One thing I have noticed - among my liberal, upper-middle class friends (doctors, lawyers etc) - is the complete inability to understand or perceive unofficial systems of power or cooperation. In their view, for a system to be recognised as working toward a common goal, there has to have a concrete and contractual link between all parties. I dont know if this is willfull ignorance or just naivety, but it increasingly comes across as child like.
In their view, suggesting anything else is OBVIOUSLY a nazi-adjacent conspiracy.
Your friends can't see the connections because they're too embedded in the web of those connections. To your friends, their views accurately describe the world, and the fact that those views are shared by everyone else they know and by the dominant ruling class of their society only reinforces this delusion. "My views are obviously normal since all the smartest people in the room agree with me, and only the kooks don't."
To be fair, the kooks feel the same way, and look at people like your friends as nutters for not realizing how deluded they are.
that's funny, since I read yours and thought it was pretty preceptive. :-) The elite's focus on woke racial & sexual oppression serves primarily to prevent cross-racial class solidarity, which would actually threaten elite power.
The reason I decided your analysis was better than mine is because mine was rooted in cynicism, and as a matter of practical day-to-day motivation, I think you’re more positive read is what carries it forth. They are all together enjoying themselves, and extremely chuffed that they are great people doing great things.. I think that’s the real impetus forward.
Credentialism is their advantage, proves their superiority, gets them good jobs and outsider power invalidates all of that. They have concrete evidence: power without credentials begets atrocities like orange man and still worse is the empowerment of deplorables who pursue their own interests contrary to the consensus’s messianic right ordering of things. It’s the Bigotry of superior knowledge: gnosticism . It’s the burden of knowing the truth but having the benighted and ignorant masses block one’s efforts. How couldn’t you hate them, them that impede?
It is “the political gnosticism of the liberal imperium “ as per Patrick Deneen.
Thank you for articulating how this system works and providing the background to support. It seems very much like the church/heretic system of centuries past. The church didn't have (in most cases) explicit authority over people, but owned the party/cultural space and had the power to set the agenda. The difference now is that we have technology to expand this party seamlessly across the world. Pretty soon the AI algorithms will have control of all social media space, and will weed out any heretical views. There's a reason why 1984 had a uniquely depressing ending.
Eli, I share your judgment, technology leads us wither we not know, but unquestionably this reordering is going to continue and proliferate globally. Fasten your seatbelts..
One of your funniest / most depressing essays ever. Good job. Here's a further (potentially) depressing question: are Party-states an inevitable consequence of modern information technology?
Our human desire to form united coalitions, ie tribes, is as foundational an instinct as our desire for sex or food. Strength in numbers and all that. Is it possible that modern Parties, having evolved from smoke signals and letters, to radio, then TV, then e-mails, then TikTok videos, have hijacked this instinct?
I worry so. The response to the recent pseudo-pandemic illustrated this amazingly. During which, among other hysterical measures, the Biden administration, through OSHA, tried to threaten millions of Americans with unemployment for not taking a highly experimental medication designed for a pathogen which many had already recovered from. "Everyone must get vaxxed!" was the Party line, and Party members duly derided and de-platformed skeptics of it (including a Harvard epidemiologist). It was an outbreak of collective insanity which I'm still trying to wrap my mind around---if only because I have loved ones still engulfed in the Party-induced psychotic dream of controlling respiratory viruses. They give me blank stares when I try to explain how masking is an Oriental superstition which came about during the Manchurian plague of 1910.
It's clear that people get off on safely belonging within "the moral majority (I don't---maybe my brain is broken, or I'm descended from Scottish highlanders or something, who knows?). So the real question is how to restore and maintain a functional plurality of viewpoints. Because one thing is clear: Party members are not interested in doing so.
is that really true? Masking being an Oriental supersition and the Manchurian plague of 1910? My initial reaction was that you’re taking the mickey and I enjoyed a hearty laugh, but then, I started thinking, are you serious? Please satisfy my curiosity.
"Wu Lien Teh’s work to control the 1910 Manchurian Plague has been acclaimed as 'a milestone in the systematic practice of epidemiological principles in disease control' (3), in which Wu identified the cloth mask as 'the principal means of personal protection.' Although Wu designed the cloth mask that was used through most of the world in the early 20th century, he pointed out that the airborne transmission of plague was known since the 13th century, and face coverings were recommended for protection from respiratory pandemics since the 14th century (4). Wu reported on experiments that showed a cotton mask was effective at stopping airborne transmission, as well as on observational evidence of efficacy for health care workers. Masks have continued to be widely used to control transmission of respiratory infections in East Asia through to the present day, including for the COVID-19 pandemic."
Note also that the 43% from individuals and the 16% from corporations qualify for tax deductions and the 19% from foundations, colleges and universities come from entities that are fully tax exempt. So just looking at the appropriations dramatically understates the level of government affiliation. If the Republicans actually wanted to defund them, they would target these deductions. Of course, they can't even get their act together to hit the direct appropriation.
A slight correction on how the licence fee operates - you have to pay it if you watch any broadcast TV on any channel, or anything on iPlayer, the BBC's streaming service. If you only use your TV to watch other streaming services (as long as, in the case of any programmes that are also broadcast, you don't watch them live), you don't have to pay it.
From the recent Crawford interview:”Ambient political conditioning is the water we swim in.”
The “cathedral”, Curtis Yarvin’s coinage.
My friend Rommie sent his son to the University of Pennsylvania. Rommie an Indian Canadian investment banker in London earns 5,000,000 pounds per year. He speaks openly about his son joining this technocratic managerial elite. Everyone who sends Junior to Harvard business school understands this phenomenon.
I think my favourite quip from this piece -important piece - is “honestly corrupt nations”.
Really the most pernicious lie is the lie of the “meritocracy.” Even the New York Times, editorial writer, Frank Brunei bemoans and exposes the meritocracy story as a lie and of course he is in the belly of the beast.
This is brilliant and informative. There are video montages out there that show Democrat politicians and media heads saying exactly the same things… the same slogans. It is like the DNC party apparatus has a single portal from which the entire political-media industrial complex gets their talking points. As explained here party faithfulness motivates this talking point compliance.
As I gain more wisdom about human behavior and the human condition, I am even more astounded with the fact that we even exist. What a flawed pile of cells we are… prone to such great collective societal destruction only because we want more and are confident we deserve more.
I am afraid I find this whole piece kind of silly. Of course the elites of any society have similar backgrounds and similar basic world views. So what?
But as a veteran of 50 years in the television business as a producer and director, you have missed or avoided the much more important factor in how information is actually controlled in our society. As a liberal, I recognize that most of the people, the vast majority of people, I worked with in television were liberals. No doubt about that.
But the people who actually control editorial content, and tell all the liberal media works what to do, are the corporations who own the outlets. That’s why Fox News is what it is (as we know from the recent trial). The dark forces with its finger on the editorial scale are the corporations, principally their marketing departments. What actual impact do you think PBS or NPR actually have on shaping national opinions, compared to all the profit making corporations? Look at the ratings. They are a fart in a windstorm. What is outstanding about these outlets is that you disagree with them and so you build a pained and elaborate scenario in which dark forces are controlling our brains. Why don’t you try complaining about unregulated capitalism and how that has an impact on what people see, think, buy, and consume? I am old enough to remember when the news business actually had an ethical framework, rather than just a place in the income stream.
I expect we likely agree on more here than you may think. I absolutely think corporations play a huge (and malevolent) role here. But I would disagree that they do so through a system of "unregulated capitalism," separate from what I'm dubbing the Party. Rather, they do so through a system of "managerial capitalism," in which very large corporations have a strong incentive to align and effectively fuse themselves with the managerial party-state (and vice-versa), as this hugely benefits both parties. The managerial state effectively shelters managerial corporations from competition and accountability, while managerial capitalism helps break down resistance to the party-state in the form of traditional moral norms and non-commodified authentic communities, associations, and other thick human relationships. This human territory is hollowed out and then progressively surrendered to the consumer market. The state assists in and benefits from this through its crusades to "liberate" and then administer more and more areas of life. Managerial ideology, which can be roughly thought of as something like an advanced neoliberalism, allows the simultaneous expansion of both the corporation and the state in tandem.
From another angle the simple answer is that a MSNBC or CNN absolutely shares the same social and *material incentives* as the rest of the party-state, and acts accordingly. In this respect they are no different from NPR or PBS. But I also think you are missing how influential NPR and PBS are *among the Party elite* - their small footprint among the mass public is far less important than the fact that they are prestige media that reaches the right audience. Now, Fox is a very interesting case, as it is harder to categorize. In my view it seems to be essentially a gigantic grift, preying on the masses who exist outside the Party, who have little-to-no power, and who are duped into thinking Fox and its executives are part of *their* party, and fight for them - rather than draining them of money in between NYC lunches with their fellow Party elite.
Thanks for the long and thoughtful response. But with respect, I am afraid you are over-thinking this.
It is entirely true that traditional moral norms and non-commodified authentic communities, associations, and other thick human relationships are being depleted, perhaps destroyed forever. And it is true that mass media of all kinds contributes to this, but by far the most corrosive force working to deplete our once much stronger human communities, is the experience of living in a society built on consumer capitalism, a force which has no humanity at all. It is very difficult, for understandable reasons, for intellectuals on the right to look in the face of this very simple and obvious fact. This force has encouraged and created a culture in which success is judged almost entirely in terms of money, return on investment, profit, flashy consumer goods and in which everything is for sale.
Advertising, the handmaiden this force, uses all the most enticing elements of sex, glamor, prestige and fantasy to encourage people to leave behind the kind of organic human connections we used to find in church or Veterans Associations, or fishing clubs, or all the other authentic human connectors. How can ordinary human beings—and most human beings are ordinary people—walk away from an avalanche of professionally produced seduction?
I worked in that seduction business, as everybody who works in the media does at one level or another. Corporations are just big bureaucracies, with all the same soul crushing systems that big government has or any other big organization has, and these corporations are designed to make money out of whatever it is that they are doing, and the more they eat each other up and become bigger, the further they are from anything human. The worst of them, in my considerable experience, are not your imagined elite management class, but the middle managers, frightened and demoralized as they do the brutal work of their masters.
In all of our very long human history, it is only in the last four or five hundred years that modernity began to stir, the enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism and colonialism, all these things coming mostly out of England, brought us to where we are now. Of course a lot of good came of that, in medicine, increased life spans, more leisure time, more education and so on. But here we are now...
So the conservative thinker, who cannot allow himself to see anything dark in market capitalism, with all the abuses of the drug industry, the pornographers, the gun industry, the petroleum industry and of course the television industry not withstanding, must look for other increasingly convoluted reasons for the world going to shit. And I agree, going to shit it is.
The other deep handicap of the conservative thinker is the uncomfortable fact that a lot of what they think of as liberal or woke or progressive or whatever, is actually much more popular politically than their own sour grapes ideology. And this is why the corporations are following it, because that is what most people want, especially young people. They don't want to hate gay people. They don't want to be white supremacists. They want the mass shootings to stop. They want the cynical politics to stop. Outfits like Disney want to do what the mainstream of the society likes, so that they can take their money, not because some dark force is luring them into the woke abyss...
A thoughtful conservative might take a look at what they see as hateful woke behavior and see if there might be something in it that is appealing to the battered human sense of decency, that thinks that slavery was wrong, that we should recognize it and acknowledge the suffering that come from it and the cruel racial politics that followed. It is decent to think that gay people just want to live their lives like anybody else and not assign some malevolence to it or get a stroke because a trans kid uses a bathroom somewhere.
I am not a college professor who did his dissertation on this, I was a working television producer who worked in the belly of the beast for 50 years. I won three Emmies and was nominated for an Academy Award. And just to be clear, working in television is as glamorous and working in a refrigerator factory.
But I appreciate the obvious thought you put into what you are doing and I believe you are sincere. I just think you are over-thinking it to avoid the more uncomfortable reality.
I don't think it's a right vs. wrong thing. I found this entire exchange to be quite interesting, and found myself agreeing with both perspectives.
To OP's first point, I would respond that the "so what?" part is that those united elites—turbo-charged by a Luxury Blob with an apparently insatiable appetite for more—are quite literally attempting to control what people think, and what they feel to be true, not just what they buy.
I also think the influence of advertising and marketing departments has been steadily waning. As an example, for about ten years I taught Media Literacy to middle schoolers, preaching the same sermon: corporations seeking to maximize profits will stop at nothing, appealing to all of our basest instincts in hawking their products on the capitalist "free” market; news organizations are influenced by their advertisers’ interests. And so on. Then quite suddenly I realized that my curriculum was not landing, because students did not really know what ads were anymore. They don't watch TV, they don't read magazines. They just scroll through TikTok or play video games. They barely look up from their screens to notice the billboards on the road as their parents drive them to soccer practice. Meanwhile, more and more adults only consume streaming, on-demand media, or read Twitter or Instagram and maybe scroll through a curated news feed. (I have no idea how effective social media-placed ads are, but my limited experience with them indicates that these are dominated by little startups trying to grab millennial eyeballs.)
Of course young people are still convinced that they need the latest iPhone or Nikes to be happy; and marketing departments now are probably more focused on, say, gaming search engines than advertising. But to me the false promise of “choice" offered by competing products, even the prison of a hyper-mediated, virtual existence, awful as these developments are—and we’re all right to resist them—are still somehow less pernicious than the policing of language and ideas themselves. Especially if you’re interested in critiquing the nature of the market.
But this relatively new information economy elite is not only configuring morality and social mores; it decides which stories, which words and phrases, are worthy of discussion. Which things can be uttered, and which cannot. All the neoliberal uniparty hyperventilating about external aUtHoRiTaRiAnIsm ignores, or dismisses, those same dynamics arising from within.
Perhaps censorship has always been present, it's just been hitherto implicit and internalized, and now it's being more explicitly regulated and engaged (cf. Twitter Files). Which is all the more reason why I find this essay by Lyons to be so fascinating. The comparisons with PRC/CCP would send most blue-check (and red-check, if there were such a thing) Twitterati into hysterics, but I find it incredibly apt.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly a fan of laissez-faire capitalism or large corporations and their dehumanizing effects. I was once a reluctant captive myself, holding a classic Bullshit Job. It’s just that, to be a bit glib, I tend to situate the locus of the problem more specifically in finance rather than marketing. And by that I don’t mean the corporate CFO office, but rather the rapacious out-of-control casino known in shorthand as "Wall Street,” or Finance with a capital F. And thanks to all kinds of scaling- and corruption-related issues, as well as the leverage and reach afforded by technology, the game feels to me to have changed dramatically in the last few years.
To that point, I don’t think anyone would be too surprised if the dark force that finally emerges victorious is capital itself armored with AI. Or would that be AI armored with capital?
This is a very interesting interchange. There is a clean brevity in Diamond boys binary "This is right and that is wrong." If only our world was such a simple place.
So it is an interesting question—is it the presence of a socially malevolent group of elites, organized and filtered by their class and education, who are manipulating the levers of cultural power to force their ideological viewpoint on the wider public and even more diabolical, to control our very language, images and myths, that is causing the authentic human bonds of connection and meaning to dissipate, or, is it the relentlessly corrosive force of market capitalism, whose cultural department, advertising, is dissipating the traditional and organic human values of family, meaningful work, community, and faith?
Is one idea dominant, or are both true? It seems to me, that in an effective narrative, we should have only one bad guy, but never mind, I think that is the root question of this exchange.
My life experience tells me that when difficult conundrums appear, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And anyway, my life experience is working inside of the corporate communications and advertising industry which makes my point of view both valuable and informed (as well as biased). While some might consider me a media elite, since I made and controlled (as much as we could) television that went out to millions of views, actually, in that hierarchy, I was just a working stiff, working for the man...
In any event, it is much simpler to imagine huge corporations hiring layers of technicians and artisans in order to herd and control the mass audience from whom they expect to extract money, than to imagine some kind of complex web of elite managers who somehow coordinate an effort to indoctrinate and manipulate those in the lessor classes for some unstated but deeply evil goal. That, to me, is a conspiracy theory.
And anyway, the corporations and their relentless greed and cruelty are well known to us, and we suffer from them every day, but a shadowy group of coordinated controlling elites has to be imagined and explained in dense and convoluted prose, as the original thesis of this argument lays out.
To address Gnome Chonky's point, advertising as he sees it is fairly limited. But advertising is attached to everything, every google search, every Facebook post, every single thing that the corporations are working at to get our attention, has some form of advertising attached to it. It is a shark who can never stop swimming.
What most people don't understand when dealing with Facebook or the cable systems or whatever, is that they are not the customers, they are the product. It is their attention that is being sold to other corporations so the corporate products and services can be directed back toward you in the hope of getting your money. And it is not the work of the spirit or faith, or the ordinary rhythms of life, or the plain experience of family or the quiet human moment of self reflection that gain attention that can then be sold. It is sex and drama and violence and farce, and relentlessly frightening news stories that do that.
And that is what is eroding the foundations of our genuinely human values and experiences. It is really pretty simple. Relentless and corrosive information, fired through a firehose of media outlets, online, on television, on every single vehicle that they can find or invent.
I'll be brief then: the controlling elite is diffuse, its web complex, and while upper-echelon interests tend to be aligned, there is no one Smoking Man, no Davos symposium, no Skull & Bones room where all the decisions are made.
BTW how did you know I am a "he"? Was the excessive verbosity a dead giveaway?
The old Fox News was arguably capitalism at work. Murdoch saw a vast unexploited market and moved in. He is clearly not a conservative, now or ever, but saw an opportunity to make a lot of money. The new Fox News with the scions and Paul Ryan fits your model to a T.
It is clear that there are some areas of business, like healthcare and prescription drugs, guns, the airline industry, the information industries, and the financial industries, and so on, which not only impact directly on the public’s safety and well being, but have been shown historically to be areas of abuse and corruption. Capitalism works (and it does work) because it harnesses the essential human drive for self interest, both for ambition and for greed. Left alone, we get the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the opioid crisis, the most expensive health care in the first world, and of course mass shootings. I ran a business for 30 years and I would have to call myself a capitalist, but I also know that in business, profit is the driving force, not civic duty.
I wonder if the Milton Hershey model of business that merged generous philanthropy and a well deserved reputation for quality products could be successful in the United States today. Perhaps there are such businesses that I am not aware of.
Very illuminating. I often wondered how it came to be that, for example, during COVID, every news outlet offered such a unified information strategy - down to even the use of gigantic virus particles ominousy floating all over the giant screens in the background.
Doesn't your argument prove that most of U.S. media should be labeled "state-party-affiliated"? I.e. What's the difference between the party status of NPR and MSNBC?
I have been arguing this concept with my friends for the last couple of years - that elites have been informally working towards creating a "Party" system in the US whereby virtually all important political/economic/cultural positions are controlled by those with a specific world view. Thank you, NS Lyons, for articulating this idea so much better than I ever could. I would implore you to check out Rob Henderson's ideas about "luxury beliefs" if you have not already done so, as he notes how elites identify each other through language and ideology. Now, my request if for someone to please come up with a word or phrase that we can use to describe this new political/economic/cultural "Party" dominance phenomenon that doesn't confuse people with Democrat and Republican "parties." (preferably not using the ubiquitous word "woke".
“This is the Party of managerial technocracy, and every member – regardless of whether they occupy a formal government position or not – possesses a shared interest in seeing the further expansion of managerial control, of democratic power being progressively elevated out of the hands of the unwashed public and redistributed to a technocratic “expert” class (themselves).”
“The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment” is the book to read on how the managerial technocracy took over. Brewster, McGeorge Bundy, Cy Vance, John Lindsay et al., with moral support from William Sloane Coffin and Paul Moore. They were all committed to managerial technocracy, progressivism, and the rest. And they all went to the same schools (St. Grottlesex, Yale, Harvard), were members of the same clubs, etc. They initiated the process of change in the US that is still unfolding. And they moved pretty fluidly between the two major political parties.
One thing I have noticed - among my liberal, upper-middle class friends (doctors, lawyers etc) - is the complete inability to understand or perceive unofficial systems of power or cooperation. In their view, for a system to be recognised as working toward a common goal, there has to have a concrete and contractual link between all parties. I dont know if this is willfull ignorance or just naivety, but it increasingly comes across as child like.
In their view, suggesting anything else is OBVIOUSLY a nazi-adjacent conspiracy.
You're asking a fish to understand water.
Your friends can't see the connections because they're too embedded in the web of those connections. To your friends, their views accurately describe the world, and the fact that those views are shared by everyone else they know and by the dominant ruling class of their society only reinforces this delusion. "My views are obviously normal since all the smartest people in the room agree with me, and only the kooks don't."
To be fair, the kooks feel the same way, and look at people like your friends as nutters for not realizing how deluded they are.
I just reread your point, I like it better than my bigotry argument.
that's funny, since I read yours and thought it was pretty preceptive. :-) The elite's focus on woke racial & sexual oppression serves primarily to prevent cross-racial class solidarity, which would actually threaten elite power.
Yes, this is a class war disguised as an identity war.
Love the “fish don’t understand water” analogy.
Describes my liberal friends perfectly.
The reason I decided your analysis was better than mine is because mine was rooted in cynicism, and as a matter of practical day-to-day motivation, I think you’re more positive read is what carries it forth. They are all together enjoying themselves, and extremely chuffed that they are great people doing great things.. I think that’s the real impetus forward.
Making themselves believe they are doing good things is very important.
They get to take baths in their superior morality.
Yes, Yes, indeed, moral superiority is the opposite side of the bigotry coin so to speak.
Nice.
Is it possibly rooted in bigotry?
Credentialism is their advantage, proves their superiority, gets them good jobs and outsider power invalidates all of that. They have concrete evidence: power without credentials begets atrocities like orange man and still worse is the empowerment of deplorables who pursue their own interests contrary to the consensus’s messianic right ordering of things. It’s the Bigotry of superior knowledge: gnosticism . It’s the burden of knowing the truth but having the benighted and ignorant masses block one’s efforts. How couldn’t you hate them, them that impede?
It is “the political gnosticism of the liberal imperium “ as per Patrick Deneen.
Thank you for articulating how this system works and providing the background to support. It seems very much like the church/heretic system of centuries past. The church didn't have (in most cases) explicit authority over people, but owned the party/cultural space and had the power to set the agenda. The difference now is that we have technology to expand this party seamlessly across the world. Pretty soon the AI algorithms will have control of all social media space, and will weed out any heretical views. There's a reason why 1984 had a uniquely depressing ending.
Eli, I share your judgment, technology leads us wither we not know, but unquestionably this reordering is going to continue and proliferate globally. Fasten your seatbelts..
One of your funniest / most depressing essays ever. Good job. Here's a further (potentially) depressing question: are Party-states an inevitable consequence of modern information technology?
Our human desire to form united coalitions, ie tribes, is as foundational an instinct as our desire for sex or food. Strength in numbers and all that. Is it possible that modern Parties, having evolved from smoke signals and letters, to radio, then TV, then e-mails, then TikTok videos, have hijacked this instinct?
I worry so. The response to the recent pseudo-pandemic illustrated this amazingly. During which, among other hysterical measures, the Biden administration, through OSHA, tried to threaten millions of Americans with unemployment for not taking a highly experimental medication designed for a pathogen which many had already recovered from. "Everyone must get vaxxed!" was the Party line, and Party members duly derided and de-platformed skeptics of it (including a Harvard epidemiologist). It was an outbreak of collective insanity which I'm still trying to wrap my mind around---if only because I have loved ones still engulfed in the Party-induced psychotic dream of controlling respiratory viruses. They give me blank stares when I try to explain how masking is an Oriental superstition which came about during the Manchurian plague of 1910.
It's clear that people get off on safely belonging within "the moral majority (I don't---maybe my brain is broken, or I'm descended from Scottish highlanders or something, who knows?). So the real question is how to restore and maintain a functional plurality of viewpoints. Because one thing is clear: Party members are not interested in doing so.
is that really true? Masking being an Oriental supersition and the Manchurian plague of 1910? My initial reaction was that you’re taking the mickey and I enjoyed a hearty laugh, but then, I started thinking, are you serious? Please satisfy my curiosity.
"Wu Lien Teh’s work to control the 1910 Manchurian Plague has been acclaimed as 'a milestone in the systematic practice of epidemiological principles in disease control' (3), in which Wu identified the cloth mask as 'the principal means of personal protection.' Although Wu designed the cloth mask that was used through most of the world in the early 20th century, he pointed out that the airborne transmission of plague was known since the 13th century, and face coverings were recommended for protection from respiratory pandemics since the 14th century (4). Wu reported on experiments that showed a cotton mask was effective at stopping airborne transmission, as well as on observational evidence of efficacy for health care workers. Masks have continued to be widely used to control transmission of respiratory infections in East Asia through to the present day, including for the COVID-19 pandemic."
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014564118
wow, thanks for the info. Would never have known.
Note also that the 43% from individuals and the 16% from corporations qualify for tax deductions and the 19% from foundations, colleges and universities come from entities that are fully tax exempt. So just looking at the appropriations dramatically understates the level of government affiliation. If the Republicans actually wanted to defund them, they would target these deductions. Of course, they can't even get their act together to hit the direct appropriation.
A slight correction on how the licence fee operates - you have to pay it if you watch any broadcast TV on any channel, or anything on iPlayer, the BBC's streaming service. If you only use your TV to watch other streaming services (as long as, in the case of any programmes that are also broadcast, you don't watch them live), you don't have to pay it.
From the recent Crawford interview:”Ambient political conditioning is the water we swim in.”
The “cathedral”, Curtis Yarvin’s coinage.
My friend Rommie sent his son to the University of Pennsylvania. Rommie an Indian Canadian investment banker in London earns 5,000,000 pounds per year. He speaks openly about his son joining this technocratic managerial elite. Everyone who sends Junior to Harvard business school understands this phenomenon.
I think my favourite quip from this piece -important piece - is “honestly corrupt nations”.
Really the most pernicious lie is the lie of the “meritocracy.” Even the New York Times, editorial writer, Frank Brunei bemoans and exposes the meritocracy story as a lie and of course he is in the belly of the beast.
This article and the recent Taibbi/Jacob Seigel piece is the reason I support truth/fact based subscription journalism.
This is brilliant and informative. There are video montages out there that show Democrat politicians and media heads saying exactly the same things… the same slogans. It is like the DNC party apparatus has a single portal from which the entire political-media industrial complex gets their talking points. As explained here party faithfulness motivates this talking point compliance.
As I gain more wisdom about human behavior and the human condition, I am even more astounded with the fact that we even exist. What a flawed pile of cells we are… prone to such great collective societal destruction only because we want more and are confident we deserve more.
Other way around, I think. The media dominates the Democrat party and is the most extreme element in the coalition.
I am afraid I find this whole piece kind of silly. Of course the elites of any society have similar backgrounds and similar basic world views. So what?
But as a veteran of 50 years in the television business as a producer and director, you have missed or avoided the much more important factor in how information is actually controlled in our society. As a liberal, I recognize that most of the people, the vast majority of people, I worked with in television were liberals. No doubt about that.
But the people who actually control editorial content, and tell all the liberal media works what to do, are the corporations who own the outlets. That’s why Fox News is what it is (as we know from the recent trial). The dark forces with its finger on the editorial scale are the corporations, principally their marketing departments. What actual impact do you think PBS or NPR actually have on shaping national opinions, compared to all the profit making corporations? Look at the ratings. They are a fart in a windstorm. What is outstanding about these outlets is that you disagree with them and so you build a pained and elaborate scenario in which dark forces are controlling our brains. Why don’t you try complaining about unregulated capitalism and how that has an impact on what people see, think, buy, and consume? I am old enough to remember when the news business actually had an ethical framework, rather than just a place in the income stream.
I expect we likely agree on more here than you may think. I absolutely think corporations play a huge (and malevolent) role here. But I would disagree that they do so through a system of "unregulated capitalism," separate from what I'm dubbing the Party. Rather, they do so through a system of "managerial capitalism," in which very large corporations have a strong incentive to align and effectively fuse themselves with the managerial party-state (and vice-versa), as this hugely benefits both parties. The managerial state effectively shelters managerial corporations from competition and accountability, while managerial capitalism helps break down resistance to the party-state in the form of traditional moral norms and non-commodified authentic communities, associations, and other thick human relationships. This human territory is hollowed out and then progressively surrendered to the consumer market. The state assists in and benefits from this through its crusades to "liberate" and then administer more and more areas of life. Managerial ideology, which can be roughly thought of as something like an advanced neoliberalism, allows the simultaneous expansion of both the corporation and the state in tandem.
From another angle the simple answer is that a MSNBC or CNN absolutely shares the same social and *material incentives* as the rest of the party-state, and acts accordingly. In this respect they are no different from NPR or PBS. But I also think you are missing how influential NPR and PBS are *among the Party elite* - their small footprint among the mass public is far less important than the fact that they are prestige media that reaches the right audience. Now, Fox is a very interesting case, as it is harder to categorize. In my view it seems to be essentially a gigantic grift, preying on the masses who exist outside the Party, who have little-to-no power, and who are duped into thinking Fox and its executives are part of *their* party, and fight for them - rather than draining them of money in between NYC lunches with their fellow Party elite.
Thanks for the long and thoughtful response. But with respect, I am afraid you are over-thinking this.
It is entirely true that traditional moral norms and non-commodified authentic communities, associations, and other thick human relationships are being depleted, perhaps destroyed forever. And it is true that mass media of all kinds contributes to this, but by far the most corrosive force working to deplete our once much stronger human communities, is the experience of living in a society built on consumer capitalism, a force which has no humanity at all. It is very difficult, for understandable reasons, for intellectuals on the right to look in the face of this very simple and obvious fact. This force has encouraged and created a culture in which success is judged almost entirely in terms of money, return on investment, profit, flashy consumer goods and in which everything is for sale.
Advertising, the handmaiden this force, uses all the most enticing elements of sex, glamor, prestige and fantasy to encourage people to leave behind the kind of organic human connections we used to find in church or Veterans Associations, or fishing clubs, or all the other authentic human connectors. How can ordinary human beings—and most human beings are ordinary people—walk away from an avalanche of professionally produced seduction?
I worked in that seduction business, as everybody who works in the media does at one level or another. Corporations are just big bureaucracies, with all the same soul crushing systems that big government has or any other big organization has, and these corporations are designed to make money out of whatever it is that they are doing, and the more they eat each other up and become bigger, the further they are from anything human. The worst of them, in my considerable experience, are not your imagined elite management class, but the middle managers, frightened and demoralized as they do the brutal work of their masters.
In all of our very long human history, it is only in the last four or five hundred years that modernity began to stir, the enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism and colonialism, all these things coming mostly out of England, brought us to where we are now. Of course a lot of good came of that, in medicine, increased life spans, more leisure time, more education and so on. But here we are now...
So the conservative thinker, who cannot allow himself to see anything dark in market capitalism, with all the abuses of the drug industry, the pornographers, the gun industry, the petroleum industry and of course the television industry not withstanding, must look for other increasingly convoluted reasons for the world going to shit. And I agree, going to shit it is.
The other deep handicap of the conservative thinker is the uncomfortable fact that a lot of what they think of as liberal or woke or progressive or whatever, is actually much more popular politically than their own sour grapes ideology. And this is why the corporations are following it, because that is what most people want, especially young people. They don't want to hate gay people. They don't want to be white supremacists. They want the mass shootings to stop. They want the cynical politics to stop. Outfits like Disney want to do what the mainstream of the society likes, so that they can take their money, not because some dark force is luring them into the woke abyss...
A thoughtful conservative might take a look at what they see as hateful woke behavior and see if there might be something in it that is appealing to the battered human sense of decency, that thinks that slavery was wrong, that we should recognize it and acknowledge the suffering that come from it and the cruel racial politics that followed. It is decent to think that gay people just want to live their lives like anybody else and not assign some malevolence to it or get a stroke because a trans kid uses a bathroom somewhere.
I am not a college professor who did his dissertation on this, I was a working television producer who worked in the belly of the beast for 50 years. I won three Emmies and was nominated for an Academy Award. And just to be clear, working in television is as glamorous and working in a refrigerator factory.
But I appreciate the obvious thought you put into what you are doing and I believe you are sincere. I just think you are over-thinking it to avoid the more uncomfortable reality.
Lyons is right, Robert Gardiner is wrong.
I don't think it's a right vs. wrong thing. I found this entire exchange to be quite interesting, and found myself agreeing with both perspectives.
To OP's first point, I would respond that the "so what?" part is that those united elites—turbo-charged by a Luxury Blob with an apparently insatiable appetite for more—are quite literally attempting to control what people think, and what they feel to be true, not just what they buy.
I also think the influence of advertising and marketing departments has been steadily waning. As an example, for about ten years I taught Media Literacy to middle schoolers, preaching the same sermon: corporations seeking to maximize profits will stop at nothing, appealing to all of our basest instincts in hawking their products on the capitalist "free” market; news organizations are influenced by their advertisers’ interests. And so on. Then quite suddenly I realized that my curriculum was not landing, because students did not really know what ads were anymore. They don't watch TV, they don't read magazines. They just scroll through TikTok or play video games. They barely look up from their screens to notice the billboards on the road as their parents drive them to soccer practice. Meanwhile, more and more adults only consume streaming, on-demand media, or read Twitter or Instagram and maybe scroll through a curated news feed. (I have no idea how effective social media-placed ads are, but my limited experience with them indicates that these are dominated by little startups trying to grab millennial eyeballs.)
Of course young people are still convinced that they need the latest iPhone or Nikes to be happy; and marketing departments now are probably more focused on, say, gaming search engines than advertising. But to me the false promise of “choice" offered by competing products, even the prison of a hyper-mediated, virtual existence, awful as these developments are—and we’re all right to resist them—are still somehow less pernicious than the policing of language and ideas themselves. Especially if you’re interested in critiquing the nature of the market.
But this relatively new information economy elite is not only configuring morality and social mores; it decides which stories, which words and phrases, are worthy of discussion. Which things can be uttered, and which cannot. All the neoliberal uniparty hyperventilating about external aUtHoRiTaRiAnIsm ignores, or dismisses, those same dynamics arising from within.
Perhaps censorship has always been present, it's just been hitherto implicit and internalized, and now it's being more explicitly regulated and engaged (cf. Twitter Files). Which is all the more reason why I find this essay by Lyons to be so fascinating. The comparisons with PRC/CCP would send most blue-check (and red-check, if there were such a thing) Twitterati into hysterics, but I find it incredibly apt.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not particularly a fan of laissez-faire capitalism or large corporations and their dehumanizing effects. I was once a reluctant captive myself, holding a classic Bullshit Job. It’s just that, to be a bit glib, I tend to situate the locus of the problem more specifically in finance rather than marketing. And by that I don’t mean the corporate CFO office, but rather the rapacious out-of-control casino known in shorthand as "Wall Street,” or Finance with a capital F. And thanks to all kinds of scaling- and corruption-related issues, as well as the leverage and reach afforded by technology, the game feels to me to have changed dramatically in the last few years.
To that point, I don’t think anyone would be too surprised if the dark force that finally emerges victorious is capital itself armored with AI. Or would that be AI armored with capital?
This is a very interesting interchange. There is a clean brevity in Diamond boys binary "This is right and that is wrong." If only our world was such a simple place.
So it is an interesting question—is it the presence of a socially malevolent group of elites, organized and filtered by their class and education, who are manipulating the levers of cultural power to force their ideological viewpoint on the wider public and even more diabolical, to control our very language, images and myths, that is causing the authentic human bonds of connection and meaning to dissipate, or, is it the relentlessly corrosive force of market capitalism, whose cultural department, advertising, is dissipating the traditional and organic human values of family, meaningful work, community, and faith?
Is one idea dominant, or are both true? It seems to me, that in an effective narrative, we should have only one bad guy, but never mind, I think that is the root question of this exchange.
My life experience tells me that when difficult conundrums appear, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And anyway, my life experience is working inside of the corporate communications and advertising industry which makes my point of view both valuable and informed (as well as biased). While some might consider me a media elite, since I made and controlled (as much as we could) television that went out to millions of views, actually, in that hierarchy, I was just a working stiff, working for the man...
In any event, it is much simpler to imagine huge corporations hiring layers of technicians and artisans in order to herd and control the mass audience from whom they expect to extract money, than to imagine some kind of complex web of elite managers who somehow coordinate an effort to indoctrinate and manipulate those in the lessor classes for some unstated but deeply evil goal. That, to me, is a conspiracy theory.
And anyway, the corporations and their relentless greed and cruelty are well known to us, and we suffer from them every day, but a shadowy group of coordinated controlling elites has to be imagined and explained in dense and convoluted prose, as the original thesis of this argument lays out.
To address Gnome Chonky's point, advertising as he sees it is fairly limited. But advertising is attached to everything, every google search, every Facebook post, every single thing that the corporations are working at to get our attention, has some form of advertising attached to it. It is a shark who can never stop swimming.
What most people don't understand when dealing with Facebook or the cable systems or whatever, is that they are not the customers, they are the product. It is their attention that is being sold to other corporations so the corporate products and services can be directed back toward you in the hope of getting your money. And it is not the work of the spirit or faith, or the ordinary rhythms of life, or the plain experience of family or the quiet human moment of self reflection that gain attention that can then be sold. It is sex and drama and violence and farce, and relentlessly frightening news stories that do that.
And that is what is eroding the foundations of our genuinely human values and experiences. It is really pretty simple. Relentless and corrosive information, fired through a firehose of media outlets, online, on television, on every single vehicle that they can find or invent.
That is how it looks to me.
Thank you for your considered and lengthy reply.
I'll be brief then: the controlling elite is diffuse, its web complex, and while upper-echelon interests tend to be aligned, there is no one Smoking Man, no Davos symposium, no Skull & Bones room where all the decisions are made.
BTW how did you know I am a "he"? Was the excessive verbosity a dead giveaway?
Re: conspiracy "theory" vs. practice:
I highly recommend Jacob Siegel's comprehensive summary on the state-driven push to police, surveil, and control thought and language:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation
The old Fox News was arguably capitalism at work. Murdoch saw a vast unexploited market and moved in. He is clearly not a conservative, now or ever, but saw an opportunity to make a lot of money. The new Fox News with the scions and Paul Ryan fits your model to a T.
Honest question. What about capitalism do you believe should be regulated?
It is clear that there are some areas of business, like healthcare and prescription drugs, guns, the airline industry, the information industries, and the financial industries, and so on, which not only impact directly on the public’s safety and well being, but have been shown historically to be areas of abuse and corruption. Capitalism works (and it does work) because it harnesses the essential human drive for self interest, both for ambition and for greed. Left alone, we get the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, the opioid crisis, the most expensive health care in the first world, and of course mass shootings. I ran a business for 30 years and I would have to call myself a capitalist, but I also know that in business, profit is the driving force, not civic duty.
I wonder if the Milton Hershey model of business that merged generous philanthropy and a well deserved reputation for quality products could be successful in the United States today. Perhaps there are such businesses that I am not aware of.
Lyons is a class traitor (thankfully).
Very illuminating. I often wondered how it came to be that, for example, during COVID, every news outlet offered such a unified information strategy - down to even the use of gigantic virus particles ominousy floating all over the giant screens in the background.
Doesn't your argument prove that most of U.S. media should be labeled "state-party-affiliated"? I.e. What's the difference between the party status of NPR and MSNBC?
Has Elon not gone far enough?
Based on the definition describe by the author, clearly yes.
But the corporate media empire is not funded by government, so they get a pass.
Makes good sense.
General reality is controlled by the Party-State and those who don’t see their reality are heretics.
Count me in.
I have been arguing this concept with my friends for the last couple of years - that elites have been informally working towards creating a "Party" system in the US whereby virtually all important political/economic/cultural positions are controlled by those with a specific world view. Thank you, NS Lyons, for articulating this idea so much better than I ever could. I would implore you to check out Rob Henderson's ideas about "luxury beliefs" if you have not already done so, as he notes how elites identify each other through language and ideology. Now, my request if for someone to please come up with a word or phrase that we can use to describe this new political/economic/cultural "Party" dominance phenomenon that doesn't confuse people with Democrat and Republican "parties." (preferably not using the ubiquitous word "woke".
“This is the Party of managerial technocracy, and every member – regardless of whether they occupy a formal government position or not – possesses a shared interest in seeing the further expansion of managerial control, of democratic power being progressively elevated out of the hands of the unwashed public and redistributed to a technocratic “expert” class (themselves).”
“The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment” is the book to read on how the managerial technocracy took over. Brewster, McGeorge Bundy, Cy Vance, John Lindsay et al., with moral support from William Sloane Coffin and Paul Moore. They were all committed to managerial technocracy, progressivism, and the rest. And they all went to the same schools (St. Grottlesex, Yale, Harvard), were members of the same clubs, etc. They initiated the process of change in the US that is still unfolding. And they moved pretty fluidly between the two major political parties.
Question: what percentage of professors would agree with this thesis and the opposite, what number of professors would be affronted by same?
Is there clear thinking amongst our professorate?