"Chimping" is as real as voting

Or: Becoming a Conflict Entrepreneur

Many of us have learned how painful it is to argue with an elderly loved one about politics: “you are arguing with the TV, and the TV can’t hear you and doesn’t care.”

It’s a cute turn of phrase, but it doesn’t really capture the dawning horror and anguish as you realize that you are no longer talking to your intimate relative: you are talking to Stephen Colbert.

And you can’t just say, “Sorry Stephen, I’d like to talk to my dad now” — what Stephen has to say is Very Important and he’s Deeply Concerned and he’s not going anywhere.

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It’s not that it’s so unbearable to disagree: it’s the feeling that an alien presence has insinuated itself into your closest relationships.

Friends and loved ones whom you like and value for all sorts of human reasons are now separated from you by an impassable gulf. And for what?

Your dad isn’t going to change anything. His opinion doesn’t matter. In the aggregate, of course, these mass media campaigns work, but your dad’s contribution to the whole is infinitesimal. They parasitized his mind (and your relationship) to buy themselves one vote, out of 152 million: 0.000000657% of the objective.

The logic of mass democracy demands this, of course — power is officially vested in The People, and every election cycle it must be gathered in again to the organs of government. The state can’t just extract your dad’s passive obedience: they need to manufacture his enthusiastic (ideally, pissed-off and righteous) consent.

The side that refuses to consume your dad’s mind in this way will be defeated by the side that does so with vampiric hunger.

But it’s not even about the vote, really, from day-to-day:

The reason to break your dad’s brain is to create the impression of inevitable social and moral consensus — to launder the coercive muscle of the state.

(Why send State Security to your door when they can get everyone you love to enforce The Rules for free?)

The mastery of mass communications technology to impose this invisible apparatus of social control was what allowed American managerialism to win the 20th-century struggle with the (openly) authoritarian managerialism of Germany and Russia. With these technological tools, capturing the mind became paradoxically much cheaper and more efficient than settling for the coerced obedience of the body.

The cost of this success is, of course, the total, incurable social and psychological derangement of the Boomers.

It’s very easy to see the pointlessness — and frankly, tragedy — of this when it’s an old man you love being eaten alive by the television.

Social media is a different beast in a few ways:

The state can no longer maintain direct narrative control the way they could in the days of Cronkite or Brokaw. There is no consensus control of public attention and moral concern — and it is difficult to overstate the existential threat that this presents to the US government.

Americans have no shared identity or consensus values. The state does not have a robust apparatus of coercive control.

Postwar America is held together by an ideological self-understanding that utterly depends on the state’s ability to tell everyone who the good guys and bad guys are, and make everyone believe it. As that capacity fails, it becomes increasingly obvious that there is nothing beneath.

For ordinary people, the benefit of a unified media environment was the illusion of local stasis:

The current around us was so immense and so uniform that we didn’t notice it, like the velocity of the earth’s orbit around the sun. Personal relationships rose and fell for personal, human reasons.

Now we are being buffeted by tremendous narrative storms and eddies at human scale: relationships torn apart over galactic grievances with no direct bearing on either of the parties concerned (though of course the conflict itself exposes latent fault lines of character and personality.)

Instead of an ironclad, imperceptible moral consensus — the Titanic steaming serenely toward the iceberg — we have narrative warlordism: patchwork of influencers competing viciously to harness and profit from your attention and moral concern.

Spencer Cox sneeringly refers to these as “conflict entrepreneurs”.

Much of boomers’ and liberals’ loyalty to the mainstream media apparatus and Our Sacred Norms is nostalgia for the good old days, before Trump “made everything so political”. They sincerely hate how “divisive” he is.

But basically every political e-celebrity (including Cox, and every other elected official) is now a conflict entrepreneur of one stripe or another.

Chimping is just voting for right-wingers.

It’s the way that you, the Little Guy, participate in the power process: the way that power is aggregated and drawn back into the machinery of the state.

You “chimp” by signal-boosting various influencers on the grievance du jour, and they present your chimping as evidence of the political importance of a) the grievance and b) themselves.

Like all propagandists, their goal is to persuade you of the deep importance of the global issue, and your helplessness to confront it alone — and therefore your need to engage with the power process through them.

(This is not a bad thing, necessarily: many of these global issues are important, and you are helpless to confront them alone, and you do need to engage with the power process collectively. Organizing people to solve shared problems is also known as “leadership”.)

The flow of your energy through these influencers enriches and empowers them, in the same way that leftists’ voting enriches and empowers NGOs, PACs, unions, black churches, etc.

Trump also likes it when you chimp, because it provides him with a mandate to act (the “impression of inevitable moral and social consensus” discussed above) — and because it places him at the top of a new power process, circumventing the older power process which he does not control.

The desired outcome is a common understanding that petitioning President Trump online — en masse, mediated by this class of influencers — is the way to Get Things Done in America. The power of the state is accessed through direct supplication to the king.

Chimping works fine, as long as you’re chimping for something that Trump already wants to do, and has the capacity to do.

Chimping is largely done by Trump loyalists, precisely because they Trust the Plan. If you thought that Trump was powerless, or doomed to defeat, or that his intentions were hostile to your interests, chimping would be meaningless. You can’t actually make him do anything.

The power of chimping is roughly as “real” as voting: it allows organized constituencies to nudge the apparatus of power in directions it was already willing to go. And that’s fine, as far as it goes — that’s about as real as democratic power gets.

The problem emerges when those options are not adequate: when leadership appears not to have either the capacity or the willingness to do what is necessary.

In the last few weeks, people have begun to lose faith in Trump’s capacity to solve fundamental political problems — but, unfortunately, they have held on to the conviction that they are rudderless and alone in a hurricane of insuperable political forces.

So, while the boomers’ propaganda environment has made them insufferable at Thanksgiving, our propaganda environment has made us demoralized and despondent.

It’s true that our problems are bigger than we can handle alone — but that doesn’t mean we have to obsess impotently over events at global scale.

The solution is to become “conflict entrepreneurs” ourselves.

As long as you are transfixed by the spectacle of America’s decline, and parasocially dependent on the competence and virtue of Republican politicians, volatility will be a source of anxiety, paralysis, and despair.

But volatility always means opportunity. The system is leaking power all over the place.

We can organize, build capacity, and capture those power flows ourselves — in lawful, peaceful, and productive ways — becoming more adaptive, regardless of what the future holds.

At EXIT, we are taking a short position on managerial systems, and building the human institutions that will come next. We believe that the future is networked family empires: so we pool capital, launch businesses, cultivate social and political influence, and raise our children to inherit what we build.

Learn more at exitgroup.us.

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