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Was listening to the fascinating podcast on Aesthetic Resistance with @johnsteppling @RedKahina @elleprovocateur & @HiroyukiHamada - Highly reccomend.
Haven’t yet finished, maybe this comes up, but was struck in the discussion of the barber shop op by something I think quite fundamental about the modern petty-bourg / white collar/ clerk class:
They fundamentally lack the ability to recognize ruling class conspiracy (either as observers, victims, or even participants) because of their intensely anti-democratic world-view and assumptions.
Part of this is a basic outgrowth of their class position-- fundamentally, their utility as a class is to a significant degree managerial, either directly or indirectly as media and marketing professionals, as ‘political’ and ‘non-profit’ workers who usurp and misdirect revolt
But I think we see this most clearly in the propaganda they endlessly consume and reproduce: virtually every political or politics adjacent cultural product that has come out over the past few decades (from West Wing to Parks & Rec to House of Cards)
assumes 1) the masses are by turns suasible and or irrational morons to be herded & 2) the job of clever people is to manipulate them, usually for their own good-- either consciously or as a kind of cunning of history.
What I’m trying to get at is that a lot of people in this class just don’t have their radars go off at obvious manipulation. They simply do not see disinfo, manipulation, marketing, etc. as fundamentally wrong. They view it as natural, neutral or even potentially benign.
This is a huge part of the obstacle to getting these people to understand what is happening, they have no instinctive revulsion to deception because it is the water they swim in.
Their existence is predicated on the idea that the masses need to be manipulated and managed and corralled. They view these as essentially legitimate activities and can really only recognize them as 'bad' in context where they are branded/ coded as such, not intrinsically.
