HOW 'MEDIA' HAS UNDERMINED POLITICS - AND NOSTALGIA FOR THE 'OLD DAYS'.

Another excellent article by Aurelien 


'This was, I think, Year Zero of the trend towards our current situation of infinite information and little real knowledge. Hardly anyone had anything interesting or valuable to say, hardly anyone knew the country or spoke the language, but the demand for opinions was such that almost anyone could contribute. The result was a kind of rabid kaleidoscope of disconnected reports and impressions, mixed with righteous indignation and not a little hatred. For the first time, perhaps, people wrote articles in newspapers not about the events themselves, but about how those images on TV made them feel. Unsurprisingly, attempts to “discuss” the actual issues turned into shouting matches......There were two broad and related reactions, which endure to this day. One was a kind of transferred intellectual nostalgia (yes, that word is appropriate here) for the certainties of the Cold War, and a desire by politicians and pundits to see world events still as the struggle between great nations with competing imperial ambitions, and to dismiss the role of local actors as insignificant. The other is to desperately seek some—any—structuring narrative that makes the confusion of today’s world seem less total. International finance, competition for energy and mineral resources, religion, the City of London, World Zionism, the Deep State, the Deeper State, UFOs and alien bases, and a dozen other explanations compete and sometimes overlap, in an attempt to make the world seem as comprehensible, as it once seemed to be. And of course all of them provide pre-fabricated frameworks of interpretation that can easily be imposed on real-life events: it isn’t necessary to know anything about the situation itself, because you can always find something to support any argument...We are pretty much at the end of rational politics in the West now, and the Martians who first appeared in the 1980s appear to have taken over completely. It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous combination than a complex and unstable world, and western governments that no longer behave rationally....Politicians no longer feel the need even to pretend to serve the national interests: after all, politics is just an entry on their CV before progressing to other things, and it can bring no greater rewards than being well-known. So you might reasonably suppose that Mr Trump is out to destroy the American economy, but that pre-supposes purpose and rational objective. As far as I can see, he just doesn’t care, provided he gets the news coverage. And indeed modern politics in western nations seems largely a question of getting more coverage by shouting louder and being more outrageous than your competitors, which is why the current set of western leaders seem more and more to be a parody or a caricature of traditional politicians, like children competing to attract attention...It seems as though we are now trapped in some kind of media-political escalatory process that cannot now be stopped, a train with no brakes going downhill. The political class has given up all pretensions to statesmanship, and is acting in ways that nobody outside can now understand, and perhaps have no rational explanation anyway, without really knowing, or caring what it is doing. This is the end-result of deregulated politics, just as the paranoid theorising, the social media fights and the hysterical escalation of language are symptoms of the deregulation of media and the end of barriers to entry. Every part of this feeds every other part, and I can’t see how this will end, except badly. There is no argument anymore: I don’t know how long it is since people wrote, or spoke, in an attempt to convince and persuade, or even inform. Now, this process of deregulation has reached its inevitable end-state of total fragmentation: tiny groups or politicians or pundits screaming at each other and trying to pummel each other into submission. We are surely approaching some kind of climax, like the end of an Ionesco play or a Feydeau farce, where things just break down completely. We will never get back to the world of The World at One.



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