Why Denial Persists

We recently returned from a conference in Lisbon, Portugal, where we spent several days after the event’s conclusion exploring this beautiful city and its environs. While there, walking Lisbon’s famed ‘seven hills,’ mostly surrounded by throngs of other visitors – either on foot, like ourselves, or in one of the ubiquitous ‘Tuk-Tuks,’ we were struck by the conspicuous absence of any signs of anxiety or concern among these crowds.

On the contrary, they were clearly in a festive holiday mood, eating and drinking at sidewalk cafés or coffee shops, as they talked excitedly among themselves or busied themselves with their cell phones. As far as appearances went, they clearly seemed to regard the world around them as chugging along in as ‘normal’ a fashion as possible.

Needless to say, as members of the wide-awake tribe, we marvelled at this. Which one among the (reportedly growing) group of people worldwide, who are painfully aware of the colossal coup taking place in the interstices of (in-)visibility, would not behold these masses of tourists, living in a fool’s paradise, with a mixture of pity and amazement?

Being unable to refrain from remarking to each other on the conspicuous cloak of ignorance hanging over these crowds, an obvious question obtruded itself to us after a while, given that these uncomprehending lambs were unwittingly being led to what could turn out to be their own demise, all the while under the impression that they are heading for the paradise of ‘smart (15-minute) cities,’ and the supposed ‘convenience’ of CBDCs, let alone the other delights of the much-vaunted ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ The question was this: how is it possible for people, a fair number of whom must surely be intelligent, if not highly so, not to put two and two together in the face of what has been happening since at least 2020? 

I have previously tried to answer this very question in relation to the very group of people (and in one instance concerning one famous member of this group) who might be expected to detect a lie the moment it has been uttered, namely philosophers – those individuals who putatively embody the intellectual acumen and moral courage of that archetypal philosopher, Socrates, who ‘spoke truth to power’ even as he knew that he would be condemned to death by a jury who admired, hated, and envied him all at once, given his popularity among certain Athenians, particularly the youth. 

Sadly, as my experience since 2020 has testified, even ‘philosophers’ – in scare quotes because individuals who work as ‘philosophers’ (people who teach philosophy, that is) – are not necessarily the real McCoy. Real philosophers are easily recognisable – they don’t only teach the discipline (they need not even be teachers of philosophy), they do it. They live it. They act according to their philosophical insights. And they show moral courage in public. If they don’t do these things, they aren’t philosophers. Here is what Robert M. Pirsig – an iconoclastic thinker if ever there was one – has to say on this matter (Lila, p. 258): 

He liked that word philosophology. It was just right. It had a nice dull, cumbersome, superfluous appearance that exactly fitted its subject matter, and he’d been using it for some time now. Philosophology is to philosophy as musicology is to music, or as art history and art appreciation are to art, or as literary criticism is to creative writing. It’s a derivative, secondary field, a sometimes parasitic growth that likes to think it controls its host by analyzing and intellectualizing its host’s behavior.

Literature people are sometimes puzzled by the hatred many creative writers have for them. Art historians can’t understand the venom either. He supposed the same was true with musicologists but he didn’t know enough about them. But philosophologists don’t have this problem at all because the philosophers who would normally condemn them are a null-class. They don’t exist. Philosophologists, calling themselves philosophers, are just about all there are. 

To be sure, it is not only philosophers who show moral courage; many non-philosophers do so, and have done so in our present time of darkening. (It is just that moral courage is a recognisable trait of philosophers by virtue of their vocation.) And just as philosophers may be expected to show a more-than-average level of intelligence, as mentioned above, so do many other people, including the ones that Pirsig so unflatteringly labels ‘philosophologists.’

But, importantly, intelligence is no guarantee that one can detect foul play where it occurs, usually lurking in the shadows – which today equals the miasma of censorship, which the tyrants are hoping will camouflage their stealthy infiltration of every aspect of our lives with their paralysing schemes and restrictions. Hence my first two paragraphs, above. 

Above, I mentioned previously answering the puzzling question, why not even the group of people calling themselves philosophers have succeeded in dispelling the mists of obfuscation being foisted upon us. My answer (see the link provided above) was phrased along the lines of the psychoanalytic concepts of the unconscious, and of repression. Repression occurs (unconsciously) when something – an event, an experience, an item of information – is so excessively disturbing that one’s psyche cannot tolerate it at a conscious level, and hence it is banished to the unconscious. Not the ‘subconscious’ – which corresponds with Freud’s notion of the ‘preconscious’ – but the unconscious, which, per definition, cannot be accessed voluntarily. 

Hand in hand with this, and symptomatic of the act of repressing the unbearable evidence that there is ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’ – as Hamlet phrased it; except that today the rot pervades the whole world, where the WEF, the WHO, and the UN are the sources of the rottenness – the people who cannot face the truth, staring them in the face, experience ‘cognitive dissonance.’ As the phrase suggests, this occurs when ‘something does not add up’ about what one reads, sees, or hears; it does not sit well with one’s accepted beliefs or prejudices. That’s when repression kicks in. 

Having witnessed (mainly) masses of tourists in Lisbon behaving as if everything in the world is just hunky-dory, and revisiting my previous explanation, to myself, of the reasons (explained above) for this apparent indifference to a life-threatening set of circumstances globally – of which they appear to be oblivious – I experienced what is known as an ‘Aha-Erlebnis,’ depicted in comic books by a light bulb flashing above a character’s head. This was prompted by my realisation, anew, of something abundantly obvious to everyone who cares to look: the fact that, while some of the people sitting at street cafés were chatting, many were not. Instead, they were looking at their mobile phones’ screens, and sometimes typing on them. 

So what, you may retort – this is nothing new; we’ve seen this for more than a decade. Indeed. But relate this to my initial question; how it was possible, at this stage of the unfolding coup against the world’s people, for people not to put two and two together, regardless of how accurate the explanation by means of the notion of the unconscious and ‘cognitive dissonance’ may be. After all, this puzzling phenomenon is overdetermined (which means it has more than one cause). The mobile phone craze adds something different, I realised.

Not merely a reminder that, no matter how often people peruse their phones, chatting to friends on social media sites such as WhatsApp, Facebook and the like, they will not see anything there about the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of the agents serving the globalist neo-fascists. The myriad censors and algorithms designed to filter the news that would help lift the veil of ignorance effectively preclude such prods of awareness. It was more than that, and has to do with the mobile phones themselves, as Sherry Turkle has helped one understand. 

In her timely book, Reclaiming Conversation, Turkle reconstructs the circumstances under which the dean of a middle school in upstate New York approached her out of concern for what she and other teachers were noticing among their students (p. 12): 

I was asked to consult with its faculty about what they saw as a disturbance in their students’ friendship patterns. In her invitation, the dean put it this way: ‘Students don’t seem to be making friendships as before. They make acquaintances, but their connections seem superficial.’

What could this be attributed to? In what follows, Turkle – an authority on the relation between human beings and technical devices such as smartphones, including the way people change in the course of using such gadgets – comes to the conclusion that the students’ behavioural changes, witnessed by the teachers, was somehow related to their excessive use of smartphones. How so?     

Having joined the Holbrooke School’s teachers on a retreat, Turkle was in a position to come to grips with the phenomenon that was raising concern among these teachers (and not only at this school, but at other schools too). This was the kind of report that she received from them (p 13):

A seventh grader tried to exclude a classmate from a school social event.

Reade [the dean] called the remiss seventh grader into her office and asked why it

happened. The girl didn’t have much to say:

[The seventh grader] was almost robotic in her response.

She said, ‘I don’t have feelings about this.’ She couldn’t

read the signals that the other student was hurt.

These kids aren’t cruel. But they are not emotionally

developed. Twelve-year-olds play on the playground like

eight-year-olds. The way they exclude one another is the

way eight-year-olds would play. They don’t seem able to

put themselves in the place of other children. They say to

other students: ‘You can’t play with us.’

They are not developing that way of relating where they

listen and learn how to look at each other and hear each other.

To be sure, this information points to something of which it is symptomatic. One gets closer to the underlying ‘cause’ when confronted with the following (p. 13):

These teachers believe they see indications of harm. It is a struggle to get children to talk to each other in class, to directly address each other. It is a struggle to get them to meet with faculty. And one teacher observes: ‘The [students] sit in the dining hall and look at their phones. When they share things together, what they are sharing is what is on their phones.’ Is this the new conversation? If so, it is not doing the work of the old conversation. As these teachers see it, the old conversation taught empathy. These students seem to understand each other less.

Having elaborated on her own interest in technology’s effects on people, and her own conviction that it is unwise to immerse oneself too excessively (let alone exclusively) in what technology offers – the attractions of ‘simulation’ – at the cost of what human-to-human interaction offers, Turkle concludes (p. 15):

As the Holbrooke middle schoolers began to spend more time texting [on their phones], they lost practice in face-to-face talk. That means lost practice in the empathic arts—learning to make eye contact, to listen, and to attend to others. Conversation is on the path toward the experience of intimacy, community, and communion. Reclaiming conversation is a step toward reclaiming our most fundamental human values.

In other words, when people use their mobile phones excessively, to the point of disproportionally minimising the originary human way of interacting – that is, in a manner that is not mediated by technology, namely face-to-face talking and conversing – they lose the human capacity for understanding facial expressions and changing voice tonalities, and importantly, the ability to feel, and show, sympathy and empathy with others.

We become, in a word, attenuated, impoverished versions of what we could be. This does not mean that we have to be anti-technological Luddites; on the contrary. It simply means that in the world we live in, we need to use advanced technology like smartphones and laptops, but we should not allow it to cause our humanity to shrivel and wither to a mere shell. 

What is the relevance between these insights on Turkle’s part and the behaviour of tourists in Lisbon, who seem to be blissfully unaware that there is a shadow hanging over them – albeit an imperceptible one, as far as they are concerned – talking among themselves, with many engrossed in what is happening on their mobile phones? 

This preoccupation with technical gadgets, which the teachers at Holbrooke School noticed among their young students too, appears to me to be a factor one could add to the other two reasons which explain why the majority of people are evidently still in denial about what is happening around them (albeit carefully disguised, but still there, for anyone who takes notice). 

Here it is not a matter of their sustained attention being focused on their smartphones, thus hampering their development, as in the case of young students, insofar as it diverts their attention from their ‘friends’’ faces and voices (on the assumption that they would talk to one another). Rather, the phenomenon of ubiquitous preoccupation with cell phones – known to us all – seems to me to be symptomatic of a more fundamental inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to tear oneself away from technical devices and pay attention to matters of a broadly ‘political’ nature, particularly those which bear upon our democratic rights and liberties. It is as if people are mesmerised by their smartphones, to their detriment.

Symptomatic of this was an incident Turkle describes elsewhere – and which I have discussed here before – where a media personality professed that constant state surveillance did not bother him, because, as long as one does not do anything to raise the suspicion of the authorities, all was well. Turkle took a stand against this position, arguing (correctly) that pervasive surveillance violates the democratic right to privacy (as Edward Snowden also believes).

I am willing to wager that the holiday crowds in Lisbon and elsewhere would side with the media guru, insofar as they do not relish the thought of coming across as ‘troublemakers.’ Besides, they are likely to insist, what would the ‘authorities’ do to harm them (us) deliberately? What a ridiculous thought! 

To understand the role of technology in this more incisively, one can turn to no one better than the late (great) philosopher of technology, Bernard Stiegler, on whom I have written here before. Stiegler, who was no technophobe either – he promoted the use of technology, but significantly, for what he called ‘critical intensification’ – cast this issue in an even more serious light than Turkle does, focusing on a concept I have used several times above, to wit, ‘attention,’ on which I elaborated in the post linked above. 

In short, he unmasked the process through which the attention of consumers is being captured by commercial – and, one can add, lately also censoring – agencies, through devices such as smartphones. This has the purpose of steering their attention in the direction of marketing certain products (and today, in the case of censoring and ‘fact-checking,’ providing reassuring information to consumers). This process does not require the sustained, focused kind of attention that has traditionally been cultivated and developed at schools and universities, and which is a prerequisite for critical thinking. Instead, Stiegler argued, it disperses attention, as evident in the phenomenon of ‘surfing’ the internet.

Consequently, the very capacity which is essential for being alert to attempts at manipulating and gaslighting the public – namely, critically active attention – is stunted, anaesthetised, if not erased. Small wonder Stiegler wrote about the ‘stupidification’ of consumers under these conditions (in States of Shock – Stupidity and Knowledge in the 21st Century, Polity Press, 2015, p. 152), where he observes: 

Attention is always both psychic and collective: ‘to be attentive to’ means both ‘to focus on’ and ‘to attend to’…We live, however, in an age of what is now known, paradoxically, as the attention economy – paradoxically, because this is also and above all an age of the dissipation and destruction of attention: it is the epoch of an attention dis-economy. 

Is it at all surprising then, that under these conditions of an ‘attention dis-economy,’ the tourists in Lisbon and elsewhere appear to be wholly unconcerned with the spectre of totalitarianism hovering above them, a critical awareness of which would require precisely ‘being attentive to’ in the sense of ‘focusing on’ and ‘attending to’ it (in the way the writers at Brownstone have been attending to it for some time already)?

I am convinced that – for reasons set out above – the uncritical use of an electronic apparatus like a smartphone is an important factor in this lack of concern, which equals an implicit denial of possible catastrophe – a denial which is maintained at the peril of the smartphone-wielding masses.