A managed-reality, Machiavellian model of the Western (and world) system
This isn't new; it's been going on awhile
I know I am not alone in seeking to build a Machiavellian model of the Western system. There has recently been a flood of independent creative thinkers, some of them refugees from university censorship of various kinds, who, mugged by reality, have reluctantly begun considering Machiavellian models of our political and geopolitical world. I salute your efforts, and I hope we can enrich each other in our parallel pursuits. But I must be clear: I disagree with most of you on one important issue.
As I perceive it, among those now considering Machiavellian models there is a dominant sense that the news media—and other relevant institutions—were relatively recently corrupted. I often find authors and commentators waxing nostalgic about an allegedly lost period when the news media, and Western democracy more broadly, were working more or less as advertised.
I believe this model of recent Western history has major problems.
I think I can show that efforts to establish clandestine, centralized control over the major news media and the established academic world began right after the Western revolutions of 1848 that begat the modern world:
I can also show that, at least by 1938, a controlled media system had already been fully constructed, articulated, and made air-tight. We have two articles on that:
Reality has been managed in a far more sophisticated manner than most skeptics imagine. And it has been going on far longer than the recent fashion to speak of ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ would have you believe.
That’s what I claim.
But why then is there such a widespread sense among the new crop of skeptics that things have gotten bad recently? In my view, because the Western bosses are now transitioning us quickly into a system of frank totalitarianism (the kind where apologies are no longer made). They’ve been preparing this jump for a long time, but the recent and sudden acceleration—which has brought us to this imminent jump—has jolted (some) people into awareness of certain aspects of the Western system that were there already but, until recently, hidden under the surface.
Our ‘democratic’ world is perhaps better conceptualized, for some purposes, as ‘sloppy totalitarianism.’ In other words, it is a system run by totalitarians, and clandestinely corrupted, but affording many kinds of relative liberties because these totalitarians understand they cannot simply impose their preferred system—which is frank totalitarianism à la Soviet Union or Nazi Germany—from one day to the next (lest a revolution erupt). They must pay lip service to our Western, freedom-loving political grammar, meanwhile preparing the ground, shifting it gradually under our feet as they make things ready for the moment when they can finally flip the big Orwellian switch and turn it up to eleven.
That moment is here. We will either wake up now or lose everything.