Social Engineering.

luka

Well-known member
There’s a fragmentation going on with the internet, certain authorities dissolving and media landscape shifting, cracking, things are more groundless and distinctions are blurring between news and entertainment, between product and consumer, and all sorts, an ongoing process that’s always throwing up new material that’s very conspiratorially charged. It can verge on quasi-religious or just a YouTube wormhole thrill “I love conspiracy theories”

One of the many millions of things that the Internet has done is to demonstrate how narrow the range of opinion AND NEWS ITSELF the mainstream media was willing to give voice to. Now you can read halocaust denial to your hearts content.

This has had a profound impact.
 

version

Well-known member
In the olden days dissent took the form of heresy. One of the disturbing things about the capitalist era is that Marxism monopolises dissent. It seems to be part of capitalism itself. Part of the same structure.

There's a joke in Lot 49 that a certain group are so anti-Communist they also oppose capitalism because capitalism inevitably lead to Marxism.

"But that sounds," objected Metzger, "like he was against industrial capitalism. Wouldn't that disqualify him as any kind of anti-Communist figure?"
"You think like a Bircher," Fallopian said. "Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror." "Industrial anything," hazarded Metzger.
"There you go," nodded Fallopian.
 
Jung is valuable but so successful, so viral and kind of open that his stuff gets applied in all manner of horseshit ways and I think it’s important to welcome the criticism
 

luka

Well-known member
There's a joke in Lot 49 that a certain group are so anti-Communist they also oppose capitalism because capitalism inevitably lead to Marxism.

"But that sounds," objected Metzger, "like he was against industrial capitalism. Wouldn't that disqualify him as any kind of anti-Communist figure?"
"You think like a Bircher," Fallopian said. "Good guys and bad guys. You never get to any of the underlying truth. Sure he was against industrial capitalism. So are we. Didn't it lead, inevitably, to Marxism? Underneath, both are part of the same creeping horror." "Industrial anything," hazarded Metzger.
"There you go," nodded Fallopian.

It's like god leading inevitably to the devil
 

luka

Well-known member
Jung is valuable but so successful, so viral and kind of open that his stuff gets applied in all manner of horseshit ways and I think it’s important to welcome the criticism

Third loves Jung. Don't worry. Everyone loves Jung.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
In the olden days dissent took the form of heresy. One of the disturbing things about the capitalist era is that Marxism monopolises dissent. It seems to be part of capitalism itself. Part of the same structure.

this is good on that:

In speak*ing about class (and truth, and class and truth) we are the heirs of two socialist intellectual traditions, profoundly at variance with one another, although often intertwined politically and emotionally. I hope to show that, up to a point, such fusion and confusion is inevitable.
All versions of socialist endeavour can and should be classified into two principal kinds, one inaugurated by Rousseau, the other by Marx. The two have opposite visions of the social subject in need of liberation, and these visions have determined everything from rarefied epistemological posi*tions concerning language and consciousness to social and political attitudes concerning wealth, culture, equality, sexuality and much else. It must be said at the outset that many, perhaps most socialists who have sincerely believed they were Marxists, have in fact been Rousseauists. Freud has eloquently described resistances to psychoanalysis; intuitive resistance to Marxism is no less widespread, even among socialists. It is emotionally and intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become socialists.
One of the greatest historians of the Left, E.P. Thompson, has synthe*sized what can be best said of class in the tradition of Rousseauian socialism which believes itself to be Marxian.1 The Making of the English Working Class is universally – and rightly – recognized to be a masterpiece. Its beauty, moral force and conceptual elegance originate in a few strikingly unusual articles of faith: (1) that the working class is a worthy cultural competitor of the ruling class; (2) that the Lebenswelt of the working class is socially and morally superior to that of its exploiters; (3) that regardless of the outcome of the class struggle, the autonomy and separateness of the working class is an intrinsic social value; (4) that the class itself is constituted by the autopoiesis of its rebellious political culture, including its re-interpretation of various tradi*tions, as well as by technology, wage labour, commodity production and the rest. Whereas Karl Marx and Marxism aim at the abolition of the proletariat, Thompson aims at the apotheosis and triumphant survival of the proletariat.
Thompson’s Rousseauian brand of Marxism triggered a sustained critique by Perry Anderson, one that is now half-forgotten but still extremely impor*tant. Although his terms are quite different from mine, Anderson sought to show that Thompson’s conviction that he was a Marxist was erroneous.2 Thompson had participated in a number of movements and intellectual adventures inspired by Marxism, and his fidelity to radical socialism – under twentieth-century circumstances – meant loyalty to Marxism’s revolution*ary legacy. But Thompson had to ignore the Faustian-demonic encomium of capitalism inherent in Marx, and so he had to oppose ‘critical theory’, and then theory tout court.3 Anderson later described this decomposition of ‘Western Marxism’ – away from class to ‘the people’ – in conceptual terms,4 a diagnosis that has been proved right by events since.
ROUSSEAU VERSUS MARX
The main difference between Rousseau and Marx is that Rousseau seeks to replace (stratified, hierarchical, dominated) society with the people (a purely egalitarian and culturally self-sustaining, closed community), while Marx does not want to ‘replace’ society by annihilating ‘rule’ and the ruling class as such, but believes that capitalism (one specific kind of society) might end in a way in which one of its fundamental classes, the proletariat, would abolish itself and thereby abolish capitalism itself. It is implied (it is sous-entendu) that the moral motive for such a self-abolition is the intolerable, abject condition of the proletariat. Far from its excellence – extolled by the Rousseauians – it is, on the contrary, its wretchedness, its total alienation, that makes it see that it has ‘nothing to lose but its chains’, and that it has ‘a world to win’. In the Marxist view it is not the people’s excellence, superiority or merit that makes socialism – the movement to supersede, to transcend capitalism – worthwhile but, on the contrary, its being robbed of its very humanity. Moreover, there is no ‘people’, there are only classes. Like the bourgeoisie itself, the working class is the result of the destruction of a previous social order. Marx does not believe in the self-creation or the self-invention of the working class, parallel to or alongside capitalism, through the edification of an independent set of social values, habits and techniques of resistance.
Thus there is an angelic view of the exploited (that of Rousseau, Karl Polányi, E.P. Thompson) and there is a demonic, Marxian view. For Marx, the road to the end of capitalism (and beyond) leads through the completion of capitalism, a system of economic and intellectual growth, imagination, waste, anarchy, destruction, destitution. It is an apocalypse in the original Greek sense of the word, a ‘falling away of the veils’ which reveals all the social mecha*nisms in their stark nakedness; capitalism helps us to know because it is unable to sustain illusions, especially naturalistic and religious illusions. It liberated subjects from their traditional rootedness (which was presented to them by the ancient regime as ‘natural’) to hurl them onto the labour market where their productive-creative essence reveals itself to be disposable, replaceable, dependent on demand – in other words, wholly alien to self-perception or ‘inner worth’. In capitalism, what human beings are, is contingent or stochas*tic; there is no way in which they are as such, in themselves. Their identity is limited by the permanent re-evaluation of the market and by the transient historicity of everything, determined by – among other contingent factors – random developments in science and technology. What makes the whole thing demonic indeed is that in contradistinction to the external character, the incomprehensibility, of ‘fate’, ‘the stars’, participants in the capitalist economy are not born to that condition, they are placed in their respective positions by a series of choices and compulsions that are obviously man-made. To be born noble and ignoble is nobody’s fault, has no moral dimensions; but alienation appears self-inflicted.
Marx is the poet of that Faustian demonism: only capitalism reveals the social, and the final unmasking; the final apocalypse, the final revelation can be reached by wading through the murk of estrangement which, seen histori*cally, is unique in its energy, in its diabolical force.5 Marx does not ‘oppose’ capitalism ideologically; but Rousseau does. For Marx, it is history; for Rous*seau, it is evil.

http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm
 
I'm not dismissing conspiracy theories as horseshit, I'm dismissing the opposition to them as horseshit, because they operate in the same modality.

And I agree. The first thing I posted here about ten years ago was a thread on this point
 

luka

Well-known member
Education is a good one because it's so obviously politicised. Gove thinks the role of education should be to produce Tory voters for instance.

Instill 'pride in Britain' etc
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
no, i broadly agree with what you are saying. I mean the conspiracy theories that revolve around deceptive nation states and one world governments. Luke is right that the right has taken on the lefts language, and what the left thought was Marxian thought. in reality the lefts main idiom is man is born free but everywhere he finds himself in chains, which is Rousseau, and wrong.

I'm not dismissing conspiracy theories as horseshit, I'm dismissing the opposition to them as horseshit, because they operate in the same modality.

put it more concretely. Rousseau's line should be revised as follows: 'man is born encoded and territorialised into the market, but wherever he looks he finds disjunctures.'

which is not exactly going to get you laid!
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Education is a good one because it's so obviously politicised. Gove thinks the role of education should be to produce Tory voters for instance.

Instill 'pride in Britain' etc

There was a particularly egregious outbreak of this a few years back due to all the centenary stuff about WWI. Gove and others slagging off the fourth series of Blackadder because it showed the British officer class to be callous imbeciles, that sort of thing. I'm too young to remember personally but I don't think the series was regarded as particularly radical or subversive when it was broadcast in the '80s, when the general culture was notionally much more conservative than it is now.
 
Last edited:

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Remember when they started doing that with Blair too? Getting people to have post WW2 style street parties with long trestle tables of food and bunting. 'Made in Britain' proudly placed on food labels n stuff.
 
It’s only social engineering when they do it. When we do it it’s just marketing or behavioural insights or spreading the truth or having a laugh.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Remember when they started doing that with Blair too? Getting people to have post WW2 style street parties with long trestle tables of food and bunting. 'Made in Britain' proudly placed on food labels n stuff.

There was that whole cringe-making 'Cool Britannia' thing in the late '90s too, which just coincided with the first New Labour government, and seemed to be predicated mainly on, err, Blur and Oasis. But as naff as it was, it was still relatively innocent and sort-of progressive, or at least not yet outright reactionary. It did at least have one eye on the future, and when it looked back to the past it was to the 1960s and The Beatles, not the 1860s and empire. And this was the era of Cornershop, Desmond's, The Real McCoy, Goodness Gracious Me and The Kumars at no. 42. Hardly radical stuff, but at least multicultural Britain was presented as part of normal life, and TV hadn't yet surrendered to the tyranny of Downton Abbey and Mrs Brown's Boys.

Edit: Desond's started back in 1989! Bloody hell. I just about remember it being on TV. So a bit earlier that those other shows.
 
Last edited:

luka

Well-known member
That is a huge part of what is now taken to be social engineering though. The manufacture of consent for a multiracial multicultural society.
 

luka

Well-known member
The sense that there was a top down attempt to normalise multiracial society. To make people accept it. I think there was, at some level. And I think that that was probably a good thing.

It is social engineering when our lot do it, but that doesn't mean I think it's bad necessarily.

But you see it on Twitter all the time. The idea that Hollywood is trying to force a woke agenda on us with casting decisions and plot lines etc.
 
Top