Spectacle

How Disinfolklorists purposefully create the illusion of organic politics.

🎭Disinfolklorists often create a Spectacle that includes us the outraged spectators - the Spectator, and their emotions, is a character in the Spectacle.

Former Russian deputy prime minister Vladislav Surkov, who created the Disinfolklore character “Putin” (we feel we know what “Putin thinks,” whereas actually we only know what a character in Russian Disinfolklore “thinks.”) and the illusion of democracy in Russia, was a theatre studies graduate.

An insight attributed to Surkov (https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0005h7c), which over twenty years he implemented in Russia and in Russia-occupied Ukraine, is the idea that politics can exist solely on the plane of the Spectacle.

Behind the concealing and consoling wall of fog, which the Spectacle operates as, resources are allocated by a sub-set of people (who may not even be participating in the Spectacle). In the Spectacle artificial (“astroturf”) conflicts between different actors, ideological viewpoints, and parties provokes a feeling in Spectators that debates are going on. Yet such agon impacts little on the actual practise of government whose policy trajectories are determined Behind Closed Doors by a small group of (usually) men who have certain personality inventories.

England's ruling party does this all the time: its “European Research Group” (modelled on a similar group in the Congress) dominated the debate on Brexit. The Brexit process itself can be interpreted as a distracting shadow play, one of whose purposes was to provide a vehicle for the transition of bit-part actors in the Spectacle to leading roles. Now, the latest wheeze is the English Nationalist Conservative Party posing as "British" Nationalists. It’s an Ingroup within an Ingroup. As was Brexit, if you are in England’s ruling party to demonstrate your continued usefulness as a Spectacle participant, you now have available to you an off-the-shelf ideology of “British” nationalism. Those who won’t rail against “Wokeness,”

“Immigrants,” or for “family values” and “traditional patriarchy” are left behind. Just like those who wouldn’t agree with the Brexit orthodoxy.

This week the “British” Nationalist Conservative Party (it’s a party within the party that has been ruling England since 2010) hold a "conference."

This is equivalent to a television programme with a plot focussed around a character acting in a pantomime.

Those of us commentating on the conference as straight journalists, supporters, or outraged civil society are like other characters in the television programme playing scripted roles. We don't know it, but the purpose of the conference is to draw us into the whole Spectacle. In our own minds we’re playing the roles of critics, of "Spectators." Yet, really we're participants in a manipulated drama, part of whose purpose is to draw us in.

The producers of the entire Spectacle (say, a far-right think tank like Legatum which is funded by private equity guys who’ve made zillions as a result of the policies of England’s ruling party since 1980 (many of whose leading lights work for Legatum)) script self-declared cartoon villains who say shocking things.

The self-designated pantomime villains have electoral mandates from small geographical spaces in England. They take it upon themselves to pronounce what “the British people” (everyone living on the island of Britain) want or need. They relish their roles, and the opposition they provoke. Like my Cambridge law school classmate Braverman (https://medium.com/political-risk/this-week-in-the-uk-weve-gone-from-the-rule-of-law-to-the-rule-of-six-and-now-that-the-justice-da7be6378953), they're simply pantomime actors playing villains. Relishing their artistry. Trump, Johnson, Putin, the Ruschist Chef. et al. just play these roles.

This spectacle then distracts everyone from the true purpose of the entire Spectacle (conference/pantomime and critics/commentators): Distraction.

Meanwhile, the rinsing of the "Muni" (http://www.powerofmana.net) in Community continues unabated and unaffected by the Spectacle which absorbs, as it’s intended to, all the critical energy in our community.