Fascinating insight into how and why the brainwashing system works in the West and the mechanisms which it uses, and how and why the individual Western man becomes a victim of this Lie Machine. What the author is saying, more or less, is that the entire structure of Western society is built and maintained on a vast system of complex and continuous lies. In short, in the West, truth and even reality itself are rather illusory at best and outright delusional at worst. Yet we carry on nonetheless. After all, there’s that big sale coming up on Friday!
Joaquin Flores is one Hell of a writer. This essay is a bit hard to understand (and even was for me for a paragraph or so), but it’s not that bad, and if I can understand it, I figure you probably can too, right? After all, you’re all beyond highbrow, no?
Stagecraft, Simulacrum, Holograph
by Joaquin Flores
From this we view that our discussion forwardly centers around the Russian use of synthetic reality, while different than the West’s version as descried through consumerism and the entertainment industrial complex, is generally also based upon the sciences of cognition and social psychology.
Beyond that which we ourselves can experience through the five senses, there are several layers of cognition required for the human mind to assign an order, reason, understanding of an event or phenomenon which we come to understand through presented accounts.
When we rely on presented accounts, and without a simultaneously running cognitive process which filters all presented information with the aim of understanding the simulacrum itself, we become ensnared in the simulacrum by its planners. This phenomenon partly explains why those reporting and analyzing the Novorossiyan initiative have been unable to read this script.
The larger synthetic bubble which encapsulates not only the minds of the people and its leaders, but the functioning of the entire modern Western civilizational project, is itself liberalism. It has both a premodern, modern, and postmodern form. But in speaking of liberalism we do not mean the theory, but the reality as internalized through the cognitive processes of its subjects. It is an entire schema, with its own Weltanschauung.
Liberalism’s view of epistemic matters is greatly lacking and involves a process of double-think. On the one hand it suffers from a naive skepticism with regard to both epistemic and ontological matters, and tends towards a Popperian ‘critical rationalist’ view of the sciences and cognition. Yet it is neither critical nor rational, but rather reasonable. Reasonableness is an emotional state like anger or infatuation, and like anger or infatuation is blinding in that it clouds judgment.
Like anger feeling like ‘righteousness’, or infatuation feeling like ‘genuine need’, reasonableness feels like ‘being rational’. The blinding nature of reasonableness is that it lulls the subject into believing that their thoughts and subsequent actions have been blessed by the gods of rationality. Much of the British Empire after the Enlightenment was justified by the sense of ‘reasonableness’ held by its leaders and supporters.
On the other hand it largely takes for granted the wrong view that the synthetic bubble surrounding their manufactured environment is entirely natural. The Western simulacrum is based upon liberalism, but to use such a word is not entirely descriptive by itself. More to the point, like much of democratic theory, it is based somewhat on giving individuals various doses of narcissistic supply, flattering them by telling them that all what they see is theirs and that all what they have is real. It informs them that they, without putting tremendous work or directing their skepticism in the right direction, are already equipped to understand the world as presented.
Rather, the liberal individual is encouraged to direct his skepticism at those who are skeptical of the entire schema, and those real skeptics are called ‘cynics’. But the world as presented to them is a manufactured holographic program which the ruling class has built (and inherited) using all spheres of media, education, ideology, ‘common sense’, and so-called civil society. Thus the totalitarian myth of pluralism proceeds from that cognitive error, and can only understand itself through its own language – which is no way to understand something thoroughly, at all.
Once ensnared in the spectacle of the simulacrum, the observer experiences a number of realizations, thoughts, and conclusions which were generally partly arranged by the planner. They are experienced on every level as their own thoughts and conclusions, and they cannot distinguishing between ‘why’ they think and ‘how’ they think something is.
In Freudian terms, while far from perfect, we can understand that in the liberal mind the superego and the id have fused into one, or perhaps it is the id parading as the superego; it is a base rooted animalistic desire to sit upon the pedestal as moral judge and jury. Actually being right may be an objective or intersubjective matter, but wanting to be right is a base instinct likely rooted in human evolution and animalistic hierarchy.
In the process of waking from a dream, we often hear a sound which is being produced from our non-dream reality, but in the dream it is coming from some source in the dream story. Strangely upon waking we realize that this sound has just started to happen – a car horn, garbage truck, alarm clock, telephone. But in the dream this sound originated farther back in the story, minutes or hours before within the dreamer’s experience of time. It is also a different sound, and as all sounds are hallucinations on some level, is interpreted as another sound. The real phone ringing in the dream is a bird or a song or words from a person, etc.
What we understand from this is that the cognitive process exists in time, but does not give us a real sense of linear time. The experience of linear time in cognition is not the same as the actual external world of sequential cause and effect. Rather the cognitive process in real time can assign to the consciousness an atemporal or anachronistic experience. Our experience of sequence and the actual sequence are not united nor unilaterally determined. Also revealed are that it is our minds that do the hearing, not our ears.
The dream experience of sounds, sights, and time is much more like our waking cognitive experience. We see and hear things we expect to see and hear, even to the point of misjudging or mischaracterizing the actual things we are seeing and hearing. And so we can extrapolate from this that cognitive processes and our even our very sense of self both mirrors and is ensnared within the entire schema of the subject’s society.
Therefore, in understanding the holographic reality, we can see the ‘Ukraine vs. Novorossiya’ phenomenon as something simultaneously real and yet at the same time projected over. It is a reality, a dream, and a holographic projection all at once. The way we remember events and their significance, and the actual order and meaning they had when they occurred are not the same.
Many people are intelligent and suspect that something is wrong with the false narrative of Novorossiyan events being projected through news and information sources, and others take it further and understand somewhere deep inside that something is wrong with the entire Western materialist and consumerist paradigm.
When intelligent people receive obviously wrong information, they underestimate the ability of others to understand that it is obviously wrong information. Thus the official, though obviously wrong, view becomes assigned in their mind’s cabinet as not only the official view, but probably also what ‘everyone else’ thinks, and as such – as social beings – becomes the ‘polite view’. It is also the reasonable view, or at least in politely examining the official view they would like to remain in the reasonable emotive state.
Thus much of the liberal simulacrum is held together by good people not wanting to offend, and thoughtful people wanting to be rational. Among others, reasonableness is the emotive state used in liberalism to justify hierarchies – the more reasonable, the higher the status. So it is produced together:
- reasonableness-as-morality
- conformity
- submission
The simulacrum however projects over those three productions the following emotional states:
- rationalism
- individualism
- freedom
The Russian planners and thinkers who work in this realm of cognitive science have been working closely to inform Putin and is advisers. They understand the above set of complex relations between actual reality, thinking, and projected reality, and understand the way the Western liberal mind functions, and how it interacts with the news cycle. Most of these experts were of adult age when the USSR still existed, and Soviet society, while ultimately destroyed by liberalism, was not a liberal society. It’s entire schema was different, and produced a different – though still modern – Weltanschauung.
These factors help to us understand why these men and women do so well what they do. They now live in a variation of the simulacrum of the liberal form of modernity, forcibly imposed onto the former Soviet Union, but they did not come of age in it. Because of the pre-90’s experiences of today’s leadership, among them are the living memories of a different society that had a different schema. Thus not only are they aware that another schema is possible in the abstract, they actually originate from one that was different and have that real life experience.
Russia is still a combination of premodern and modern society, with the technologies and foreign memetic influences of Western postmodernism often projected over it. Russia, in a manner similar to that described by H. Marcuse in One Dimensional Man, (or Pan-Arabists like Michel Aflaq) has it is disposal the possibility of diverging from the modernist Western course and either returning to or creating for itself an entirely separate civilizational direction and course sui generis. This would also have the effect of promoting global diversity and multipolarity.
Now that we have explored some of the theories of cognition which help to understand the simulacrum, we can present a general overview of the specific tactics which the Russian leadership are presently employing in order to manage the perception and actual experience of reality.
