The term “propaganda” originally referred to a 17th-century committee of Roman Catholic cardinals that sought to propagate the religion through foreign missions — the marginally and only temporarily benevolent face of European colonialism. In modern times, public relations guru Ed Bernaysrevived the term to describe the way Woodrow Wilson’s administration convinced Americans to support U.S. involvement in World War I. Propaganda was about telling the same story through so many media channels at once that there appeared to be only one story.

Today, however, the primary goal of government propaganda is to undermine our faith in everything. Not just our belief in particular stories in the news, but our trust in the people who are telling the stories, the platforms, and fact-based reality itself. Facts are, after all, the enemy of beliefs.

What many of us forget is that this new style of influence through disorientation is really an appropriation of the counterculture’s techniques. This is what the Situationists were doing. So were the hippies and “heads” of the 1960s.

Before Watergate anyway, it felt as if the press and the government were on the same side, telling the same story to us all. There was no way for the underfunded counterculture to compete with mainstream reality programming—except by undermining its premises. The flower children couldn’t overwhelm Richard Nixon’s National Guard troops, but they could put daisies in the barrels of their rifles.

Taken to the extreme, this sort of activist satire became Operation Mindfuck, first announced in 1968 by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their Illuminatus Trilogy. The idea was to undermine people’s faith in government, authority, and the sanctity of consensus reality itself by pranking everything, all the time.

The idea of Operation Mindfuck was to break the trance that kept America at war, blindly consuming, and oblivious to its impact on the rest of the world. Destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks and confusion. Say things that may or may not be true — but probably not. But maybe. Levitate the Pentagon as an act of protest. Publish conspiracy stories about Jackie Kennedy walking in on Lyndon Johnson sexually abusing the exit wound in JFK’s head when his body was being transported back to Washington, DC.

Can they cast spells on social media that change the way people think and vote?

Operation Mindfuck sought to suggest that anything anyone in the counterculture was doing at any time might just be part of an elaborate prank. This put outsiders in a difficult position: The only safe assumption was that anything a hippie was doing was part of Operation Mindfuck — some sort of trick or game. But because this could only lead to paranoia, one had to assume that whatever they were doing was probably harmless. They were, after all, just pranks. For their part, the counterculture agitators hoped the assumption that they were just jesters would keep them safe from any real persecution.

But over the ensuing decades, it was the progressive left whose ideas ended up becoming mainstreamed. Really, from All in the Family onward, it was progressive values in fictional TV — Maude to M*A*S*H, Murphy Brown to The West Wing. And as that became the dominant cultural narrative, Operation Mindfuck became the tool of the alt-right. Is the Cult of Kek — that Egyptian frog cartoon — real? Can they cast spells on social media that change the way people think and vote?

Or consider the president himself, releasing more decoys per minute than an Apache helicopter and forcing Americans to, at the very least, entertain the notion that the entire media is run by the deep state. Anything is possible, right? Climate change is a hoax. The earth may be flat, as an increasingly vocal minority are arguing. Easily misinterpreted videos on Twitter force everyone to stop and think twice before deciding they know what it is they’re really looking at. (P2P blog editors note: the video in this link is now unavailable; click here for a selection of contrasting videos illustrating the author’s point).

But the value of Operation Mindfuck isn’t just the opportunity to exchange one delusion for another. It’s not about replacing the fantasy of a borderless world with that of a walled nation-state or that of a free-market jungle with communism, but seeing all of them as extreme, ideological endpoints. These are reality tunnels — perceptual limitations and conceptual frameworks, shaped by our experiences and prejudices. None of them can be understood as absolute. But at the same time, we have to remember that some of these tunnels are a whole lot closer to reality than others. It’s up to us to choose the most constructive and compassionate ones to inhabit.

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From sixty-two to six. That’s an astonishing increase in the concentration of wealth: especially in just one year. Sociologist Robert Merton coined the term “Matthew Effect” — “unto every one that hath shall be given” — almost fifty years ago in reference to the phenomenon of the rich getting richer. But never has this concept been so clearly illustrated as it is today. Six people who could carry on an intimate living room conversation are as rich as almost four billion people.

How could this happen? The usual right-wing suspects, professional defenders of what they call “our free enterprise system,” are doing their utmost to reassure us there’s nothing to see here. But the fact that progressively larger shares of wealth are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands should suggest to even the most unobservant that “our free enterprise system” isn’t really very free at all.

As a character in The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and R.A. Wilson, explained:

“Privilege implies exclusion from privilege, just as advantage implies disadvantage. In the same mathematically reciprocal way, profit implies loss. If you and I exchange equal goods, that is trade: neither of us profits and neither of us loses. But if we exchange unequal goods, one of us profits and the other loses. Mathematically. Certainly. Now, such mathematically unequal exchanges will always occur because some traders will be shrewder than others. But in total freedom— in anarchy— such unequal exchanges will be sporadic and irregular. A phenomenon of unpredictable periodicity, mathematically speaking. Now look about you…and you will not observe such unpredictable functions. You will observe, instead, a mathematically smooth function, a steady profit accruing to one group and an equally steady loss accumulating for all others. Why is this…? Because the system is not free or random, any mathematician would tell you a priori. Well, then, where is the determining function, the factor that controls the other variables…? Privilege… When A meets B in the marketplace, they do not bargain as equals. A bargains from a position of privilege; hence, he always profits and B always loses.”

Equal exchange — that is, exchange between equals — is a positive-sum transaction in which neither party benefits at the other’s expense. Privilege is just the opposite. For every guy who gets a dollar he didn’t work for, Wobbly leader Big Bill Haywood said, there’s another guy who worked for a dollar he didn’t get. The reason is that the exchange isn’t between equals. One party is able to benefit at the other’s expense because they are unequal in power; one of them has the power of the state at their back.

If you look at the richest people and largest corporations in the world, you will find that their wealth comes not primarily from producing things, but from controlling the conditions under which other people are allowed to produce. That’s right — they collect rents for the “productive service” of not obstructing productive activity by other people.

Most of the world’s food is not grown by people feeding themselves on their own land or cultivating their land to produce food for others. It is grown by people working land — most of it stolen — owned by other people who demand tribute for access to it. Most of the world’s manufacturing corporations no longer manufacture anything themselves. They outsource actual production to independent sweatshop employers, and simply use their ownership of “intellectual property” — patents and trademarks — to enforce a monopoly on sale of the finished product. And the biggest concentrations of wealth of all come from the state-granted privilege of lending the circulating medium into existence and advancing credit against future production: a function that, absent bank licensing and legal tender laws, could be performed by the producing classes themselves advancing credit against each other’s future output.

The Gateses and Buffetts of the world, in obtaining their wealth, are every bit as much a beneficiary of the state as any feudal landlord or Soviet commissar.

Photo by autovac

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