Know your value... and know your values
The first thing they try to destroy in a coup is always people's sense of themselves.
Watching your country descend into a coup from abroad is a heckuva thing. I'm not unique. I have friends who also watched their countries be destroyed by various types of despots and thugs. There is nothing exceptional about the United States, it's just been a scale issue. It had a good run. I do feel justified in using the past tense already, because what will follow will be something else in both best and worst case scenarios. It'll still go by the same name, but it will be something else.
I blog too slowly and am not hardly original enough to have a fresh take on the carnage under way in the U.S. and all the social, political, and economic tsunamis around the world it's triggering. The thing I was going to post can wait for next time, it feels both old for the present situation, and (maybe with some re-work) still too soon for what's coming next.
The blitzkrieg of action out of the White House is meant to stun and keep everyone off balance, reacting to things that are two steps behind. This isn't new as a strategy, it had been articulated just over 20 years ago by a still unknown senior advisor from the administration of George W Bush in an NYT Magazine article by Ron Suskind. I still remember reading it over a coffee and bagel at a cafe in Olympia, Wash., in better times:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'." — Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, by Suskind (2004)
This concept is being applied now at a much faster pace, but it's not new. It took Hitler 53 days to dismantle a constitutional, democratic republic. Not slow, but there are faster examples. Fujimori took over full control of the Peruvian government in just a day. Yeltsin disolved the Russian parliament — and then sent the tanks after the building — within a month's time. Erdoğan fought off a coup attempt in Turkey with an auto-coup of his own in about a week, give or take. Orbán's Fidesz party took it's time over a few months. Elon Musk's coup as part of the Trump operation will slot in here somewhere in the middle, already taking decisive action in just a couple of weeks. It's well underway.
The goal is different for kleptocrats. They're here to rob the place. "The oligarchs have no plan to govern, wrote Timothy Snyder in his newsletter this week. "They will take what they can, and disable the rest. The destruction is the point. They don’t want to control the existing order. They want disorder in which their relative power will grow."
This isn't about them. It's about you.
Amid all of this, We the People will get shoved around. We'll be told to make fast, economic choices and trade-offs. Who gets thrown under the bus? Already agencies and departments using public funds approved by Congress that support medical, food, infrastructural and social needs have seen their projects illegally frozen by Elon's doge thugs. They are run through a gauntlet to remove text and phrasing from their websites and project descriptions that mention women, minorities, trans people, the climate, etc., only to find out that they were never going to get that funding back anyway.
"If we so readily ignore our principles to secure funding, were they ever principles at all? ... And if we abandon our principles to save our programmes, what exactly are we saving?" — Marina Kobzeva
Making people cherry pick which values they'll keep is only part of it. The current American regime has rapidly systemised devaluing humans, and so it makes sense that its oligarchy consists of Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman and the sort who are interested in substituting humanity itself with bots running on whatever it is that they're pretending is artificial intelligence (it isn't). This also was kind of foretold. In April of 2000, Bill Joy published his seminal and still-discussed and debated treatise, Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. It was a warning about the dangers of advanced technology surpassing human control. Joy argued that as machines grow more sophisticated and society becomes increasingly complex, humans would gradually surrender decision-making not by force, but by sheer dependence. He warned that this shift would devalue our role to little more than caretakers of systems too complex and vast to control, or really just be turned off.
Joy was naive, and too optimistic, but he was close enough for a turn-of-the-century Cassandra. The flaw was in thinking humanity wouldn't be cajoled and coerced and finally forced into accepting obsolescence by a gaggle of billionaires who've hijacked society through a narrow set of platforms with gamed algorithms. We are now running the federal payments system like it was a poorly managed micro-blogging platform. Elon wanted 𝕏 to be the "everything platform." Here we are. Anyway, the future has been lurking around us for some time, but now it's arrived and it's just... crap.
In opposition to all of this you need to retain two things, or quickly develop your understanding of them. First: know your value. The coup runners want people to devalue themselves, see themselves as disposable and remain afraid. People with a good sense of self value take less shit. This is known. Second: know your values. This coup is very transactional, they're expecting people to sink into a low form of survival mode and just do what is asked for them in the hopes that all this is going to blow over. It isn't going to just blow over. The country is something else now. But you're still you. If you start abandoning that, then it's really over.
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Yours Truly
