The Cold War as a progenitor of cognitive pollution

Eric Raymond is a computer programmer of rare talent and has a blog, Armed and Dangerous, which is perhaps 65% programming related and 35% dicussion of a diverse range of issues and observations. He brings an eclectic and ranging intellect to his posts which are almost always intriguing. One such is Gramscian damage by Eric Raymond. There is a tone of conspiracy theory to it which always puts me off, but Raymond's intellect and accomplishments demand some latitude and the case he makes is somewhat persuasive.

Raymond's argument is that we are still working through the consequences of a Gramscian game initiated by the Soviets during the Cold War.

The Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

In a previous post on Suicidalism, I identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons. Here is that list again:

There is no truth, only competing agendas.

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you’ll find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is the Baran-Wallerstein “world system” thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia.

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

There's more interesting material in the original post, but that's the gist of it.

I was particularly taken by that list of postmodernist, critical theorist, multiculturalist, nihilistic, politically correct nostrums. Each of them have enough of a grain of truth in them to gain traction with the intellectually anemic, and yet on critical examination, carry no water. Some are non sequiturs, some are meaningless statements, some are flat out wrong. Some are normative statements without empirical support.

Meaningless
There is no truth, only competing agendas.

The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous.

For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified.

Non sequiturs
All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

Wrong
There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another.

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World

When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.

Sure, there are a lot of nuances, and there is scope for argument around the margins, but the broad thrust of these bedrock assumptions of the critical theorists and politically correct are simply wrong or meaningless no matter how reasonable they appear at first blush. All you have to do is ask, "How would I know whether this is true?" Once asked, it becomes obvious that all these are nonsense statements in terms of logic and/or evidence.

But if you were to ask which of these statements was true of a High School senior, a graduating college student, anyone in a Studies program or the softer social sciences, or journalists and others of the clerisy, and you would likely get assent on most if not all. What you would not get is evidence to support that statement of faith.

These belief sets and their attendant fantasies are debilitating to any individual and undermining of a functioning society. It is grievous the volume of cognitive pollution generated by the Cold War and curious as to its longevity. It would be interesting to do a correlation between the degree to which individuals believe these propositions and the nature of their accomplished life outcomes (income, wealth accumulation, education attainment, etc.).

UPDATE: The Soviet Union may have pursued this in order to create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism. The irony is that though the Soviet Union is long gone and communism in its various masks is thoroughly discredited, the seeds of the Gramscian memes are still bearing fruit. Gramscian memes are still fostering an ideological vacuum which will not be filled by Marxism-Leninism but by old fashioned Nationalism or Totalitarianism or Fascism or some other noxious ideology. We may be slowly turning back these Gramscian memes but not fast enough.