the world, issuing orders, making threats. The next he was running for his life after the Romanian public realized how little he truly was. Something like this happened on a smaller scale after the Trump-Biden debate of June, 2024. Once suggested by Nancy Pelosi as a candidate figure for Mount Rushmore, the incumbent's campaign collapsed when the public realized the aged president was senile. NBC opinion writers lamented:

President Joe Biden was supposed to put the nation’s mind at ease over his physical and mental capacity with his debate showing Thursday night. But from the onset of the debate, Biden, 81, seemingly struggled even to talk, mostly summoning a weak, raspy voice. In the opening minutes, he repeatedly tripped over his words, misspoke and lost his train of thought.

In weeks Biden was gone and Kamala Harris ran in his place. A new story took the place of the old one. But pollsters are still worried that their 2024 elections surveys were being thrown off by preference falsification. Respondents may not be picking up the phone or answering questions honestly, giving inaccurate results. "Pollsters say they are employing a range of methodologies to ensure that they are not underestimating Donald Trump amid survey after survey that shows a dead heat in various swing states." How solid was the new narrative?

The pollsters worry about preference cascades only if there is a significant chance the dream may collapse if a candidate's ill-chosen act or word causes the public to wake up again. Recently Chris Rufo accused Kamala Harris of being a plagiarist. But the public really doesn't expect politicians to be original. The NYT says Kamala had a ghostwriter. "Ms. Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, wrote the book with another author when she was the district attorney in San Francisco." This is par for the course. Modern politicians are brands. There is an entire campaign apparatus devoted to "projecting" an image, life story, identity etc. onto the public consciousness. They have teleprompters, earpieces, and, all else failing, post-interview editing. As someone said, "Politics is Hollywood for ugly people." 

They are dreams who handlers hope will stay in character. But if we return to reality, politicians become just products the public is entitled to judge by their performance, like competing brands of cooking oil or soap. Which product gave the better income, international security and lower crime last time? Which of the "new improved" offerings is likely better? We descend to a workaday place where things are ordinary. Reality is a dangerous place where people must compare actualities instead of illusions.

Perhaps the most subversive political movie of the 2010s was Christopher Nolan's "Inception." It is ostensibly about dreams, but the purpose of manipulating dreams is to bend time, which subjectively passes differently for those dreaming at different levels. Political illusion is like that also. It's about bending time to seize power, which is very real. In politics the great moments seem always just around the corner, a vote away, instead of being decades of hard work distant.

The dreamers expectantly round the bend and see all the promised beautiful buidings glimmer for a mere instant before they collapse into the sea. The point of progressive politics is to ensure that reality never arrives at embarassing moments, or better yet, never arrives at all. It's always just over the next hill. “You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can't know for sure. Yet it doesn't matter..."

Until you wake up.