Was Qanon Right?

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but where does QAnon go for the apology? You know, QAnon, which believes in lots of really ridiculous things like, you know, Democrats eating babies, but they were kind of harping a lot on the idea that the elites are running this pedophile ring. And I made jokes about them. I also made jokes after the Epstein thing happened originally that were on the idea of, well, you know, obviously, there was some smoke there will now with all that’s come out in the last couple of weeks, it’s a little more than smoke.

Bill Maher

There’s some of Maher’s schtick going on there, but there’s also something he is pointing to that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately regarding the “mind” of the demos. On an instinctual level, the demos knows something isn’t right. Are they wrong? I don’t think so. But while their instincts are often right, its thinking and judgment mostly aren’t. The demos are in pain, and it doesn’t understand what’s causing it, and even though they too easily accept crackpot diagnoses and snake oil cures, the demos are not getting an explanation that makes better sense to them from America’s establishment intellelctuals.

So let’s talk a little about what Maher is getting a whiff of here. I think it might be a key to finding our way to sanity in the future.

What might sanity look like? Well a sane society is one in which the instincts of the demos and the thinking of educated elites are more aligned than not. How do they get aligned? They must have a shared sense of a moral order. Our dilemma lies in that as a society, while most Americans of good will deep down share the same moral instincts. But the way that the demos and educated elites articulate those moral instincts is utterly alien to one to the other. (This is the Jonathan Haidt thesis.) Sanity lies in finding a way to draw on what’s deepest in the shared decency of all Americans to form a united front to resist the insanity that otherwise is engulfing us. Sanity requires that there be an organic interdependence between the demos and elites, the less educated and the well educated, between the rural and urban. By interdependence I do not mean uniformity, but rather real difference held in creative tension. What we have now is complete dissociation, and it’s no wonder that the world has gone mad. That’s what happens when things get so out of balance .

So where does the responsibility for developing a solution lie? I would argue it lies primarily with our public intellectuals—the folks in the universities and the media. They are not doing it now because they care more about their careers, which requires that they be more attuned to what is fashionable and cutting edge within their own bubble, than caring about what might actually be helpful in restoring some semblance of national sanity. So while the demos might suffer from inadequately clear bubble thinking, so do our educated elites in a different way. So let me spend a few minutes defending that assertion:

Most of our public intellectuals’ thinking is warped because of the way it is for the most part inured to the logic of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix or TCM. Nobody in our Liberal establishment challenges those premises. They might not like this or that particular feature of the TCM, but the premises are never questioned. And so even though most of our Liberal establishment intellectuals don’t think of themselves personally as nihilists, they just blithely accept that the rules of our politics and economics, no matter how nihilistic they might be, are the only rules possible. And then they get upset that someone like Trump or Musk behaves like a nihilist. Well what do they expect? Why shouldn’t they act like nihilists if the fundamental architecture of the system they serve is nihilistic?

This is why Liberals, while well-intentioned, are intellectually incoherent. The best of them are genuinely appalled at the sytem’s cruelty. Why can’t we all just get along? Well, getting along is an app that just doesn’t work on this Operating System’s software. And the only solution in the long run is to change the OS.

But such radical thinking is not possible for Liberals because the Liberal app runs on the TCM OS. They can’t think outside of its constraints. For instance, Liberalism, is incapable of such a critique because of the Liberal app programs a commitment to individual freedom and the right for each person to determine for him or herself what is moral or not. That’s how a free society works—who am I to criticize the personal nihilism and transhumanist beliefs of so many of the finance and tech oligarchs? It’s a free country, right? Who am I to judge? And besides guys like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman don’t think of themselves as nihilists, and it’s not my business to care whether they are or not. This refusal to negatively judge other people’s values, unless, of course, they are traditional values, makes it impossible for them to respond adequately to what’s happening.

So the key here is that the Liberal app’s focus on the individual makes it virtually impossible for Liberal intellectuals to get their heads around the fact that while nihilism may or may not be the personal belief system of individual oligarchs; it’s unambiguously the logic of the system they serve. You can’t critique the system if your thinking is completely circumscribed by the way you’ve been programmed by the system.

So it’s extremely difficult for Liberal establishment intellectuals to understand that the personal beliefs of the tech oligarchs are irrelevant; what matters is the de facto nihilism of the system whose nihilistic program they are advancing with little or no resistance. The system is confident that no resistance can be successful so long as everybody’s thinking proceed from its fundamental nihilistic premises. And so essential to those premises is that people who have traditional values or religious beliefs are emotionally needy nostalgists who want to live in a fantasy world rather than in the hyperreal world that the TCM now defines as Reality.

This is where our Liberal intellectuals get brain cramps: They insist that everybody has the individual right to adopt their own belief system—and they will defend that to the death. They’re not against religion. People should believe whatever they want so long as they don’t impose it on others. But their focus on individual freedom of belief leads them to fail to understand how this focus on individual freedom serves the nihilistic purposes of the TCM to atomize resistance.

The culture war is an app that is essential to the architecture of the TCM. It keeps Liberals who more or less accept the premises of the TCM fighting with those conservatives who don’t, and in doing so keeps people of good will divided and so preemptively neutralizes resistance to the TCM’s nihilistic objectives. You folks keep fighting about abortion, guns, and transcending the gender binary over there, while we do our nihilistic thing undisturbed over here.

This is why the Matrix metaphor is so powerful. Everybody, perhaps most especially our Liberal establishment intellectuals, thinks they are free thinkers liberated from the hidebound superstitious nonsense of the ancestors. Science is real, and their thinking is data-based. Anything anybody thought or experienced before the year 1600 is obsolete. No need to spend time with any of that. Reading history or premodern philosophy is a nice hobby, like collecting old coins or stamps, but has nothing to do with us now or our hopes for the future. And that way of thinking is largely accepted as conventional wisdom throughout American society. But is it wisdom or is it simply what we have been brainwashed to think insofar as we have accepted our acculturation within the TCM?

Unless they’re unusual in their ability to question their presuppositions, our Liberal establishment intellectuals have no idea how their thinking is programmed by the system’s nihilism. They have no idea how they’ve been programmed to think they are thinking freely when in fact they are thinking exactly what the system has programmed them to. And establishment Liberalism, whether Left or Right Liberalism, or the Capitalist or Socialist Liberalism of the intellectuals who profess any form of rationalist materialism, is more deeply aligned with the programming of the TCM than the thinking, muddled though it might be, of the demos and its religiosity. The feet of the demos are more grounded on the earth, even if their heads are spinning. The feet of our deracinated public intellectuals are grounded nowhere and their heads are programmed by the logic of Techno-Capitalism Matrix. The more successful they are in their careers, the more deeply installed is the TCM’s programming in shaping their thinking.

The demos votes for Trump for reasons most in the Liberal establishment cannot understand, so the establishment dismisses it as racism and homophobia. That’s there, of course, but only because it’s what they grew up with and gives them a feeling of stability at a time when they feel, rightly, that the rug has been pulled up from under them.

And, sure, Qanon is a bizarre belief system that has very tenuous relationship with factual reality, but it’s born of a deep instinctual sense that something isn’t right, and in that they are not wrong. And maybe this is what Billl Maher was beginning to realize. Whatever else might be whack about the conspiracy-theory-prone demos, they are passionately anti-nihilistic, while our whatever-floats-your-boat Liberal intellectuals are not. For this reason, while Liberals might have their facts right, they are more dangerously wrong than the demos. Their thinking might appear to be more sane and logical and reality-based, but not really if their thinking is nothing more than an algorithm programmed by the logic of the TCM.