An image of a mirage, taken in the Mojave Desert (shared to wikimedia commons by user Brocken Inaglory under a Fair Use license.) Mirages are one form of illusion, and this piece deals heavily with illusion, delusion, and pretense.

I’ve worked a number of jobs in my life, and almost all of them had an employee handbook or a list of policies that we had to follow. Likewise, every class I’ve taken had a syllabus that we were supposed to follow, and every class I teach has the same. Generally speaking, I try to follow these and to apply them evenly, because it seems less trouble than doing things otherwise. One thing that every successful employee learns and every successful college student figures out eventually is that not every policy is applied stringently – teachers and managers are, of course, human, and human beings have limits to their energy and capabilities.

The policies in question aren’t ignored per se, but there’s wiggle room. There always is. What a policy like a workplace rule or a statement in a syllabus is, is actually a limit. This is the line that you can get in trouble after crossing. You won’t necessarily, every single time, and under ideal conditions it will apply every time, but if you’re taking part in this enterprise, what you’re agreeing to is the fiction that this line matters.

Image of drama masks, from Wikimedia Commons user Yuvika Koul, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.

In short, these policies are what we pretend to be the case.

This is also the case with laws. We pretend that laws matter, because if you get caught breaking them, you may be punished. You might also get let off with a warning for speeding or something like that. But, fundamentally, what’s going on is that we just agree to pretend that the law in question matters. Especially under observation.

After thinking about this for a time, I came to a conclusion: we spend an awful lot of our time pretending that the world functions a particular way, when it does not – in fact – work that way.

For many people, this pretending comes fairly naturally. For others, it takes a fair amount of effort. For some, all they can manage is to pretend that they’re still pretending. From the outside, all of these tend to look relatively similar, and they are functionally the same (a thing is as it does, as we say.)

But it’s really weird that we do this, isn’t it?

I recently started listening to the podcast Hood Politics with the rapper Propaganda (the stage name of Jason Petty), and I’ll admit that this essay is influenced a bit by the episode entitled “Fear the Clap Back”, which begins with a discussion of the recent statements made by the U.S. Government in relation to the Armenian Genocide. In short: we all know it happened, why has it taken a century to acknowledge it?

What is changed by this statement?

Another cogent summary of this idea can be found in the essay “How to Kill a Zombie”, hosted on OpenDemocracy.

My thinking is that what’s different is the fact that we — or, at least, the people who care about the US government’s statements — can now stop pretending it didn’t happen. Which is both important and unimportant. It’s important to acknowledge it happened, but merely acknowledging it is just the first step.

I’m reminded of a concept that came out of Lacan, was articulated by Slavoj Žižek, and which I first encountered in the work of Mark Fisher: the “big Other”. I first saw this written out in Capitalist Realism, where Fisher says that of it that

is the collective fiction, the symbolic structure, presupposed by any social field. The big Other can never be encountered in itself; instead, we only ever confront its stand-ins . . . One important dimension of the big Other is that it does not know everything. It is this constitutive ignorance of the big Other that allows public relations to function. Indeed, the big Other could be defined as the consumer of PR and propaganda, the virtual figure which is required to believe even when no individual can . . . the distinction between what the big Other knows, i.e. what is officially accepted, and what is widely known and experienced by actual individuals, is very far from being 'merely' emptily formal; it is the discrepancy between the two that allows 'ordinary' social reality to function. When the illusion that the big Other did not know can no longer be maintained, the incorporeal fabric holding the social system together disintegrates.

In short, what allows society to function is that we all agreed to make up a guy who believes all the lies that are told in “polite” society – in press releases, press conferences, speeches, news articles, advertisements, all of that – and we have to act like what this guy believes matters. None of us have met “the guy”, none of us think this is a real person, but we avert our eyes and engage in the fiction, because if we didn’t then society would collapse under the weight of the falsehoods. The big Other is a load-bearing fictitious person, in short.

When President Biden acknowledged the Armenian Genocide, he was telling the guy we all made up about it. When Turkey’s President Erdoğan threatened to acknowledge the genocide of the Native Americans, he was threatening to do the same thing – to tell the guy we all made up about what happened to the indigenous peoples of North America (Prop’s analysis, that Turkey is an essential part of U.S. foreign policy due to them being able to more functionally deal with the Middle East and to act as a middleman for U.S. foreign policy seems like it’s true, but the acknowledgment of American genocide is very much calculated for a non-U.S.A., non-Middle Eastern audience.)

We can call this “Imaginal Politics”, because it is a political application of imagination, but it is not an application of the imaginary or conceptual to politics. What is being asked of us is that we imagine that the world is the status quo. We imagine the big Other into being, we imagine this giant empty of attributes, and then we imagine that what this guy believes and agree to only act like what he believes is true. It’s a bizarre system, and it’s one that is inherently unstable

I say this, because moving public opinion and moving reality are two different things, and moving public opinion is – by a massive stretch – much easier. This is why politics has been reduced down to mere gestures, especially in liberal governments: because, for a very long time, real policy was exactly where the liberal parties of the world wanted it to be (after the 1970s, liberalism won in the global north, and note that I’m talking about actual liberalism, not the thing that conservative Americans imagine when they say that word,) so they didn’t have to materially adjust things. They just had to gesture in the direction that they wanted public opinion to move, and this is largely in service of maintaining the status quo.

Think: why is it that governments, domestically, have only three tools? Those being to increase police powers, offer tax breaks, and to make empty performative gestures. Foreign policy isn’t much better – sanctions, trade deals, and press releases are just about the only things used there. Spectacle is the only thing that’s relatively unchanged in both, and is thus one of the first tools to use.

It is a politics concerned with image, sans content, sans vision.

I would say that it’s because – by and large – we have been taught self-deception, and we engage, endlessly in self-deception. We set the world up to support this self-deception, and we eventually set up a closed loop that supports the continuation of this deception.

Of course, this is a layer we have put over the real world, and on which we scrawl our designs. And the Real keeps pushing up around the edges of this layer, and threatening its integrity. You can’t empty-gesture your way out of civic unrest caused by the murder of an unarmed black man. You can’t clap away a pandemic.

Climate change can’t be stopped by taking a knee while wearing kente cloth.

Image taken from a New Yorker article, but originally from Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty. Presented without comment. — Image taken from a *New Yorker* article, but originally from Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty. Presented without comment.

Because we have allowed politics to work on the paradigm of pure image – as a simulation of power instead of actual power – we are in one of the worst situations that we could possibly be in. What is called for now is actual, radical change instead of the image of radical change, and that’s not going to happen without a serious shift in approach from those who hold power.

But this vision of politics as replacing one delusion with another is going to kill us all.

So, why is this?

I think a big part of it is the fact that much of human life is actually bound up in imagination. As per Graeber in the Utopia of Rules:

Most human relations—particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies—are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view.

As well as his explanation of structural violence from the same:

One of the central arguments of this essay so far is that structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them—including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top—while the latter can wander about largely oblivious to much of what is going on around them. That is, the powerless not only end up doing most of the actual, physical labor required to keep society running, they also do most of the interpretive labor as well.

And he defines this as:

One of the reasons it is difficult to see all this is because the word “imagination” can mean so many different things. In most modern definitions imagination is counterposed to reality; “imaginary” things are first and foremost things that aren’t really there. This can cause a great deal of confusion when we speak of imagination in the abstract, because it makes it seem like imagination has much more do with Spenser’s Faerie Queene than with a group of waitresses trying to figure out how to placate the couple at Table 7 before the boss shows up.
Still, this way of thinking about imagination is relatively new, and continues to coexist with much older ones. In the common Ancient and Medieval conception, for example, what we now call “the imagination” was not seen as opposed to reality per se, but as a kind of middle ground, a zone of passage connecting material reality and the rational soul.

Okay, that’s enough long passages from Graeber. Among other things, empathy is an exercise in imagination: you have to imagine what the other person might be feeling at this point in time. This is an important and perfectly legitimate use of imagination – and you shouldn’t assume that I’m saying it’s unimportant because I’m calling it “imagination.” I write science fiction and fantasy when I write fiction, so you can imagine I have a fairly positive view of the quality.

The Dunbar number is something that determines the “natural” group size for a primate, related to their brain size. image is a common chimpanzee, used under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license, originally uploaded by wikimedia commons user Charles J. Sharp.

But there’s also the Dunbar Number to consider. I’m not going to get into particulars of the number, because there’s some disagreement, but I think that it’s fairly obvious that, after a certain point, we can’t attach much importance to individual people – which doesn’t mean that we don’t care, but it means that we care in the abstract.

This abstracted caring is part of why we have the big Other. We can’t empathize with everyone, so we make up a guy that we can be generally okay with and not worry about it – but we have to fill in what this guy we made up thinks and believes, and we have to care about it to an extent. Hence we develop this generalized view of what “everyone” thinks.

So what can we do?

No. Clapping is not what we’re going to do. Nor clapping back. Image taken from GQ.

Honestly, I think that this one is simple, but is going to be a bit slow: we just have to speak honestly, and we have to have faith that other people can undestand what we’re saying. We know that the Armenian genocide happened. We know that our treatment of native peoples is shameful and needs to change. We know that billionaires are bad for the world.

Likewise, those of us who make policies and rules should do our best not to make policies we have no intention of enforcing evenly. To do otherwise is to invite a form of corruption: making it so that everyone is in violation of a policy or law, but deciding randomly who, what, and when to punish is little different than having no rule whatsoever.

In short, we have to stop making up an abstract person who doesn’t care. We have to assume that, in general, people are smarter than we think and care more about things than we would initially believe, and if we assume this degree of trust and faith, we should do our best to be worthy of it.

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Masters of Delusion: On the big Other