Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual - TK News by Matt Taibbi

Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual - TK News by Matt Taibbi: Reviewing "Repressive Tolerance" and other works by Herbert Marcuse, the quack who became America’s most influential thinker

We hear a lot about what is called the “Cancel Culture” and wokeism, especially from those on the political right who see these forces as threatening our civilization with its law and order. I’ve seen many on the right such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity bemoan this destructive trend but without offering a good explanation why this is happening or what can be done to stop it. For explanations of the ideas behind these forces of deconstruction I recommend Stephen Hicks’ book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault and Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.

I would now add Marcuse-Anon: Cult of the Pseudo-Intellectual, an insightful essay by Matt Taibbi, who writes for Rolling Stone and wrote books such as Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another. Taibbi comes from a journalist background and is politically on the left. However, I’d say he is closer to being a traditional liberal than a progressive one. His essay builds a case for explaining a lot of what is happening stems from Herbert Marcuse, a Marxist philosopher. My blog post won’t be able to do justice to Taibbi’s article, so I won’t try to summarize his argument or key points here. Instead, I’ll share some key quotes that stood out.

Here are selected quotes from different parts of the essay.

Most Americans have never heard of him — he died in 1979 — but his ideas today are ubiquitous as Edison’s lightbulbs. He gave us everything from “Silence Equals Violence” to “Too Much Democracy” to the “Crisis of Misinformation” to In Defense of Looting to the 1619 Project and Antiracist Baby, and from the grave has cheered countless recent news stories, from the firing of Mandalorian actress Gina Corano to the erasure of raw footage of the Capitol riot from YouTube.

He was the real-world embodiment of Orwell’s utopian linguists who were impatient to rid the world of all those annoying words for shades of difference. Once you have a lock on “good,” why bother litigating degrees of its opposite? Bad is bad. He thought in binary pairs, and freely conflated concepts like inadequacy, misgovernment, and indifference with cruelty, repression, persecution, and terror, a habit of mind that’s inspired a generation of catastrophizing neurotics who genuinely don’t know the difference between disagreement and an attempt on their lives.

We saw it in health officials who went from condemning anti-lockdown protests to, a week or two later, declaring that racism — not on their radar prior to the murder of George Floyd — was a “lethal public health issue” superseding the pandemic. We saw it with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez applying the transitive property of whatever nineteen times over to make Ted Cruz’s decision to refuse certification of the Electoral College mean he was “trying to murder me” and “almost had me murdered.” Same with the New York Times employees who declared their lives were thrust in peril by soon-to-be-fired editor James Bennet’s decision to run an editorial by Senator Tom Cotton.

Summing up, this is a theory of an intellectual elite forced to seize absolute power on behalf of racial minorities, the disabled, and other oppressed groups, while canceling free speech and civil rights for all others, and especially for the corrupted mass of working-class people, who are no friends of the revolution but actually ignorant conservatives obstructing the road to “pacification and liberation.” Does this sound familiar?

It does indeed sound all too familiar!

I find Taibbi’s respect for facts and objectivity refreshing so I always look forward to his commentary and analysis, even when I disagree with him. These disagreements give me the chance to test my beliefs.

On “White Fragility” - Reporting by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi just posted a long piece on the book White Fragility which he correctly takes to task. Here are his opening sentences. "A core principle of the academic movement that shot through elite schools in America since the early nineties was the view that individual rights, humanism, and the democratic process are all just stalking-horses for white supremacy. The concept, as articulated in books like former corporate consultant Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (Amazon’s #1 seller!) reduces everything, even the smallest and most innocent human interactions, to racial power contests."

Taibbi doesn't mention postmodernism in his article but I think this philosophy which denies the idea of objective truth is used to disarm and dismiss those who challenge this White Fragility ideology. 

The Media’s 10 Rules of Hate | Washington Spectator

Matt Taibbi’s The Media’s 10 Rules of Hate | Washington Spectator

In an earlier post I commented on Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matt Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone who has covered political campaigns. This article from The Washington Spectator captures ten rules of hate that Taibbi discusses in chapter 2 of his book. While I don’t agree with some of his observations or claims I agree with his general points about how the news media wants us to hate one another. Taibbi starts with “pick up any major newspaper, or turn on any network television news broadcast. The political orientation won’t matter. It could be Fox or MSNBC, The Washington Post or The Washington Times. You’ll find virtually every story checks certain boxes.” What are these boxes?

Call them the 10 rules of hate. After generations of doing the opposite, when unity and conformity were more profitable, the primary product the news media now sells is division.

The problem we (in the media) all have is the commercial structure of the business. To make money, we’ve had to train audiences to consume news in a certain way. We need you anxious, pre-pissed, addicted to conflict. Moreover we need you to bring a series of assumptions every time you open a paper or turn on your phone, TV, or car radio. Without them, most of what we produce will seem illogical and offensive.

While I think Taibbi has a valid point I also believe another deeper factor drives this dismal lack of objectivity: postmodernism. Per Encyclopedia Britannica, postmodernism is “a late 20th-century movement characterized by broad skepticism, subjectivism, or relativism; a general suspicion of reason; and an acute sensitivity to the role of ideology in asserting and maintaining political and economic power.” If objectivity doesn’t exist then news reporting doesn’t need to be bound by a respect for the facts and the need to restrict opinion to the editorials.

Nonetheless, Taibbi offers interesting conclusions based on his first hand experience as a reporter.

1.    There are only two ideas

There are only two baskets of allowable opinion: Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, left or right. This is drilled into us at a young age.

2. The two ideas are in permanent conflict

3. Hate people, not institutions

4. Everything is someone else’s fault

Here’s how we create political news content. Something happens, it doesn’t matter what. Donald Trump nominates Brett Kavanaugh. A hurricane hits Puerto Rico. A massive humanitarian crisis hits Syria. Whatever it is, our task is to turn it into content, quickly running it through a flow chart:

BAD THING HAPPENS

Can it be blamed on one or the other party?

YES (we do the story)

NO (we don’t do the story—see rule #5)

5. Nothing is everyone’s fault

If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it. Or better to say: a reporter or two might cover it, but it’s never picked up. It doesn’t take over a news cycle, doesn’t become a thing.

6. Root, don’t think

By the early 2000s, TV stations had learned to cover politics exactly as they covered sports, a proven profitable format. The presidential election especially was reconfigured into a sports coverage saga. It was perfect: 18 months of scheduled contests, a preseason (straw polls), regular season (primaries), and playoffs (the general), stadium events, a subgenre of data reporting (it’s not an accident that sabermetrics guru—read baseball statistician—Nate Silver fit so seamlessly into political coverage).

…

By 2016 we’d raised a generation of viewers who had no conception of politics as an activity that might or should involve compromise. Your team either won or lost, and you felt devastated or vindicated accordingly. We were training rooters instead of readers. Since our own politicians are typically very disappointing, we particularly root for the other side to lose.

In this business, everyone is on a side, and we’re always fighting, never looking for common ground. It ruins everyone’s suspension of disbelief if we do.

7. No switching teams

The concept of “balance,” which used to be considered a virtue, has been twisted all the way around to mean a taboo trade practice, a form of dishonesty. [HCS Note: I would prefer replace the term “balance” with “objectivity.”]

8. The other side is literally Hitler

…

There’s nowhere to go from Hitler. It’s a rhetorical dead end. Argument is over at that point. If you go there, you’re now absolving your audiences of all moral restraint, because who wouldn’t kill Hitler?

9. In the fight against Hitler, everything is permitted

Meanness and vulgarity build political solidarity, but also audience solidarity. Breaking barriers together builds conspiratorial closeness. In the Trump age, it helps political and media objectives align.

The problem is, there’s no natural floor to this behavior. News and commentary programs will eventually escalate to boxing-style expletive-laden pre-fight tirades and open incitement of violence.

If the other side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. What began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor, and the show does not work if those contestants are not eventually offended to the point of wanting to kill one another.

10. Feel superior

We’re mainly in the business of stroking audiences. We want them coming back. Anger is part of the rhetorical promise, but so are feelings of righteousness and superiority.

It’s the same premise as reality shows. The most popular programs aren’t about geniuses and paragons of virtue, but instead about terrible parents, morons, people willing to be filmed getting ass tucks, spoiled rich people, and other freaks.

Accept a binary world and pick a side. Embrace the reality of being surrounded by evil stupidity. Feel indignant, righteous, and smart. Hate losers, love winners. Don’t challenge yourself. And during the commercials, do some shopping.

Congratulations, you’re the perfect news consumer.

If you are a conservative or libertarian you probably will disagree (as I do) with many of Taibbi’s examples because he aims his harshest comments at Fox (Sean Hannity in particular) and Trump while giving the mainstream (liberal) media relatively mild criticism. Nonetheless I’d say he has captured valid problems with how the news media cook their political bias into their stories.

As I said at the beginning Taibbi’s explanation that it’s more profitable for the news media to inflame hatred than agreement and has turned the news into a full contact sport misses the deeper cause. Postmodernism flourishes in the “soft” spheres such as the arts and humanities which deal with human based activities rather than the “hard” activities like the sciences which deal directly with nonnegotiable reality. News reporting tries to make sense of human actions and can be influenced by the biases and agendas of the reporters, editors and managers.

I’m talking primarily about reporting in politics, not on natural events like fires, floods, hurricanes, or murders and traffic accidents. However, even in covering natural disasters the reporting can be colored by injecting commentary on whether these events result from human-caused global warming. So the basic reporting of the facts might be accurate but are shaped into a narrative to support the belief that we cause climate change.

Nonetheless, I’ve found it helpful to read someone like Taibbi who comes from a different political perspective than mine, who lives in the world of news reporting, and has seen first hand how bias permeates this world like the air we breathe. In my experience most of the consumers of this “truth product” (Taibbi’s term) absorb this product without question. They assume their news sources present the whole, unvarnished truth. If you question this “conventional wisdom” they think you’re refusing to accept the obvious truth, that your bias affects your conclusions. Meanwhile they believe they are exempt from bias.

A friend of mine likes to say it’s a though many of us live inside The Matrix, a fabricated world that fools us into thinking it’s reality. The Wikipedia summary of The Matrix seems particularly appropriate: “In The Matrix, the main character Neo is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill by rebel leader Morpheus. The red pill represented an uncertain future—it would free him from the enslaving control of the machine-generated dream world and allow him to escape into the real world, but living the ‘truth of reality’ is harsher and more difficult. On the other hand, the blue pill represented a beautiful prison—it would lead him back to ignorance, living in confined comfort without want or fear within the simulated reality of the Matrix. Neo chooses the red pill.”

Keeping Taibbi’s rules of hate in mind can help free us from The Matrix. If we take the red pill it means we need to work a bit harder to think objectively – and independently – in the search for truth.

News as selling mythologies

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I’m reading Hate Inc.: Why Today's Media Makes Us Despise One Another by Matthew Taibbi, a contributing editor for Rolling Stone who has covered political campaigns. If you’re not familiar with Taibbi I’ll note that he would never be accused of being a right-winger! In reading his essays and his book it’s clear Taibbi despises Fox News and Donald Trump. However, unlike many of his new media brethren who have jettisoned objectivity to push their politics, Taibbi seems to value being objective even when it leads him to uncomfortable conclusions. While he excoriates Fox and Trump he also turns his guns (although with markedly less harshness) on CNN and MSNBC.

In the chapter titled How Reading The News Is Like Smoking, Taibbi says the following.

The main difference between Fox and MSNBC is their audiences are choosing different personal mythologies. Again: this is a consumer choice. It’s not the truth, but a truth product.

People who watch Fox tend to be older, white, and scared. They’re tuning in to be told they’re the last holdouts in a disintegrating empire, Romans besieged by vandals.

…

People who watch MSNBC, meanwhile, are tuning in to receive mega-doses of the world’s thinnest compliment, i.e. that they’re morally superior to Donald Trump. The network lately has become a one-note morality play with endless segments about Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Paul Manafort.

…

The coverage formula on both channels is to scare the crap out of audiences, then offer them micro-doses of safety and solidarity, which come when they see people onscreen sharing their fears.

I’ve written before about Arnold Kling’s book The Three Languages of Politics in which he identifies three primary languages in American politics. Liberals tend to talk in terms of oppressors and the oppressed. Conservatives fret about civilization succumbing to barbarism. And libertarians see things in terms of individual freedom from coercion. Based on listening carefully how liberals, conservatives and libertarians talk I think Kling’s model is valid.

Taibbi’s description of Fox’s primary audience identifies conservative’s fear of leftist barbarians undercutting the traditional foundations of civilization, which reflects Kling’s language modal. While Taibbi doesn’t discuss the views of MSNBC (or the other major news outlets) in the same terms as Kling, I assume Taibbi would agree with many of the Trump haters I’ve met who claim that Trump is a racist, misogynist and didn’t earn his wealth but who obtained it by taking advantage of people. A common theme underlies these charges: that Trump (and therefore his supporters) favor oppressing people because of their race, gender or economic status.

Later Taibbi says:

I’ve run into trouble with friends for suggesting Fox is not a pack of lies. Sure, the network has an iffy relationship with the truth, but much of its content is factually correct. It’s just highly, highly selective – and predictable with respect to which facts it chooses to present.

Here I’d say the same thing could be said about CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR. Taibbi gives them a pass, as if they don’t do exactly the same thing he attributes to Fox. On the other hand, the first appendix in Hate Inc., “Why Rachel Maddow Is On The Cover Of This Book,” explains why Taibbi put Maddow’s photo on the cover with Sean Hannity. He concludes the appendix with this comment about Maddow.

What she reads each night is not the news. It’s Stars and Stripes for a demographic, the same job that made Sean Hannity a star. Only she does it for a different audience, Lonesome Rhodes for the smart set. Even she must realize it can’t end well.

[Lonesome Rhodes was a character in a 1957 movie titled A Face in the Crowd. Here is the Wikipedia summary of the plot: “The story centers on a drifter named Larry ‘Lonesome’ Rhodes who is discovered by the producer … of a small-market radio program in rural northeast Arkansas. Rhodes ultimately rises to great fame and influence on national television.”]

While I’m only halfway through Hate Inc. I’ve read enough to be comfortable with recommending it to people on the left or the right. As Taibbi says, the news organizations “keep people away from the complexities of these issues, by creating distinct audiences of party zealots who drink in more and more intense legends about one another. We started to turn the ongoing narrative of the news into something like a religious contract, in which, in which the idea was not just to make you mad, but to keep you mad, whipped up in a state of devotional anger. Even in what conservatives would call the ‘liberal’ media, we used blunt signals to create audience solidarity. We started to employ anti-intellectualism on a scale I’d never seen before, and it ran through much of the available content.”

The only thing I’d add is that this anti-intellectualism springs from shedding objectivity.

We're in a permanent coup by Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi doesn't support Trump yet his articles show objectivity that is sadly lacking in the news media. His latest piece, We're in a permanent coup, provides another example.

Early in the article Taibbi lays out his concerns.

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.

Towards the end of his article Taibbi says, 

I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

Taibbi labels this tug-of-war between Trump and those who want to remove him from office as the Permanent Power Struggle. This is a common theme of Tucker Carlson: that the Democrats lust for power compels them to dispose of Trump who they feel is an illegitimate president.

While I agree with Carlson's point there is a deeper one. Would we even have this perpetual political WrestleMania if the Federal government didn't wield so much power? Would we still have this to-the-death battle to wrest the levers of power from the incumbent party to the political party that lost the previous election? I doubt it!