Monster Worldviews - All Out Attack

Introduction

“If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup.” — Opening quotation

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and this is episode number 568, Giant Monster Worldviews All Out Attack,¹ with guest Keith Preston, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Saturday, January 30th, 2021. And that title, that’s an inside joke for Godzilla fans. The new trailer dropped for Godzilla vs. Kong. It looks like it’s going to be exactly what I want it to be. I’m one of the rare breed who absolutely loved Godzilla: King of the Monsters. But anyway, those are not C-Realm topics. And I know even having mentioned pop culture or sci-fi, I’m going to get some feedback from serious people who tell me that that’s not why they tune in. Tune in — wow, what an anachronistic expression. No tuning required. Download and play only. Or, you know, stream it if you want. Whatever works.

Before yesterday, it had been a long time since I had last talked to Keith Preston. I don’t think I talked to him at all in 2020, so we had a lot of catching up to do. So we’re going to talk about the obvious stuff. I mean, come on, we’re looking back at 2020. We’ve got to talk about the election. We’ve got to talk about the pandemic. Not in that order, though. In fact, most of the juicy election talk I’m going to save for the C-Realm Vault podcast, which will be out today. Today will be a two-podcast day, no matter how long it takes.

Well, I’m tempted to say, hey, let’s just jump right into the conversation with Keith Preston. But instead — and I’m going to have to ask the forgiveness of the C-Realm Vault subscribers, because they have already heard this — I want to share with you a piece of writing that Douglas Rushkoff sent out to all of the people subscribed to his email newsletter. And you’ll understand why as you listen to the conversation with Keith Preston, because I tried to reproduce Doug’s arguments, but not very concisely. So I want to give you the concise, you know, scripted version up front.

I’m looking at an email that Doug Rushkoff sent out eight days ago, last Friday, January 22nd, 2021. He starts off with just a short personal greeting, and then he pastes in the text of his most recent — or at the time most recent — essay that he had written for Medium. It’s called “Show’s Over, Back to the Real World” [title as heard]. I’m not going to read it all to you, but he starts off talking about how places like Twitter, and even more so the corporate media, are really going to miss Donald Trump. He was great for their ratings. And then he invokes the book Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. I’ll pick up reading here in the fourth paragraph, I think it is.

Postman was concerned that migration of news journalism from print to TV would end up turning current events into a kind of entertainment. Text can be debated. Images either capture our attention or not. The values of television are not information or deliberation, but captivation and stimulation. Making matters worse, in 1987, the FCC eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, the federal policy requiring television stations to provide a certain amount of news programming in order to keep their broadcast licenses. As a result, TV news went from an unprofitable, mandatory public service to another potential profit center.

As we’ve come to learn, this means favoring sensationalism over information. “Big bang,” as the newsrooms I worked in back then called it, referring to any video of gunfire, explosions, or bleeding in war zones. These days it means anything having to do with Donald Trump. The more salacious and outrageous, the better. Those of us on the left became so addicted to the soap opera that we even fell for an overwrought explanation of Trump’s 2016 victory as a highly coordinated conspiracy between him and Putin, while simultaneously holding the knowledge that Trump isn’t even capable of a highly coordinated conversation. Questions of equivalence aside, many of us on the left succumbed to panic and hyperbole, at least in part because our sense of trauma was being mercilessly magnified by the for-profit media outlets we had entrusted with informing our perspectives. Under the guise of being informed citizens pushing against fascism, blue staters dutifully tuned in to Morning Joe, Rachel Maddow, and Don Lemon for a daily dose of outrage. These reports may have been largely factual, but their purpose was less to motivate civic participation than to stimulate a few shots of adrenaline or cortisol. Exaggerations of Trump’s gaffes abounded, from miscontextualizing Trump’s claim that he was the chosen one, to accusing Trump of calling COVID a hoax. We have become no more addicted to this stimulus than the networks have to the ratings and ad revenue.

The far right, meanwhile, has gone online and become addicted to dopamine. The news of the day serves as little more than fodder for a LARP, live-action role-playing game, based not on Dungeons and Dragons or the Harry Potter universe, but on conspiracy theories. And because this activity is interactive, the cycle of addiction it engenders is even more compelling than TV. QAnon leverages the mechanisms of fantasy role-playing and fan fiction to engage its participants in a form of active sense-making and pattern recognition. Every time an addict is able to draw a connection between Biden and Burisma, Podesta and Pizzagate, or AOC and Antifa, they get a shot of dopamine. Once the easy associations are used up, players must go deeper into the absurd in order to connect a blackout at the Vatican to the fictional arrest of the Pope, or prove how a 2015 data theft in Italy means that Obama manipulated the Philadelphia voting results remotely. Like a sex addict who needs to resort to progressively kinkier behavior for the same thrill, any of us going down these rabbit holes must dig for deeper and more absurdly totalizing conspiracies to trigger the same sense of release. Making matters worse, the overstimulation of the dopamine system triggers paranoia, which in turn pushes the addict to make more sweeping connections between utterly unrelated phenomena. This paranoia then triggers the least stable among us to commit acts of violence, from shootings to storming the Capitol, or to interpret these tragedies as false flag or MKUltra operations of the deep state. People and media on the left then use this violence as justification for more surveillance and control, which triggers more paranoia. And on we go.

And then I’ll read just the first sentence of the next paragraph, because for me, this is the punchline:

These addictions are simply incompatible with a working civilization.

So, end block quote from Douglas Rushkoff. And now, here is my most recent conversation with Keith Preston.

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Catching up after 2020

KMOJoining me once again, for the first time in a long time, is Keith Preston of Attack the System. Keith, it’s good to talk to you again.

Keith PrestonHi, it’s good to be back.

KMOSo we didn’t talk at all in 2020, so we have a lot to talk about.

Keith PrestonInteresting. I didn’t know it had been that long. As far as I recall, the last time we talked was for my radio show, which I haven’t done in over a year and a half.

KMOOh, wow. Yeah. So time flies. 2020 — wow. There’s so much to talk about there. I guess we have to start with the pandemic. What are your experiences? What are your thoughts? What are you hearing from people about it? I mean, I know there are a lot of different, very mutually exclusive narratives going around about the pandemic. So what are the people that you’re talking to saying?

The pandemic and the Spanish flu

Keith PrestonWell, it’s an interesting set of circumstances. It’s something that’s unprecedented really in modern times. The closest thing that we have to it from history would be the Spanish flu of 1918. When the pandemic started, I started researching the Spanish flu, because I wanted to figure out, well, how did this work last time it happened? And when the pandemic started I was thinking it was going to last for a while, because the Spanish flu lasted for a couple of years. And it was very similar to this. It started early in the year in 1918, February and March, and the first wave of it mostly affected older people and people with serious health issues. Then there was another wave of it in the fall of 1918 that was more general and affected people of different ages to a greater degree. And then there were actually four different waves that lasted over about a two-year period. I think the end of it was considered to be around April of 1920.

So if we’re following the same pattern, which we seem to be so far — we had one wave in the spring and another one in the fall and winter — it looks like this may be going on for another year or so, or maybe a little over another year. Although in that situation the waves weren’t nearly as bad in the latter phases, in terms of the number of people affected and things like that. But yeah, it’s already been almost a year since all of this happened, and it’s interesting, because nowadays we’re getting used to seeing people wear masks everywhere we go, and it’s like living in a hospital.

And obviously, some people have been more negatively impacted by this than others. People who work in jobs where lockdowns have either shut down their business or shut them out of their job have certainly been impacted the worst by this. And I think that in many ways, the policy response to the situation has been one where the middle class and the upper class sort of hide out from the pandemic while the working class continues to bring the things. The policies that have been established, from what I can tell worldwide and not just in any one country — it varies from place to place — but it looks like the priority has really been to protect the health of the affluent classes on the backs of the less affluent classes, which is not entirely unpredictable. So I think that’s been the main socioeconomic effect of it globally.

Lockdowns, relief and the riots

Keith PrestonThe response of the United States to the pandemic has been the worst of just about any country, or one of the worst. Because the U.S. has pursued — well, it’s been geographically based. Different states and localities have had different policies. But we pursued the same lockdowns that many other countries have pursued, but without the same level of relief and support provided for the people who were displaced by these lockdowns. I mean, they had no problem with bailing out Wall Street and the banks and all of that when that started going under. That didn’t take long at all. Meanwhile, they spent a year arguing about whether to send out another $600 check and things like that.

So one thing that it’s really done is expose the level of total indifference that our own elite have to the public good. It’s similar to — this is probably an apocryphal story — but there’s the story about Queen Marie Antoinette when she was told the people are demanding bread, and she said, well, let them eat cake. I doubt that’s a true story, but the myth behind that is, well, the French elite in the years leading up to the French Revolution — part of their problem was their total indifference to the needs of the people, which cost them their heads in some instances. And we’ve actually seen bits and pieces of that in the last year.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that after a lockdown had taken place for about three months, we started having a wave of riots. The situation with George Floyd, I think, was just the catalyst. Certainly things like that have happened before. There have been riots, more localized riots, in response to situations like that. But I really think that the George Floyd incident was just sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was actually talking to someone I know who was once a prison guard, who was saying that the riots over the summer are very similar to prison riots. Meaning, when you have inmates on lockdown — let’s say there’s a disciplinary action, you put inmates on lockdown — they don’t start behaving better. Instead, they will [wording unclear; heard “betray you”] when you bring their food or something like that. And he said, yeah, this is just a prison riot writ large.

And so I do think that’s kind of what happened. The most serious lockdowns were the ones that were initially imposed, which were in the spring. And after everyone had been under lockdown for about three months, and there was no work, there was no school, there were no sports, there were no clubs, there were no bars, there were no concerts, nothing like that — all of a sudden, there’s this wave of rioting. It was interesting that that happened when it did. I don’t think that would have happened without the pandemic.

Shifting public-health narratives

Keith PrestonIt’s also interesting to see the way in which the public health authorities have constantly shifted the narrative. When the pandemic started, they were saying, well, don’t bother wearing masks, that’s not going to help you any — which I thought at the time, well, that sounds foolish. I mean, if this is a contagious illness, of course wearing masks is going to help. That’s why they wear them in hospitals and during surgery. Nobody would wear them in the medical world if they were useless. Then, of course, they did an about-face on that. Then they started insisting that everyone wear masks. They said, oh, by the way, we were lying about that; we just didn’t want people hoarding masks. Another thing, too, was that when the protests started, you had all of these people who for months had been saying, well, don’t venture out of your house, don’t go to a wedding, don’t go to a funeral, don’t go to the store. Now they were saying, oh, but it’s okay to go and protest; just wear a mask while you protest.

So what we’ve seen is that we can’t believe a word public health authorities say. We see that the sources of information we have, whether it’s government officials or the media, constantly shift their framework in order to bend the narrative in the direction they want to take it at a particular time.

And like I said, I don’t think the civil unrest we’ve seen in recent times would have happened without the pandemic. In fact, I think the incident at the Capitol on January 6th was just another in this series of events. You have a situation where not only do we have the economic effects of the pandemic, but we also have the ongoing economic effects that are still with us from the last economic meltdown 12 years ago. And then we also have the wider cultural polarization we’ve seen in our own society. This keeps building up, and it has been escalated in the Trump era.

And also the psychological effects of the pandemic, I think, for some people have been very negative. It hasn’t affected me personally, because the kind of work that I do, much of it was online anyway. So I was always sort of a remote worker. And I also do work in higher education, and a lot of that just simply moved online. So I was like, okay, I don’t need to go to work. Fine. So for lucky people like me, it’s been kind of like going on vacation or something. But for less privileged people, it’s been a lot more negative — not only in terms of not being able to work, not having a steady income and all the things that go along with that, being threatened with eviction. I think something like 40% of the U.S. population is on the verge of eviction now.² But also just the psychological effects of not being able to socialize or go to things like family events.

I’m not somebody who really craves that kind of thing. So once again, I haven’t suffered tremendously with all of this. But it was true that in my own family, there was no Christmas this year. There was no Thanksgiving gathering this year. And some people are basically becoming socially isolated in a way that most psychologists will tell you can be problematic for people’s mental health.

Children and young people

Keith PrestonOne thing I think is particularly interesting, too — I was talking about this on another program a while back — what about children? What about someone who, say, when the pandemic started was five, and by the time this is done with they’re going to be seven or eight? During their early childhood formative years, what they’re used to is, well, there’s no school because there’s a deadly disease going around, and everywhere they go they see people wearing masks. That’s going to be life as they know it. You’re going to have a lot of smaller children going through their formative years with all of this, and these are going to be their earliest memories. People are going to ask them later in life, what are your earliest memories? Oh, back when everybody was wearing masks. So we have to consider the psychological effect of that when it comes to things like child development, and I think decades down the road we’re going to see some fallout from that.

KMOTrue. You know, I have a 20-year-old son, and he’s socially awkward. He’s a very smart kid, and he’s got smarts that I don’t have — in math and science and computer programming and music — and his skill set, with the right training, could lead him to a lucrative career. But because he doesn’t want to get out and deal with humans, he needs constant prodding. And this pandemic has just been a dream for somebody who doesn’t want to get out into the world. I really fear for my 20-year-old son, who’s just sitting at home — no job, not going to school, no plans to do anything — and the pandemic just validating it. And not only validating it, but making it really the only — I mean, he could do some online study, which I wish he would. But really, the pandemic validates his desire to be a shut-in.

So it doesn’t come at a good time for anybody really, but for people who are at a stage in life where you’re supposed to be gathering some momentum, to have everything just locked down and frozen — things are not going to start rolling again just as soon as you remove the barriers. I think the lockdowns and the stagnation that has descended upon not just the economy but a lot of people’s lives is going to have some staying power. It’s going to take quite a bit to overcome that. So I’m very concerned about that.

Keith PrestonYeah, I think a lot of the focus has been on the economic effects of this, which are obviously serious. But the psychological effects, particularly for younger people, I think in the long run are going to be a big deal. In my own circle, I know people who have kids who are, say, high school age, and they’re going to school online or part-time, and they’ll talk about how their academic performance has declined — because either the quality of education they’re getting is just not good, or they’re just not as motivated. And also the lack of a social circle, the fact that they can’t go do things with friends like they would expect to, seems to have taken a toll as well.

One of the things I do is teach university classes, and I’m teaching online. I’ve noticed that students seem to be less motivated with the online classes. There’s less participation. A lot of them just don’t seem to think it’s a real class because it’s online. And I think that is going to be problematic in the long run. They’re going to have a lot of students who are going to develop bad study habits, and it’s going to be hard to get back into the groove of, oh yeah, I’ve got to start taking school seriously again.

KMOWell, presumably they want real credit for the class.

Keith PrestonYeah, yeah, yeah. It’s something that I’ve noticed. The students just aren’t taking their work as seriously as they once did. I mean, they always did, but there’s been a decline in seriousness.

An anarchist response to the pandemic

KMOWell, politically and philosophically, you describe yourself as a pan-anarchist. As an anarchist, what would you like to see the government doing, or what sort of social response would you prefer to see over what we’ve had?

Keith PrestonWell, for one thing, people have asked me about that since all this started. They said, well, you don’t believe in government, right? So how would we have dealt with the pandemic? I’m not a medical scientist, so I don’t know all the ins and outs of that that well. But as far as the lockdowns and all of that, first of all, I think they were a mistake. I think it was greatly a case of overreach.

As to the question of how you would handle something like this in some abstract utopian society where there’s no government — there are different ways you could look at that. Would it be a matter of freedom of association, where neighborhood associations create their own policies, or individual businesses have their own policies, or schools have their own policies? It’s all a matter of, well, go where you feel safest. Or you want to go to a bar where they don’t care if anybody wears a mask — fine, that’s on you. That’s one way of looking at that.

But I do think it was overreach in many ways. One thing I think is particularly unfortunate is the way that this has become a political issue, in the sense that it’s just become another culture war issue. You have some people on one end who are saying that the virus doesn’t really exist, or if it does, it’s not dangerous, and that any restrictions at all — even private ones, even voluntary ones for public health reasons — are an intolerable [wording unclear; heard “enrichment”] of liberty, which I think is kind of excessive, some of the ideas you see coming from some of the anti-lockdown protesters. And then, of course, you have the other side saying, well, if you don’t wear a mask, you’re going to kill grandma. And so the different sides have tried to weaponize this and make it into a political issue. And I think the government and policymakers have contributed to that. It’s not just something people have done on their own.

But I do think that the lockdowns were overreach in many ways. I don’t know that it was necessary to totally shut down for months virtually all business except things that are absolutely essential. And I do think that if that was going to be the policy, there should have been a means of dealing with the economic fallout in a way that wasn’t addressed. You’ve got people saying, well, there should have been more extensive unemployment benefits, there should have been a universal basic income. I think something like that should have been implemented if the total lockdown route was the route that was going to be taken — which I’m not convinced was necessary or a good idea. With the benefit of hindsight, I’d say that it was probably overreach in many ways, and the emphasis should have been on quarantining the most vulnerable people, the people most likely to catch the disease and have serious health issues, and then the resources should have been steered towards assisting those people. But it is what it is.

QAnon and the culture war

KMOWell, 2020, with both the election and then the pandemic, seemed to exacerbate a culture war which was already at a fever pitch. I’m interested to hear what sort of clashing worldviews you encounter in your conversations with the various people with whom you have contact.

Keith PrestonWell, you mean concerning the pandemic, or concerning the —

KMOWell, as I say, the pandemic accelerated something which was already raging. So we talk about the effects of the pandemic on people’s behavior, on the worldviews they gravitate to. Like, QAnon was around before 2020, but it really exploded in 2020 in terms of people being aware of it and taking it seriously. I quietly monitor a QAnon group on MeWe, and it’s really fantastical — I mean literally fantastical, in that the people are spinning these fantasy stories with one another, just reaching for anything. I saw arguments that referenced an alternate-history fan site, pointing to particular pages about how the Vatican owns New York City and owns Washington, D.C., and how “We the People,” which had been capitalized — just the first letter in each word had been rendered in all caps — to make it a corporation. I mean, just fantasy stuff. And you can see that the documents these people are linking to say explicitly in the URL: this is a wiki for alternate history fans. And yet it’s grist for the mill. The QAnon folks are in a creative fever, just grabbing all these different data points and narratives and weaving them into this grand conspiracy. And it’s very bizarre to watch.

But at the same time — and this is Douglas Rushkoff that I’m quoting here — the QAnon folks and the people spinning grand conspiracy narratives are sort of getting a dopamine hit from this creative activity, this collaborative sense-making that they’re doing. But the folks on the left who are just getting agitated, and having their agitation stoked by the mainstream media, have become addicted to stress responses, adrenaline and cortisol, which puts you psychologically in a way worse place than somebody who’s getting high on dopamine because they’re engaged in this ongoing creative activity. So while the QAnon stuff is certainly much crazier in terms of, could this literally be true? — absolutely not — in terms of their psychological state, I think that the red tribe is doing better than the blue tribe for the most part these days.

Keith PrestonYeah. And it’s interesting to see how all that’s unfolded, because increasingly we see these polarized extremes becoming even more polarized and even more extreme. It’s not uncommon, though, whenever there’s a time of crisis, for people to start going off and developing a lot of weird beliefs and ideas. Historically, you’ll frequently see that cults thrive during times of crisis.

One thing that I started to notice way back in the 1990s had to do with the impact of the farm crisis from the 1980s. In a lot of rural areas of the United States, particularly in the plains areas of the Midwest, you started to see a lot of traditional farming communities that were devastated by the impact of the farm crisis. And you started in those days to see a lot of people from those communities drifting off into further and further fringe ideas. And then that escalated after the incident at Waco in 1993 and some other stuff like that. There was this subculture that developed that was often considered far right, but it was so bizarre it really couldn’t be labeled anything. You had this subculture that would mix things like the most outlandish conspiracy theories with religion, with the occult, with alternative pseudo-history like ancient astronauts, with science fiction, with UFOs, and all kinds of weird legal theories and weird economic theories — and stuff like what you were just talking about, the QAnon people. The QAnon people are a current manifestation of that. I was starting to notice this back in the 1990s, and it looks like with QAnon and some other things like that, it’s now crept more and more into the mainstream. I wouldn’t say normal, but it’s becoming increasingly normalized.

As far as the incident at the Capitol, a lot of the more aggressive people who were involved in that were part of this QAnon movement. I think the guy with the horns — the antler-horn helmet or whatever — was one of them. I think the woman who was shot and killed, I think she was a QAnon follower. So yeah, we’re starting to see these increasingly bizarre belief systems working their way into the mainstream.

And one thing that I think is a problem — we’re talking about stuff you get from the mainstream media — the narrative that they tried to spin during the entire period of Trump’s presidency was that Trump is the root of all evil, and if it wasn’t for him everything would be fine.

KMOYeah, because everything was great in 2015.

Keith PrestonYeah, yeah. Well, maybe for them it was, but for most people it’s not. I think that’s a real issue: not only do we have this widening cultural polarization, but we also have a much wider class division. People who live in the large urban centers and have professional careers and are upwardly mobile are just becoming completely detached from other people. And they just don’t have a clue much of the time. So when something like the riot at the Capitol happens, they’re like, where’s this coming from? But it’s something that’s been a long time in the making.

One thing that’s interesting is the way that Dr. Anthony Fauci has been made into this saintly figure. I joked recently, pretty soon they’re just going to make him pope or something like that. But if you know anything about this guy’s history, he doesn’t have a very good history. I remember him from the 1980s and ’90s, when the AIDS crisis first came along. And back then he was something of, I guess you could say, a fearmonger, in the sense that he would say things like, well, a third of the world population might die of AIDS, it’s going to be the new bubonic plague. Public health officials would say stuff like that back then. And when the pandemic started and I saw that he was the head of the White House response team or whatever, I was like, oh, not this guy again.

But all of this is having the effect of unraveling the wider social fabric, in the sense that not only are people becoming polarized over politics and the culture war stuff, but now that’s been escalated. We already had a society that was experiencing extreme polarization, widening class divisions, a lot of negatives in other ways. And then the pandemic came along and gave it all a good injection of steroids. And then on top of that, you’ve had the riots, you’ve had everything going on with Trump’s election. And that’s brought us to where we are now.

Great Reset fears

KMOYou know, one thing I’ve noticed — and this is not new; I’ve been seeing this for over a decade, and it’s probably been going on much longer than that, I’ve just been paying attention for about a decade — is that there are a variety of conspiracy theories that are aimed to appeal to wealthy right-wingers. They usually involve basically just wiping the slate clean: the U.S. dollar doesn’t exist anymore; if you owned dollars in the past, you don’t own them now; we’re redistributing everything to everybody equally. And for somebody who has accumulated a lot, this is something to inspire fear. Usually I see this conspiracy theory touted by guys in suits who are looking to sell. In the past they were looking to sell you some sort of gold product, like a gold certificate, because your dollars were going to just vanish and you needed hard currency. And in recent years I’ve seen it used to sell Bitcoin, to people who wouldn’t really understand how to even buy Bitcoin, much less mine it. So they need an intermediary, a broker of some sort, to make the purchase for them, for a commission. But now I think that has been recast as the Great Reset. People are talking about how to build back better in the aftermath of the pandemic. And for people with a particular paranoid sensitivity to money issues, that means once again: we’re going to destroy the wealth of people who have worked hard and saved, and distribute the new money to undeserving people. That’s a narrative that I see getting renewed traction.

Keith PrestonYeah. Well, theories like that are all over the place. There are a lot of different variations of them. And I do think that within the context of current circumstances, government overreach is a concern. Whenever there’s any kind of emergency situation, or perceived emergency, there’s always a tendency towards government overreach. We saw that after 9/11, for example.

KMONever let a good crisis go to waste.

Keith PrestonYeah, exactly. And it’s also true that the economic effects of the pandemic have been serious and have been disproportionate. And we’ve also seen a big money grab by the power elite. They didn’t have any problem at all bailing out Wall Street banks and all that kind of stuff. But this subculture that you’re talking about — the ones that are always saying, well, buy guns and buy gold; that’s a big recurring theme with these folks — I think they’ve really gone crazy during this. Not that they weren’t before. But the entire subculture that buys into stuff like that, or the collection of subcultures that buy into all these ideas, have really gone off the deep end in a lot of ways.

On the left, I’ve seen, certainly ever since Trump has been president, this thing about, well, there’s this coming fascist dictatorship, the Fourth Reich is right around the corner. I’ve seen that idea being spun quite a bit as well. I even knew people who were making sure they had their passports so they could leave the country, because, oh no, here it is, it’s the Fourth Reich. And all of that has just created this climate of conflict where nobody really trusts anybody anymore.

Tribes, foreign puppets and the Lebanon comparison

Keith PrestonOne thing that’s interesting about the United States — not that it’s at this point yet — is that it reminds me of things that I have read about periods leading up to civil wars in some other countries. One example I always like to use when I discuss this is Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. In Lebanon there was a civil war, and it was one of these kinds of civil wars where you had dozens of factions and constantly shifting alliances. It was really more like the gang fights that you see in the inner city, where there’s a bunch of different gangs and shifting gang coalitions: this gang was our friend yesterday, they’re our enemies today, they’ll be our friend again tomorrow. That’s what the civil war in Lebanon was like. It’s what the civil war in Syria was like. The civil war in the former Yugoslavia was somewhat like that as well.

And increasingly I see the United States — I’m not saying civil war is going to start tomorrow, but we are being fragmented into this kind of collection of tribes that really have nothing in common with each other. They view each other as existential enemies. In fact, I’ve discussed this with people who are very partisan politically — who vote blue no matter who, or vote red till you’re dead, or something like that — and I’ll tell people like that, yeah, it seems like the two sides almost view each other as enemy countries. And they’re like, yeah, that’s kind of how I view it. So that kind of polarization is taking place, and we saw that with the election. Of course, the riot at the Capitol was by people who were convinced that the election had been stolen from Trump, and they thought that [wording unclear; heard “trump was trying to engineer a coup”] to subvert the Constitution or whatever. But at the same time, when Trump was elected, there were plenty of people who were saying the Electoral College should refuse to [wording unclear; heard “seek”] Trump; they should invalidate the results of the election because he’s just so unqualified. So it comes from both angles.

There are also foreign conspiracies. During the entirety of the Trump presidency, MSNBC was pushing this Russiagate narrative: well, Trump is really Putin’s puppet. Now the right wing is calling Joe Biden “Beijing Biden” [wording unclear; heard “beijing by their expense”], that he’s a puppet of the Chinese. So I guess the right, for whatever reason, hates the Chinese the most, and the left hates the Russians the most. Who knows why — there’s probably some kind of reason for that. But the different sides are accusing each other of being foreign puppets and all of that. So that’s interesting to observe.

KMOWell, Russia, particularly under Putin, has pushed culturally conservative policies, which are anathema to the American left.

Keith PrestonYeah, exactly. In fact, on the further fringes of the left, you have this conspiracy theory that’s being put out that is the mirror image of McCarthyism in many ways, because you have the Kremlin at the center of this evil global conspiracy — only this time it’s not to enslave the world with communism; instead it’s to promote world fascism. So Russia is sort of the epicenter of world fascism, building alliances of fascist parties all over the world to [wording unclear; heard “support all good things like gay rights”], and this kind of stuff. In fact, whenever sectors of the left have a more favorable view of Russia or of China, or have a more Third Worldist type of outlook, or a beyond-left-or-right outlook, they’ll accuse those people of promoting a red-brown alliance, a communist-fascist alliance, something like that. Even somebody like Dr. Jill Stein’s party was accused of this. I once saw some of these far-left [wording unclear; heard “russified”] people accusing the Green Party of being a [wording unclear; heard “third in position for socialization”], implying it’s really a fascist party, which is interesting.

RT, Al Jazeera and the churches of media

KMOWell, Russia and Putin have really muddied the waters here in America by sponsoring Russia Today, their news network, where they hire otherwise marginalized dissident voices from the United States, people like Chris Hedges. They give them a TV show in a professional setting, and it looks almost as good as CNN or MSNBC or any of the other big-money networks. And yet it’s amplifying voices that have, I think, for the most part, a very valid criticism of American politics and American culture. But it’s not because the Kremlin necessarily agrees with the arguments being made. They just do it because it’s divisive.

Keith PrestonYeah. I know people who have worked for Russia Today, and they’ll tell me that at Russia Today the editorial position is, we don’t really care what you say, as long as you’re not overly anti-Russian; other than that, say what you want. But there are a number of foreign networks like that. There’s Press TV, which is an Iranian network — I’ve been on that; well, I’ve been on Russia Today myself. There’s Telesur, which is Venezuelan. There’s a Chinese network like that. There’s also Al Jazeera, which is Qatari.

Speaker uncertainI like Al Jazeera. I watch Al Jazeera almost every day.

Keith PrestonYeah. Where they stand in international relations is kind of muddled. They’ve kind of got their own thing going on, because they don’t get along with the Saudis either.

But I do think that it’s interesting that you see these media subcultures developing where it’s almost like churches. One thing that I’ve often said about the way modern societies like our own work is that in older societies, the institutions that would disseminate the values and the norms of the society were typically organized religion. In a modern society like our own, where religion is less influential — at least partly — that role has been picked up by educational institutions and now by the mass media. So in many ways you have the red tribe that watches Fox, and the blue tribe that watches MSNBC, and whatever other tribes watch Russia Today. It’s really like churches. Instead of being a worshiper at the Catholic church or the Protestant church or the synagogue, they attend the Church of Fox or the Church of MSNBC.

I know people who are really into that. I know people who are very evangelical Christians, and they follow these Fox News hosts and conservative talk-radio guys — the Rush [Limbaugh] and [wording unclear; heard “abolish humanity”] types — just like they follow their favorite online or media ministers. So they’ll get their religion dose, and then they’ll get their political dose, and they sort of blend it together. And the people on the left are probably less likely to be religious overall, but they still have a kind of religious mentality about a lot of their ideas. In some ways it fills the same psychological or social role as religion does for other communities. So in many ways it’s like a quasi-religious war. In fact, I’ve often compared it to the conflict between the Shia and Sunni in the Middle East. I’ve often said, well, we’ve got the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe; they’ve got the Shia and Sunni, say, in the conflict between the Saudi bloc and the Iranian bloc. And of course, whenever I’ve mentioned that to actual Red Tribers and Blue Tribers, they’ve always vehemently denied it, because their views represent the one true faith, not just another tribe.

KMORight. Well, everybody represents the one truth, right?

Keith PrestonExactly.

Trump as “God’s man”

KMOSpeaking of religious takes, particularly from religious conservatives in the U.S., toward Donald Trump: I heard an interview the other day with just a guy on the street who said Trump is not a godly man, but he’s God’s man right now. Which is to say, he’s not a particularly religious figure, but he is an instrument of the Lord for a righteous cause.

Keith PrestonOh, I’ve heard people from that milieu compare him to biblical figures like King David — he’s like our King David. I find that hilarious, in kind of an odd way, because if you look at who Donald Trump is, he in many ways symbolizes the kind of American decadence that these religious people are supposed to oppose. This is a guy who’s been married multiple times, to Playboy models, and porn stars, and — I mean, what does he do for a living? He runs gambling casinos, strip clubs. He has more in common with Hugh Hefner than with what you would think of as a very religious person. And yet he’s emerged as their hero.

KMOWell, my mother is very religious, and she despises Trump — absolutely despises him. She’s not a reliable Democrat voter, but she was very invested in the Democratic primary last year, and invested great hope in the figure of Michael Bloomberg, who was in the race for about five minutes and spent millions of dollars just to get on stage and be humiliated at the one debate he participated in.³ Let’s talk about the Democratic primary. I was an Andrew Yang fan. I sent money — [the conversation segment ends here; it continues in C-Realm Vault Podcast episode 388]

The conversation continues in the Vault

Program identification: “On the C-Realm Podcast, a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

KMOThat was Keith Preston. And the conversation with Keith Preston will conclude in this weekend’s episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast. If you’re listening in the future and you want to find that episode, it is C-Realm Vault podcast episode number 388.

And thanks, as always, to all of the C-Realm Vault podcast subscribers. They are the reason why you never hear me pitching any products on this podcast. They are the perpetual sponsors. And for that, not only do I owe them a debt of gratitude, but so do you, the bulk of the free C-Realm Podcast audience. If you’ve been thinking about joining the C-Realm Vault for quite some time, but just never got around to it — well, when the time does come, go to patreon.com/KMO.

More from Rushkoff

KMOAnd now we’ve pretty much reached the end of the podcast. But before I go, I would like to return to Doug Rushkoff’s Medium piece. I read a few paragraphs from it before the conversation with Keith Preston, and now I’m going to pick up exactly where I left off and give you just a few more paragraphs. Not reading to the end, but just a section that I think, particularly combined with the portion of conversation with Keith Preston that you just heard, really stands on its own and provides a bit of a capstone to the conversation. Doug Rushkoff writes:

These addictions are simply incompatible with a working civilization. Civilization is a compromise. At some point, we surrender some aspects of autonomy for the common good. Wearing a mask in public sucks. But it’s only being experienced as a personal humiliation because it’s been cynically leveraged as a symbol of castration. It’s important we acknowledge and restore the dignity that middle America has lost to neoliberalism’s outsourcing of jobs, military pursuits, and opioid profiteering. We don’t need to retrieve the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’s child abuse mythology in order to do so. It’s only the addictive cycle that’s calling for scapegoating, always just one week away from being realized.

Likewise, the far left must give up its dream of the ultimate purge that will somehow cleanse America of racism and other retrograde views. Critical race theory is still closer to an academic art project than an actionable civic strategy. Attempting to identify and cancel everyone who supported Trump or his crazy conspiracy theories, while satisfying, may not be the most practical path toward restoring the civic fabric, or even race and gender equality.

Bit of an understatement there. Continuing:

Turns out we don’t have the easy solution for democracy or human civilization. It’s a struggle. It happens way too slowly, and efforts at making sense of the whole picture will always leave us incomplete. It’s just too complex. Our brains are being trained to seek certain and totalizing answers for such paradoxes, and to be intolerant of the incomplete and unresolved state in which we actually live. Rather, we must begin to make sense of the world together. Using the attack on the Capitol or Trump’s coming impeachment trial as a starting place may not be such a good idea. Yes, an addict has to face real justice for the crimes committed in pursuit of the next fix. But that’s not how we address the underlying addiction.

The better choice in such an environment is to turn to our actual neighbors and address real problems, engage in mutual aid, favors, take our eyes off the instantly gratifying screens and feeds and back onto the real people in our world. The screens only show us what’s wrong and turn any potential activism into some version of fan fiction through which we attempt to interact en masse with the mostly obsolete top-down systems of our society. No wonder we’re so frustrated and addicted. The real world is way more accessible, even under a pandemic. It’s not even about making friends with our adversaries, but cooperating and solving problems together. We can engage in the hands-on, practical work of creating food security for people around us, building Wi-Fi mesh networks for kids who can’t get to school and don’t have good access, or do community outreach for health care or elder care. There’s real service we can do today to relieve pressure, make us less angry and paranoid, demonstrate alternatives to addiction, and replace dangerous dopamine with the bonding hormone oxytocin.

So that’s all I’m going to read from the essay. There are a few more paragraphs that he takes to wrap things up, but I like ending on oxytocin. When you’re experiencing an oxytocin-rich neural state, it feels really good. I’d much rather be on that high than adrenaline and cortisol, or dopamine.

A few words about craziness

KMOSo in the final moments here, I just want to say a few words about craziness. Because from my perspective, both blue and red tribe mainstream worldviews are crazy. And if somebody says or does something that I think is crazy, I don’t like to talk about mental illness. I’d like to talk about craziness. Because, as Thomas Szasz pointed out in his books, typically the people that are subjected to involuntary, coercive mental health treatment are people who have become a financial burden on others. I’m sure we can all think of examples — well-known people, and people in our own lives — who make plenty of money, who pay their own way, who support themselves, but they believe things that we think of as crazy.

I used to associate with some hardcore atheists who really, really hated religion. And among that set of people there’s an aphorism, just a little bit of doggerel. They say: people who believe absurdities will commit atrocities. Well, I think most of us believe something that’s absurd. And most of us don’t commit atrocities. And when it comes to people like Antifa, or their Red Tribe counterparts, the Proud Boys or the Boogaloo Boys or what have you — to me, the differences in what they believe are irrelevant, because they do share one key belief between all those groups, and they act on it. And that is the belief that they can make the world a better place by gearing up for battle and going out into the street and beating people up. That is a young man’s fantasy. And I’m no longer a young man.

And yet, addicted as I am — as we all are — to the sources of so-called information that come to us day in and day out via these screens of ours, I find myself caught up in violent, retributive fantasies. And I just want to train myself, when I’m feeling that — when I’m visualizing, exercising violent omnipotence to coerce others into doing exactly what I think needs to be done to make this a more stable, sustainable, sane and humane world — I just need to ask myself: what’s my neurochemical profile right now, and what recent stimuli have provoked it? And then the follow-up questions are: do I want to remain in this particular neurochemical profile, or do I want to change it? And if so, what do I want to change it to? And what’s the best thing I can do right now to make that happen?

And one thing that is almost always a good idea is to get outside, get out there into the big room under the big blue ceiling and get some exercise. I say that’s almost always a good idea. Not a good idea here today, because it’s like 13 degrees outside Fahrenheit. That is well below zero degrees Celsius, for you folks listening in countries where that’s what makes sense to you.

Real people, real places: Baltimore

KMONow, I want to return just for a second here to Doug Rushkoff’s parting advice, which is: get involved in the real world with real people and do real things that need doing. And I know that some people — Marxists and others who are dedicated to a particular political philosophy — will object to this and say that that’s not the way that you change society; that this cottage-industry, starting-from-the-grassroots, trickle-up positive-change model is Pollyanna nonsense; that really, if you want to change the world, you have to do the long, hard work of engaging in the struggle for power, and you have to win. And yeah, I get it.

But here’s the thing. Doug’s recommended methodology — just working with the people around you, interfacing face-to-face with voices that can be heard without any electronic mediation — that’s not necessarily a way to fix the world. It’s a way to fix your mindset. Let’s not even say fix your mindset: it is a way to move in a more adaptive and enjoyable direction.

I just took a road trip, and I couldn’t really afford to take this road trip. Even though the transportation expenses were paid and my food and lodging were provided, still, it’s a week away from my regular work schedule, and that activity is what generates income for me. And yet it was desperately needed. I was thinking of moving to Puerto Rico, and I had made an exploratory trip to Puerto Rico just before the pandemic hit and locked us all down. I did that because, at least, my internet research indicated that for what I spend to live here in Vermont in isolation — and I was isolated before the pandemic — I could move to a city and have both an apartment and a co-working space that I could go to every day, where there would be other people. They wouldn’t necessarily be working on the projects that I’m working on — in fact, they wouldn’t be — but they would be in a place that is designated for work, and they would be human beings in physical proximity to me. And that would be an enormous boost to my sense of well-being and engagement with the world.

And as I say, this road trip that I just took — one, it involved a lot of driving, which I don’t really enjoy anymore, and two, it took me away from income-generating activities for a week — but it also put me in touch with real people: face-to-face human contact, which is sorely lacking in my life and which I greatly value. So thanks to Kevin Lin [spelling unverified] for making it possible for me to go down there on the organization’s dime. And thanks to Static Warpshell [spelling unverified] for arranging a walking tour of neighborhoods near where he lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where there is both decaying infrastructure — the decaying infrastructure of previously widespread prosperity — and also neighborhoods which have adapted to the changes and are renewing themselves.

Now, I know there are other neighborhoods in Baltimore which are not doing nearly as well, but I will definitely be back to Baltimore, as it’s a city that does a lot of things right, and it does a lot of things really, really poorly. And as much as I think it’s unhelpful that as a society we have become so fixated on accusing anybody that we disagree with of being crypto-racists, and really playing up the racial tensions in this country for cynical ends — in Baltimore, the things that are done right and the things that are done poorly really do break down along racial lines, just looking at the map. So I will have a lot more to say about Baltimore. I’ve recorded a conversation with Static Warpshell after our walk, after I was back here in Vermont, and that will be the basis of a YouTube video that will be going up next week.

And speaking of YouTube, now that I’m back, I’m still doing my three-hour daily YouTube live stream, where I draw and I engage with the people who populate the chat. So shout-outs to the chat regulars. Thanks, everybody, for showing up. You make it enjoyable.

WallStreetBets and the long-time C-Realm audience

KMOAll right. And with that, I’m going to wrap up this episode of the C-Realm Podcast. Actually, there’s one more thing I want to talk about, and I won’t talk about it at length. You’ve surely heard of the subreddit WallStreetBets, where a bunch of people decided to foil the machinations of hedge funders who were looking to do a massive short sale — a short squeeze, as they call it — on GameStop. And these folks all just got together and pledged to buy GameStop stock and bid it up, from around $20 to over $200, thus putting the hedge-fund billionaires in a tight spot themselves. And now the mainstream media has given a platform to the hedge funders to say this is absolutely unacceptable: we manipulate the market, not you people. And if the common people are going to get together and form mobs that foil our legitimate market manipulations, well, then maybe we do need to entertain the idea of some federal regulation here — something which we normally would not countenance.

As a result of learning about this story, I went and joined that subreddit, WallStreetBets, and I was looking at it today. And there was a post there from one of the founders or a moderator saying, our membership has quadrupled in the last couple of days — which means that three-quarters of the people there are newcomers. Which means that the character of the group, in a moment like this when all these new people come in who don’t have any past experience with the group and don’t know what the flavor of the group was before this big media event — the character of the group can change radically when that happens, and probably not for the best. What is unique, what is familiar about that group, is in peril right now. And I’m not saying don’t join, don’t look at it, don’t inform yourself via that medium.

But it just makes me thankful for the long-time C-Realm audience. Of course, I was an early podcaster. There are people who have made great names and fortunes for themselves in podcasting, and they took up that activity a decade after I did. And I sometimes stew over that. It’s like, oh, I was too early. I put my best efforts into this thing long before most people had even heard of a podcast or knew what a podcast was. And yet the fact that no C-Realm episode has really ever gone viral in a way that brings a whole lot of attention to me — well, that has helped to preserve the character of the long-time C-Realm audience. And I’ve encountered so many of you over the years. And while I have largely rejected the collapse obsession and the arguments of doomers as being really just simplistic, wishful thinking for the most part, I still really value my interactions with the C-Realm Podcast listenership. Measured in dollars and cents, my net worth is probably negative, but measured in human contact — and particularly in contact with smart people who like good stuff — I’m a rich man. So thank you all for that.

All right. I’m going to get to work on the C-Realm Vault podcast now. But thanks for listening. I will talk to you again pretty soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. As spoken. The catalog title is “Monster Worldviews - All Out Attack”; at the start of C-Realm Vault 388, KMO first says “Monstrous Worldviews All Out Attack” and corrects himself to “Monster Worldviews All Out Attack,” a play on the title of a Japanese Godzilla film. ↩

2. As spoken. Estimates published in 2020 (for example by the Aspen Institute) put roughly 30–40 million people in the United States at risk of eviction — on the order of a tenth of the population, not 40%. ↩

3. As spoken. Michael Bloomberg took part in two Democratic primary debates in February 2020 (Las Vegas, February 19, and Charleston, February 25). ↩