Reality Honks Back: A Reflection on the Reality War | Hacker News Reader

Reality Honks Back: A Reflection on the Reality War

theupheaval.substack.com

22 pointsjorgesborges5 comments

Very good analysis. The author writes:

>The post-modern fish swims in a narrative sea, and their first reaction is always to try to control it (through what the CCP calls “discourse power”) because at heart they well and truly believe in the idea of the “social construction of reality,” as Lasch pointed out in the quote at top. If there is no fixed, objective truth, only power, then the mind’s will rules the world. Facts can be reframed as needed to create the story that best produces the correct results for Progress (this is why you will find journalists are now professionally obsessed with “storytelling” rather than reporting facts).

This reminded me very much of a 2004 discussion between Ron Suskind and an unnamed, high ranking US official which appeared in New York Times Magazine in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. Although the official who made the statement wasn't named, it was widely purported to be Karl Rove.

>The aide said that guys like me [Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-...

This mentality exhibited by "virtual class" who believe everything is simply a narrative to be set, controlled and manipulated by the powerful, the disaster in Iraq and this episode with the truckers brings to mind another quote:

>Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. -Mike Tyson

The "reality-based community" quote also came to my mind when I read the article, so I wonder if the writer also thought of it. It perhaps wasn't highlighted, though, because it further serves to undermine their point, since Rove and Trudeau are not what I would consider ideological allies, and it can't be ignored that ideology is making a huge difference to how events are playing out (and even underpins why there is a policy being protested against in the first place).

I suppose there is a sense in which Rove and Trudeau share the same view on power, but that doesn't mean it is helpful to group them together as "Virtuals". We already have a word for people who try to influence the world using political power, and that word is "politician".

While it's reasonable to say that politicians are often disconnected from the situation on the ground, that is not a new observation, and I think we need more than the examples of Iraq and the truckers protest in order to prove that the mentality of politicians is deficient. One could even argue that both Rove and Trudeau have actually been successful, since Bush got re-elected (and gained US military bases, and oil, and reconstruction contracts) due to the "disaster in Iraq", and Trudeau gets to paint his opponents as Nazis who are attacking the ordinary citizens that he is standing up for.

A more insightful analysis might be that the powers available to politicians in modern Western democracies mean that certain types of problems can't be avoided (whether that's terrorism or pandemics), and that only a limited set of options are available to politicians for trying to solve them (such as war and law). The fact that wars are messy and some people are disruptive when their livelihoods are threatened is not really surprising.

This is an incredible analysis of the current culture divide that introduces a new concept of Physical vs Virtual worker classes into the our social structure.

Agree completely. This piece really hits a sweet-spot for my tastes in terms of a relatively balanced looked at the dynamics with new ways for thinking about it.

An interesting framing between "Virtuals" and "Physicals", but this is perhaps an over-simplification. Are doctors and nurses not "Physicals"? They deal with physical people every day (in fact, they perform "physicals" on people) and yet I'd guess they don't feel a strong affinity with the truckers (supporting neither their cause nor their tactics).

Also, I think the analysis downplays what is somewhat unique about this protest, which is that the truckers have access to large objects which can cause disproportionate disruption in arbitrary locations.

Hospitality staff, for example, don't have that tool at their disposal, and I assume they are more likely to live in cities (the land of the "Virtuals"), despite doing physical and noticeable work (which would align them with the truckers, under the article's thesis). Would they even want to carry out a disruptive protest if there were a (similarly justifiable) vaccine mandate applied to their industry?

The article's lede was therefore probably buried at the end, therefore, where it says:

> So expect the Virtuals of the ruling class to double down on trying to exert control, moving with all haste to develop new and innovative methods of information management and coercion to try to eliminate every human vulnerability from the machine. Self-driving truck startups are about to have an excellent next funding round.

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