Living in Culture

People complain about “mandates” imposed on them to cope with the resurgence of covid virus.  At the same time,  people dread and complain about climate change—though the earth has been changing all along. Media always emphasizes human control.

Culture  makes things seem stable.  From  infancy we grow up in culture, not nature,  although we confuse the two.  Even many moralistic environmentalists prefer culture to nature.

white supremacy

White  supremacy in this country apparently  fears that minorities—especially blacks and Jews—will “replace’  them,   as in the Charlottesville torchlight chant “Jews will not replace us.” 

“Replace” in this use means fear of extermination—economic competition—and death anxiety.   it seems to me that casual use of “existential”  has increased in mainstream news writing: whether the pandemic or economic circumstances—or both—is responsible.

This sounds to explain this scapegoating that  always accompanies fantasies of supremacy.  At the same time, ambivalently, “replace”  means that you regard yourself as superior: as the culture hero.  Naturally, supremacy—however .buried—means you  you can skip  vaccination for ambivalent reasons.   You’re too strong to need it;  and you don’t like to be dependent on elites or scientists who after all invented the vaccination.

It’s a hysterical moment that Trump and social media popularized.

Another way of looking at it  is to see that cultural certainties are growing stale.   At least until noon certainties form,  people are nervous.   I remember being struck by Sebastian Hafner’s discovery at age 7 in newsprint that Germany had lost the first world war—and doing his homework with the sounds of gunfire registering the disintegration of Victorian Germany outside the house in 1920s Berlin.

Makes you think that the world is changing.

Advertising and Self-Esteem

All is advertising.

I’m thinking of advertising as a morale pump. Ads convey information, but they also boast in order to boost. Not only is the advertised product is “the best,” but you’re the best for using it. Striving for self-esteem—striving to be heroic—is the way we’re built. Ads use heroism to make you feel better about yourself. Amusingly, when the pump starts to wear out, ads put down false heroism.

That is, advertising is part of personal life too. “Social” media, for example, advertises your life. It gives your life purpose, order, and above all, makes your life sound better than other lives. Viewed this way, it’s not corporations whose ads give you a boost, but something in us.

Which is best? Like heroism, advertising is competitive. Insurance companies compete, so do wrinkle creams and laxatives. Hollywood and TV heroes compete, as in the notion of superheroes, which are up-to-the-minute in style and stronger than last year’s model.

Of course countries compete too. After all, propaganda is advertising on national scale. The US is known for conquering the frontier, rescuing the world from Fascism in world wars, and winning the Cold War. As a result, the country claims to be a “superpower.”

How do you tell which hero is better? You compete to win. You have a war or sports or a fashion show. Business competes in markets—especially stock markets, which pit reputations against one another: which takes advertising. Just as ads beat competitors by comparing them unfavorably, heroes trash losers. To prove their heroism, everybody needs an enemy. As Reagan quipped to Gorbachev in a lighter moment: it’s a shame that we don’t have enemies from outer space to unite us.

Everybody needs enemies to define heroism. Part of the reason for the “chasm” that divides Americans politically these days is the need for enemies, even though we explain the divide by imagining that the ex president Trump is a superhero able to bend vast crowds to his will. Supposedly his TV background advertised his brand with mysterious force.

The motive behind heroism is rescue. Everybody wants to be rescued. Advertisements offer hope. They promise to rescue you from depression or even self-hatred. Romance rescues you. Ads promise to rescue you from hurricanes, diseases, and old age—ultimately from death. Cancer hospitals offer you more life, but so do burgers and cheese and other foods. Ads, especially perhaps TV ad’s, use romance to boost self by offering family. You become godlike as progenitor, creating more life.

Letting It All Hang Out

One afternoon, when I started teaching at the University in the 1970s, a student rang my doorbell. He was a stranger.  Some weeks before, he had been painting a room in his second floor apartment in South Hadley.  When he had changed out all of his painting duds, a high school girl on the sidewalk caught sight of his  nudity.  The girl had told her mother, and Dad had led the family to court.  

A judge sentenced the painter to a year of weekends at the county jail, with a police record.

I sympathized with the student.   Even if he were an exhibitionist, the punishment seemed excessive. So I agreed to write about the case if I could get an editor interested. 

The student told me that the dad of the family was friends with a gas station owner in South Hadley who had egged him on.   I spoke to the gas station owner, who gruffly brushed me off and told me to talk to Dad.

Dad warned me not to come to his house, so  we ended up at the gas station, cooped up in my VW bug. Dad had gone to the local police, he said, because the women in the family had been so upset by the daughter’s sight of the student’s  nakedness.  I had the impression Wife was hysterical. Her anxiety upset Dad, he insisted. After the hippie, sexually liberated 60s, I suspected that the idea of the student’s nakedness was a show of masculinity, and Dad felt challenged by it. 

Dad and I had only begun talking when Dad noticed a  magazine in the visor of my car. It listed my address as UMass.  Dad seized on it as the explanation of everything.  He saw all professors as the enemy:  prejudiced and condescending. His voice hardened with suspicion and guarded ferocity.

In Dad’s eyes the interview was a plot—and he may have been right insofar as I was naïvely unprepared for the radical disconnection of our imaginations.  The Vietnam War was still raging, Nixon was lying,  and I had strong convictions about the Vietnam war. We broke off the interview.

As this happens, editors weren’t interested in the story.   A year went by before an editor contacted me and asked if I were still interested in writing about the case.  By then, I had lost touch with the student, and declined. Perhaps six months afterward, the student came to my door and inquired about the story.  I made excuses.

Today public opinion, from “Me Too” to Alex Jones, is seriously conflicted.   Yet  the protocols of truth have relaxed.  Philosophers such as Harry G. Frankfurt win awards for analyzing “bullshit” (2005).  Trump reminded us is that truth or falsehood matters less then feeling good about yourself: narcissism.  As he says in The Art of the Deal, “The final key to the way I promote is bravado.  I play to people’s fantasies .  .  . I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration.” On social media, it is tempting to use innocent exaggeration to make one’s own life better or worse than it really is. In other words, Truthful Hyperbole = Inflating reality to suit yourself.

Advertising is kind of bullshit.  And deep down, as narcissism, bullshit is a kind of self-advertising.

The Forbidden and Irresistible Word

When I was in junior high school in greater Boston rebellious souls wrote “Fuck You” on the boys’ room door (yes, we called it the boys’ room).  The principal met the challenge: he had all the boys stay after for an hour—he threatened detention every afternoon until the last day of school until the culprit confessed.  

That night at supper my folks asked me about mu school day.  I recounted the adventure of the afternoon.  I suppose I was curious to see how my parents would react since the word was so mysteriously  taboo, so I told them,  including the offensive words  To my surprise,  my father seriously warned me  that nobody should use the word,  especially in front of a woman (nod to my mother).

These days even girls at the bus stop use the word to salt their conversation.

“Shit” has become a bumper sticker,  and the N-Word, which used to be a  shared badge of identity, even affectionate, among Blacks in the 1960s,  has become terribly taboo. “Shit” and “asshole” reflect the shame humans feel that our life is based on killing and digesting other living things.   We’re  ambivalent about such aggression, glorifying military and superhero aggression while making it taboo. We depend on it every day.

Media will use the euphemistic “f-word” instead of the  forbidden word itself. “Fuck” has been one of the last taboos accepted in polite use. It’s really taboo.

My theory is that the idea of fucking stands for creating more life,  and this may be,  as  Ernest Becker says, “Whoever gets enough life?” including fucking and eating. the primary motivation of  living things. Who wants to be dead forever?

If you are specially generative, you are  heroic. The problem is that nobody is endlessly generative. In particular, ordinary people may not feel generative. This is especially true in a culture that is competitive about heroism.  Ordinary folks may wonder, “Is this all there is?” The self is haunted by depression or an awareness of failure.

In this sense use of “fucking” is like vitamins.  It can make you feel powerful: generative and heroic. But it’s an illusion.   Therefore culture tries to protect it.

Howling

Reading the New Yorker’s account of the Capitol insurgency (Jan. 25, 2021), I was struck by how many in the mob had no idea what to do once they had penetrated to the citadel of national power. The insurgents milled around looking for official scapegoats: enemies whose punishment could whisk away frustrations and fulfill desires. Somebody smeared excrement on the wall, as in a tantrum. No wonder those who believed in Q conspiracy theories raged against pedophiles—they felt like victimized children.

Had the leader (Trump) showed up with a plan for a coup, the mob would have perhaps carried out a coup. But the leader was half- hearted. He enjoys rousing crowds, but as with his tweeted insults, he was clever enough to push for the edge of criminality, but knows how to hold back to avoid serious punishment. He claims he was just joking, or hides behind ambiguity.

American class system represses those at the bottom, as in the Republican stonewall against the Bill to raise the minimum-wage. The anger at the bottom only comes out indirectly. If you enlist in the military, you don’t shout complaints at your officers, anymore than you risk firing by telling off your boss. One reason that cops are able to kill Blacks with near-impunity is to make Blacks afraid to demand their rights. Or justice.

In the New Yorker’s account, the Proud Boys—the insurgents most serious about a coup—met at a bar in the morning to drink beer. <>

The drinkers remind you that alcohol loosens inhibitions, and may stoke a barroom brawl. American culture associates the working poor blowing off steam with alcohol. In the Capitol, on January 6th, the mob was desperate to express themselves, trying out the seats of power, grumbling about enemies. As the morning drinkers put it, ‘We are going to own this town!’ one of them howled.’>>

One reason for Trump’s magnetism is his novel use of the presidency to express anger with impunity. Instead of being depressed, he invited working-class supporters to experience the thrill of their anger. As in the first days of World War I, the experience for working folks rushing to enlist was “freedom.”

Moral Aggression: cultural fantasies that made a comedy of errors fatal

(This is a reprint of an essay I did for Psychology Today, originally published July 20, 2013. I was writing In response to Trayvon Martin’s murder by George Zimmerman. The argument Is relevant to Donald Trump’s full-page newspaper ad calling for the execution of five Black teenagers later exonerated; and Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two protesters against police violence in Kenosha, Wisc. on Aug. 25, 2020,)

Were it not for the bullet in his heart, Trayvon Martin’s encounter with George Zimmerman would be a comedy of errors. As a stranger in street clothes packing a concealed weapon, Zimmerman had no business shadowing and challenging Martin—in fact a police dispatcher had just warned him to cool it. Zimmerman was literally looking for trouble, yet he misjudged the danger because Florida had put a pistol and the sinister “Stand-your-ground” law into his hands. Ironically, teen culture had put old-fashioned fists in Martin’s hands.

The problem is that both men were drawing on dangerous cultural fantasies. Emulating the heroic vigilante in American movies and lore, Zimmerman tried to live out a fatally unrealistic story. Instead of saving “his” neighborhood, he became a clownish bigshot getting a bloody nose and killing one of the neighbors he was supposed to be protecting—and an unarmed boy to boot. Whether he struck first or not, Martin too was acting out a cultural fantasy: the heroic black male fighting to survive racist mean streets. He had no idea he was suicidally confronting the sort of sinister concealed weapon that makes Florida an unsafe place to be.

Martin had as much reason to feel threatened as Zimmerman did, as he said in his phonecall to Rachel Jeantel. In legal terms, as Alafair Burke observed, if the court had pointed out that Martin was punching Zimmerman in self-defense, then the verdict could have been different. In fact it would reveal the dangerous absurdity of the neighborhood vigilante scenario. 

The incident escalated to hair-trigger fatality because each man was drawing on a cultural story that left out curiosity, inquiry, and negotiation. The fantasies excluded the imaginative sympathy–the “Hello, how are you?”—that is the basis of civility. In part they reflect the reliance on violence to stimulate thrills and chills and profits in entertainment. As media researcher George Gerbner found, one consequence is that heavy TV viewing will lead you to overestimate how dangerous your own neighborhood is.

The moralistic law-enforcement student who wanted to be a judge like his father seems to have imagined that law means enforcement, not talking through problems with strangers. The culture of young black males similarly prepares them to mistrust and fear a shadowy figure like Zimmerman, whether he was a cop or a potential mugger.  

So this is a story about a failure of civility—and the law—to control paranoia, hair-trigger reflexes, and fantasies of heroic force. What motivates the story and made it tragic is the combination of moral aggression and the allure of abandon.

Moral aggression ranges from petty hypocrisy and bullying to the systematic use of righteousness as a weapon to intimidate and kill. History quakes with murderous eruptions such as the Christian crusades, witchhunts, lynching, and all wars. But righteous malice can also be sly, as when politicians sanctimoniously punish the poor by cutting food stamps. 

Moral aggression is crucially entangled with self-esteem. In a sense it’s at the core of personality, as Karen Horney recognizes when she sees culture encoding demands or “shoulds” that from infancy start molding—and often warping—personalities. After all, mum and dad (culture) stuff you with a sense of “what is right” long before you’re know who are or can sort out your values. And people use “shoulds” against each other, which is one reason we fear dictators. When you put down someone who’s “wrong,” you feel “better,” pumping up your self-esteem. If you use moral aggression to exterminate “bad” others, as in Auschwitz or the Old Testament, you can even feel godlike.

The fantasy is most atrocious when it runs amok, as in witchhunts or ethnic cleansing. If you’re seething, the urge to throw off all inhibitions leads to rampage killing or “going postal.” But in American culture these days abandon is pervasive in movies, news, sports, and military ambitions. Shedding inhibitions is a style. Hence the copycat quality in many rampage killings. Our choices are always conditioned by culture. If you fly into a rage, you still have to choose how to act it out. Consciously or not, you need models. If everyone is fascinated by radical gun violence and you join the mayhem, your bigshot infamy commands the world’s attention.

But here’s the hook. Abandon is cruelly ambiguous. If losing control unleashes rage, it’s deplorable. Yet abandon can be seductive too. All sorts of cultural voices, from sports and warfare to advertising promise that if you could just throw off your inhibitions, you could tap some amazing resources in yourself: become a daring millionaire, an Olympic athlete, or an invincible gangster. In slang we say “Go for it!” Superman models this fantasy when he throws off his dorky Clark Kent duds and shows his superhero cape and jockstrap. This is the romance of abandon. Pro wrestling fakes it. Rampage killers live it.

The second ambiguity is that abandon has no obvious limit. How much is enough? Abandon is terrifyingly lethal when the twitch of a finger can trigger maximum violence and kill a child or the city of Hiroshima. George Zimmerman’s pistol supported fantasies of abandon. With a gun he had no reason to be cautious about the hoodied stranger he spotted. He didn’t realize that Trayvon Martin was also into abandon until his fist smashed Zimmerman’s nose. 

flirtation with berserk abandon is one marker of “bad boy” fantasies in pop culture, as the many extravagant and dead rappers illustrate. Trayvon Martin flirted with the bad boy role, suspended from school several times, and once challenged by cops over some ladies’ jewelry found in his backpack. In one cellphone snapshot he posed with a potted marijuana plant, and in another gave the camera the finger with both hands. He had no police record, and these details are harmless, yet they suggest the ambiguities of outlaw self-reliance and streetwise toughness modeled in male adolescent culture—and the corresponding readiness of officialdom to profile minority males.

Ironically, Zimmerman was more of a “bad boy” than Martin. In 2005, he was in trouble for assaulting a cop, and his ex-fiancee took out a restraining order against him. In his new moral watchdog identity, in a recording of a call to police, he growls about “fucking punks” and “these assholes, they always get away.” This is not the wise voice of the law. You might conclude that Zimmerman uses moral aggression to keep himself better under control. 

Let’s not forget the larger cultural picture. Zimmerman echoes the nation’s ambition to be a self-appointed “global policeman.” In American mythology. the neighborhood watch vigilante is akin to “the minute man.” Today, the watch is also an expression of the national security state that spies on its citizens as possible terrorists and mounts a manhunt against any whistle-blowing Snowdens who refuse to cooperate. 

Overreaction to threat has official support in the “Bush doctrine” that at any sign of threat, the US is justified in “shooting first and asking questions afterward.” The Bush/Cheney mentality recalls the Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, the policy of launching a counterstrike the second you spot a missile inbound. The invasion of Iraq cynically employed this mentality, striking with “shock and awe” to counter an imminent attack: a sickening lie that strirred up insurgent anarchy and killed over 100 thousand civilians before the global policeman was forced to withdraw.. Li

Like the “Bush doctrine,” Florida’s “Stand-your-ground” law assumes that any threat to your security warrants total violence. You can see this bizarre idea sanitized in the use of unaccountable drones to assassinate suspects today. No trial, no evidence, no appeal. Given human bungling, drones are as dangerous as Zimmerman’s gun, without which this would be a story about a bloody nose. 

Among those miscalculations is the death of innocents. Only in recent years have we had to face incontrovertible DNA evidence of wrongful imprisonment and judicial murder. But faced with DNA evidence, some prosecutors have repeatedly refused to reopen such cases, presumably because to avoid feeling crushed by guilt. After all, what could be more abominable than the suffering of innocent people condemned to terror and death? Moral aggression put Todd Cameron Willingham to death in Texas despite scientific testimony ignored on appeal. Governor Perry (later head of the energy department in the Trump administration), openly sabotaged the resulting investigation.

Conventional wisdom often behaves as if morality and abandon are self-evidently “natural.” In fact they can used like any other cultural tool or weapon.  Hours after the politically skewed Supreme Court voted to gut the voting rights act Governor Perry’s Texas leapt to pass a discriminatory voter ID law disguised as a means of foiling fraud—for which no evidence exists.

Texas police recently jailed18 year old Justin Carter on $500,000 bail because a Canadian woman vigilante tipped them that in a bantering Facebook discussion two months after the Newtown massacre, Carter had made a sarcastic joke about murdering schoolkids, parenthetically signaling (lol) and (j/k) = just kidding. The Canadian snoop discovered that Justin had apparently lived near an elementary school as a kid (!) The First Amendment is supposed to protect us from witch hunters. Did racism exacerbate the ignorance and callousness of the police and judges?

 In Justin Carter’s case, prosecutor Jennifer Tharp seems to be using moral aggression to look tough to nervous voters. In a culture that is scaring itself silly and looking for easy scapegoats, the temptation to cheap heroism is addictive. Yes, there are vicious criminals around us, on Wall Street and in uniforms as well as in dark alleys. But the Zimmerman fiasco, and the vigilante culture that contributed to that fiasco, aren’t punishing treacherous wealth and crooked power. Rather, they use bogus morality to pick on defenseless nobodies. Like all cultures in all eras, the US is greedy for heroes, and we manufacture them the way Guangdong province turns out shoes. In a dizzyingly ironic way Trayvon Martin has lost his life opening a window on the hallucinations of heroism in the new century.

 Again, keep in mind that abandon and moral aggression go together. And so Florida’s berserk “stand-your-ground” law goes hand in hand with a harsh minimum sentencing law. George Zimmerman the killer is innocent, whereas Marissa Alexander, a black woman who fired a harmless warning shot through the ceiling to hold off an abusive husband, goes to prison for twenty years. To cut off the doctrine of self-defense from its cultural context is asking for trouble—not to mention, unjust. If two armed Floridians felt threatened, stood their ground, and shot each other to death, would the solution be to start firing whenever you first spot a stranger? Would lawmakers support that paranoia?

 Disney World is not the only magic kingdom in Florida that thrives on illusions.

Resources mentioned in this essay:

Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil

Alafair Burke, “What you may not know about the Zimmerman Verdict: the Evolution of a Jury Instruction,” Huffington Post, July 15, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/becomeFan.php?of=hp_blogger_Alafair Burkehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=alafair-burkehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/users/login/

 Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth

Kirby Farrell, Berserk Style in American Culture

Kirby Farrell, The Psychology of Abandon

David Grann, “Trial by Fire: Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?” New Yorker, Sept. 7, 2009.   <<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

Michael J. Moore, “The Legacy” (documentary film about California’s Three Strikes law)

William Boardman, “Criminalizing Free Speech”

<< http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/18322-focus-criminalizing…

Victimhood and Self-Esteem

In a recent campaign rally in Georgia, President Trump labeled himself and his supporters victims. He insisted on the term “victims.”  Of course he meant that he was defeated in the presidential election by fraud—even though court after court has turned him down, demanding evidence. Commentators have argued that Trump has clung to the delusion because he can’t bear to lose, or he hopes to retain power for his Republican party.

But a deeper motive might lie in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Becker  argues that humans are the only animals  that can conceive of death and we protect ourselves from crippling anxiety by transforming culture into denial of death.  

You’ve probably noticed, for example, that television ads are all ultimately about symbolic immortality.  Whether it’s  medicine to cure disease or food to feed the appetite for more life, the ads emphasize romantic bonds and strength.  (A couple at their sexual peak, say, commands the most powerful and beautiful car—the car promising the most life.)

What about victimization?  After being the most powerful person in the  country,  you can see why Mr. Trump would associate defeat with death. And having considered  himself the most powerful person in American history,  you can see why he would see himself as a victim. His identification with victims could help to explain his campaign to have the innocent Central Park five and others put to death for brutalizing people.

But what about his supporters? Many of them, following his  lead, have denied the Covid virus. They have politicized masks and even denied that the pandemic is real. The present viral surge threatens the power of their denial. After all, the rightwing Trump  preaches individual strength and responsibility.  He snickers at “liberal” emphasis on compassion. But everybody is susceptible to illness; everybody dies.

Becker uses the term “symbolic immortality”  to capture the slipperiness of  denial.  To be a victim is to be unfairly hurt. The compensation is to be righteous.  And superior. Jihadi terrorists  invoke  the same sense of superiority in their use of “martyrdom”—dying to please God and be welcomed into heaven.

Victimhood magnifies the self.   And what could be more superior than the immortality of the gods?

Conspiracy as Heroic Purpose


The first year I worked in Germany, we met on American Jewish lad who’ve been living there for a year. I mentioned how impressive German culture was, thankful that it was democratic and no longer Nazi. The chap scolded me. His neighbors in Germany, he said, were as peaceful and productive as his neighbors at home in the US. Since I believe that people are mostly alike and good, I felt ashamed.

But I was ambivalent. History shows us people behaving with sadistic violence, at the same time they use cultural ideals trying to perfect themselves. But no life is perfect. If personality drives toward self-esteem, what do we do with actual failure and guilt? After Nazi victories in the west, Klemperer reports in his diary, Germans were satisfied to have the shame and depression off their defeat in World War I erased. With the Hitler cult, the victories created a sense of magical undoing. With their self-esteem assuaged, Germans had less enthusiasm for the invasion of Russia.

Once a German neighbor invited us over for a visit in order to show off her new humid and swanky swimming pool in the basement. Somehow the conversation touched on the Holocaust, and the woman became agitated. She made it clear that the subject was off-limits, saying something like she was fed up with hearing about German guilt for the Holocaust. It seemed to me she was boosting her self-esteem by identifying with the German nation, even as she was politely bragging about her swimming pool to the American visitors who had defeated the Germans in World War II.

I was intrigued that The New York Times (October 11th) reported that the “Q” conspiracy theory was “thriving” among German right-wingers. Not surprisingly, those who have embraced the Q fantasy are mostly from the former East Germany, where self-doubt and envy of the prosperous West Germany created an appetite for self-esteem.

The QAnon fantasy imagines Trump as a superhero battling forces within the government, “the deep state,” who are Satanists and pedophiles. The comic-book quality of the story gives riskless heroic purpose to the lives of believers. And the materials are ancient. The Jewish evil of the Deep State looks back to the blood libel of the Middle Ages (Jews supposedly killing Christian children to use their blood in matsos), even as Q’s antigovernment themes give new life to the deep South’s hatred of federal government going back before the US Civil War. More recently, as far right media has become prominent in the US, Q’s emphasis on the sexual abuse of children recalls the Satanic Abuse story in the 1980s and 90s.

Q thrives on the peculiar hero-worship that Trump inspires in some people. But Q also depends on what Canettti calls crowds and power. As in a cult, you join the belief system with others who expand your power: Q’s motto is “Where we go one, we go all.” Like all conspiracy theories, Q makes believers elite: the special knowledge makes the believer superior to everybody else.

“Q always says: ‘Trust the plan. You have to wait. Trump’s people will take care of it,’” a researcher said. “If Trump does not invade Germany, then some might say, ‘Let’s take the plan in our own hands.’”

Echoes of the messianic Hitler. Covid scares people, but for some, the virus intensifies threats to identity. Not Hitler or Trump but the conspiracy story itself rescues believers by providing heroic purpose.

Dinner with the Singapore Air Force

The Mouse Ran Up the Clock

In 2006, when I was working in Singapore, an officer in the local Air Force invited me to dinner.   President Bush and Cheney had just invaded Iraq on the pretext that Saddam had instigated 9/11. Cheney had recently been CEO of Halliburton, and maps of Iraq had figured in a secret meeting of oil executives in the vice president’s office. Things were unsettled in the Middle East and there was anxiety about fuel scarcity and cost: fear that “the low hanging fruit”  had been picked.  

So during dinner in Singapore I argued that the Bush/ Cheney invasion of Iraq was a dishonest imperialistic attempt to capture one of the last top oil reserves in the world using 9/11 as a bold  smash-and-grab maneuver unlike, say, the secretive grab of Iranian oil with the installation of Mr Pahlavi as Shah.

The Air Force officer disapproved of my grumbling about the invasion of Iraq.   Singapore is a wealthy island the size of a golf course, and very vulnerable. What I didn’t realize was that the officer was looking ahead to China’s hegemonic ambitions in Southeast Asia and the world.

Lo, not two decades later, China has become on economic and authoritarian powerhouse.   China has subsumed the Tibetans, Uighurs, and Hong Kong,  and global influence through the checkbook diplomacy,  including “The Belt and Road” initiative. As the country expands, the reliance on technology for social control is breathtaking—see  the previous post, “Measuring Up.”

Now President Trump seems to be confronting China with his tariff wars and lately skirmishes over the Covid flu, 5G, TikTok, and weChat. Supposedly the threat—even all of the juvenile TikTok—is that the company gathers data on naïve Americans which the communist government can command.

The shuddering joke is that American corporations have been gathering big data without limits.  The Internet has become a market for big data. Social media such as Facebook and Twitter pretend that truth matters, but their real business is buying and selling big data, which gives pricing power to advertising. Unlike European countries,  the US has few laws protecting privacy. Politicians are free to use big data in their propaganda and outright lies.

Measurement is a tool. The computer makes  measurement a powerful tool. As population grows, science itself becomes a tool.  As the powerful become more anxious about the political imbalance, the  appetite for newer and more powerful tools seems inexhaustible. How will it be used?  Is the Singapore Air Force right?