> As Antonio Gramsci understood, rules achieve hegemonic domination when they are able to cloak their coercion with the consent of the ruled.
If something has the consent of the ruled, can it be coercive? If it can, what even is consent?
If something has the consent of the ruled, can it be coercive? If it can, what even is consent?
If a 10,000-strong anti-skub march happens in my town, but the nightly news doesn't mention it at all and instead airs man-on-the-street interviews with smiling middle-class people who all quite like skub, what just happened? Are the populace for or against skub? It doesn't really matter if any anti-skub organizations can be made to appear to be ineffectual or aberrant or insane or invisible.
It's very tricky to tell people that their desires, beliefs, culture, and religion are merely ruses to further domination. It blurs the line between coercion and consent. It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual).
Why do you think that? Keep reading the article. The West doesn't really need Fear (except against whistleblowers etc), but uses Friction and Flooding extremely effectively. The "mysterious" coordination of the increasingly-consolidated media helps provide Friction against organizing effectively against skub, and a steady insistent Flood of pro-skub messaging ensures those without much investment in skub either way suffer the mere-exposure effect and think skub is normal (those man-on-the-street interviews, skub showing up in movies and TV, ads for skub, weirdly patriotic messaging about skub).
>It seems to suggest, paradoxically, that people can only consent to things that they ought to consent to, according to the beliefs of the person making the judgement (in this case a Marxist intellectual).
I think it suggests that people should make decisions based on unadulterated information, rather than that which is spoon-fed to them by authoritarians. Did you read the rest of the article? "Marxist" is an analytical lens, not indicative of someone who wants to give your toothbrush to the revolution.
You're making the same mistake as Gramsci. You decide what the correct beliefs are and the fact that other people don't have those beliefs is evidence of their coercion.
No, the subjects of the article decide that. I'm just some asshole commenting on it.
Relatedly, it's weird that you're directly asserting that I'm doing something that I'm not doing -- you've decided it, thus it is so. You'd think that you could quote the bit where I'm deciding what the correct beliefs are. I suspect you're inferring it from my suggestion that an increasingly-consolidated mass media decides what's normal and presents it to us. If so, I have a short educational video [0] on the topic.
Sure, by baselessly asserting that I, or Gramsci,
>>decide what the correct beliefs are and the fact that other people don't have those beliefs is evidence of their coercion.
Have I missed something? You wrote that "[i]t's very tricky to tell people that their desires, beliefs, culture, and religion are merely ruses to further domination", which suggests that I, or Gramsci, make that argument. I don't think I did; he doesn't seem to be. Should I infer that the three Fs outlined again and again in the article are in fact the desires, beliefs, culture, and religion of the people being oppressed?
Yes. SEC staff have had to face angry haters after shutting down Ponzi schemes. Not from the people running them. From the suckers, who were hoping that if it went on a little longer, they'd come out ahead.
Every society eventually wrestles with these things.
Most people just say well next time I’ll elect my other side and they’ll do abc that I would consent to. And the process repeats.
Still in some sense if there is true consent by an individual then it isn’t necessarily coercive though it could be manipulative.
Also the consent of two saying I don’t mind if you take/abuse from the one can be totalitarian.
If we think Trump was bad, I think people might be horrified at how hard the pendulum swings back the other way. Many people hate much of the policies going on under Biden (even if just out of partisan reasons and not principles), and one party acting like they can do whatever they want because they have the presidency and a tie in a senate doesn’t change there are like 50 million people who feel like they’re being “oppressed”.
Just as dubya seemed less bad once we had Trump, the next guy might make Trump look the same in comparison.
All done with “consent of the ruled”
An interesting aspect of this is: full blown direct democracy is one thing, but simple finer grained continuous high quality polling of public sentiment (however imperfect) is rarely discussed, and isn't particularly technically challenging.
That an underlying idea here was that all the government needs to do is act upon the feedback of these groups. The government didn't have to lead.
That didn't work out very well in practice though. I don't believe the issue was around the statistical methods, or some kind of bias, although they could add extra issues.
More that the problem is just asking a random collection of members of the public what to do is not in general what the public wants, or not when it comes to be enacted. As the general public does not have the time or the inclination to dig deep on issues and possible results. It's in effect government by 'hot take'.
I bring this up - because whilst not the same, the continuous democracy you describe may also have some of these issues.
This is touched on in an Adam Curtis documentary - probly All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace
https://thoughtmaybe.com/all-watched-over-by-machines-of-lov...
I feel like local communities this would work well, since a majority overriding a minority might not be as egregious as say a majority of rural folk having their will done over city folk and vice versa.
What I wish we could do is let’s say the federal government says in accordance with majority sentiment, masks are required for children in school. The state of Texas though has the ability to override it or leave it in place, but then the city of Austin could then override what Texas overruled and so on. I don’t know something where the will of more people is being followed.
Oh I agree...but I'm not even making a claim that this will affect change, I am simply suggesting that broad increased awareness of ~true public sentiment (as opposed to largely baseless *claim of public sentiment that we are fed on TV) would be interesting, and maybe even useful. I believe it would decrease the level of delusion in society.
> What I wish we could do is let’s say the federal government says in accordance with majority sentiment, masks are required for children in school. The state of Texas though has the ability to override it or leave it in place, but then the city of Austin could then override what Texas overruled and so on. I don’t know something where the will of more people is being followed.
I'm not opposed to this in principle, but I am leery of claims of "in accordance with majority sentiment" under the current mode of measurement, and information distribution that precedes polling. I believe the whole system is rotten.