Black Op Blowback

Back in the early 1990s I did some work at an ad agency in New York where Roger Ailes of NewsCorp was also a client, and I remember him walking around in shirt and tie and, unless I’m mistaken, suspenders. Even then a whiff of brimstone wafted after him as he padded along the carpeted halls, jowls a-quiver. Years later (during the long Clinton witchhunt, in fact) I wrote for a lousy Saturday night TV drama and discovered, halfway through the season, that the rest of the staff were decidedly right wing in their political views. This is where I first heard the phrase “perception management.” This bland phrase refers to the art of the big lie, which men like Roger Ailes have developed into an elaborate science, moving the goalposts a bit further along from where Josef Goebbels left them back in the mid-1940s. I first heard the phrase during an otherwise boring exchange with a network executive whose college-bound son was considering a major in “perception management.” The father was proud of this prudent choice - lying, to him, was clearly a “growth” industry.

The term “perception management” was actually coined - surprise, surprise - by the US military. Here’s the DOD definition: “Actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning as well as to intelligence systems and leaders at all levels to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviors and official actions favorable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.” The upshot couldn’t be clearer - the “psy-ops” techniques developed after World War II to subvert regimes we didn’t like have now taken root in domestic soil where they are destroying the basic agreements that make civic life possible.

I thought of all this after reading Andrew S. Taylor’s comprehensive piece on Ayn Rand and the shell game practiced by the “libertarians.” Together with the Neocons, the libertarians have done much to undercut the possibility for civic discourse in America today, tying progressive forces into knots of sputtering, ineffective rage. One wonders how long this “gaming” of the civil discourse will produce the desired outcome, but to date there’s no reason to think the tactic is on the wane.

If, as Taylor points out, the libertarians are brazen liars, their cousins the NeoCons are brazen and condescending liars. Their elevated self-regard makes their delusions that much harder to locate, much less pierce. The Neocons MUST lie…and they must lie for OUR benefit. It would be pointless for us to try to understand this necessity because we are not among the select few who have the fortitude to look at the world as it actually is. We are too stupid to comprehend, for example, the social benefits of hatred and destruction, how the hatred generated by the demonized opponent is actually what sustains social cohesion. Behind William Kristol’s boyish smile lies the endless arrogance of truths that only he and his closest friends are capable of bearing.

It’s easy to miss the naked aggression of this kind of bad faith. Lying is a form of aggression that tends to escalate toward overt violence. If you lie to someone today chances are you’ll want to incarcerate them tomorrow…and not long after you incarcerate them you will begin to experience the urge to eliminate them altogether. I think of this whenever I see a hapless democrat allowing himself to be lied to on some talk show, rising to take the bait with no loss of civility, no real protest, meek as a lamb.

I would like to hear from someone versed in Game Theory about how to defang this beast. My suspicion is that the short term advantages that lying confers on the liar prove illusory over the long term. Inexorably, the endless manipulation of others begins to distort our own perceptions of the world. Here the Buddhist picture of mind shows its sophistication. The rules that govern our actions, from a Buddhist perspective, are pragmatic ones. It’s not, for example, that lying with malice violates some Kantian norm about treating others as ends rather than means (although it certainly does) - it’s that lying with malice tends to distort the way we perceive the world and our relationship with it. Broadly speaking, lying re-inforces our sense of separation from others such that the compulsion to lie gains ever more strength until we lose sight completely of the truth. While you enjoy a short term tactical advantage over your truth-telling adversaries, over time you lose in ways you are perhaps not even aware of. You are transformed into a lesser being and at the same time you are slowly consumed by the endless opposition you have energized within your own increasingly isolated realm. Enter Macbeth.

It makes no sense to engage with someone speaking in bad faith. It doesn’t help them and it doesn’t help you. Despite their arrogance, these people are children, and they must be treated with the patience children require when they engage in self-destructive behaviors. The presence of bad faith should patiently be made the explicit topic of the discussion. Didn’t Habermas write extensively about this? Why does the left have such a difficult time bringing its actual knowlege to bear on the debate? “The best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity,” as Auden wrote.

In closing I’d like to propose Simone Weil as an antidote to Ayn Rand and quote from her astonishing essay, The Illiad, Poem of Might: “The true hero, the real subject, the core of the Iliad, is might. That might which is wielded by men rules over them, and before it man’s flesh cringes. The human soul never ceases to be modified by its encounter with might, swept on, blinded by that which it believes itself able to handle, bowed beneath the power of that which it suffers…Might is that which makes a thing of anybody who comes under its sway. When exercized to the full, it makes a thing of man in the most literal sense, for it makes him a corpse…From the power to transform him into a thing by killing him there proceeds another power…that which makes a thing of him while he still lives.”

Tough times approach.

Guy Zimmerman