In an age where technology could liberate us, it has instead been harnessed to enslave us to a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and powerlessness.
It is disturbing to realize that we live in a time where technologies have existed for over a decade which can allow those with the resources, as in big tech, to aggregate and analyze levels of personal-individual data from the whole population so precisely that there can be no mistake about exactly what people want, however defined, either in terms of individually targeted advertising or in terms of large demographic groups.
One could imagine even some kind of future post-political governmental or corporate directorate just analyzing what people want via population-level data collection, and rolling out various policies and products, and bypass the whole process of either elections or market testing.
It would be a popular ‘directorship’ that surpassed older parliamentary models in its democratization, in the positive sense of the term.
We are developing these ideas to form the basis of future work to be published very soon on the kinds of changes to the present system we see on the horizon, and using the failures of Hollywood’s ‘The Message’, and Hollywood’s corrective moves afoot today, as a microcosm of what the collective West may do imminently.
But what is even more disorienting and bizarre is the realization that while the elites (WEF, IMF, Wall Street, Downing Street, the City of London, Hollywood, etc.) have access to all this information, and know what people want or believe in a very detailed way, they continue nevertheless to promote policies, politicians, products, and culture (art, film, music, etc.) which are unappealing and do not resonate broadly.
Surely, they appeal to some niche audience(s), but that cannot be confused for a mass market. In the US, only Donald Trump has used analytic data, in particular from Cambridge Analytica, to understand the zeitgeist – that was one of the keys to his electoral success in 2016.
No, something else is afoot, for these political policies and cultural products stemming from elite institutions, across all of society – from politics to entertainment and beyond – are something more than just offensive, they are divisive and punitive.
There are various possibilities which explain now why this is the state of affairs, but some candidates are better than others.
What we want to explore in part is an overall theory of power, or rather how power itself is proven or established, which permeates in the West. And we can draw this conclusion from understanding the disconnect between the analytic data and what we are actually given.
The Not-So-Beautiful Truth
Generally what follows is coming to terms with the dystopic reality that their theory of power today is based in just how unpopular something can be, and still result in the power structure itself being in place.
In other words, popular and democratic approaches to governance and culture are apparently not the point for them, but rather how unpopular an imposition can be. A whole other study in the vane of Nietzsche or Foucault would need to be conducted to dig into the genealogy of the philosophy behind this system of ethics in the late-modern western elite mind.
Still, their theory and practice is simple to understand: if people want something, and you give them what they want, you have abandoned power and given it to the people. Power is maintained by withholding from people what they want, and power is proven by doing the unpopular and remaining in power.
This is a paternalistic and authoritarian approach to the population, in the sense that it treats them as children. Children, after all, only want candy for dinner, and a good parent does not just give children what they want at any moment, but rather what is good for them.
The problem here is that adult citizen voters are not children, and society’s elites are not their parents, either figuratively, ethically, nor in reality. Decent parents, which is most of them after all, have loving and benevolent spiritually and biologically derived attachments and motivations in regards to their children.
We can see that the larger problem here isn’t the dynamic (parent/child) in the sense of paternalism, but that the ‘parents’ (the elites) are trying to harm the children (the population) in this case.
A benevolent paternalism? The historical model
Now, nationalism emerges in early modernity with an angle here. The etymology of ‘nation’ – natio or nasci – relates to familial relations, being of the same family.
While paternalistic and authoritarian themes absolutely permeate that political reality, with potentially disastrous results, there are relatively objective tests that can be performed in an historical, factual, or analytic sense which can inform us as to whether those policies and cultural products indeed worked for the population.
We can discuss this in terms of political culture, in terms of literacy rates, longevity, quality of life and happiness, the level and quality of culture in the fine arts, mental health and wellness, employment figures and incomes, education and healthcare, and so forth.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, polling a population and then transforming that into policies was a more drawn out process. And we do not want either to engage in any naive historical revisionism which romanticizes the past.
For surely society from at least the very first mass-hydraulic civilizations, with the taming of agriculture and livestock, comes some class differences or antagonisms in society.
This means that policies will naturally involve some kind of compromise.
Nationalism in this sense, especially in countries undergoing a developmental process model, (whether 18th century France or 20th century China) represents a kind of social solidarity which unifies various layers of society around certain goals which reasonably can be said to reflect almost everyone’s long-term interests.
But we can understand here that in that historical model there was an underlying reality of a common set of values, shared culture, shared sense of history, and therefore a shared sense of national purpose.
It is important also to include here that culture and policies do not have to work the same way, because they work in tandem. The policies in any class society through history represent compromises towards a common goal, but culture (everything from art to religion and beyond) is not a compromise, but a supremely unifying force.
In fact, the unifying culture not only mitigates the impact of the objective class antagonisms in society along an independent vector (meaning, in its own right), but also informs the wants, needs, desires, and beliefs of the contending classes (meaning the lens through which they understand their class interests) in ways which produce social harmony.
But the process historically was more drawn out, because they did not have the levels of electronic surveillance and data collection which could inform political and cultural leaders, creators, and elites.
The Chinese process, for example in Mao’s time, had a process for developing the ‘mass line’. It involved having party members in leadership that were drawn directly from the masses, so similar to nationalist projects, there was this profound insight into what people actually wanted and believed in.
The Communist Party would also in other ways poll the population through public engagement, and then bring this back to the drawing room to produce the ‘mass line’ – as close as possible a reflection of the public’s genuine needs and sentiments, but then reformulated to be compatible with the party’s desired socio-economic and developmental telos.
The party had some telos, some end-goal, and wanted to take the population (and the physical economy) from where they were at, and bring them to a future(ist) destination.
They wanted to transform the society from a semi-feudal one into a state-capitalist/socialist one, which would require some degree of cosmopolitanization of some layers of society.
Broadly, in the 1stthrough 3rd industrial revolutions, the role of human labor, skilled and educated labor, was critical.
The elites in societies in the late 18th through the early 21st centuries, and the societies at large, had a high degree of common cause in this period of time. Social historians focus of course on the history of the class struggle, and the view that the interests of capital and labor were diametrically opposed.
While there is truth here (and more so now than before), it obfuscates the broader point that capital back then required labor and labor required capital.
Now labor, perhaps organized labor in some Marxian sense, could replace private capital with state capital (i.e. ‘socialism’).
But it didn’t replace the need for capital, nor can we neglect that even in Marx’s ‘Critique of the Gotha Program’ the German philosopher cum political economist made it clear that the worker’s state (after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie) cannot really give the workers the full earnings (product) of their labor, since the state would need to reinvest a portion of the surplus value back into expanding the productive forces, so that the later stage of socialism, i.e. communism, would have a material-economic foundation to come into being.
Liberal vs Truthful Criticisms of Paternalistic Authoritarianism
Before us now then is the question of deconstructing paternalistic authoritarian governance models in the abstract, and then comparing that to its reality, historically and today, to uncover very large differences.
Liberal criticisms or deconstructions of paternalistic authoritarian governance are timeless and abstract, meaning that there is no room or framework with which to construct parameters in which they are appropriate (aside from short-term emergency situations) as a status quo.
In contrast, in the above, we have given sufficient argument or example in the Chinese case that there is a way to do a paternalistic/authoritarian governance in the appropriate historical epoch0 in developmental terms.
China was chosen as the model to show the intersection of humanity, efficacy, fairness, and rationality even under conditions that are less than ideal. In other words, if we can make the case for China as the worst case scenario, we have made the case categorically.
Liberal deconstructions of paternalistic authoritarianism tend to make the post-war error, as that made by Umberto Eco and Roger Griffin alike, in that they focus on the givens of the time and place and in fact fail in their similar goals to sketch out a general or generic, universal definition of fascism which can transcend confusions in its various permutations.
Their failure lies in doing the opposite. They problematize the various givens of the day, the various policies – populist ones, that people wanted, and fail in deconstructing the essence of fascism without making circular argumentation: fascism is a problem because it is a very bad paternalistic authoritarianism, and paternalistic authoritarianism is bad because it is akin to fascism.
Liberal deconstruction fails in a self-comprehension of the genesis of liberal ideas as they emerged historically from traditional societies.
Now, the liberal-progressive strain, influenced by the Marxian approach, has room for a more nuanced approach, and can view liberal-progressivism as the crowning achievement, developmentally speaking, of a society or civilization, as in ‘from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence’.
But if liberal progressive ideas are detached from a historical-materialist approach in this regard, then there is no material-developmental relationship between the changes to the productive forces in society on the one hand, and how they make possible a liberal body politic and cultural substrate on the other.
In other words, it is purely an abstract ‘battle of ideas’, or the absence of liberalism is merely a case of not ‘injecting’ or ‘cultivating’ such ideals into the body politic, the culture, or the population at large, regardless of where that society situates developmentally in historical-economic terms.
Findings and Conclusions
In conclusion, we are advancing these ideas as the foundation for forthcoming work that will delve into the transformations we foresee within the current system.
Central to this analysis will be an examination of Hollywood’s failure in shaping ‘The Message’ and the reactive corrective moves underway, which we view as a microcosm of the broader shifts likely to unfold across the collective West.
By studying these dynamics in Hollywood, we aim to better understand and anticipate the imminent strategies and responses that will shape the political and cultural landscape in the near future.
Indeed, we find ourselves at a terrifying crossroads in human history. Big data analytics have handed the ruling elites tools that could, if wielded responsibly, align governance with the will of the people in ways previously unimaginable.
The sheer amount of personal data available, aggregated and analyzed to pinpoint every individual desire, should have heralded a new epoch of democracy, where government and culture are shaped by the collective will.
But instead, what we have is the opposite: an authoritarian manipulation of this power, not to reflect the popular sentiment, but to suppress it.
Trumpism, in this sense, is big-data populism, and contains the most popular-democratic potential which re-infuses both vigor and freedom into the body politic. But the elites seem to oppose this approach.
This is no accident. This is a deliberate strategy to maintain control. The elites—those in the WEF, IMF, Silicon Valley, and their political puppets—have moved beyond the pretense of democracy.
They use the data not to serve, but to subvert. It is not a failure of governance but an assertion of a new kind of power, one that thrives on discord, disillusionment, and division.
They know exactly what the people want, and yet they deliberately withhold it, offering instead a perverse menu of policies, culture, and propaganda designed to enrage, divide, and disempower.
They push the limits of unpopularity to see how far they can go before the people rise up, only to realize that the structure itself—the apparatus of control—is impregnable.
They are testing the elasticity of public tolerance, pushing the boundaries of oppression not to address the needs of the people but to demonstrate their immunity from consequence.
This is the ultimate expression of anti-democracy, of anti-populism, in the age of big data. The elites are not simply unresponsive to the popular will; they are actively hostile to it.
They use the immense technological power at their disposal not to foster a shared cultural or political reality but to fragment and atomize the population, creating a landscape where true democratic consensus is impossible.
The result is a society where governance becomes an exercise in cruelty, where the more disconnected a policy is from the popular will, the more it signals elite power.
The liberal critiques of this system fail precisely because they misunderstand the nature of the power being wielded. They mistake the superficial trappings of democracy for democracy itself, failing to see that what we face is a post-democratic reality.
It is no longer about elections or the marketplace of ideas; it is about managing dissent, controlling narratives, and maintaining a thin veneer of legitimacy while perpetuating an authoritarian order.
This is not paternalism as it existed in pre-modern or nationalist frameworks, where at least a semblance of the public good was pursued. No, this is paternalism weaponized, stripped of benevolence and directed solely at maintaining the elite’s stranglehold on society.
The tragedy is not just that we live under this system, but that we have been conditioned to accept it, even to expect it.
In an age where technology could liberate us, it has instead been harnessed to enslave us to a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and powerlessness. This is not merely a failure of democracy but its calculated annihilation, a destruction carried out in full view, hidden only by the complexity of the mechanisms used to carry it out.
The future, if left in the hands of these elites, promises only more of the same—more control, more division, more distance between the rulers and the ruled. And until this reality is confronted, head-on, we will remain subjects, not citizens, in an increasingly hollowed-out, authoritarian world.
By Joaquin Flores
Published by SCF
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com