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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?