The binds that confine.
The devastating consequences of “wokeness.”
No class. (Seikoesque Payne, cc by 2.0/ Creative Commons.)Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.
—C Charles MackayA la lanterne!
—Popular slogan during the French Revolution
18 MAY—Wokeness, “aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)” according to Merriam–Webster’s 11th edition, is everywhere these days. The CIA going woke? The Pinkertons, long-time nemesis of labor unions, flying the Rainbow Pride flag? Raytheon pushing critical race theory? What is going on? Has the U.S. “left” finally triumphed over its foes and it’s some kind of brand new day?
Not even remotely. In fact, “progressives” are circling the drain to measure by their influence. Medicare for All is going nowhere, the minimum wage remains $7.25 an hour, unions while making gains recently, most prominently, at an Amazon warehouse in New York, are still on the verge of extinction—impotent Twitter protestations by Bernie notwithstanding. But so are the ruling class elites who have routed progressives for decades. The vaunted “Squad” in the House just voted unanimously in favor spending $40 billion more to pour weapons into Ukraine. Bernie Sanders went along for the same ride in the Senate.
Why this, and how is it so?
My answer comes in two parts. These developments have their roots in 1) the state-sponsored battle against civil unrest in the U.S that began in the 1960s, and 2) intellectual concepts discovered by polymath thinker Gregory Bateson—in this case the idea he called schismogenesis. We need to get our minds around this exotic-sounding notion if we are to get our minds around our current social and political crises.
As is well-enough known, if not vividly remembered among some of us, the U.S. erupted into a high-pitched domestic rebellion during the 1960s, manifest in the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution, organized labor, political opposition to the C.I.A., and the antiwar movement. Notably enough, prominent leaders in these movements were assassinated ( King, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, the two Kennedys) or died under mysterious circumstances (Walter Reuther, civil rights leader and president of the United Automobile Workers). These movements threatened the status quo very profoundly. Taken together, they might have altered our republic’s course—and the world’s—greatly to the good.
One might have thought it enough to satisfy the ruling elite that the leaders of these movements or opponents of the military-industrial complex were dead or otherwise “neutralized.” Certainly the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother, in 1963 and 1968 respectively, brought to a tragic end the most promising passage in America’s postwar history—years in which a fundamental change in direction seemed within reach.
But this proved not enough, and the elites who run this country embarked on an additional strategy. This was to capture the social and political movements of the 1960s with two objectives. One, the intent was to prevent a resurgence of rebellion against the ruling elites. Two, they also sought to prevent cross-alliances among the various rebellious movements—a motive, some theorize, to explain the death of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr,, who was, at the time of his murder in 1968, trying to unite the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and organized labor.
All sorts of oddities have arisen in consequence of this campaign. One of the feminist movement’s most prominent figures, Gloria Steinem, was long ago revealed to be a C.I.A. operative, though these reports were suppressed for many years. Reflecting its co-opted leadership, the AFL-CIO provided assistance to various C.I.A. covert operations during the Cold War. Closer to our time, Black Lives Matters is subsidized by the Ford Foundation in the amount of roughly $100 million—while receiving large additional funds from organized labor—and is now infested with corporate and state actors.
C.I.A. agent Steinem. Cover blown. (Gage Skidmore/ cc by SA 2.0.)And on the other side of the ledger, what? Concrete measures of material progress, such as increased wages for the working class, universal healthcare, and a restoration of union membership to more working Americans remain curiously out of reach.
There is a name for this highly effective signal-jamming by government and corporate elites: It is called maintaining the schismogenesis. Take your time with the pronunciation. Then let us consider this apparently exotic term carefully, for it is highly pertinent to our circumstances.
Schismogenesis denotes the beginning of the breakdown of a relationship or a system. Gregory Bateson, a scientific polymath who conducted research from the 1930s throughout the 1970s in a wide array of fields, including anthropology, semiotics, cybernetics, linguistics, and biology, first developed this concept while observing the social interactions of a New Guinean tribe called the Iatmul. Interestingly enough, Bateson later instrumentalized the idea of schismogenesis while working for the Office of Strategic Services, the C.I.A.’s precursor. This perpetuation of division, schismogenesis, is what I contend all of these woke corporations and government agencies are actively engaged in.
If I am correct, this is not a phenomenon we can take lightly.
The explosion in wokeness dates to the years immediately following the Occupy rebellion of the “left” and the Tea Party rebellion of the right in 2009 and 2011 respectively. This is very curious timing indeed. Absent in all of these modern woke campaigns, of course, are the aforementioned measures that actually represent material improvements for the working class and any mention of the menace of war and imperialism Even now, divisive and unpopular concepts such as Critical Race Theory and “intersectionality,” first cultivated in academia by upper middle-class elites, are being touted by woke corporations and labor unions.
Against this Goliath, it looks as if true progressives are doomed. Ironically, it also looks as if the woke propagators may have created a tool that will also insure their own demise.
Why? This explanation relies on another of Gregory Bateson’s concepts: the double bind.
After Bateson’s work for the O.S.S. during World War II, he began investigating the complexities of communication. In particular, he was intrigued by schizophrenia and coined the term “double bind” during his research. A double bind consists of a sequence of injunctions that have the following structure:
⁋ a primary negative injunction containing a threat of punishment,
⁋ a secondary injunction, also containing a threat communicated verbally or otherwise, that conflicts with the first injunction,
⁋ and a tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victims from escaping the field.
The simplest illustration of a double bind that I can think of also happens to be very germane to the social and political crises that concern me. It is as follows.
It is easy to understand how “progressives” are trapped in a double bind. Focusing on class alone is racist, misogynist, etc., their narcissistic woke ringmasters tell us. In consequence, solutions for working-class problems are effectively jettisoned from the agenda. But focusing on appeasing the myriad identitarian factions never coalesces into the solutions to working-class problems progressives loudly proclaim to favor. This is what I mean by a double bind.
Not to be missed, our ruling elites are also snared in a double bind. The bind for the elites is this: By maintaining divisions among the general population to prevent threats to their rule, the elites are unable to generate the societal cohesion necessary to address national challenges, namely the loss of domestic industrial capacity and the looming threat of climate change. Whichever way elites turn to address this contradiction, they will lose something. If they drop schismogenesis as a means to engender national solidarity, they must surrender power and wealth to the populace. If they maintain the schismogenesis, they will not be able to address national challenges and risk losing… everything.
Another complication for the ruling elite is that the Bannonite right, led by figures such as Donald Trump and Tom Cotton, is much more cohesive and potent than the U.S. left, harbors an abject dislike of wokeness, and seeks to exploit its unpopularityamong the general population. By forcing the terms of discussion and policy proposals through a woke filter, popular universalist proposals by progressives, such as a public health-insurance option, never achieve a position in the Democratic Party platform and instead, the status quo of sops and bailouts to corporations continues apace. By failing to deliver substantial relief to non-elites, the Democratic establishment has opened the door to a sustained populist Right counterattack, the beginning of which was the triumph of Donald Trump in 2016.
Better to speak of it than vote for it. Pramila Jayapal, president of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. (CPC photo archive.)The elite project of maintaining the schismogenesis has been effective for generations and was put into overdrive with the rise of the wokeness campaign. Now, with the need for national solidarity to address existential threats to the nation. The question is whether U.S. elites capable of retiring wokeness as a weapon, surrendering some material power to the non-elites, and therefore saving themselves and everyone else from the fallout of national collapse.
As economist James Galbraith said in 2011:
Large countries can and do fail, they have done so in our own time. And the consequences are very grave: drastic declines in services, in living standards, in life expectancies, huge increases in social tension, in repression, and in violence.
Indeed, it looks to me as though the damage from the schismogenesis campaign is terminal. Currently, the brilliant ruling elites of America are employing a rally-round-the-flag tactic to try to generate national cohesion. By casting Vladimir Putin as a new Hitler, the elites, with the help of endless streams of mainstream media propaganda, seek to scare the general population into submission. However, judging by recent polling, this is not having the desired effect.
Joe Biden, defender of the elite status quo, would lose handily to Trump in a 2024 rematch, according to recent polling. If the struggle against Russia escalates, catastrophic consequences, such as the collapse of the U.S. dollar, could result. The domestic fallout would throw the country into the type of unrest that James Galbraith alluded to.
This is an outcome wherein our decadent elites might find themselves swinging from nooses or dodging bullets, a shocking contrast to the carnal indulgences elites have enjoyed during their hegemony.
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