The Blog

2020-

2020-12-20 d
WITH EYES WIDE SHUT
"The true goal, rather unfortunately, is to instead insulate our failing elite in a hermetically sealed bubble, where only those who hold unthreatening, regime-affirming ideas are ever allowed to set foot."
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"Western elites, however, are mostly concerned with preventing any sort of ”wrongthink” from having any space in the public square. In the West, the point of “censorship” revolves around insulating the elites from the opinions and complaints of the growing mass of plebs, rendering them “untouchable” by such vulgar, heterodox deplorables. This is, in fact, an extraordinarily dangerous development."

Our Coddled Elites and All the Pain They Can’t Feel

Censorship of speech on social media masks the pain signals that many elites could rely on to understand the social conditions of the “Other America” they no longer wish to see.

Few developments in recent memory have had more of an impact on the conservative faith in the virtues of the market than the outsized role social media companies have come to play in our lives. At one point long ago, in a very different America, social media was a “problem” insofar as it was clearly seen as a sort of dopamine rat maze marketed to impressionable children and feckless young adults.

Academics like Jonathan Haidt talked about the negative effects, such as a rapid spike in suicide attempts among girls that seems to have coincided with the public launch of Facebook. Meanwhile, the hegemonic libertarian orthodoxy of the Right offered a shrug in response: “Hey, it’s a free market, so if you don’t like it, log off and don’t use it!”

But those were the good old days of the 2000s and early 2010s, the heyday of a Bush and Obama-led neoliberal consensus. Back then, radical identitarian ideology, at least in the imaginations of many on the Right, was seen as a passing fad, a phase for “extremely online kids” and “liberal arts majors” who certainly would all grow out of it once they got “a real job.”

But as it happened, the companies and the workplaces bent to the whims of these extremely online liberal arts majors, while the ideologies of the Left held firm. And thus the role of social media companies went from merely exhausting the dopamine receptors and spiking anxieties among young folks to becoming fully-fledged political actors in their own right, using their power and their platforms in order to ”guide” political discussion.

It’s Not Just the Censorship

According to many Americans—the aforementioned “kids” prominently among them and leading the charge—it’s well and good that companies like Facebook and Twitter take steps to curb the spread of “misinformation” among the American populace. Without such steps, the alternative surely would be ever-increasing chaos, racism, and the oh-so-vaguely defined “fascism.” As a result of these speech restrictions imposed on private platforms, other Americans now perceive social media companies and the mainstream media, which is heavily dependent on social media for clicks, to be working in concert to stifle conservative points of view.

At first blush, this second view, that what we see in America and the West today constitutes a form of censorship of conservative viewpoints, as undertaken and financed by an ascendant liberal elite, has a lot to recommend it. How else, one wonders, might we explain the blatant double standards and conspicuous thumbs being placed on various political scales during the run-up to the 2020 “dump Trump” election?

Recently, YouTube announced that because the so-called safe harbor date had been passed with the state certification of the 2020 presidential election, the company would start deleting videos claiming the election was stolen. No such similar rule ever cropped up in 2016; indeed, one can still find videos on the platform today claiming that the Russians stole or bought the election for Donald Trump. And that is, of course, just one example among dozens or hundreds. Where were the ”independent fact checkers” during Russiagate, save when they were being castigated on social media as “contrarians”?

Even so, it is important for conservatives today to realize one basic truth. Convincing as this story may be, what we see in the West today is not a project aimed at censoring conservative ideas. To say that is not to deny that censorship goes on—in fact, it goes on every day, and it is getting worse with each successful intra-workplace crusade to bar ostensibly offensive thoughts from public view—but to underline that the problem is actually much worse than censorship.

Conservatives who remain too focused on the algorithms suppressing their own news articles or adding warning labels to their tweets risk missing a far more destructive process playing out before their eyes, with much more dire implications for the future of the American Republic.

... Our Suicidal Betters

And it is this that finally brings into sharper relief the true shape of Western media censorship, and its truly bleak implications for the future of America. If the goal was merely to prevent conservatives from spreading the idea that the election was stolen, then our current censorship regime has failed spectacularly. But that is not the goal, and the censors have not failed.

The true goal, rather unfortunately, is to instead insulate our failing elite in a hermetically sealed bubble, where only those who hold unthreatening, regime-affirming ideas are ever allowed to set foot. Unlike Metternich, whose spies opened people’s mail and then forwarded the most salient complaints to the relevant ministries, our elites do not care about what is written by “the deplorables,” as long as nobody in power actually has to listen to them! If “do not threaten the stability of our (somewhat) functional society” is the motto of totalitarianism, then “shut up and just go away” functions as the motto of our new Western elite.

This is a perilous climax we Westerners are careening towards. To repeat, totally censoring the spread of ideas among ”the deplorables” is probably impossible, but totally censoring the ideas that come into the hallowed circles of our elites is an increasingly achievable goal. One only has to look around at our media landscape to see how successful our elites have already become at this game.

An elite class insulated from the signals coming from the rest of the society is as dangerous as an athlete who can no longer feel pain: because pain signals are the body’s way of telling us that we should stop doing something before we hurt or kill ourselves. Athletes who cannot feel pain usually cannot prevent rapidly hurting or killing themselves, often in fairly gruesome ways. Elites who have stopped listening to the pain signals from the body politic not only risk hurting or killing themselves in similarly gruesome ways, but they also threaten the very societies they supposedly rule over, and the countless lives of the human subjects they are committed to neglecting.

... Let us end this on a final, sad example of the success of this decidedly non-totalitarian censorship. The COVID-19 crisis and the haphazard, random, and arbitrary lockdown policies are currently devastating America, with economic and social fallout playing to the tune of another Great Depression. But unlike that older crisis, today’s pain is not evenly shared: the plebs running the small businesses or waiting the tables are utterly devastated, while the professional classes sit smugly behind their screens, ordering food via apps staffed by precarious contractors and shopping via Amazon, where contingent workers pack and ship their glittering prizes. And yet, one could be forgiven for thinking we basically do not have an economic crisis at all, so complete is the silence coming from our chattering classes regarding the fate of middle America.

Does anyone think this is somehow a coincidence? A flaw in the system? An unfortunate oversight, soon to be corrected? No. Here, too, the censorship does the job it was always designed to do.

Conservatives today think they are right to be worried about censorship. And they are very right to be worried. But they are not worried enough about these increasing pain signals failing to register, and what that systemic failure augurs for the future. On the campaign trail in 1992, Bill Clinton famously reassured a heckler that he could “feel his pain.” But 1992 was several lifetimes ago, and heckling should now be the least of the concerns facing a socially distanced elite that no longer wants to feel anyone’s pain, indeed no longer desires to feel anything uncomfortable at all. Today one hardly needs to be a Julio-Claudian to fiddle while America slowly burns. (read more)

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