There is much talk of authenticity today. Like all of neoliberalism’s advertisements, it appears in an emancipatory guise. To be authentic means to be free of pre-formed expressive and behavioural patterns dictated from the outside. It prescribes that one must equal only oneself and define oneself only through oneself – indeed, that one must be the author and creator of oneself. The imperative of authenticity develops a self-directed compulsion, a compulsion to constantly question oneself, eavesdrop on oneself, stalk and besiege oneself. It thus intensifies narcissistic self-reference. . .

The striving for authenticity, the striving to equal only oneself, leads to a constant comparison with others. The logic of comparison transforms otherness into sameness, and thus the authenticity of otherness consolidates social conformity: it only permits system-compatible differences, namely diversity. ‘Diversity’ as a neoliberal term is a resource that can be exploited. Hence it contrasts with alterity, which eludes any economic utilization.

Byung-Chul Han. The Expulsion of the Other: Society, Perception and Communication Today

Propagandists have the capacity to make us feel like they are saying something we always wanted to hear. It’s as if they peered into our souls and found the words to express exactly what we felt deep inside.

But not all people who say things that resonate with us are propagandists. How do we distinguish between a manipulative liar who hits us in our Shadow to dupe us and a person who has insight that enriches us?

There are several steps we have to make to root out a propagandist, and here I want to talk about the first one. It’s a very obvious one but people forget to make it way too often.

The step I’m talking about is to ask, “is there evidence that this person is sincere? Or is he avoiding the need to live what he preaches?” For example, is this passionate anti-vaxxer fully vaxxed? Is this passionate vaxxer avoiding the vaccine? Did the public school advocate put her kids in private schools? Does the anti-racist activist have black friends? Does the “trad wife” run a successful business? Does the homeschooling advocate employ 3 nannies and barely ever see her kids?

This seems so obvious but people often fail to take this step. Russian propagandists rant about the evil West while their wives and children all have American citizenship and live in Miami. The propagandists earn the money to keep their wives and children in Palm Beach by getting a million duped losers to listen about stories about how terrible life in Palm Beach is.

Tucker Carlson’s children are all in Ivies and nepotized into the establishment, the money for which comes from hypnotizing the same million of duped losers (most of Tucker’s viewers are now in Russia) with stories about the terrible US establishment.

Insight or an exploitative lie? It’s up to us to find out.

This is only the first step, though. There’s a lot more we need to do as part of our intellectual hygiene.

The Ukrainian student loves everything about the US. Except for one thing that evokes something akin to sacred horror in her.

“It’s that thing they call coffee,” she says.

It’s true that pretty much nobody in the world understands the weird swill that passes for coffee in North America. I’ll be in Spain in a couple of weeks, and real coffee is what I anticipate the most.

It’s even worse in Canada. I remember staring at a cup of “coffee” in Canada and asking, “why, God, why? There must be a reason you permitted this abomination to come into existence but what can it be?”

I found a website in Ukraine where I can buy electronic versions of books in Ukrainian. I’m ridiculously happy.

Obviously, it’s easy to find pirated copies but I couldn’t live with myself if I cheated Ukrainian authors out of well-deserved income. A new, recently published novel costs between $2 and $3.50, so it’s a steal as it is.

I don’t want to persecute my regular readers with detailed discussions of Ukrainian books that haven’t been translated, so I want to open a different blog where I’ll post about my readings in Ukrainian. I looked around, and literally nobody is doing it on a serious, consistent basis. As a result, the book market in Ukraine is filled with expensive, translated – and normally extremely woke – garbage when books by national writers, which by their very nature are the opposite of woke, languish in undeserved obscurity.

Yes, my Ukrainian is currently in a pretty bad shape but I’m nothing if not obsessive. I’m memorizing vocabulary lists to recover the knowledge I had 20 years ago. To my great shame, my only published article of literary criticism in Ukrainian was originally in Russian. My father had to translate it for me. So I have a lot of work ahead of me to learn to write well.

Then I’ll come here and gossip about my experiences as a Ukrainian-language blogger.

Not only is this artificial intelligence quite artificially biased, the text it produced is absolutely horrid. So I’m seeing the artificial part, but the intelligence part, not so much.

And a little gift for the sad individuals who continue to stan for Russia and its “conservative values”:

Russia unveiled a new monument honoring Stalin in Volgograd today.

They will never learn. pic.twitter.com/oWcZ7SS016

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 1, 2023

Price controls were a method used by Hugo Chavez to destroy the economy of Venezuela. I don’t like to overuse the word socialism but this is literally socialism. I’m still very confused as to why Orban is supposed to be a conservative icon.

I will never understand how it’s possible to be a conservative and support price controls. There were price controls on everything in the USSR. Does anybody need a reminder on how that worked out? This socialist shit renders currency worthless and immiserates the people every single time.

People very often confuse words with actions. “Yes, but he said…” Who cares what anybody said? Look at the actions. Observe the results. I can’t tell you how many times people respond to my question as to why they detest one politician and support another with a sentence starting with “he said…”

A friend asked me out to talk about “something important that I wanted to share for a long time.”

After we sat down, the friend opened with a long and haltingly delivered disclaimer.

“I don’t want you to think badly of me… I know this might sound bad but I want to be honest with you… I hope you don’t judge me for what I’m going to say…”

In all honesty, I was sure she was about to tell me she was having an affair. I wasn’t going to judge because it’s not my place to judge people. Plus, I’m always on the side of my friends.

Finally, the friend lowered her voice, looked around, and whispered…

…drumrolls…

“I think there’s too much of this wokeness stuff everywhere.”

One of the largest provinces in Canada is moving forward with a plan to become the first province in the country to decriminalize several hard drugs. Starting on Tuesday, residents of British Columbia who are older than 18 will be allowed to carry up to 2.5 grams of drugs such as cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, methamphetamine and morphine, the BBC reported. British Columbia was granted permission by the government to try out the plan for three years, when the drugs will still be illegal but those carrying less than 2.5 grams will not be arrested, charged or have the drugs confiscated.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/world/british-columbia-becomes-first-province-canada-decriminalize-heroin-fentanyl-cocaine-other-hard-drugs.amp

Heroin and fentanyl dealers always carry very small portions, and now they will do it completely legally. 3 milligrams of fentanyl are lethal, so 2,5 grams can wipe out quite a few inconvenient Canadians who still remember the concept of rights.

Yes, these people got themselves addicted because it felt nice. But shouldn’t their government be playing on their side and not making it easier for the dealers to wipe them out? Why won’t they even just confiscate a clearly lethal dose?

Vancouver in British Columbia had already become unlivable because of throngs of homeless addicts crowding a formerly lovely city. If you can’t lock people up permanently under the pretense of COVID, the next best thing is to keep them at home by filling the streets with the dysfunction of drug addiction.

Make no mistake, this is not about the “right” of the addicts to kill themselves with their addiction. It’s about polluting our public spaces and squeezing us out of them. It’s about shortening the lifespan of the population that still remembers how to protest and refuse to be treated like cattle.

Anybody can fall under the influence of brainwashing and propaganda. The best antidote to this fact is knowing it. The people who are the most convinced they can never be duped are the most easily duped.

Propaganda is successful only when it speaks to what we really want to hear but don’t dare confess it to ourselves. Propaganda doesn’t invent. It discovers.

Propaganda speaks to what Karl Jung called “the Shadow.” The Shadow consists of the dark, mean impulses and thoughts we push into our unconscious because to accept then would damage our sense of self. To process these dark impulses, we can channel them into socially legitimate pursuits. We can become surgeons, police officers, soldiers, or teachers. We can sublimate them into works of art. We can express them during confession or in therapy.

Every individual has these dark impulses. And every culture has them on a collective level. In order to do propaganda work successfully, you need to find these painful pressure points in the people you address it to. Sometimes, propagandists fail because they confuse their own pain points or their own shadow with somebody else’s.

Here’s an example of such failed propaganda. Russian propagandists have spent years trying to promote the following narrative in Ukraine: “Ukrainians! The West is trying to sow seeds of discord between brotherly Slavic nations by pitting us against each other. They do that to weaken us and keep us subjected!” This narrative failed completely because the fear of Western domination is part of the Russian Shadow but is completely absent in Ukraine.

Or take an example that’s closer to home, the BLM. It’s successful because it speaks to the people’s sense of discomfort around African Americans. People rightfully perceive this discomfort as shameful. It’s their Shadow. The BLM narrative helps them ease this discomfort by projecting it onto an imaginary evildoer: the racist police or the imaginary white supremacists. The BLM is the barrier between themselves and the nasty, dark feelings they intuit in themselves but can’t bear to acknowledge.

This is why the White Fragility book was so popular among white people. It helped them feel less alone with their darkest impulses. It was cathartic because finally what they were hiding from themselves could come out into the open. For those whose Shadow doesn’t contain racist feelings (but contains other equally dark impulses because everybody has a Shadow), this whole phenomenon was confusing.

Once you know your Shadow, you can figure out which kinds of propaganda are likely to have an effect on you and build up resistance to its seductive lure. The first step is always to say, “I’m human and hence susceptible to influence.” There’s nothing shameful in that.