In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentence in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves. For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

• With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

• The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

• Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East. Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

• There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

• The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

• The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

• The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

• Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

• The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

• The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

• Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on

Bad advice.

Everything we do as humans is provisional. Because of time’s eroding power, everything is revisable. There is a reason for the word ‘decision’ being a part of our language. Not accidentally, the term derives from the Latin for ‘cut;’ in other words, when we decide something, we make a volitional ‘cut’ of sorts in the sequence of events, or in the reasoning concerning such events, that precede the decision – a concrete reminder that human beings are not equipped with an algorithmic device that enables them to know with absolute certainty what course of action to pursue. Every decision, therefore, represents an acknowledgment that we have to act with incomplete, provisional knowledge, and by implication, that more information and more comprehension could lead to a different decision.

Philosophers have known this for centuries, even if their philosophies sometimes give the opposite impression. Nietzsche – who was himself a thinker of provisionality, as evinced in his exhortation, to overcome the ‘spirit of revenge’ against time’s irreversible passage – did Socrates an injustice when he used his name as shorthand for the excessive rationalism of Western culture. Rather than ‘Socratism,’ he should have used the term ‘Platonism,’ provided he meant the reception of Plato’s work, and not the Greek master’s work ‘itself’ – even if, unavoidably, the latter is ‘itself’ only available to us after centuries of translations.

After all, anyone who has read Plato’s texts carefully – even in translation – and not only through the eyes of his countless commentators, soon recognises the distance that separates what may be called the two ‘faces’ of Plato. There is the metaphysical, idealist Plato, and there is the ‘poetically reflective’ Plato whose writings (perhaps unexpectedly) reveal what one might call his nuanced awareness of the ineradicable provisionality of even the ostensibly strictest distinctions. It is difficult to say which one of these has given rise to a never-ending series of ‘footnotes’ among Western philosophers since his time, according to Alfred N. Whitehead, who noted of Plato’s writings that the ‘wealth of general ideas scattered through them’ comprise a ‘an inexhaustible mine of suggestion,’ but I would opt for the second one.

In the Phaedrus Plato shows that he knew, for instance, that a “pharmakon” is both poison and remedy, that language is simultaneously a rhetorical instrument of persuasion and the arena where struggles for truth are enacted; both the soil where poetic powers germinate and metaphysical armour for the protection of mortal bodies. Poets and dithyrambic music do not belong in the ideal republic, according to him, but paradoxically the poet in Plato is harnessed for the sensorily evocative linguistic embodiment of the epistemic inferiority of the senses, as the myth of the cave in the Republic demonstrates, accompanied by his simultaneous claim that the truth represented by the sun shining outside the cave transcends the perspectival limitations of the senses.

Do these paradoxes not reflect Plato’s awareness of the provisionality of his metaphysical bulwark against human uncertainty and finitude, embodied in the supratemporal, archetypal Forms, in which all existing things participate, however imperfectly?

The clearest indication that Plato knew about the ineradicably provisional status of human life lies in his depiction of his teacher, Socrates, who did not write anything himself, as the archetypal philosopher of provisionality – unambiguously captured in Socrates’s famous ‘docta ignorantia’ (learned ignorance), that the only thing humans know with certainty is ‘how little they know.’ Despite these signs in Plato’s work, that he was quite conscious of the limitations to human knowledge (further demonstrated in his notion of the paradoxical, errant causality of the Khôra in his Timaeus, which simultaneously is and is not in space), what the philosophical tradition has sought to emphasise is Plato’s own strenuous attempt, in his metaphysical doctrine of the archetypal Forms, to provide supra-sensible protection against the inescapable erosion of human knowledge by time – for this is what is ultimately indexed in an awareness of provisionality.

These considerations – which could be extended significantly – make a mockery of the idea that there is a fail-safe research methodology (with its accompanying methods), that would guarantee the time-resistant validity of human knowledge, instead of acknowledging that, despite our very best efforts at securing precise, unassailable knowledge, it is nonetheless always already infected with the eroding germ of time. This is the sobering insight gained from one of Jacques Derrida’s most exemplary poststructuralist essays in Writing and Difference, namely ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences,’ where (following Claude Lévi-Strauss) he distinguishes between the image of the ‘bricoleur’ (tinkerer, handyman, Jack-of-all-trades) and the ‘engineer.’

The former avails him – or herself of any tool or material at hand to construct or ‘fix’ things in order to restore them to working condition, while the engineer insists on fail-safe instruments and working materials to guarantee exactitude of measurement and time-resistant functioning of the products of their design and work. Needless to stress, these two types function as metaphors for distinct ways of approaching the world around us – some people think like the ‘engineer;’ others like the ‘bricoleur.’

Contrary to the standard reading of this essay by Derrida (where this is but one of the stages of his complex argument), which erroneously attributes to him a kind of postmodernist privileging of the bricoleur over the engineer, he states explicitly that humans are in no position to choose between these two paradigmatic figures of knowledge – inescapably we have to choose both. What does this mean? Simply that while we have the epistemic duty to emulate the engineer, we also have to face the sobering thought that, our best efforts at constructing unassailable knowledge notwithstanding, our knowledge systems – even in its most ‘tried and tested’ form, namely the sciences – cannot evade the ruinous effects of time, or history.

This is amply demonstrated with regard to the history of physics in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), although Kuhn’s thesis, articulated in the book, has many rationalistic detractors, who cannot bear the thought of science being equally subject to temporal constraints as any other form of human knowledge.

Such champions of epistemic absolutism need only remind themselves of the exemplarily Socratic admission of the leader of one of the two teams at CERN’s Giant Hadron Collider that worked on the attempt to confirm the ‘existence’ of the ‘Higgs boson’ (or so-called ‘God-particle’) – an Italian woman physicist named Fabiola Gianotti – that the confirmation of its ‘probable’ existence, far from representing the summation of ‘complete’ knowledge in the realm of physics, merely means that the work of understanding the physical universe is only beginning. Socrates all over again, and from a natural scientist.

How is this possible? What she was referring to is the fact that physicists now face the daunting prospect of probing the nature of dark energy and dark matter which, they claim, together comprise the largest part of the physical universe, and of which physics knows hardly anything except its percentile extent. And who knows how many revisions will be made regarding the ‘standard model’ of physics in the course of unravelling the structure, nature, and functioning of these two ‘dark’ entities – if they can be called ‘entities’ at all? Another confirmation of the provisionality of human knowledge.

This, incidentally, is also related to Jacques Lacan’s notorious (but understandable) claim that the structure of human knowledge is ‘paranoiac,’ by which he evidently meant that we are deluded into believing that human knowledge systems are far more enduringly unassailable than they actually are – a Lacanian claim that resonates with the insights of the redoubtable English novelist, John Fowles, in his novel, The Magus.

Returning to Plato’s oft-ignored wisdom concerning provisionality, it is not difficult to establish a connection between him and Lacan, who was a very thorough reader of Plato, for instance of the latter’s Symposium – perhaps the most important of his dialogues on love. Just as Plato shows with admirable insight that, what makes one into a lover – and indirectly also a philosopher – is the fact that the beloved, insofar as she or he remains a beloved, instead of a possessed, always has to be ‘just out of reach’ of the lover. We are lovers, or philosophers, to the extent that we ‘desire’ our beloved, or in the case of the philosopher (and the same goes for the scientist), knowledge, neither of which we could ever totally ‘possess.’

What this suggests, of course, is that the lover or philosopher never quite reaches fulfillment of their desire – should you ‘attain’ the desired beloved, or knowledge, your desire would evaporate, because there would be no need for it any longer. Desire is a function of absence or lack. This makes a lot of sense – provisionally, at least.

If human beings were to be able, at last – which, by and large, they are not – to accept and embrace their own finitude and temporality, they would realise that all things human in the domain of culture and the arts, science, and even philosophy, are provisional, in the strict sense of being subject to revision, ‘correction,’ modification, or amplification. Many of the difficulties faced by people in the world today derive from their futile, hubristic attempt, to be ‘engineers’ in the sense of perfecting knowledge through science and technology, ignoring Derrida’s counsel, that we are also, finally, mere bricoleurs, or tinkerers, jacks of all trades.

Hardly ever before in human history has the futility of believing that one can overcome the ineluctable limitations on human endeavours been more amply demonstrated than during the past five years. What the international cabal of neo-fascists at the World Economic Forum (a misnomer if ever there was one) had regarded as a foregone conclusion, namely, to ‘condition’ people into accepting the proto-totalitarian regime they tried to impose through Covid lockdowns, social distancing, masking, and eventually by mandating, as far as possible, the deadly Covid pseudo-vaccines, has turned out, in retrospect, to have been merely provisional.

This is no reason for complacency on our part, however, as most of the awake tribe know. Their implicit belief in their quasi-divine powers guarantees that they will try again.

[This post is loosely based on my essay, published in 1998 in the Afrikaans Journal for Philosophy and Cultural Criticism, Fragmente, and titled ‘Filosofie van Voorlopigheid.’]

Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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Author
Bert Olivier
Bert Olivier works at the Department of Philosophy, University of the Free State. Bert does research in Psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, ecological philosophy and the philosophy of technology, Literature, cinema, architecture and Aesthetics. His current project is 'Understanding the subject in relation to the hegemony of neoliberalism.'

There is no better time than now to read E. H. Carr\u2019s The twenty years\u2019 crisis 1919 39. It could have been written last month. The similarities of the situation that Carr describes (the first edition of the book was published in 1939) and today are striking. Not solely in the most recent events including the disregard of international law by the signatories of the Rome Statute which would not have surprised Carr since he believed that such a law cannot exist, or can exist only when it is supported by force, but more importantly and more ominously in the structural characteristics of the international system then and today: those that have led to the World War II and that seem to lead us to a new war.

Both systems were badly structured at their very inception (Versailles and the end of the Cold War). Both contained within themselves the seeds of destruction. The Versailles system began as a utopian and seemingly principled endeavor. The greatest responsibility for that is rightly laid by Carr and many others (including memorably by Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace) on the doors of Woodrow Wilson. When we say \u201Cresponsibility\u201D it seems strange to blame somebody for the utopian or seemingly idealistic ways in which the international system should be organized. But at the very first step the application of the principles that were brought from Princeton and Washington D.C. to the world stumbled. It exposed hypocrisy more strongly than had the principles been less idealistic. The right of self-determination was doled out inconsistently to some nations while denied to others. As Harold Nicolson writes in his beautiful The Peace-Making 1919:

The most ardent British advocate of the principle of self-determination found himself, sooner or later in a false position. However fervid might be our indignation regarding Italian claims to Dalmatia and the Dodecanese it could be cooled by a reference, not to Cyprus only, but to Ireland, Egypt and India. We had accepted a system for others which when it came to practice, we should refuse to apply to ourselves. (p. 193).

Colonies, protectorates, trusteeships (with open-ended period of such trusteeship) were given to the lesser nations. Racial equality was rejected even as a rather benign formal principle despite the lofty rhetoric about equality of men. That rejection, bad in itself, was accompanied by the most cynical transfer of German-controlled possessions in China to Japan, thus leading to the May 4 movement and the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.

The Carthaginian peace of Versailles created two types of nations according to Carr. The satisfied Anglo-Saxon nations and to some extent France (although France not feeling herself strong enough always had trepidation about its status) and the trio of large unsatisfied states of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The latter two were Western allies unhappy with the division of the spoils at Versailles. Germany tried in the twenties to change or invalidate some of the covenants of the Treaty by extracting herself from the obligation to pay the rather exorbitant sums in the form of reparations (which it indeed never paid in full) and surreptitiously initiated military cooperation with Soviet Russia thus trying to avoid the limits on the type and size of its army. But overall it led to very little gain and dissatisfaction increased. When Germany began to overturn, with gusto, the letter and the spirit of Versailles, it was done through military force and intimidation. \u201COur enemies are little worms\u201D, opined Hitler. The irony, as Carr notes, is that the more Germany was able to overturn the rules imposed on her, and the more those like Carr who disagreed with inequity of the Treaty in the first place thought that this would satisfy her, the more angry Germany was getting. Thus German (by then Nazi) anger increased in proportion to its success in overturning Versailles. What could have been given peacefully and would have been met with gratitude was now given under the threat of the gun and received with contempt.

In retelling of this well-known story although Carr never assigns the blame for the collapse of the system directly, he implicitly splits the responsibility between the two sides. He blames the satisfied nations for not being willing to share some of the gains obtained from having won the war. Carr often compares international with domestic relations. For the domestic relations to be stable the rich have to give up little bit more than in proportion to what they have. In other words, if a political system is to be stable\u2014whether domestically or internationally\u2014the strong have to be willing to make sacrifices, to accept \u201Csome give or take\u201D as Carr calls it. To create a sustainable international system, the satisfied powers have to share the spoils with other powers or impose relatively equitable (\u2018balance of power\u201D) peace so that others have a stake in the system. If they do not, the unsatisfied powers will have no stake. This is exactly, Carr writes, what happened between 1919 and 1939.

Any international order must rest on some hegemony of power. But this hegemony, like the supremacy of a ruling class within the state, is in itself a challenge to those who not share it; and it must, if it is to survive, contain an element or give or take, of self sacrifice on the part of those who have, which will render it tolerable to the other members of the world community. (p 168)

Even the peacefulness of the satisfied power is explained by Carr by analogy with domestic politics. The rich promote domestic peace because the maintenance of the current order is beneficial to them. \u201CJust as the ruling class in a community prays for domestic peace, which guarantees its own security and predominance, and denounces class-war, which might threaten them, so international peace becomes a special vested interest or predominant Powers\u201D (p. 82).

Calls for peace are not explained by varying morality of powers or classes but by the difference in their positions. Calling for peace is not per se something that may be considered morally superior. Should have American revolutionaries in 1776 followed the calls for peace?, Carr asks. Moralizing, sometimes made by the powers that want to maintain peace, is devoid of ethical superiority. It is simply based on the interest of such powers to maintain the status quo.

As this brief description makes clear similarities with today\u2019s situation are many. Whereas the conclusion of the Cold War did not have an official ending similar to Versailles, its main contours reproduced Versailles. The satisfied powers, the winners of the Cold War, were the US, UK, France and foremost Germany that regained unity. On the other hand, the \u201CNew World Order\u201D produced one large power (Russia) that was from the very beginning unsatisfied with the outcome, especially since Russia, like Germany in 1918, did not at all feel defeated. From the very beginning when under Yeltsin the country was half-destroyed and internationally behaved more or less like a US vassal, Russia was resentful of one aspect of the victors\u2019 policies: the extension of their military alliance to Russia\u2019s borders. As in the collapse of the system of Versailles we see the same dynamic here. Russia objected to the expansion throughout even when it reluctantly reconciled itself with NATO membership of its former East European satellites and the inclusion of Baltic republics but could not, or didn\u2019t want to, accept more.

The complaints, like in the German case, lasted for a very long time. They started under Yeltsin, continued during the first and the second Putin administrations and produced nothing. The by-now famous Putin\u2019s 2007 Munich speech brought no results. The message was very similar to the message that was absorbed by Germany in the 1930s: the structural features of the system cannot be changed peacefully and they cannot be changed by entreaties or complaints of the dissatisfied power. The dissatisfied power took more or less the same course of action that Germany took in the 1930s: the inequities, in its view, could not be set aright by conversations, discussions and negotiations but only through the sheer exercise of military power. The war with Ukraine was a way to overturn some of the implicit covenants of the end of the Cold War in the same way that for Germany the Anschluss and the occupation and the division of Czechoslovakia were the ways in which Germany took it upon herself to implement the principles of self-determination proclaimed by Wilson but denied to Germany.

Despite such similarities one would hope that the outcome would not be the same. It is nevertheless interesting to reflect on the fact that the book was written in 1938 and published in September 1939. Let us hope that we are not at the same historic point now as Carr was then.

In Volume II, Book 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America, de Tocqueville writes the following about soft despotism: Chapter VI

I HAD remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and I perceived, upon my return to Europe, how much use had already been made, by most of our rulers, of the notions, the sentiments, and the wants created by this same social condition, for the purpose of extending the circle of their power. This led me to think that the nations of Christendom would perhaps eventually undergo some oppression like that which hung over several of the nations of the ancient world. .

A more accurate examination of the subject, and five years of further meditation, have not diminished my fears, but have changed their object.

No sovereign ever lived in former ages so absolute or so powerful as to undertake to administer by his own agency, and without the assistance of intermediate powers, all the parts of a great empire; none ever attempted to subject all his subjects indiscriminately to strict uniformity of regulation and personally to tutor and direct every member of the community. The notion of such an undertaking never occurred to the human mind; and if any man had conceived it, the want of information, the imperfection of the administrative system, and, above all, the natural obstacles caused by the inequality of conditions would speedily have checked the execution of so vast a design.

When the Roman emperors were at the height of their power, the different nations of the empire still preserved usages and customs of great diversity; although they were subject to the same monarch, most of the provinces were separately administered; they abounded in powerful and active municipalities; and although the whole government of the empire was centered in the hands of the Emperor alone and he always remained, in case of need, the supreme arbiter in all matters, yet the details of social life and private occupations lay for the most part beyond his control. The emperors possessed, it is true, an immense and unchecked power, which allowed them to gratify all their whimsical tastes and to employ for that purpose the whole strength of the state. They frequently abused that power arbitrarily to deprive their subjects of property or of life; their tyranny was extremely onerous to the few, but it did not reach the many; it was confined to some few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent, but its range was limited.

It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them. I do not question that, in an age of instruction and equality like our own, sovereigns might more easily succeed in collecting all political power into their own hands and might interfere more habitually and decidedly with the circle of private interests than any sovereign of antiquity could ever do. But this same principle of equality which facilitates despotism tempers its rigor. We have seen how the customs of society become more humane and gentle in proportion as men become more equal and alike. When no member of the community has much power or much wealth, tyranny is, as it were, without opportunities and a field of action. As all fortunes are scanty, the passions of men are naturally circumscribed, their imagination limited, their pleasures simple. This universal moderation moderates the sovereign himself and checks within certain limits the inordinate stretch of his desires.

Independently of these reasons, drawn from the nature of the state of society itself, I might add many others arising from causes beyond my subject; but I shall keep within the limits I have laid down.

Democratic governments may become violent and even cruel at certain periods of extreme effervescence or of great danger, but these crises will be rare and brief. When I consider the petty passions of our contemporaries, the mildness of their manners, the extent of their education, the purity of their religion, the gentleness of their morality, their regular and industrious habits, and the restraint which they almost all observe in their vices no less than in their virtues, I have no fear that they will meet with tyrants in their rulers, but rather with guardians.1

I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.

I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.

After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain.

By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again. A great many persons at the present day are quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience. I do not deny, however, that a constitution of this kind appears to me to be infinitely preferable to one which, after having concentrated all the powers of government, should vest them in the hands of an irresponsible person or body of persons. Of all the forms that democratic despotism could assume, the latter would assuredly be the worst.

When the sovereign is elective, or narrowly watched by a legislature which is really elective and independent, the oppression that he exercises over individuals is sometimes greater, but it is always less degrading; because every man, when he is oppressed and disarmed, may still imagine that, while he yields obedience, it is to himself he yields it, and that it is to one of his own inclinations that all the rest give way. In like manner, I can understand that when the sovereign represents the nation and is dependent upon the people, the rights and the power of which every citizen is deprived serve not only the head of the state, but the state itself; and that private persons derive some return from the sacrifice of their independence which they have made to the public. To create a representation of the people in every centralized country is, therefore, to diminish the evil that extreme centralization may produce, but not to get rid of it.

I admit that, by this means, room is left for the intervention of individuals in the more important affairs; but it is not the less suppressed in the smaller and more privates ones. It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated; whereas that obedience which is exacted on a few important but rare occasions only exhibits servitude at certain intervals and throws the burden of it upon a small number of men. It is in vain to summon a people who have been rendered so dependent on the central power to choose from time to time the representatives of that power; this rare and brief exercise of their free choice, however important it may be, will not prevent them from gradually losing the faculties of thinking, feeling, and acting for themselves, and thus gradually falling below the level of humanity.

I add that they will soon become incapable of exercising the great and only privilege which remains to them. The democratic nations that have introduced freedom into their political constitution at the very time when they were augmenting the despotism of their administrative constitution have been led into strange paradoxes. To manage those minor affairs in which good sense is all that is wanted, the people are held to be unequal to the task; but when the government of the country is at stake, the people are invested with immense powers; they are alternately made the play things of their ruler, and his masters, more than kings and less than men. After having exhausted all the different modes of election without finding one to suit their purpose, they are still amazed and still bent on seeking further; as if the evil they notice did not originate in the constitution of the country far more than in that of the electoral body.

It is indeed difficult to conceive how men who have entirely given up the habit of self-government should succeed in making a proper choice of those by whom they are to be governed; and no one will ever believe that a liberal, wise, and energetic government can spring from the suffrages of a subservient people.2

A constitution republican in its head and ultra-monarchical in all its other parts has always appeared to me to be a short-lived monster. The vices of rulers and the ineptitude of the people would speedily bring about its ruin; and the nation, weary of its representatives and of itself, would create freer institutions or soon return to stretch itself at the feet of a single master.

There is a peculiar comfort in believing that things simply happen by accident. That the powerful don’t conspire, that institutions don’t coordinate, that the crumbling pillars of society represent mere happenstance rather than design. I’ve come to call these people “accidentalists” – those who find refuge in randomness, who dismiss patterns as paranoia.

The Cost of Seeing

Like the red pill in The Matrix, recognizing patterns changes everything. Many choose comfortable illusions over uncomfortable truths. As Hannah Arendt observed, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.”

For the professional class – academics, journalists, corporate managers – acknowledging these patterns means confronting their own complicity. Their success, their status, their sense of self – all are built on supporting rather than questioning power structures.

The accidentalist mindset offers refuge from this self-examination. Better to dismiss than face one’s role in the machinery.

The Death of Coincidence

It requires impressive mental gymnastics to believe that those with power – who achieved it through careful planning and coordination – suddenly stop planning and coordinating once they obtain it. That they abandon the very tools that brought them success. That they become, somehow, passive observers of their own decline.

When confronted with evidence of coordination – be it documented government censorship, institutional narrative control, or coordinated media campaigns – the accidentalist draws an arbitrary line. “Well, that’s different,” they say. “That’s not a conspiracy, that’s just…” And here they trail off, unable to articulate why some coordinated actions by the powerful count as conspiracies while others are merely business as usual.

The Weaponization of Skepticism and Manufacturing Outcasts

The term “conspiracy theory” itself reveals institutional manipulation. The CIA’s 1967 dispatch (Document 1035-960) explicitly directed media assets to use this label to discredit Warren Commission critics. They transformed skepticism into pathology – making the very act of questioning power seem delusional.

This weaponization of language worked brilliantly. Today, pattern recognition itself becomes suspect. In 2022, the New York Times published perhaps the most revealing example of institutional arrogance – an essay warning citizens against “doing their own research,” suggesting they weren’t competent to question expert conclusions. The message was clear: leave the thinking to us. Trust the experts. Stay in your lane.

That this patronizing directive came from a publication with its own history of spreading misinformation speaks volumes. The accidentalist, naturally, sees no problem with experts telling people not to think for themselves. They miss the deeper implication: when institutions actively discourage independent investigation, they reveal their fear of informed scrutiny.

The pattern is unmistakable: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them. The accidentalist never asks why questioning power triggers such coordinated attacks.

Today’s Denials, Tomorrow’s Headlines

Consider a revealing moment: In 2021, several of my friends eagerly recommended Dopesick, (“I think you would especially like this”), condemning the Sacklers’ manipulation of medicine for profit. Yet these same friends mocked me for questioning pharmaceutical companies today – despite their status as the most heavily criminally fined industry in human history. Those who recognized similar patterns were labeled ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘threats to public health.’ Scientists suggesting lab origins became ‘conspiracy theorists.’ The pattern repeats: identify skeptics, discredit them, make examples of them.

Let’s examine three cases where “conspiracy theories” transformed into acknowledged history:

• The Sugar Deception: In the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to blame heart disease on fat instead of sugar. These industry-funded studies shaped dietary guidelines for decades, creating a massive public health crisis through “low-fat” but sugar-laden foods. The accidentalist views this as an isolated historical incident rather than a template for corporate manipulation of science.

• The Tobacco Playbook: For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence linking smoking to cancer while funding research to create doubt. Their infamous internal memo stated, “Doubt is our product.” The accidentalist sees this as a unique case rather than recognizing the same tactics in current corporate practices.

• The Vioxx Cover-up: Merck concealed evidence that their blockbuster drug caused heart attacks, leading to an estimated 60,000 deaths. Internal documents revealed executives strategizing to “neutralize” critics. The accidentalist treats this as an aberration rather than standard operating procedure.

The Pattern Repeats

Consider the timing: A 342-page Patriot Act appeared weeks after 9/11. Operation Lock Step described pandemic measures in 2010. Event 201 simulated responses in October 2019 – the same day as the Wuhan Military Games. Months later, these exact measures were implemented globally. What are the odds?

The patterns of control repeat at every scale:

• Globally: WHO/WEF coordination
• Nationally: Regulatory capture
• Corporate: Internal suppression of dissent
• Local: Community pressure to conform

Power’s fingerprints are everywhere. Once you see them, they can’t be unseen.

The Corporate Convergence

Here’s where the accidentalist worldview truly fails: These weren’t separate conspiracies but a single system perfecting its methods. The tobacco giants that knowingly addicted millions didn’t disappear – they bought food companies (RJR Nabisco) and continued manipulating public health. Those same food conglomerates now merge with pharmaceutical corporations (Monsanto/Bayer), putting the same scientists who engineered addictive cigarettes and processed foods in charge of our medicine.

These corporations don’t just share ownership – they share methods. The same tactics used to addict smokers were applied to processed foods. The same research manipulation that hid tobacco dangers now obscures pharmaceutical risks. The same media control that sold cigarettes as healthy now promotes untested medical interventions.

The Reality Merchants

Consider the current media response to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s nomination as HHS Secretary. The coordinated messaging is impossible to miss – talking heads across networks uniformly label him a “conspiracy theorist” and “danger to public health,” never addressing his actual positions. These are the same voices that championed destructive pandemic policies, now attempting to discredit someone who questioned their wisdom.

Or examine Dr. Jay Bhattacharya – a Stanford professor whose expertise was unquestioned until he challenged lockdown policies. Despite eventual vindication, the institutional response was swift: coordinated media attacks, academic ostracism, and algorithmic suppression. The pattern is clear: expertise is respected only when it aligns with institutional interests.

Engineering Compliance

The template begins with manufactured scarcity and enforced dependency. But understanding the mechanics of fiat systems is just the beginning. The real revelation is recognizing how this architecture extends beyond money into every domain of human existence.

Covid-19 didn’t create new systems of control – it revealed existing ones. The infrastructure for rights suspension, narrative enforcement, and dissent silencing was already in place. The “Great Reset” wasn’t conceived in 2020. The surveillance architecture wasn’t built overnight. The ability to coordinate global policy, control information flow, and reshape human behavior wasn’t developed in response to a crisis – it was waiting for one.

Moreover, the selective enforcement of truth reveals power’s preferences. Regardless of what one thinks about Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook statements, his $900 million fine stands in stark contrast to the total impunity enjoyed by the New York Times and other media outlets whose WMD lies led to hundreds of thousands of deaths. This reveals how power protects its own while punishing outsiders, even when institutional lies cause far greater harm.

The Psychology of Disbelief

“That can’t be true” becomes the mind’s defense mechanism against pattern recognition. This isn’t natural skepticism – it’s programmed rejection (as detailed in “How the Information Factory Evolved”). The larger the pattern, the stronger the denial. They’ve weaponized skepticism against itself, creating a population that reflexively defends authority while attacking any challenge to it.

We’re watching the early stages of converging control systems, with clear signs of what’s coming:

• Digital IDs linked to health records
• CBDCs enabling programmable money
• Social credit systems disguised as ESG metrics
• Surveillance capitalism merging with state control
• Artificial scarcity through controlled supply chains

These aren’t predictions – they’re systems actively being built and tested across the globe, from China’s social credit system to Nigeria’s CBDC rollout.

Understanding the Impossible

“But how could they pull this off without anyone knowing?” the accidentalist asks. The answer is simple: compartmentalization. Like the Manhattan Project, most people in global institutions are unaware of the larger plan they’re working on. Even in tech companies, the Gmail team has no idea what YouTube’s content moderators or Google Earth’s mapping division are doing. Each department serves its function without seeing the whole. Professionals across academia, corporate America, and media unknowingly serve a broader agenda, often believing they’re working for noble causes.

The truth isn’t hidden – it’s protected by its own audacity. As Marshall McLuhan observed, “Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity.” This explains why major revelations often hide in plain sight: the scale of coordinated deception exceeds what most people can psychologically accept as possible.

Breaking the Spell

The ultimate revelation isn’t how powerful they are – it’s how fragile their control really is. Their greatest strength – total integration – is also their greatest weakness. Complex systems have more failure points. The more systems are interconnected, the more a disruption in one area can cascade through the whole.

The solution isn’t fighting their systems directly – it’s building parallel structures that make them irrelevant:

• Local food systems over global supply chains
• Peer-to-peer networks over controlled platforms
• Direct exchange over surveillance currency
• Natural immunity over subscription immunity
• Real communities over virtual spaces

The Choice

The question isn’t whether power conspires – it’s why we’re so resistant to seeing it. What comfort do we find in believing in accidents? What fear do we harbor of seeing design?

Perhaps it’s simpler to believe in chaos than to confront order. Perhaps it’s easier to dismiss than to engage. Perhaps the accidentalist position isn’t about truth at all – it’s about maintaining the comfort of ignorance in a world that increasingly demands awareness.

Because once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it. Once you understand that power coordinates, plans, and conspires by its very nature, the only wacky conspiracy theory becomes believing it doesn’t.

The awakening isn’t something that happens to us – it’s something we choose. And that choice, multiplied across millions of individuals, will determine whether humanity enters a new dark age or experiences its greatest renaissance.

The question isn’t whether you see it. The question is: what will you do once you can’t unsee it?

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Author

Joshua Stylman has been an entrepreneur and investor for over 30 years. For two decades, he focused on building and growing companies in the digital economy, co-founding and successfully exiting three businesses while investing in and mentoring dozens of technology startups. In 2014, seeking to create a meaningful impact in his local community, Stylman founded Threes Brewing, a craft brewery and hospitality company that became a beloved NYC institution. He served as CEO until 2022, stepping down after receiving backlash for speaking out against the city's vaccine mandates. Today, Stylman lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife and children, where he balances family life with various business ventures and community