Ideas Are Not Defeated By Better Ideas – Part II: Conditioning
Some years ago, it was easy to forgive the more libertarian-minded on the right for believing in a free market of ideas. Most of us believed in such a thing anyway, at least to some limited degree. Like all free markets, however, such a place for ideas is and has always been purely theoretical. Or, less charitably, but more appropriately, fantastical.
If Only You Knew Better: the liberal presumption that has so utterly convinced the managerial class into madness. Take any divisive topic, political or non-political. The left wing riots didn’t happen in 2020, and even if they did happen, they were good. A virus with a less than a .001% mortality rate for the general population justified destroying American lives, destroying the American economy, and forcing an experimental, barely-tested form of gene therapy on a population that probably had natural immunity already. Elections can’t possibly be stolen in liberal democracies, except by Nazis and their GOP supporters. Boomers strolling around the Capitol building was worse than three thousand people crushed to death beneath falling concrete and rebar in the heart of Manhattan.
It may seem like broken record to continually return to 2020, but the point can’t be hammered home enough: the country as we knew it ceased to exist that year. The pretenses that had kept America going through the Bush and Obama years were violently ripped down and set aside. The ruling elite and their white liberal drones embraced a level of madness that the elite are finding, at least with regard to the virus hysteria, can’t easily be walked back. Now, half of them are calling for a war with a nuclear power, and a loud minority seem to think assassinating heads of state or launching a few nukes is appropriate. This is the death spiral before the collapse starts to get bad. These people have no idea what they’re doing and are so completely certain in their superiority that they are incapable of reversing course. One wonders to what degree many of them are possessed.
With this in mind, it’s stunning to see anyone still cling to the liberal belief about ideas and marketplaces at all. Liberalism failed. We could waste our breath debating when, exactly, it failed, but 2020’s foray into chaos should have made everyone aware by now that liberalism exists today as a hollowed-out shell. It is nothing more than a bulwark to the authoritarian impulses of those who run our society. An excuse. A smokescreen. It’s something no one really believes in, except those who have no say in what’s going on. It’s a general idea used to manipulate, excuse, and hide the levers of power.
If there is no marketplace of ideas, then what is there instead? In the first post in this series, we looked at how ideas are engaged with—the interior aspect of idea formation and propagation. In this post, we’ll look at the exterior aspect: the combined social-psychological landscape: in other words, if there were to be a marketplace so-called, it would be in this sphere. After these have been addressed, it will be time to approach the question implied at the beginning of all of this: if ideas are not defeated by better ideas, then what are they defeated by, and what good are better ideas in the first place?
Losing Debates & Social Conditioning
In the previous post, we considered the role the will plays in engaging with concepts and ideas. To put it simply: the intellect deliberates across options after receiving sense data, and the will chooses from the available options, or it can choose to do nothing. This applies to simple things like what we’re going to eat for breakfast this morning, or if we’re even going to have any, as well as to whether to accept certain elements of foreign ideologies into our reasoning structures.
The will’s role in behavior affects not only what we think, but what we draw our attention to while thinking, and then how we express our thoughts exteriorly. All sorts of factors probably play into this expression, particularly physiological responses to things like stress or confidence. As a result, smart people sometimes do stupid things due to perceived external pressures that they react to. It isn’t hard to imagine, for instance, someone who is ultimately correct losing a public debate simply because he lacked charm or tact, wasn’t prepared, or gave the impression of being totally unconfident in his position. Demeanor plays as much a role in persuasion as what’s actually being said—often more.
That the will is not always exercised appropriately is worth considering here. If someone presents an argument better reasoned than his opponent’s, but he fumbles his delivery, what is it that makes it possible for him to lose the debate? Situational readiness, perhaps, or inability to deal with non-sequiturs, what-aboutisms, the like. Likewise, even if he can deal with them, suppose he’s just too awkward or unpleasant to sympathize with, comes across like a nutcase, or is otherwise arguing from a framework totally removed from the audience’s own—playing a match in a hostile field, so to speak.
There are reasons, albeit not wholly rational ones, that can explain why the will might refuse to engage with an idea before even knowing what that idea is. This is, in fact, the purpose for social conditioning: to program consciousness to reject certain ideas out of hand—purely by labeling them, without even defining them—and to embrace others by using the same method.
Consider the language here. Programming implies an automatic understanding of the conscious process—one that might even resemble, in a modernized and empty sense, the model that presumes a primacy of the intellect over the will. If you can ascertain how the intellect functions in general, then it should be conceivable that programming it is possible—and if this is the case, we walk ourselves right into the welcome arms of AI enthusiasts and people who read Godel, Escher, Bach. On the other hand, even these people have a hard time explaining what the will actually is; after all, it remains conceivable that the social conditioning can just be rejected. Someone could go through public school, ingest all of its drivel and conditioning, and still come out of it simply saying “no, I don’t agree.”
Nonetheless, social conditioning is effective. Talk of Overton windows and slippery slopes, and a short overview of twentieth century history is enough to show how thoroughly and quickly social conditioning can change the trajectory of a culture. The spread of media, aided by coincident technological revolutions, has made the entire West into a convenient petri dish for sociological experiments on massive scales. What we have learned is how easily people will abandon their wills if given a convenient enough reason to do so.
This is not a modern phenomenon per se, of course. Ideology, propaganda, and rhetoric have been weaponized into tools of conditioning since the days of Adam. The first suggestion of ideological manipulation came from the devil by way of a serpent’s lips. And yet, modern technology has brought together—or more appropriately, consolidated—vast populations, centralized social and political narratives, and granted a dedicated minority an inescapable voice. One man’s speech can spread not just to a single other person, or a dozen others, or a hundred others, but to hundreds of millions of others in the space of an instant. Put this fact into what we know about how systems develop, and it’s not hard to see the potential, the reality, of vested interests socially engineering the entire world.
For social conditioning to work effectively, certain factors within the society have to exist before all else. As Jacques Ellul stated in 1965, the primary factor is what he terms a certain sense of radical individualism:
Propaganda can be effective only in an individualist society, by which we do not mean the theoretical individualism of the nineteenth century, but the genuine individualism of our society. Of course, the two are not diametrically opposed. Where the greatest value is attributed to the individual, the end result is a society composed in essence only of individuals, and therefore one that is not integrated. But although theory and reality are not in total opposition, a great difference nevertheless exists between them. In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, a man himself is the master of his life; in individualist reality each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not at all master of his own life.1
Social fragmentation makes it possible for widespread social conditioning. Consider our contemporary society as it has existed for the past century or so: waning religious preference and attendance; the subversion, abolition, or otherwise abandonment of social organizations based on race, ethnicity, or gender; and worst of all, the various and many-pronged attacks on the family. Laws, such as the Civil Rights bills of the sixties, and social movements populated by mentally unstable discontents, like feminism and the gay rights, have worked actively and explicitly to produce a society cut off from its social building blocks.
Atomized, demoralized, and fragmented: these are the words that they brush over with terms like “liberated, equal, and free.” Talk to any self-identifying member of thees groups today, and you’ll find that they’re just as lost and confused as the people they disdain. The social conditioning—the propaganda—works both ways. Those innumerable forces and influences that Ellul refers to, those that prevent a man’s self-mastery, are the weapons we’re all too familiar with today. They’re more developed now, however, both technologically and psychologically, than Ellul probably anticipated back in the mid-60s. All of them stem from the same sinful roots and all of them prey on the same deficiencies in man’s soul.
An individual is protected from this conditioning only if he is not “cut off from membership in local groups,” Ellul continues, because “such groups are organic and have a well-structured material, spiritual, and emotional life,” which means that “they are not easily penetrated by propaganda.”2 Ellul uses as an example the military, which in today’s American environment has become largely contaminated, depending on what branch is considered, by transgender ideology, and whose generals at the top seem to encourage this. Nonetheless, as its lowest levels, particularly in the ground forces, unit cohesion still seems to exemplify this sort of psycho-social insulation.
But we need not consider something as extreme as the military for this. Local men’s groups organized around, say, parish life, can resemble ideological holdouts against liberal social conditioning. Traditionalist parishes, in particular, who openly and obviously position themselves outside of the mainstream narrative concerning religious belief, sexual morality, and, at this point, even just common decency, can exemplify these as well. These organizations are getting harder to bring to field in large scales thanks to the social and legal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, but they nonetheless do exist. Perhaps the silver lining is that unlike before, when these organizations could exist divorced from a religious context, the only places they can even hope to thrive now are in places directly wedded to a religious institution. What insulates them the best from regime conditioning isn’t just the camaraderie found among peers united to a common purpose, but also the unique experience of organizing around God.
This explains some of the hard right’s resilience to regime propaganda. Social conditioning is far more difficult to do when one has a firm sense of identity, and identity is rooted in religious and ethnic backgrounds. Religion provides a means by which a man can relate himself to God, or at the very least, some sense of the transcendent; ethnicity provides a material background with which to orient himself in history. Those who lose these things, or simply throw them away, are prime targets for centralized, mass-formation conditioning.
The right is victim to different sorts of propaganda, make no mistake, but the typical cross-section of a right wing coalition in the west will reveal a greater diversity of beliefs and in-group preferences than one of the left. This is in some sense one of the weaknesses of the right: we believe what we believe too thoroughly to make the sorts of concessions necessary to get along. This is specifically because we still have, or at least respect, those roots that make regime propaganda ineffective. By contrast, the average white liberal doesn’t. As Ellul explains of the managerial class:
Once these groups lost their importance, the individual was left substantially isolated. He was plunged into a new environment, generally urban, and thereby he was no longer geographically attached to a fixed place, or historically to his ancestry. An individual thus uprooted can only be part of a mass. He is on his own, and individualist thinking asks of him something he has never been required to do before: that he, the individual, become the measure of all things. Thus he begins to judge everything for himself.
[…] But in practice, what actually happens? The individual is placed in a minority position and burdened at the same time with a total, crushing responsibility. Such conditions make an individualist society fertile ground for modern propaganda. The permanent uncertainty, the social mobility, the absence of sociological protection and of traditional frames of reference—all these inevitably provide propaganda with a malleable environment that can be fed information from the outside and conditioned at will.3
This should sound familiar. I wrote something similar last year, with regard to the COVID hysteria and the push of that narrative from above. It was an inverted conspiracy theory in the sense that the standard narrative was itself the conspiracy: that COVID was a super-plague that was going to kill us all if we didn’t triple-vax, double mask, and self-isolate every time there was a case recorded. This was all nonsense, as evidenced by the CDC’s own data.
But the reason this ideology spread wasn’t just because of the average liberal’s fear of death or disease; they’re well aware of the danger posed by car accidents or drugs, but it doesn’t stop them from ignoring these things. Nor was it caused solely by those with vested interests in the media conglomerates, whose bosses and bank-rollers preferred working from home and ordering delivery to engaging in society. No, it was caused by something else. It was conditioned:
The foundational pride of the white liberal is not his autonomy but his intelligence. And consider where staking one’s pride on one’s own intelligence gets you: skepticism. The COVID narrative relies on the belief that the truth of any given situation isn’t merely complex, but utterly incomprehensible to any save specific elect interpreters known as experts. That’s what they mean by “science”. They function with a practical sense of judging ambiguous probabilities, but they immediately surrender this agency to the rulings of experts on given subjects when those experts begin speaking.
The white liberal embraces the conditioning, because, if Ellul is right, it supplies for them an organizing framework within which to operate. Consider that most of the managerial class is comprised of the sort of people he described above: rootless cosmopolitan types whose understanding of a tradition or a social order is only a little deeper, at best, than surface level. A lot of upper-middle class Boomers will fit this description, having revolted against the remains of the American social order during the cultural revolution and who have seemingly never looked back.
The ideal citizen conceived purely as an economic unit was an idea that their generation, broadly speaking, embraced without reservation, since it came with sexual liberation as a carrot. They were socially free to fornicate on a whim, economically free to invest in cheap land while entry-level service jobs paid triple or quadruple what you can get now, and politically free to enjoy a level of ethnic homogeneity that most of the country can’t even imagine today. As they grew into old age, most of this Boomer class could look forward to vacations abroad, reverse-mortgaging their houses, and dumping their retirement into investment schemes that didn’t even exist when they were in college. In short, an entire generation was swindled into cooperating with what might have been one of the largest looting operations in human memory: the transfer of the wealth they accumulated through the most prosperous period of American history from the families of those who worked for it into the hands of investment financiers. Consider it was these same financiers who, in turn, also powered the tech bubbles of the late 90s and early 00s.
They were susceptible to this programming because they were willing to barter what past they had for short-term gains. Some of those were financial, but most of them were material or sensual. Most Boomers were probably not openly antagonistic or even critical of the past traditions and institutions that were overturned, disrupted, or cast aside. But for everyone who was taken along for the ride, they likewise did nothing to stop it. After all, life was good, even during the race riots. It’s why many of the Boomers give blank stares and abject denials when their children and grandchildren say it’s absurd to think that stocking shelves can pay for a college degree. They have no idea what has happened to purchasing power, college tuition rates, lending practices, or wage stagnation, and even if they did, they don’t care. They had their opportunity at the cake, and all they had to do was come to the table to eat it. They don’t realize that opportunity is now gone.
This isn’t just the work of reason operating within a limited frame of reference. Reason would listen to arguments to the contrary, recognize the decline, admit that maybe banks who try to sell old timers reverse-mortgage schemes are crooks. Reason would not see this data and then declare loudly that every generation since their own is simply lazy. The conditioning comes through in topics of greater importance and longer-lasting than simple fads. It orients an entire sense of world view. Indeed, that’s the point:
Propaganda furnishes objects, organizes the traits of an individual’s personality into a system, and freezes them into a mold. For example, prejudices that exist about any event become greatly reinforced and hardened by propaganda; the individual is told that he is right in harboring them; he discovers reasons and justifications for a prejudice when it is clearly shared by many and proclaimed openly. Moreover, the stronger the conflicts in a society, the stronger the prejudices, and propaganda that intensifies conflicts simultaneously intensifies prejudices in this very fashion.4
As Ellul points out, the more you argue with people who have embraced the conditioning, the more the conditioning works to imprison their free will. Considered under either of our scholastic models, the intellect is surrendered over to the operations of the social conditioners. This can only happen with a free act of the will—a true deal with the devil, as it were, because like drug addicts, the conditioning can get so severe that reason fails to work. The difference is that to heal a drug addict, you can start by removing the drugs, and after withdrawal has ended, the road to recovery in psychological terms is at least manageable. Those possessed by the social conditioning have no material substance to remove in order to shock their system.
Possession is not an inappropriate word to use here, either. Like drug addiction, the willful resolve to dispense with personal autonomy constitutes a certain violence against our design. No doubt it is a root cause of various sinful behaviors. Gravely so, presumably, when we consider the sorts of narratives that the average white liberal embraces and espouses. One could try to argue that the dispensation of personal autonomy constitutes a sort of faith in the secular liberal framework, and that this is somehow similar to the sort of faith demanded of us Christians.
But this would be a serious error, and not simply because a properly-ordered intellect services one’s faith the way soil nourishes a plant. It would be a serious error because the liberal has to buy into this sense “faith”—this false faith—because he’s exchanging his reason in favor of some deeply sinful inclination. This could be anything from sexual overindulgence or perversion, to an embittered self-rightousness that embraces blasphemy. Any ideology that embraces self-willed liberation positions the ego at the center, trying in vain to push God out of the picture.
We have to keep in mind that the sort of mental gymnastics that make this possible are the exact sorts of unreasonable madness that the demonic preys upon. It’s unlikely that every single white liberal is possessed, of course, but talk to any of them at any length and it’s hard not to see how miserable they consider their own lives. Variations of self-importance may limit the degree to which they’ll acknowledge it, but even their entertainment tips their hand. Depression, madness, or some sort of neurosis is never far from the center of their attention. They may even defend this with the presumption that these are the only things that make drama interesting.
Not without coincidence, Ellul draws a connection between the thoroughly conditioned individual and the neurotic. The victim of social conditioning, which Ellul calls the “propagandee”, is one who “can only live in accord with his comrades, sharing the same reflexes and judgments with those of his group”; which is functionally similar to “the neurotic,” who “anxiously seeks the esteem and affection of the largest number of people.”5 Citing a study by Karen Horney, Ellul remarks on the neurotic’s “extraordinary need for self-justification” that “expresses itself in the projection of hostile motives to the outside world”:
he feels that destructive impulses do not emanate from him, but from someone or something outside. He does not want to fool or exploit others—others want to do that to him; and this mechanism is reproduced by propaganda with great precision. […] As with the neurotic, the “victim-enemy-scapegoat” cycle assumes enormous proportions in the mind of the propagandee, even if we admit that in addition to this process some legitimate reasons always exist for such reactions.6
Social conditioning is designed to control populations of people, and if Ellul is correct, it does so by driving them insane. A confused, demoralized populace will believe just about anything, and the average white liberal, beneath his veneer of calm security and the confidence required by his choice of career, is more uprooted from the certainty of his circumstances than almost any other class of people.
Reversing Course
Based on the writings of Ellul referenced above, it seems imprudent to discuss errors without at least mildly grappling with solutions. Social conditioning has acted upon the impulses that propelled liberalism into taking over secular sphere. One could be forgiven for thinking, then, that if someone with a better framework—like a traditionally-minded person with a strong sense of identity—could get their hands on the levers of the social conditioning machine, then we could reformat society into one more conducive to right reason and virtuous deed. This is somewhat the impulse behind right-authoritarians who misguidedly embrace aspects of Fascism under the impression that they can baptize it.
It is, however, nonetheless misguided. The revolutionary spirit, as Augusto Del Noce wrote, is “the secular translation of eschatological thought into the philosophy of history.”7 It is an attempt, in other words, to ‘play God’ with society, culture, and the political structure at one’s disposal: to rewrite society in order to establish a perfect utopia. Any sensible political praxis rejects this very idea out of hand, not because it isn’t necessarily effective to implement certain authoritarian measures, but because its stated goal is impossible. There will be no perfect society, whether a just man or an evil man ends up getting his hands on the levers of power. And any group of people preoccupied with daydreams of a perfect society will be too easily misled like sheep into whatever other abusive political system their elites decide to inflict upon them. This is, more or less, the first half of the Twentieth Century’s political history. Moreover, the dreams of implementing a less-imperfect society, if modeling it after theories and presumptions about human nature, push the radical into the same camp as the revolutionary. If you believe theory is enough to change the world, you’re fooled by that same revolutionary spirit.
We may exist in a society where there are central pillars of culture that have already become centralized. Several institutions come most readily to mind: Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Capitol Hill, Hollywood, the Ivy League, et cetera. But take a closer look at them, and you’ll see how much work it takes to keep all of them centralized. The narratives over the last few years have already showed cracks in the regime’s public-presenting face. The oligarchs don’t like each other as much or more than they dislike their stated opposition—the only difference is that their entire ecosystem implodes without the presence of an opposition. Tech, media, entertainment, even finance and politics: all of these structures take enormous efforts to keep cohesive, and we’re not just talking about material logistics or technological requirements. We’re talking the cooperation of the people involved.
Applying leverage along those existent fault lines is key. This sort of praxis is only relevant to people in positions to do so—those who personally know the regime insiders, work for them, work with them, or who otherwise happen to have absurd amounts of money just laying around. Power is motivated by personal connections. Nepotism moves mountains. Almost nobody, and certainly nobody reading this humble website, can count themselves among that stock. Such groups, in fact, self-select and self-police well enough that it’s unlikely anyone sympathetic to views outside regime-approved narratives would even end up in such positions. But, who knows? A guy like Trump got to hold the nuclear football once.
For the rest of us, our praxis shouldn’t be to merely survive. Localism and strong bonds at the family, parish, and community levels go a lot farther than centralized media will often claim. It’s been said repeatedly before, but localism at varying levels is about all you’ll have to rely on if things really go bad. This includes, for those inclined, some survey of local politics—but don’t be surprised if in some regions those doors remain shut fairly tight by financial interests. Local business organizations and chambers of commerce are good to support as well, though they may not be the force they once were. The steady generation-long erosion of local business power, coupled with the intrusion of large corporations into these groups (always in the interest of ‘connecting with the local population’ or something) has not been kind to them. Nonetheless, as local organizations go, you can usually fair worse.
Localism will not solve the larger problems, however. Make no mistake, top-down authority is required for an orderly society, and the authority of this country is presently one hostile to such a thing. We can’t rest on our localist laurels and expect everything to be fine. The purpose of maintaining and emphasizing localism is to have as strong a net as possible for when the empire’s crumbling finally reaches your state, your city, your street. 2020 gave us a very brief taste of this already; only a fool would presume that it won’t get any worse.
Localism is also the key to a steady systematic deprogramming of those socially conditioned to the mainline currents of present liberalism. Like zealous converts, they can’t be approached on their own ideological grounds. They won’t listen to appeals to reason or efforts to convince them of non-mainline narratives. The overwhelming majority, unfortunately, will almost certainly never ‘wake up’ and realize—even if they don’t necessarily admit it—that they’ve been wrong all this time.
This does not completely discredit them as your neighbors, colleagues, fellow parishioners, or next-of-kin, however. Not everyone should be considered a lost cause. Many people possessed of this liberal spirit have beliefs more malleable than they first appear. Being unknowingly immersed in an anti-mainline environment, where conversation is easy and no one is going out of their way to make points, talk politics, or grandstand—where no one is being a sperg, in other words—goes great lengths toward undoing social conditioning. In fact, the more one speaks of politics and social issues, the more the conditioning becomes reinforced, and the more the programming works. In order to deprogram, as it were, you have to avoid hitting the run.exe program. Absent the explicit awareness of God’s calling toward ultimate reality, peer pressure, of which the most effective is the subtlest kind, is the next best thing.
The smallest building block of finding a way forward through the conditioning, however, remains smaller even than parish or community. It’s not even the abstraction of ‘the individual’ in a social sense. It’s the firmness of one’s interior life: the understanding, foremost, of our moral behavior being measured before God, alone, at death. Momento mori, should we be reminded; the sum total of our actions should be toward the end of getting ourselves and anyone we know to Heaven. What God wants for us is the antithesis of social conditioning. His Word is the remedy to propaganda. Where propaganda and conditioning offer the cold indulgences of empty passions and self-obsession, the Word offers us a deep relationship with the eternal by which we can orient ourselves. Built off of this is our prayer life. Nothing, nothing, is more powerful and effective than prayer. Begging for God’s intercession, both in your own life and in the lives of your enemies, is absolutely necessary to include in any way forward.
In order to reverse course, we have to embrace a spiritual radicalism that positions God at the center. This doesn’t mean spiraling into cultish esotericism. It means embracing a living liturgical tradition within the Christian faith. It means joining the Church. That the Church itself has to clean house, that it needs bishops who recognize the state of the American empire in decline, are willing to risk being divorced from federal funding, and who build direct, tangible, good relationships with their dioceses—both their priests and their flock—are all topics for another day. What the Church needs now are good people. There will not be the growth of a wider, more virtuous, less evil culture until the Church in the west begins mounting a legitimate offensive. It will be the start and the end of such a reform.
Until then, the localist angle is worth persevering in. In the next post, we will be looking at the world view of the liberal himself for the purposes of understanding how, or whether, to connect with him past all the social engineering. These people may come across as drones. Many, but not all of them, are. But for those of us in the belly of the beast, so to speak, who live surrounded by the managerial class, it’s neither appropriate nor practical to write off the entire population as hopeless.
1Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, translated by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (Vintage Books, New York: 1965), 91.
2Ibid.
3Ibid, 92.
4Ibid 162.
5Ibid, 167.
6Ibid, 168.
7Augusto Del Noce, 248.
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