Winning Arguments In The Matrix

The 1999 film, the Matrix (the first one in what became a series, specifically) remains one of the best movies ever made, particularly if you're interested in understanding reality as it is today.  Several years ago I wrote a song called "Here In The Matrix," on that theme, and the essays I've written broadly on the subject of what I've been calling social engineering also speak to this theme.  I found Naomi Klein's latest book, Doppelganger, to be a very incisive analysis of the nature of the matrix of control we find ourselves living within today.  I would add that if this is a subject of interest to you, it doesn't matter whether you agree with Ms. Klein about whatever issue she has a position on.  The book is about the much bigger picture, it is a meta book.

When Kamala and I weren't listening to the audiobook version of Doppelganger during our tour of Scandinavia last month, we were listening to Al-Jazeera, and the bomb-by-bomb accounting of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people.  When Al-Jazeera began to repeat itself, we'd switch to BBC, NPR, and other western networks.  The contrast between the stories being told in the west and those being told by the rest of the world were such a perfect illustration of the patterns Naomi Klein described so well in Doppelganger.  It's also a phenomenon that can easily be observed in the course of the years that I've been having the same kinds of experiences.  Once you're tuned into it, you can see it happening everywhere, to just about anyone that might have influence over a few thousand people in the world, and lots of others as well.

Jumping ahead to my conclusion, there is somewhere between little and no point to engaging in or winning arguments in the Matrix.  Whatever arguments you make, no matter how concisely or how eloquently, can and will be warped by some or another elements of what NK calls the Mirror World.  Those arguments, that either present the opposite case to the one you're making, for example turning the victim into the aggressor, or that make a skewed mockery of the position you're presenting, for example turning calls for a multi-ethnic democracy into a call for genocide, will inevitably be made against you and yours, as soon as you make your arguments, in the Matrix.

At the end of her book, Naomi tries to make some statements about how things could get better, but her general air of bleakness about the whole situation is not well hidden.  I don't think there's any good reason for me to pretend I don't share it.  But now I will proceed to try to win an argument in the Matrix, about why it's pointless to win arguments in the Matrix.  And what I specifically mean by "the Matrix." 

I'll start with what just happened when I took a walk around the neighborhood this morning.  I came back to the apartment complex and there was the apartment manager.  Somehow or other we got to talking about how kids spend too much time playing video games these days, and then he started telling me about the horrible antisemitic things people are saying in marches on college campuses lately.  He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that there's a genocide of Palestinians being perpetrated by people killing them in the name of the state that calls itself "the Jewish State" and is run by Jews, so maybe some people reaching some antisemitic conclusions based on that is par for the course.  And of course these allegedly antisemitic slogans aren't even antisemitic, unless you interpret them all wrong.

Even if this guy were interested in understanding the reality of the situation that he's got his Mirror World version of in his head, and I could interfere with this particular individual's brainwashing, the workings of the Matrix will guarantee millions more people like our apartment manager will continue to be omnipresent across the western world and beyond.  It's not like he came to these warped understandings by himself -- he got his perspective from TV.  Whether it's Fox or MSNBC, it doesn't matter -- they're all on the side of militarism and genocide when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

Of course, the impact of corporate or "public" media on the minds of the masses is well-known and has been for a long time, this is nothing new.  It continues to be a huge problem and continues to be a huge part of the matrix of control, so I mention it.  

One thing that especially interests and alarms me these days is the response by many people to this corporate media propaganda, which largely involves having arguments on the Matrix about the Matrix.  Another is the way sensible arguments, theories, narratives, or explanations are almost inevitably and immediately warped and mocked in what has become an automated process of deception and confusion that is applied to any relevant perspective you can find being presented within the hegemonic world of social media corporations and their communications platforms.

In the movie (spoiler alert), there are aliens from another planet that have taken over ours, and they're sucking the energy out of all the humans, keeping us in pods.  They have us living in an imaginary world that they've designed in our minds to look like the one we used to live in.  In this imaginary world, we work boring jobs, we go out to eat, have conversations with our friends, engage in political arguments, go out to the movies, etc.  Everything we're doing in the Matrix is just for the purpose of feeding the aliens who are sucking up our brain energy, but we don't know that.

If it wasn't clear before February, 2022, then it should have become clear in the wake of October 7th, 2023, that there are some serious efforts going on here to control the narrative around these wars wherever the western media or western-controlled social media platforms are dominant  What's also more and more clear by the month is these efforts are not limited to the usual sources of propaganda you can find on traditional media like news articles, TV, etc.  Various aspects of the way the dominant social media platforms function make them easy to be useful for anyone promoting a black-and-white analysis of any issue.  No matter how many times you may win an argument, the ridiculously simplistic, zombie version of your argument will be the one you can most easily find being put forward on social media, by design -- if any argument on the subject can be found on a given platform at all.

Once the caricature of a perspective becomes the dominant one through this process, reality has been turned on its head, left has become right, support for peace is support for terrorism, communication is endorsement, ignorance is strength, censorship is freedom, etc., then comes the question of how this "knowledge" is to be applied.  At which point the dominant tactics that have been so actively promoted by the liberal press since 2020 kick in -- namely, "deplatforming," or the use of harassment and violence to make sure your enemies can't safely gather in a public setting.

Several incidents in Portland, Oregon that have taken place over the past couple of months illustrate the whole phenomenon with particularly graphic eloquence.  They all involve the same milieu of self-identified "antifascists," for whatever complex of reasons overwhelmingly trans women (who were raised as boys, to be clear), loosely affiliated, according to social media accounts clearly associated with the "antifascists," with Rose City Antifa.  The association of these folks with Rose City Antifa makes sense, because the ideological leadership of this organization actively promotes the "deplatforming" idea that is central to the activities of this group of "antifascists."  (Want some evidence of this?  Read Shane Burley's latest book, or just listen to the last time he was interviewed for an hour on Oregon Public Radio.)

In one incident, at a rally against the bombing of Gaza I attempted to speak at in October, an extremely aggressive individual began screaming in my face and calling me things like a "Nazi consortionist" through her mask.  More alarmingly than this outrageous behavior was how no one around me who had attended the protest acted like this was in any way unusual behavior, or something they needed to address in any way aside from studiously ignoring that it was happening, or in one case operating under the assumption that my assailant and I were having a "conflict" that needed to be resolved.

To be clear, the accusation that I am a "Nazi consortionist" is that I unapologetically interviewed a person who some people think is a white nationalist, in order to get their perspective on reality, and why they ever became white nationalists.  This effort at communication with people who might be inclined to join such groups -- an important effort that needs to be much more common -- has gotten me condemned as a "Nazi consortionist," or just as a Nazi.

Once you have decided someone is a Nazi, if you're part of a group whose ideology says you have to attack the Nazis, deplatform them, make sure they can't safely show their faces in public, speak, perform, etc., physically assaulting them is fine, anything goes.  This is the explicitly-stated orientation of this form of "antifascism," and again, it has been actively condoned by the liberal media in so many ways, as they highlight one after another progressive politician declaring that "I am Antifa," and enthusiastically joining Antifa in their denunciations of any group that supports Trump as being fascists -- an orientation that is incredibly convenient for the Democrats, if they do continue to believe that calling Republicans fascists and fueling one side in a culture war is a good way to get votes.

What happened to me was nothing compared to what happened a few weeks later, when a feminist group tried to have a meeting in a library function room.  Because this is a group that is concerned with male violence against women, and about how terms like "male" and "female" are defined in this context and other contexts, they are then seen as opposed to the rights of trans women.  Being thus defined as opposed to the rights of trans women, they are then defined as transphobic and desiring the elimination of trans people.  Wanting to eliminate trans people, or any other group of people, thus makes them Nazis.

Every step of the way, this process of the collapse of any real sensible analysis through something that looks kind of like logic is supported by the ideological leaders of Rose City Antifa, who again are taken very seriously by the liberal media in this and other countries and publish articles in corporate liberal outlets regularly.  But more importantly, the process of the breakdown of sense here is assisted tremendously by both social media algorithms that promote conflict and division, and by the impossibly-concise and truncated nature of most any effort to have serious discourse on such platforms.

Therefore, feminists become transphobes and transphobes become Nazis "who want to kill us" and therefore must be physically assaulted when they try to have a meeting in a library.  Punches and fireworks were thrown along with many words shouted, women were injured, and injuries could have been much worse.  Efforts at dialogue were rebuffed with more screaming, which is also what I have encountered when attempting dialogue with this crowd.

Most recently, a group of anarchists having a gathering that was explicitly billed as a gathering of anarchists were attacked by these "antifascists" on the grounds that because these anarchists didn't require attendees to wear masks, they were no better than the US Army giving the Indians blankets infected with smallpox, as they wrote on their blog celebrating their assault on this gathering.

I know there are people reading this who are trying to be patient with me and my free speech obsession but who are thinking, "but those feminists really are TERFs" or "but interviewing that Nazi was a bad thing to do" or "but it really is incredibly inconsiderate to vulnerable members of our society not to encourage mask-wearing when there's a rise in Covid cases going on."

The thing is, the tactic of screaming at and/or physically assaulting anyone trying to have a public gathering is a terrible tactic!  It's been proven over and over again for a century now around the world that this tactic, known for a long time among antifascists as "deplatforming," known to other more contemporary circles by terms such as "cancellation campaigning" or "cancel culture," backfires terribly wherever it's been tried, and tends to lead to or at least contribute to really terrible outcomes, the Third Reich being the most extreme example of them.

And even if you believe, based on whatever bizarre reading of history, that physically assaulting the far right, whoever is defining that term, wherever they're gathering, is the duty of every antifascist, as has been said on many occasions, it should still hopefully be easy enough to see how this tactical orientation can go terribly wrong, once you've also adopted a completely reductionist view of humanity, so that everyone you have philosophical or political disagreements with becomes a Nazi who should be treated with open hostility and violence.

If you can find people from within the bowels of this cultish mindset who are willing to and capable of communicating with you, and then if you manage to extract their brains from the vise of this kind of thinking, they may learn how to fly like Neo, so to speak, but there will be so many others to take their places -- as systematically as the algorithms which will reinforce their narrative, in so many ways, along with the liberal media establishment, since deplatforming attacks fit so comfortably in the glove of the censorship-happy fear-mongering in the liberal media about disinformation, by which they mean any narrative that they don't approve of.

You can win so many arguments with so many who have been sucked into the Mirror World, the Matrix-like reality that isn't, but the Matrix will produce more minions, by virtue of its design.  I don't know the way forward any more than Naomi Klein seems to.  But when you're in a hole, it's best to stop digging.  In that vein, I think I can confidently say that whatever we do that does not involve wasting our time having arguments in the Matrix is probably better than the alternative.  We won't get out of this hole, this Matrix, by winning arguments while trapped inside it.  We need to get out.