Theory of Everything - Recent Cultural/Political

SCANALYZER Continuity
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If you believe politics is downstream of culture as I do, you will savor this lengthy essay by David Samuels. It is meaty and explains what has happened (and is still evolving) when it comes to shaping (creating from whole cloth, actually) public opinion and something called “permission structures”.

It begins:

“Something big changed sometime after the year 2000 in the way we communicated with each other, and the means by which we absorbed new information and formed a working picture of the world around us”.

And with:

“The time was ripe, in other words, for a cultural revolution—which would, according to the established patterns of American history, in turn generate a political one”.

In this persuasive argument, he names names, like Walter Lippmann and David Alexrod, who acted in loco Wizard of Oz, to bamboozle Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man, the Lion and even Toto. Along with the rest of us, and drive home the fact we weren’t in Kansas anymore. This was, well, earth shaking at the very least.

I haven’t the time or energy to try to distill this long-ish argument. The best I can do is commend it to you as worthy of about a half hour of your reading it. If, like me, you are ever trying to find the signal in all the static, here is a worthy effort. The title is:

RAPID ONSET POLITICAL ENLIGHTENMENT - How Barack Obama Built an Omnipotent Thought-Machine and How it Was Destroyed

Highly recommended as a history of US culture late 20th - early 21st century, where we are today and a whiff of possible hope for the future. I wish you “happy” reading.

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To sweeten the pot - to further entice you to read this important essay, here’s another quote, from near the conclusion:

"If Obama the global strategist is clearly a failure, and his hand-picked successors at home were a senile old man and a babbling idiot, then the country’s corporate elite and tech oligarchy might rightly question the wisdom of continued payoffs to Obama’s Chicago-style Democratic machine and make peace with Donald Trump instead. Which they did.

The same warning still stands, though. Just as America was unlikely to become a better place by letting White House aides manufacture “public opinion” through their laptops and iPhones, and license fact-free virtue campaigns on nearly every subject under the sun, from the wisdom of “gender-affirming” surgeries for children to defunding the police, it is also unlikely to become a better place if the right uses the same machinery to advance its own wishful imaginings, by costuming themselves in the robes of foreign churches while trumpeting the wonders of secret alien space technology and bemoaning the evils of the Allied side in World War II. In fact, the two groups share a great deal in common with each other, starting with their visceral dislike for the idea of American uniqueness. Exceptionalism is the master narrative of American greatness, and today its only true defender seems to be Donald Trump."

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I remember reading this article after the election. Long article but very informative. I agree with most of it.

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