While we probably shouldn’t start off any article on here with a Hitler quote… Hitler once said, “I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the few.” While Hitler may have had his own rationale for saying such a thing, our interpretation at DMSG is that when concepts and ideas are expressed as simply as possible, they radiate far further than nuanced messages ever could. In representational republics, where the vast majority of the population is entitled to voting on things, you need to create messages that everyone can at least understand. DMSG calls this concept Value Radiation Theory, in which the easiest-to-understand messages are the ones that win out in politics. The problem that arises with this concept nowadays is that in an increasingly stupid society, the lowest common denominator in America is now clinically retarded. When the success of political movements rests on whether or not someone with an IQ below 80 can understand any party’s economic system and social policies, any successful political movement requires that its most ardent supporters be mentally or emotionally stunted as well. While I can risk cancellation by explaining why America’s lowest common denominators are getting stupider, in this article we’re going to look at how to successfully operate outside a political system that requires stupidity to compete in. First, however, we are going to go further into detail about how Value Radiation Theory works in America, the political landscape that makes itself understandable for the clinically retarded.
In America, the transmission of political messages is facilitated largely by a phenomenon known as Symbolic Convergence Theory, in which the bourgeois’ mythos and propaganda that we are spoon-fed throughout our educations and careers converges into vague-but-always-capitalist worldviews, with different groups forming around different variants of these fantasies. Because of this Symbolic Convergence, in which most Americans agree on the same things economically, political messages often simply repeat the same phrases and noises in order to bypass the need for any coherent policies in the messages at all. As an example to showcase what Symbolic Convergence Theory is, when I say things like, “free market” or “liberty,” you already understand what I am referring to in the Americanized and corporate-friendly sense of these words without me needing to specify anything else. Even though these concepts like “free market” and “liberty” are cultivated by the bourgeois’ state and media apparatuses, concepts in society can arise outside these institutions that feed into their own counterculture’s Symbolic Convergence phenomena. When I say things like “13%,” “41%,” or “based,” the vast majority of the readers younger than a certain age here already know what I am referring to without me needing to elaborate any further, due to being immersed in internet counterculture. When liberals accuse others of using “dog whistles,” it’s humorous to me because they admit that, like how we train dogs by using noises, bourgeois governments and their parties train voters by using noises. This process of cultivating Symbolic Convergence phenomena allows a country like America, who’s lowest common denominators wouldn’t be able to understand anything complex otherwise, to have party-aligned opinions on economics and social issues.
When it comes to how the Symbolic Convergence Theory ties into Value Radiation Theory, this cultural programming allows for values already inlaid in the minds of millions to be far more popular than more rational alternatives. In representational republics, the only values that can transmit enough to be successful are the ones already pre-approved by the bourgeois establishment. It doesn’t matter that hydrogen cars are better in every way, if all the corporate-approved arguments currently exist for only the continued production of electric and gasoline vehicles. It doesn’t matter if renewables like solar and wind don’t produce anything more than a billionth of an electron at a consistent load, when those are the only alternatives to climate disaster we are presented with. Putting this into a metaphor, let’s think about ordering food at a restaurant: imagine there’s a secret menu, just like the one at In N’ Out, but about 90% of the customers have no idea it exists since they don’t do their research. If you were to order off the secret menu, others might look at you funny for a minute, and if you were to try and convince them to order unfamiliar items like “the Flying Dutchman” off the secret menu, most of them would refuse to do so unless they had already seen the term accepted by the cashier (so as to not look like a fool) and were made to believe it was possibly better than their usual choice. In choosing whether to make this switch, no matter how momentary it is, the customer is evaluating whether or not it’s worth the risk to make the switch.
While the fast food metaphor begins to break down beyond this when we look at how market forces influence our perceptions, as all of these foods items in any given restaurant are made by the same business, I’m going to introduce the Unfolding Vending Machine metaphor here to illustrate how choices work to eliminate one another in capitalism. Let’s pretend that there was an unfolding vending machine, with the front-facing panel of the machine filled with snacks, attached by hinges to the greater part of the machine so it could swing open. Hiding behind this hinged panel brimming with snacks, imagine that a secondary glass display was filled with off-brand and alternative snacks inside. Now, imagine that the producers of the publicly-known snack options on the front panel ran hit pieces on the most competitive items on the back panel, covering things like their excess calories and high cholesterol. This would make the public even more hesitant than they naturally were to even consider buying an unknown snack off of the back panel. When we extrapolate this metaphor to more important topics, like energy sources, it’s easy to see that when it comes to less-moneyed alternatives like nuclear power, it is clear that the dominant market actors continually push out or shut down any potential rivals. The manufacturer of Twinkies will, if there’s enough money at stake, seek to fight over their market share with other competitors, in a way similar to how petroleum companies have waged war against nuclear power for decades. The manufacturer of Twinkies will, if possible, ensure that their competitors are never up for sale on the front panel of the vending machine, where the majority of people look to buy their snacks. When the average person even sees these alternative snacks, in a world where Twinkie and Twix routinely slander their rivals, the negative perceptions they’ve built up over the years preclude them from even considering buying these alternatives most of the time.
At the end of the day, in a country where corporations bankroll politicians and own media outlets, these campaigns against market competitors take on national implications. When capitalists talk about the “free market of ideas,” they don’t take into consideration that the market directly determines which ideas win out in this society. It’s not the accuracy of the ideas but rather the profitability of the ideas that determine their success, with the dominant market factors establishing their own truths for their own industries, as we see with anti-climate change studies and media campaigns funded by Big Oil. Taking that into account, it is worth saying that most of the information we absorb and process as human beings in an industrial society are not verified by us. In order to be functional human beings, we need to continually take leaps of faith in trusting the authorities on different topics to tell us what’s true, with fields like mathematics deliberately requiring only that we follow rules, rather than understand them. We rely on scientific reviews and third-party organizations to largely certify that what we know about things is accurate, with their findings only reaching our ears through both the corporate media apparatus and our bourgeois government’s outlets. The problem is that in capitalist society, we see deviations from the truth regularly due to the running of media campaigns and lobbyists, in a process that amounts to basically corporate-driven Lysenkoism. The best we can hope to do, when it comes to being aware, is largely trust credentials and use the knowledge we have in our fields as workers and in our lives as perpetual students to figure out who is and isn’t telling the truth. The problem that arises here is that, in truth, there’s very little that we can trust in what both the largest and smallest news outlets in society tell us. On one side we see the mainstream authorities on what’s true bankrolled and owned outright by corporations and on the other side, we see tiny publications run by questionably sane figures like Alex Jones. While we’ve all heard criticism leveled at the Soviet Union for not allowing free speech, we’re not even allowed rational thought in America because our information outlets are controlled by such biased sources. When we aren’t given impartial facts, the only way to not seem “crazy” is to agree with whatever propaganda the majority of Americans buy into, rather than believing in what’s proven to be true.
Due to the information that’s accessible to the population being so biased, the majority of preexisting information that political parties have to work with in gaining voters in a capitalist society is bunk to begin with. If you’re a political party and most people believe in things like the sky being orange, you have to almost accommodate their falsehoods in order to advance your party’s interests, and by the time you get to compromising on values like your honesty in order to succeed, you inevitably fall into the trap of capitalism all over again. The transmission of values that bear the uncomfortable truths is always going to be an uphill battle in such a system and will never be understood by the lowest common denominators most likely, as these people more often than not need the cultural programming showcased by Symbolic Convergence Theory in order to understand anything related to politics at all. Value Radiation Theory is based, as previously stated, on the idea that the simpler the values, the further they spread, and in a country like America, where we have centuries of accumulated capitalist propaganda built up like silt in a river which the values have to at least cooperate with, it practically dams off the river from any potential for change beyond violent floods. Due to the fact that more advanced models of socialism contain seemingly contradictory concepts like markets and state ownership, material freedoms and reeducation camps, and so on, these values simply don’t have the chance to ever transmit in America because they don’t align with our own programming. While material conditions determine social conditions, when our minds are this molded and when our concepts are this constrained to whatever benefits the bourgeois, it’s unlikely that most Americans could ever articulate the socialist solutions to their problems on their own or even recognize those collectivist solutions for what they are. For all intents and purposes, the West has locked itself down to any radical changes and the existing systems may continue to do so for decades to come, until they’re ground into dust by economic collapses.
For all intents and purposes, in a society where our existing concepts are so warped to begin with, in a political system where only simplest answers to complex problems are ever chosen, it’s easy to see that actual socialism isn’t politically competitive here. While we can bundle socialism with identity politics in order to garner the support of some groups, it probably won’t create what’s best for society and certain ethnic groups in the long run anyways. While we can talk about Vanguardism here, as I’ve talked about it plenty enough in other articles, there is another solution that doesn’t risk ruining our lives: separatism. In a world where the economy is so interconnected, this might seem like an impossible idea to pursue but as the retiree-worker ratio grows ever higher, those who can separate will ultimately benefit from not being part of the collapsing industrial systems. Land ownership in capitalism is still legal and it is completely possible to acquire great sums of land in overlooked but verdant places, settle there, have many children, invite likeminded people to settle there, and gradually start a society based on new ideals that you all agree with. While we could invent industry from scratch, it’d be much more plausible to just work within the confines of society, settling in a low-cost area adjacent to an urban area gifted with natural resources, and just build up our own community’s infrastructure and industry with the incomes we extract from the greater society. Aldous Huxley feared that the perfect dictatorship would be one without walls, where no one could conceive of leaving a place they felt miserable in, and when we look at many countries like America and Canada today, that is completely the case. As industrial society continues to collapse, as living standards continue to plummet in these comfortable hellscapes, more people will be eager to leave. Technologies like artificial intelligence will only exacerbate this trend, as the reduction in the work force creates a reduction in consumption that creates a reduction in the workforce and so on. The idea of separating from society isn’t perfect and comes with a lot of challenges, but as we see with communities like the Amish, it can be done legally in ways that the government respects. The Amish don’t pay taxes for programs like social security, which is very important to note here, and live unmolested in their own areas, free to travel back and forth between their communities and the greater society. Creating a dialectical materialist community, full of middle-class workers who commuted back and forth between a high-wage city where syndicalism was still strong, bringing in capitalist society’s money to develop their own community, wouldn’t be a bad idea and it would save us the grief of having to save the rest of the world. While separatism is by no means DMSG’s stance on the issue of reforming America, it is something that I have given thought to and intend on pursuing as time goes on.
