“Why does the lust for naked power become a major human motive exactly now, when the dominion of man over man ceases to be necessary?”
George Orwell, Second Thoughts on Burnham
“...the neoliberal project cannot be implemented in a formally democratic way without mass-scale manipulation.”
Rainer Mausfeld, Fear and Power
Last week, a short video made the rounds in one of the messenger chat-groups I subscribed to, to hang on to sanity in these insane times. The 1-minute clip showed a young woman, probably in her 20s, filming herself with her phone as she was placed in what looked like a hospital bed in a hospital setting, with tubes attached, full gown and N95 mask. She then briefly turned the camera to give view of the room. In the background, you could see a film team in full hazmat gear, filming and probably interviewing someone (big microphones were in sight) at the opposite end of the room where some other beds had been set up. The girl’s filming was hectic, and she spoke with a subdued voice, turning the camera back to herself: “So we’re lying here and simulating, as you can see...because this is the new Corona centre [probably an ad hoc facility made to receive Covid patients somewhere in Germany] and now they are making a test run.” Then she held what looked like an official paper, in black on white print, into the phone camera: “And we got particular assignments. This is mine: ‘Please inform one of the employees that you are feeling like you have trouble breathing at 1.35 pm.’ Now it’s 1.30 pm, and I’ve still got five minutes. This is my bed number [shows paper that says, ‘Patient no. 63’] and I will get money for all of this.”
In normal times, under the conditions of an actually existing threat of a pandemic, doing a “test run” on Covid facilities seems like a cautionary measure. But what was the film team there for? And why the precise specification she should call a nurse a 1.35pm? We do not know what happened next, nor do we know if she was filmed in her simulation of a Covid patient for public dissemination. We do not know (for now) if that material was used in such a way as to evoke a particular feeling in the viewer, namely what we have been told since the beginning of the Covid era: that “the virus” is a direct threat to our life – and that of our children, our partners, our parents, our friends. But what we know as a matter of fact is that film teams need material. And where there is none, it must be created. Propagandistic material assembled in hospitals is particularly effective, for hospital environments conjure a concern with where we are the most vulnerable, and which is equally our most cherished value: health. The effect that dysfunctional health care facilities have are especially disturbing. If children are involved, even better, for the effect is infallible. Hospitals and schools targeted in wars are therefore synonymous with pure evil and getting them on camera is pure gold for reporters. If they are unavailable for the moment, a hospital environment, babies, incubators, crying nurses on camera will do as well, as George Bush Sen.’s Operation Desert Storm of 1991 has proven. But every epoch has its own form of propaganda. And the most effective form of propaganda is best distilled in repeated shocks of fear. Omicron variant, anyone?
What we know for sure is that the German government has purposefully and tactically launched a public relations campaign in April 2020 with the strategic aim to precisely do that: cause feelings of anxiety on a mass scale. The aim, which was published in a document now only available due to legal effort[1], was to “become clear on a worst case scenario for the population of Germany”, while “avoiding the term ‘Worst Case Scenario’”. The paper, issued by the German ministry of the interior, advised public relation strategists, medical experts (among them our own German Anthony “I represent Science” Fauci, Christian Drosten), professionals, the media and publishing houses, communication and marketing officers in key positions for disseminating government information that “[we] need to get away from a type of communication that is focused on the case fatality rate [which is rather low in Covid-19]. These mechanisms have certainly contributed to the trivialisation of the epidemic in the past.”[2] In a move of shocking brazenness and cynicism, the paper goes on to decree that
“in order to achieve the desired shock effect, the concrete effects of an infection on human society must be made clear: many seriously ill people are brought to hospital by their relatives, but are turned away and die in agony at home, struggling for breath. Suffocation...is a primal fear for every human being...When [children] infect their parents and one of them dies in agony at home and they feel they are to blame because, for example, they forgot to wash their hands, it is the most terrible thing a child can ever experience”.[3]
In order to achieve the “desired shock effect”, so the German government goes, public communication must use psychological manipulation practices to focus on guilt in the probable death of a parent or grandparent in order to evoke “the most terrible thing a child can ever experience”. As if this deliberate use of children as pawns for their manipulation strategy were not inhumane enough (and to be honest, a strategy that the Antichrist incarnate would be jealous of) – it worked on the public and still does so today. The gargantuan rise of suicidal thoughts in children as young as 11[4] and teenagers, and the consultation of helplines to an unprecedented degree, the overload of psychiatric wards and practices with young boys and girls, is just one of the many side effects the Covid measures with its focus on “national health and safety” has brought into effect.
The most disturbing aspect of this – if one can ignore deliberate psychological torture practiced on children for a minute – is that this information is public and free. But we haven’t seen much of reaction in the wider public sphere yet, where the same actors roll out their propagandistic materials unhindered and without much effort, or in fact, any resistance from the established sectors, the (relatively) comfortable classes, and barely much from the working class. While censorship is a powerful tool in consolidating classical power structures, the new Covid regime can also make do without it: psychological control is better, much cheaper, and more effectively achieved. As every person who has ever smelled the air of power knows, a mode of governance based on fear will serve the totalitarian purpose best. Even before the Covid regime came into power, and the biosecurity state cashed in on neoliberal authoritarianism practiced in the decades before, German social psychologist Rainer Mausfeld analysed, as the subtitle of his latest book, Fear and Power, suggests, “Domination Strategies of Fear Production in Capitalist Democracies” (2019)[5]. One important, if not crucial component of such strategies or techniques, and pre-emptively paving the way towards blank mass fear, is “confusion” or a “fog of confusion and disillusionment”, as he quotes one of the most formidable theorists of neoliberalism, Philip Mirowski.[6] Confused communication is not a by-product by an increasingly unhinged and cynical elite that inhabits a parallel universe in detachment from ordinary citizen’s everyday realities (as pointed out elsewhere[7]) while projecting alienation on them, but a very conscious political move, orchestrated as a perfect subjugation technique to consolidate neoliberal rule:
“For the stabilisation of the power relations that have emerged under neoliberalism, a decline in public political discourse, especially if it is not recognised as such, is of enormous advantage. Since the tension between capitalism and democracy in capitalism’s extreme neoliberal form can no longer be concealed by Orwellian strategies of top-down opinion manipulation - for example, by systematically changing the meaning of words - neoliberalism depends on blocking the ability to form any convictions at all. When words become semantically empty and arbitrary in their meaning [think of how the term “solidarity” is used when addressing Covid vaccination mandates, SC], when sentences are only affective appeals without being embedded in argumentative contexts, and when a communicative exchange takes place based on frame narratives that are contrary to reason, the basis for rational thinking is withdrawn. The mental flurry of meaningless words, scraps of meaning, and affects created in this way fundamentally block the possibilities of gaining any mental order at all, and thus create the foundations for a collective social stultification. [Thus] the political space is also emptied, and the foundation of democracy withdrawn once and for all”.[8]
A society built on sowing confusion and the withdrawal of the ability to form a conviction is particularly susceptible to more authoritarian forms of communication and governance, as we can all witness today. The strategy of the German federal government – and similar strategies are to be found among the US, UK, not to speak of Australia, and other G7-nations in response to Covid – has paid off: and it didn’t particularly take much. 40 years of neoliberal rule have so worn down the people that resisting domination, or even pointing to why domination of people by people is harmful, has become pointless. How do you think people told for decades to “tighten their belt” and “suck it up” with regard to quality of life, education, the right to an impartial information, democratic participation, and forming an independent conviction, should react to the news of a deadly virus that has us all in its grip (allegedly)?
What has substituted conviction built on the weighing of costs and benefits is rage and jangling, for it is psychologically more economical. The more uncompromising the demand - “vaccination hesistant people should be locked up/lose their jobs/be made to pay” - the more successful, and the more likely its actual political implementation, as the Austrian political classes’ fascist “lockdown of the unvaccinated” has proven. As one eye witness has recently reported in a Facebook post, a passenger failing to show his Covid vaccination pass on a train from Munich to Berlin was literally chivvied through several train compartments by police officers, conductors and an incited crowd of several dozen passengers until he was thrown off the train at a small station - to the applause and cheers of some 80-90 passengers loudly comtemplating whether the “unvaccinated vermin (ungeimpfte Schädlinge)” should be “locked up, put into labour camps, or simply, sterilized.” Fear leading to a social division not seen since the days of the Führer has made these openly fascist – behold the imagery of ‘labour camps’ and the term ‘vermin’ - possible. Hence, Covid has only redeemed what the creation of the neoliberal subject was meant for: total social cowardice and obedience, based on the execution of naked power in the form of violence. In that sense, Mausfeld is correct to say that history will look down upon our era as the “era of counter-enlightenment”.
Neoliberal society has become both a self-fulfilling prophecy and a performative contradiction: it no longer exists. Sowing fear and confusion, and reaping power have always been the food and drink of the lazy, self-serving, foul, and ghoulish technocratic class, the health experts and ministers, the lobbyists, the NGOs and Twitter bots, the political party clowns, the AOCs, Baerbocks, Lauterbachs, the Berlin art space fucks, the traitors of the people.
The “Omicron” variant? An anagram for “moronic”. They’re not even trying anymore.
[1] The German Federal Ministry of the Interior was required to publish a version of the initially classified paper on its website on April 28, 2020. In addition, in the course of an action for information against the Federal Republic of Germany, the underlying e-mail correspondence on the creation of the paper was made public. See Kaltwasser, Dennis: “Linguistic Communication Analysis of Discursive Antagonisms in the Corona Crisis”, Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, vol. 45, no 2 (2021), p. 39-51.
[3] Ibid.
[5] https://www.westendverlag.de/buch/angst-und-macht/
[6] Mirowski, Philip. Hell is truth seen too late. Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, 46, 1-53, p. 21.
[7] https://beefheart.substack.com/p/the-parallel-universe
[8] Mausfeld, Rainer, Fear and Power [Angst und Macht], cit. op., p. 50-4.