Through the Looking Glass (1)
This is where we stand now, in all our once free societies, where government is primarily focussed on the business of censoring without sign and chilling without any change in temperature.
Making Elephants Visible
After the Irish general election of November last, a friend observed to me that the contest had taken place not so much between parties and candidates as ‘between those who think the news is the news and those who know it is not’.
This is real. Having myself run in the European elections during the summer, I find it a precise summation of my experience. Both elections took place in circumstances of systematic denial, whereby the agenda for discussion covered just about everything except what was really happening to our country. To raise these unmentioned issues was to be rudely interrupted and bundled into another direction by gatekeepers posing as timekeepers, even when sections of the audience had already begun to prick up their ears. There was literally nowhere you could go to raise these questions before any appreciably-sized audience — not the national media, not the local media, not the set-piece election ‘debates’, not even the ‘alternative’ media, which generally seemed more interested in carping, backbiting and ambush.
Of course, these conditions extend far beyond the territory of elections; they are, in fact, ubiquitous and quasi-total, and have been so for the past five years, the foundations having already been put in some years before. This is the pseudo-reality that now governs protocol of all formerly free and democratic societies: a state of suspended animation in which what is most decidedly and alarmingly occurring is by definition excluded from discussion, with the population having already been ‘trained’ into a condition of mutism bordering on lockjaw concerning all matters and questions of true importance. Breathing-in the background radiation of the pseudo-reality, the ordinary passer-by comes, by dint of the overwhelming surrounding consensus of omertà, and thence by acquired force of habit, to regard the pseudo-reality as genuine, just as the Emperor was convinced by the tailors’ descriptions of his fabulous new clothes.
The pseudo-reality was from the outset destined to become a permanent condition by virtue of the emerging capacity of tyrannical powers to construct forms of 3D propaganda, and the unsuspected venality of most of those who had been custodians of the public right to freedom of speech. Even as recently as the time of Orwell, propaganda was largely a matter of words (‘Newspeak’ — remember?), which, working within the imaginations of the human elements — individual and collective — possessed the malign power to invoke in the minds of those humans crypto-realities that changed their perceptions and their responses. Now, in the era of mass technologisation, we have moved beyond words, which reveal themselves as merely the initial building blocks in the creation of what are, for all intents and purposes, three-dimensional realities that insinuate themselves as the true versions of reality because they are built in the sightlines upon which populations rely for a clear view of what might be true. As a result, much of the mendacious paraphernalia of technocracy has acquired the substantialism once accorded in culture to religion, which means that propagandists have become both the ‘developers’ and constructors of our new cultural landscapes and skylines, as well as the demolishers of the old. Some of us, gifted with something like X-ray vision, have the capacity to see through or around the resulting impositions; but most have not.
This is where we stand now, in all our once free societies, where government is primarily focussed on the business of censoring without sign and chilling without any change in temperature. For the many, it is impossible not only to know what is true, but even to know that any occluding of the truth is in train. For the few, it is possible to detect not so much the operation of this changed culture as its ricochets and consequences in the deep undergrowth of society. People who once seemed intelligent and reasonable now seem to have lost their edge. Matters which would once have resulted in major public discussions, most likely followed by a rolling of official heads, now pass by as though unnoticed or unworthy of notice. Politicians and officials now speak to the public in a different tone — as though they have become the rulers rather than the servants of their peoples. Journalists lie, not merely in their articles and broadcasts, but all the more in what they leave out of these bulletins. Elephants stroll up every road and down every avenue, stand at bus stops and climb on alongside the commuters and schoolchildren, and only the children are disposed to show the slightest interest in them.
‘Look! Look!,’ they cry. ‘An elephant!’
Shhh!. There is no elephant!
‘Look over there! A naked Emperor!’
I see no Emperor. Naked? Never!
This is what it is like to live in a pseudo-reality, and yet have no name for it, no means of observing its consistent patterns. Even those of us who are aware that something monstrous is afoot are at a loss to describe what we see or sense. It is all too much, unprecedented, implausible. We contort our minds trying to understand certain phenomena that we have never observed before, and here is the explanation right in front of our eyes. There is no puzzle, once this is understood: that those of us who are baffled by the apparent absurdity of people’s behaviour are simply not seeing or hearing what those people see and hear, and nor are they seeing and hearing what we see and hear. We live alongside them in two different worlds, one we understand and know to be the natural, organic world, the other a completely constructed world, suspended within the pre-existing one, rendering it and its logics invisible and inaudible. A useful analogy might be an Ames room, which is constructed to play with the idea that our brains assume every room to be rectangular, so that as someone walks around it, they seem themselves to grow taller or smaller.
Or perhaps it might, in its effects on its victims, be similar in effect to a hanging room, suspended on ropes within another, from which it is but infinitesimally detached, in which the subject, imagining himself to be looking out the window of a solid edifice, is actually observing the world from a perspective constantly distorted by the imperceptible movements caused by his suspended situatedness. The pseudo-reality is a world of lies within the world of the true, an edifice of lies masquerading as reality, the rind passing itself off as the fruit.
One of the core objectives of Through the Looking Glass, the eight-part series of podcast conversations I have embarked upon with my Substack colleague, Gerry O’Neill (of The West’s Awake), is to make this pseudo-reality visible — to pull back the camera so that the tricks of perspective and light become discernible; to point out the false hanging from the true. A secondary objective might be the outright dismantling of this pseudo-reality and the indicting of its architects, builders and managers. I said something like this to the individual who gave me the quote at the top of this article, and got the following reply: ‘The first would be enough.’
This is true. Exposing the piracy will result in its eventual scuppering. But this will not be in any sense a programme of media forensics. What it will attempt is to present elements of what is happening in the world as they might have been presented in the mainstream media (and once there was no other) before the pseudo-reality began to be constructed, almost five years ago. In certain respects, we will apply the values of the alternative media to the topics we discuss, but more than that we will exhibit the grammar of the now deceased democracy-defending Fourth Estate to the project of insinuating that something radical has gone radically wrong with the instruments of disseminating information and facilitating discussion.
That’s the idea of the looking glass image, which was actually Gerry’s idea based on my interpretation of what he was trying to get at. As he described it to me, I began to think about the idea of a mirror held up to society which would subvert the notion of a ‘funhouse’ or ‘carnival’ mirror, which is one way the pseudo-reality strikes me, though neither in a fun nor particular carnivalesque fashion. The idea is to portray the mainstream media for what it now is — a distorting mirror, which uses (metaphorical) convex and concave mirrors to achieve a contorting effect. The best appellation I was able to come up with at first was ‘Mirror Maze’ which is another term for ‘hall of mirrors’, but it somehow failed to resonate. Gerry then mentioned ‘Through the Looking Glass’, though at the time neither of us was particularly happy with that one either. Having gone through all the options we could conceive of, rejecting each in turn, we decided to leave it lie for a time. When I returned to it, I instantly decided that ‘Through the Looking Glass’ was the best by far of the phrases we’d tried out. In addition to the ‘distorting’ aspect, it has the concept of walking through the mirror into a different world — faithful or contorted of it — on the other side, which is part of what we hope to do also — the ‘other world’ being not the pseudo-reality (which we all necessarily must live in to some degree) but the real one, which is still ‘in there’ somewhere. In a sense, although its subtext is media failure and betrayal, Through the Looking Glass is not so much a ‘media show’ as a reality show. If it works, it should start up in people a sense of nostalgia for the way media functioned before they concentrated on full-on 24/7 lying to the public.
Much of the aforementioned will arise as subtext rather than as an immediate focus of discussion. At another level, Through the Looking Glass is essentially a kind of public-focussed discussion about current affairs, politics, society, culture, et cetera, which aims to bridge the chasm between the mainstream and the alternative media, disintegrate the false reality that the organised criminal regime is using to thwart public understanding of its crimes, and look at vital matters from a position of belonging to society without necessarily being all that happy about the way it’s been going. That, by the way, is my stab at nailing it, and Gerry would very likely put it entirely differently, which is one of the things I like about his ideas and about him.
It’s what the mirror depicts that we’re interested in, rather than the mirror itself. As things settle in, we intend to draw on the alternative sector as well, especially elements of it that cover what the legacy media ought to be covering but aren’t. In the first episode we touch briefly on the excellent work of Patrick E. Walsh, who for the past couple of years has been exposing and forensically analysing the extent of the increases in excess deaths, in Ireland and elsewhere, the cover-up of this being one of the most egregious examples of the mendacity of the mainstream. We’ll undoubtedly be returning to this topic over the course of the eight programmes. Our hope is to alert people to what has changed in the mechanisms our societies depend on for an understanding of what is happening to and around them, and also to try to depict these events and personalities in their actuality.
The first episode is mostly about the meanings and possibilities arising from the Trump inauguration, and its implications for a world that includes our country. Gerry and I have slightly different views on this, as we have on other matters (for the same reason that ice cream comes in chocolate and vanilla), but we share a desire that the potential of this moment be discussed in a constructive and perhaps hopeful fashion. We also speak a little about one of the figures still within the mainstream of Irish public life with the potential to transcend this appalling phase of our nation’s and our world’s history, and perhaps even step up to lead his country out of it.
When Gerry approached me about his idea, I wasn’t entirely sure what it would be like, but I’m pretty happy with how it’s turning out. This first one was largely an experimental pilot, focussed on establishing a style and mode of discussion that might be somewhat different from both the mainstream and alternative models. If it seems like an ordinary common-or-garden discussion programme, then we will probably have succeeded in tapping into the nostalgia that exists for media not founded on lies or pessimism. Like a lot of things that are hard to explain, it works at its own level and in ways that could not have been anticipated.
The ‘scene’ of the first episode is Gerry, Sabrina and the Kelly family’s ‘Love Shack’, just south of Monasterevin, on the border of Laois and Kildare, the legendary locus of the extended siege that occurred as a result of the Herrema kidnapping of 1975, when the name of that village, along with those of IRA kidnappers, Eddie Gallagher and Marion Price, and their captive Tiede Herrema, were branded on every living human consciousness, never to be removed. This, for certain, was an era when, whatever its darknesses, was one in which the pseudo-reality was unimaginable.
Gerry and I are deeply grateful to Richard and Sabrina for their hospitality to us, our film crew and my wife, Rita.
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