The war on terror continues as we learn how unintelligent U.S. intelligence agencies really are. The economy continues to tremble. The terrorists continue to make threats. Americans are having nightmares; and some of us would like to know what is going to be done.
Last week we watched American senators fawn over an FBI whistleblower. On Sunday politicians and government officials postured on various news programs. The Associated press headline on was, "Senators Say Bush Plan Misses Flaws." Apparently the Great Bungle Machine is slated to continue under the same management, only now the Office of Homeland Security is going to become a cabinet department. Both Republicans and Democrats are skeptical. They all know there's no solution without accountability. The president is unwilling to dismiss the incompetents who underestimated the threat and who failed to add up the various intelligence tidbits. No doubt, some senators are glad to have occasion to criticize the president's permissive approach to the national security bureaucracy. Yet our "heroic" lawmakers, holding the purse strings as they do, have always shown their readiness to "go along and get along" with the existing security structures. Who can stomach these latest Congressional hearings? It is sickening to watch dubious products being advertised. One finds politicians and officials from all parts of the government paraded before us. They offer solutions and ideas, excuses and placebos. They sometimes criticize one another, but one has to ask where the statesmanship has gone? In fact, we should suspect that a kind of cynicism has eaten away much that is good in Washington. It is a cynicism that realizes that ours is an age of advertisement and publicity, of entertainment and mediocrity. A successful politician only needs to strike a pose, to speak effectively, to bolster confidence and appear to be doing something "positive."
I am reminded of a passage in the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. "Ours is the age of advertisement and publicity," wrote this unappreciated Danish critic of spiritual insincerity. In his essay, "The Present Age," Kierkegaard described a process of "leveling" in which greatness (intellectual and spiritual) is to be gradually done away with and replaced with an all-encompassing mediocrity. "In order that everything should be reduced to the same level [i.e., the tendency of democracy], it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom ... a mirage - and that phantom is the public."
Today's obsession with polling results is suggestive. In ancient times they examined the entrails of sheep and goats to decide great issues in politics and war. Today they use "that phantom" the public for the same purpose. Kierkegaard was keen to point out the danger in this approach. The individual is real, he explained. The solitary man is concrete. But what is the public? Kierkegaard suggested there is no such thing as the public. "There are parties and they are concrete," he admitted. "But the public is a monstrous nothing."
As I watched our politicians play before the cameras last week, it crossed my mind that the public might be an imaginary mirror in which modern political narcissists admire themselves. So caught up in this imaginary mirror and its supposed majesty, our lemming-like leaders unwittingly leave unscathed the substance of their concerns. In other words, they merely apply to symptoms or surface images that can readily find reflection in the Great Mirror.
It is interesting to note that Kierkegaard also called into question the reality of the press. This is an amusing thought, especially after reading Bernie Goldberg's recent book, Bias, in which he exposes leading media figures as frauds whose wooden heads are filled with shallow political platitudes. To be sure, Kierkegaard admitted that the press is real insofar as it represents party interests. Aside from this, however, he doubted its imagined substance, i.e., he cast doubt on the press's supposed objectivity, concern for truth, insight, etc., which is largely a sham as Goldberg so strikingly proved. But the "press" is not the only sham. Perhaps in the age of advertisement and publicity there are interlocking shams extending throughout the state and the economy: things that are fervently believed in, like stocks or paper currencies or quarterly earnings statements - that have also become transformed by the regime of leveling, the regime of the public.
For Kierkegaard the unrealities and imposters of modernity are due to the way our consciousness has been flooded and corrupted by publicity and advertisement. This flood has created a mirage, an imaginary mirror in which we see ourselves falsely reflected. Were he alive today, Kierkegaard would argue that advertising and publicity has warped our intelligence as it has distorted our perceptions. And now we come to a national security crisis like no other. It is alleged that al Qaeda operatives are plotting to murder four million Americans by using weapons of mass destruction in their next major attack. How will the media handle this information? How will it distort the national security process while continuing to foster that illusion, that imaginary mirror - the public - which so obsesses our "statesmen"?
Of course, as Kierkegaard suggested, the press is a monstrous nothing in its own right: what a social scientist might call an "aggregate hypostatization," i.e., the erroneous awarding of human attributes to something that is not human at all. If the press is human, then it is human only in the sense that a mob is human. The renowned scientist, Gustav Le Bon, once wrote: "By the mere fact he forms part of an organized crowd, a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization. Isolated, he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian - that is, a creature acting by instinct." According to Le Bon "a crowd ... can never accomplish acts demanding a high degree of intelligence." And here we return full circle to Kierkegaard's suspicion regarding democracy's leveling tendency. Democracy is all about crowds, is it not? Le Bon tells us that the crowd (in this case, "the press") "can only bring to bear ... those mediocre qualities which are the birthright of every average individual...."
The loss of excellence is the real question, after all. We are interested in what the government will do to prevent a catastrophic attack on the United States. We are looking for excellence in politics and war. We seek to find anti-terrorist geniuses. Surely they exist. Surely they can be found. But what chance is there of finding them, of elevating them to office at the expense of so many "little" people who would be understandably enraged and aggrieved at the thought that they, after all, are not as great as suggested by that imaginary mirror they love so well - the public.
Alas, a sharp critic will immediately know what to make of politicians like Bill and Clinton, Tom Daschle and John McCain. Here are actors who cannot step away from that imaginary mirror. Having lost touch with reality, seeing themselves reflected in a fiction (i.e., the public), they become exemplars of fiction. This is politically workable only because everyone around them is, to some extent or another, hypnotized and focused upon the non-substantial, the imaginary instead of the real. (For those who need to be nudged awake, "the real" is what happened on Sept. 11, and what may soon happen again if we don't change our ways.)
Every political cynic under the current regime knows that "presentational effectiveness" (i.e., good advertising and effective publicity) is the path to success. What they do not admit is that putting one's emphasis on "presentational effectiveness" now usurps sane policy in favor of plausible madness. As an example of this, look at our immigration policies in which we let thousands of suspect foreigners from hostile regions flood the country without an effective mechanism for tracking them. Or what about the shrinking of the U.S. Army down to ten overstretched and undersupplied divisions. In this regard one must repeat a simple fact: namely, that a country with ten army divisions used be called "Holland" or "Sweden." But now a country with ten army divisions is called a superpower. Not only that, it is called the "lone superpower." Here we see what advertisement and publicity can achieve. After more than a generation of "presentational effectiveness" a nation (in reality a misunderstood picnic) is considered a superpower if we continually advertise its superpower status. Never mind that this superpower hasn't tested a nuclear weapon in a decade. Never mind that its ICBMs are obsolete, its civil defense nonexistent, its counter-intelligence laughable and its National Missile Defense a pipedream! In fact, our Cold War victory over Russia (following our dismal showing in Southeast Asia and Africa) was due to "glasnost," which was merely the Kremlin's word for advertising and publicity. Then came books like The End of History and The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The world of finance followed with its own equivalent: a decade of bullishness. "What goes up must come down," was said to be a fairy tale for children. But in some things children are wiser than adults. Last year the recession began. We are determined, it seems, to advertise and publicize our way out of it. First the downturn was denied. Then it was over before it began. Perhaps this dubious recovery was one of those monstrous nothings - like the press, the public, or the political hierarchy.
Reality and appearance are not one in the same. The secret that corrupt politicians have always clung to - their golden key as it were - is the secret of simulating sincerity and playing the patriot. The purpose of this simulation (or is it dissimulation?) is to present the public with a statesmanship that is more palatable than authentic statesmanship. This is the shortcut that corrupt minds are always tempted to take. It is commonly known as "the easy way out." Authentic statesmanship is never easy. It is full of hard turns, bitter necessities and controversial stands. But a knavish politician is untroubled. After all, his policy is not statesmanship. He craves high office as a palliative to chronic vacuity.
It was Friedrich Nietzsche who first realized that in the age of advertisement and publicity, the genius of self-promotion - the genius of the actor - was bound to take and hold first place. Nietzsche pointed to Richard Wagner, the originator of "music drama." He said that Wagner was not a great composer at all, but a great actor. A few decades later Jacques Barzun had a further insight. Wagner was not alone in being a skilled self-promoter and artistic demagogue who made use of advertisement and publicity to mythologize his image before the public. Karl Marx and Charles Darwin did the same thing in different ways. If we dared to update the critique offered by Nietzche and Barzun, we would begin by noting that the brilliant second-raters (Darwin, Marx and Wagner) not only usurped music, social science and the origins of man, but showed the way for the third and fourth-rate men who now dominate art, science and social theory with the ugly, the erroneous and the absurd. The poison of advertisement and publicity in an age of mass-mindedness cannot be underestimated. The universities and the art galleries drip with this poison, just as Congress and the CIA remain drugged and delusional under its influence. Industrious frauds and imposters are encountered at every turn. Nietzsche's description of Wagner as an "actor," therefore, has a wider relevance because this description applies to nearly all the parts and branches of our culture - even to the church and state (which are supposed to stand above the culture and offer it direction if not discipline). So let us analogize by way of Nietzshe's essay, The Case of Wagner.
According to Nietzsche, "One is an actor by virtue of being ahead of the rest of mankind in one insight: what is meant to have the effect of truth must not be true." This formulation is credited to Francois Joseph Talma, a celebrated French actor (1763-1826). Talma's idea, said Nietzsche, "contains the whole psychology of the actor; it also contains - we need not doubt it - his morality."
In the age of advertisement, publicity and entertainment: isn't it true that the commercial presentation along with the feature presentation is better than reality? In fact, the entire entertainment medium fosters the illusion of a "reality" more interesting and engaging than reality. It was Kierkegaard who warned us that reality is "prosaic" and therefore infinitely problematic for those who are easily dissuaded from truth by boredom. Now that we are more thoroughly soaked in advertisements, publicity and entertainment than in Kierkegaard's time, is it any wonder that society fends off boredom by compulsively imitating third-rate art? The real trouble comes, however, with the rising action of a "War on Terror" and a shaky economy based on fiat money. What if American businessmen and statesmen followed Talma's dictum: what is meant to have the effect of truth must not be true? Is it possible that this is the reason for our present corruption? Is it possible that we have preferred "success" as something found in other people's eyes, in that imaginary mirror called "the public"? Is it possible that we have sought something that has the effect of truth without regard for what is really true? Asked another way: how else will the philosophers of the future explain the incredible farce that now plays out in Washington with such dreadful consequence? I fear we have not understood the Christian teaching that the first shall be last and the last shall be first; that the man who gives up his life will save it and the man who tries to save his life will lose it. Contrary to today's received ideas, the hazard of our moral condition is not overcome by a Machiavellian technique that outwits itself. If we want to be at our best we must face the worst. Only by courageously accepting our smallness and feebleness can we attain greatness. Yet if we continue to think of greatness as seeing our reflection in a monstrous nothing (i.e., in the eyes of the public or history), then we will become monstrous nothings in ourselves.
Nietzsche's Case of Wagner offers us one additional insight worth mentioning. It has to do with the relation between greatness, authenticity and decadence. Nietzsche wrote, "great success, success with the masses no longer sides with those who are authentic - one has to be an actor to achieve that." In an age of advertisement and publicity, a plausible presentation is sufficient when authenticity becomes irrelevant to success. "In declining cultures," wrote Nietzsche, "wherever the decision comes to rest with the masses, authenticity becomes superfluous, disadvantageous, a liability." We can see that the emergence of the actor into politics has produced a crisis.
This leads me to comment on the country's financial situation. Writing about quarterly earnings reports the March 22 edition of FinancialSense.com, Jim Puplava wrote: "Some have likened it to a play with ... stage, props, and actors." As it turns out, the economy can be no different from the polity. If music, art and politics are degraded by advertising and publicity, why should the economy be any different? Those who manage the economy are born and raised in the same cultural milieu. They are therefore subject to the same corruption. Therefore, key financial "actors" discovered their own version of Talma's formulation: what increases a stock's value has nothing to do with the stock's actual value. Profitability is only important in a presentational sense. As Jim noted, "what investors now hear, see, or read as earnings is still an illusion. The 'new' earnings numbers no longer reflect the bottom line. They have become the creative figment of imagination from the actors."
On January 25 Jim wrote a piece with the title "Breakdown: Greed, Complexity, Conflicts of Interest and The Moral Hazard." Therein he pointed to Kmart and Enron's bankruptcy as symptomatic of a growing system-wide problem. "The integrity of our financial system is breaking down," he explained. "Numbers on [company] financial statements can no longer be taken at face value. Why? Because the numbers on the income and balance sheet may appear to mean one thing, when in reality, they may mean something entirely different."
Dishonesty in big business, like dishonest stewardship in national security policy, is bound to have tragic consequences for millions of people. It was the thesis of the famed German scholar Max Weber that the Protestant ethic was somehow responsible for the productive, progressive economy that developed mainly in Protestant countries during the 19th century. Weber pointed out that all great nations since antiquity have had businessmen, but most were no better than pirates and robbers. Honesty was not a tremendous sticking point, and honest folk were not encouraged to enter business until the Protestant idea of a financial "calling" came to the fore. The resulting environment of stable trust and good faith was the basis for economic experiments and successes that were impossible in earlier times. If Weber's suspicions were right: a disinterested money-making imperative, accepted by honorable people as an honorable calling, is essential to the functioning of a great economy. According to Weber, "The universal reign of absolute unscrupulousness in the pursuit of selfish interests by the making of money has been a specific characteristic of precisely those countries whose bourgeois-capitalist development, measured according to Occidental standards, has remained backward."
Certainly there have been successful frauds and pirates. Pointing a gun in someone's face can put money in your pocket. Defrauding investors can make you rich. Yet there is danger in it. And taking a larger view of the matter, a successful financial system cannot long base itself on fraud or piracy. At some point in time the victim becomes exhausted, the society collapses from demoralization; and then the robbers must denounce their criminal associates (e.g., Stalin) to survive, or else they must denounce the criminal system itself (e.g., Soviet communism) and start over with a new scheme of robbery.
In conclusion: whether we are looking at the scam that is modern art, the scandal that is modern politics or the little green notes that say "IN GOD WE TRUST" - the age of advertisement and publicity cannot continue much longer with the kind of excesses we have seen in recent years. The Bible says that the "truth will set you free" (even though it will cost you an upset stomach). At present our economy isn't sound, the terrorists aren't defeated and the country is not safe because we have believed in "monstrous nothings" - as Kierkegaard called them - and we have preferred that which is pleasing and plausible to hard truth. Today's false situation must give way. Either we change our hearts or we lose our prosperity, our country and perhaps even our lives.
