The Symbolic Revolt Against the Word

A new form of political persuasion is unmooring the western philosophical tradition and all that is built upon it.

At a rally presidential candidate Donald Trump communicated inflation by holding up two boxes of Tic Tacs. One was big, one was small and all he said was "This is inflation." A response came from The Daily Show presenter Desi Lydic: "That is not an example of inflation; it’s just two different sizes of breath mints." These media skirmishes happen not just in the US but in Western Europe as well where right wing parties of a new flavour are surging in popularity amongst voters. They do so by reaching their audience in a new way. To understand this we must look at what came before.

Logos

Since modernity there has been placed great value on the word in Philosophy. While words have had their detractors, like Wittgenstein and attempts to circumvent it through logical symbol which is parsed like algebra, using words and reasoning is still key to the business of Philosophy. The end result, often laid at the feet of Postmodern or Post-Structuralist thinkers, is that language only destroys and cannot make. Examples range from; a sort of Nietzschean conclusion that we can argue god out of existence but not into it, a newspaper that can "debunk" but rarely "bunks" anything, Youtube critics that garner millions of views through critique while their own creative works languish to a teenager concluding that no proof can prove anything because they can just ask "But why?" until you capitulate. Yukio Mishima called words a corrosive acid that strips away reality and leaves abstractions. His solution in Sun and Steel deviates from his inspiration Nietszche not by shaping values after the destruction of the old but by balancing it by the indescribably bodily as a counter weight, art and action as one. Mishima would end up presenting the spectacle of his own seppuku after taking over a military academy, underscoring his speech not by final words but a final act. Art as communication that resists words’ corrosive attributes but is living is one half of the puzzle.

Gutenberg 2

The introduction of the printing press was a challenge to organisations that drew their power from well organised information. The Catholic Church was unable to maintain its canonical interpretation of the bible throughout Europe as "common" people sidestepped the church to read the bible themselves and draw their own conclusions in the meadows and barns where the preachers spoke. This Protestant revolt would end up shaping the modern world, but was not a straight line to a higher form of society. Indeed it was American protestants who burned witches in spite of the learnedness of being literate. Indeed cheap books proliferated all sorts of odd ideas, most of which were useless. This powergap between the literate and illiterate was closed with modern education, yet broad literacy did not disrupt the influence of the burgher-esque class. It became not that you read, but what you read. The internet changed this. With the price of generating information having become so low, orthodoxy is being challenged. Online people openly flaunt their disdain for established academics and their theories about society. But unlike the reformation, the internet is about connections, not things. This makes it less decentral that a printing press and a reader. While there are still old style online outlets serving as a protestant open air church, most traffic goes through big social media websites. Here censorship is applied to maintain a narrative and remove opposition depending on who owns the website. An example is that Elon Musk’s X reverted a policy that calling a trans person by a former gendered name (deadnaming) was hateful, now calling someone "cisgender" is. This war of words is corrosive, where critique, addendum and community note can only destroy an argument. Exercising a narrative is than to limit words around an expression one approves of: closed comments, banned from commenting and comments with certain words automatically hidden (sometimes even unbeknownst to the commenter). In this battle, a weak point has been found: the image.

Commonplace interpretation

Circling back to Trump’s Tic Tacs, the critique of the sizes being different products does not destroy the point. The viewer interprets the metaphor, the feeling of doing groceries. In this it is a departure from pure pathos as a basis for persuasion. It reaffirms the commonplace of rising grocery pricing with a commonplace way of interpreting: seeing is believing.

Seeing and believing are internal to the subject. By using this method without an external intermediary like an argument the message is immune to literary critique and thus immune to academia. Academia with its focus on words tries to capture this, bring out the message into the light for critique, but it must do so with arguments of words. This is then vulnerable to the corrosive critique of words. These are arms of the nouveau right’s approach to messaging: cheap proliferation, direct to consumer and academic critique for academic thought. We can see their opponents as their market competitors: high labour cost product through few channels of distribution. Academia’s critique of their (mis)interpreters has been neutered by its form and they thus rely on their canonical interpretation as a rebuff, an I-am-right-because-I-am-smart withholding explanation in what could be said to be a Trumpian fashion. This makes it different from historical right wing escapes from the academic system such as "Me ne frego.” (I don’t care in italian, fascist response to criticism).

Whenever an ideology finds a new medium of expression it horrifies what was before if it is immune to the normal methods of pressure. The Catholic Church controlled the churches, the books and the language until the printing press published translated bibles. 2000’s Republicans struggled with late night shows because comedy wasn’t a genuine expression of belief and thus immune from moralising and moral hazard signalling. Today the establishment struggles with memes because every overt move they make is subject to their own critique. A Scottish man uploaded a video where a pug raises his paw in response to a Nazi greeting. He was convicted, and the judge said that the fact that it was a joke was not mitigating the harm of offence. But the ruling was criticised in a way the west often criticises other countries’ treatment of comedians, free speech and offence. When only recently riots happened in britain and people were being convicted for online agitation there were comparisons to countries that would be critisised by the British Government if they did the same. The corrosive power of words inspires critique but makes the practical exercise of maintaining power illegitimate (similar to the idea of "no ethical consumption under capitalism” or Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment illegitimising commerce and felt empathy). If states and institutions wish to continue they only have five options.

Umbilical

As the word no longer legitimises the structures, there are 3 regressions, 1 innovation and 1 evolution available. The first regression is that to raw power, of akkadian godkings whose word is law, of riot police, of Me Ne Frego. The second is a regression to religion, of priests at the nile instructing the farmers what to sow, of experts, of class structure. The third regression is the regression to faith, of preachers at the pulpit shaping the internal thoughts of man to be not from the text but always of the text, of the op-ed and the salon-table-book, of the burgher. The innovation is the cattle factory and its design to shape action without intervention, to make the spaces of information flow in particular ways as to make its creators’ wishes emergent and unaccountable to them. Finally there is evolution, the one most frightening, namely to allow the living into its structure. To ride the wave of popular (and populist) creation to find a new legitimisation in it. This last path is unlikely as institutions have a bad track record of creating institutions that both outlast them and still memetically procreate their plans. Most institutions made by institutions can never deviate outside of that institution, not gain legitimacy other than what is imbued by its creator and thus not survive the passing of it’s maker. These projects lack life from conception and can be considered only umbilical. If this path needs to be executed, ask oneselves this: what institution can I make that can become so self sufficient as to be able to spawn its own institution which is self sufficient? If the institution cannot procreate it becomes obsessed with its own immortality, that of empire carefully preserved in the image of the conqueror. A glance at the Romans or the Seleucids would make one hopeful, but empires of these natures once they merely preserve cannot repair damage. Its rot is inevitable because any rot is irreversible beyond base suppression. The price of a state of rot is that at some point, people welcome the fire to cleanse the house anew.