How cool was it that noted cocaine-fueled philosopher Slavoj “Slavoj Zizek” Žižek titled his 2002 political screed after what is inarguably the coolest line in 1999’s cult sci fi classic “The Matrix?” And no, Slavoj hasn’t been sharing his stash with me, I just think that makes Žižek pretty cool.
Anyway, this post is not about Žižek, as much as you’d *sniff* like it to be. This post is about the September 29, 2020 Presidential debate, which I did not watch out of concern for my own sanity and which I warned others not to watch for similar, salutary reasons.
The institution of debate has a long history in public politics. We romanticize images of Socrates and Meletus hashing it out in the public square of Athens because we have received only Plato’s narrative retelling of the event. Had we been there in person, we might’ve been more tempted to join Diogenes in the amphora, masturbating in the shade of Alexander.
If I were not Diogenes, I’d fuckin’ kill myself lol” - Diogenes of Sinope in 2020
In “The Undiscovered Self,” psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote that the emotionality of a debate was inversely related to its chance of rational persuasion:
"Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises about this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies."
Jung is entirely correct. But the problem is that the general public is really, really, really bad at elevating discourse above the emotional level. As a lawyer who participates in jury argument on the regular, an impassioned argument is often more effective than a logical and detached one because people are emotive reasoners.
In fact, your emotional reasoning is so bad, it enables your past self to lie to your current self and completely deceive it in terms of what you consider to be “real.” The whole basis of cognitive-behavioral therapy is to identify when such instances occur and sabotage you reaching correct conclusions.
Expanded to the societal level, we run into what Baudrillard described in his 1981 treatise Simulacra and Simulation. Without going into too much det… HA! Really had you going there. We’re getting deep into these motherfucking details, buckle the fuck up.
So let’s start off with the historical dialectic as Baudrillard saw it: in the premodern stage, where society is organized around mythology, religion, and tribe, the given object is presented is an artificial placeholder for the “real” object, something very much like a platonic theory of forms. Because each object must be made by hand, is givenness and fitness for purpose is evident in the manner of its crafting.
In contrast, modern (e.g., industrialized) societies are societies of mass production. The distinction between representation and reality, particularly in the givenness of objects, begins to break down because items are now mass-reproducible. What does it matter if my hammer is broken, for example, when I do not have to ask the village smith to craft me a new one special? Now I can get one cast in the foundry in the city over the hill.
You may not like it, but this is what peak postmodern intellectual functioning looks like.
Finally, Baudrillard sees this resolving in postmodern society, where there is no distinction between real and representation; we are left with simulacra, or that which is simulated but has no referent, or at least no longer has a referent. Whereas modern societies were organized around production and consumption of commodities, postmodern societies are organized around the concept of “simulation,” or the interplay of images, information, and signs. Nowadays, one’s hammer is the keyboard, and the currency one mines from the world is clout, influence, and position, rather than a tangible product. The concept of “political economy” is driven out, to be replaced with the concept of “simulation.”
In the “simulation,” the old distinction of social class, national identity, etc., dissolve in favor of their simulacra: position, influence, assumed identity. We now live in a world of symbols and codes, a hyperreality created by overlapping spheres of modern media that totally divorce us from the “real.” In his words, we flee the valueless, given-nature of the “desert of the real” for the ecstatic, quasi-religious and liberating experience of immersion in hyperreality.
In his words, we exist in:
“a state of terror which is characteristic of the schizophrenic, an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him, meeting with no resistance, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of his own body protects him. In spite of himself the schizophrenic is open to everything and lives in the most extreme confusion”
America, 1988.
This is why “debate” no longer applies to us. Trump fans live in their hyperreality, and it is not adjacent to the hyperreality in which Biden supporters live. No one exists in the no-man’s-land of the real. At this point, we have lived so long with the simulacra that there are no maps back to the desert. Given something truly authentic, we would reject it out-of-hand as too fantastic to exist, like Tolkien’s magic ring.
So what is the point of the polemic? To bemoan the postmodern condition and wax nostalgic for the modern or pre-modern, as so many political commentators are wont to do? NO. I say we go the other direction; radical freedom. By understanding the nature of the simulation, we can embrace it, shape it, control it. If the postmodern form of production is in symbols and their manipulation, then learn to manipulate those symbols. But realize that performative nonsense like debates is an attempt to simulate the old order. Rather than embrace the politician as symbol of political will, why not instead embrace direct democracy, fueled by social media and the Internet? Take the robustness of the public square to the digital; utilize emerging tech to register consensus and permit voting on policies and ideas directly. Do away with the abstraction of “nations” and the nation-state itself. Build communities organically and arrange power structures horizontally.
Unless you’ve got a better idea?
Sounds like a good application of the blockchain. Assign a "wallet" to each citizen and a "token" for each policy decision. Make the keys to the wallet biometric. Have each municipality run the same amount of "miners" to calc the system. An encrypted, immutable system that has an open ledger to the public.