Yin and Yang Journalism

08 Jul 2011

When Princess Diana died UK journalists become as unpopular as politicians. With the UK's "News Of The World" scandal tabloid journalism is again under pressure. But it's not just popular journalism that is looked down upon, reader comments at serious newspapers seem to be becoming increasingly negative. Consider an article published a few days ago by Rudolph Giuliani in The UK Times. The link is here, the article starts as follows:

Reagan’s revolution is still toppling tyrannies

The Arab Spring is the legacy of the President’s passionate commitment to democracy

During the Hungarian Revolution that began on October 23, 1956, a statue of Stalin was toppled in Budapest. Peaceful protesters placed pre-Communist Hungarian flags inside the boots of the enormous statue, which was all that remained of the once-towering figure. Time magazine chose the “Hungarian freedom fighter” as its Man of the Year. The Soviets soon rolled in and crushed the revolution, and the country would remain cloaked under a communist regime until 1989. The Hungarian people could not choose their leaders or pursue their dreams or even start a small business.

Around the time of the Hungarian revolution, Ronald Reagan was filming Hellcats of the Navy, appearing alongside his wife, Nancy Davis. It seems impossible that the leading man in this mostly forgotten film would one day help to dismantle the yoke of communism in Hungary and across Eastern Europe.

But it did happen, and it happened because Reagan did not believe that people in countries such as Hungary should simply settle for the leaders they had or the soul-crushing life they offered. Reagan saw the American Way not as simply one choice out of many possible options. For him, the American Way was the best way, the right way. He believed that American democracy was exceptional, and that citizens around the world deserved a chance to live life free from poisonous government control. He stood up to the Soviet regime and went far beyond the veiled critiques and understated whispers of past American leaders.

Ronald Reagan told the Soviets and the world that democracy was the greatest force for good this world has known. And just 32 years after he made a movie about the navy, and only nine years after he became President, the totalitarian, communist regime listened to him and capitulated. Hungary became free, and October 23 is now a national holiday in that country. The statue of Stalin is long gone, and it is wonderfully fitting that a statue of President Reagan will now grace a land that never gave up its dreams of American-style democracy.

Today a new Reagan statue will be dedicated in London, near the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, in honour of the 100th birthday of America’s 40th President.

Margaret Thatcher was Ronald Reagan’s stalwart friend. Together they...

There was a time, not so long ago, when conservatives readers would have enjoyed this article. Today, however, the reader comments are almost universally negative. Here is a selection:

Doherty: What a load of jingoistic rubbish this article is!..

Travis Bickle : Why is this garbage being published in the Times?...

VM: Why is the Times publishing this half-baked history lesson?...

Mario Innecco: Democracy is the "rule of the mob"... Is it any wonder that the whole of the Western world is bankrupt as a result of democracy?

It's not that readers have switched from conservatism to liberalism, it seems as if they're simply rejecting the ways in which journalists traditionally write, it's as if they have wisened up to a certain style of presentation. In this article, you see, Giuliani's tries to convince the reader of something that is intuitively absurd - the idea that American Conservatives such as Ronald Regan engineered the Arab Spring - using emotional hooks. If you turn off your intuition and go with the flow he tricks you into accepting the premise, even though everyone in the world knows, if they stop to think about it, that American Conservatives have been propping up Middle Eastern tyrants since the 1970s in order to maintain the stability of their oil supply.

I stumbled across this article today and thought it was a marvellous example of something I have been writing about recently - zombie politicians, zombie journalists, and zombie academics. In this article I said: "Talking politics is useful if you want to deprogram an intellectual who thinks himself knowledgeable about politics. Then what you can do is start questioning him about politics, and pull out the assumptions behind his chatter, then drill down into these assumption and tear them to shreds. You make him realise that his arguments are built on mindless woolly assumption, it's all a house of cards. So you show these so called intellectuals that they are like witch doctors, they don't even have the creative imagination of ordinary zombies, they are precisely what they most despise, muddle headed self contradictory ramblers."

Do you see this is exactly what Giuliani is? I don't think he is deliberately lying, he has just been drinking his own Kool-Aid for so long that he has hypnotised himself. He will put his hand on his heart and swear this is the gods honest truth. It's that religious like conviction in self serving nonsense that marks him out as a real zombie. 

In the Republic Socrates talks about social decline begging when the King starts listening to his wife. First she criticises him for not being famous enough, then he becomes a seeker of fame instead of pure virtue. Later his wife wants money, and the degradation progresses. The idea of the female as potentially evil is famous in philosophy, remember Pandora's box. Plato's analogy works on multiple levels and you can think about it for a long time, but on one level it is describes the difference between yin and yang politics.

When I was a young I remember my mother using emotional tricks to try and get me to do things, she would say "I bet you can't wash up as quickly as your sister. Why don't you try?". Perhaps when I was very young I was sucked in, but as I got older I just saw straight through her motives.

Yin politics is like this, it's manipulative rather than authoritarian, it doesn't tell people what they should believe, it doesn't order people around; instead it uses dishonesty to get what it wants. The problem is that manipulative power sucks in those who weld it, because to make it work you have to pretend as convincingly as possible that you really believe it, you have to embody an untruth, you have to be an actor, and the part you play starts sticking in the soul. This is one of Socrates' most devastating arguments again democracy, clean honest power is swapped for effeminate manipulative power which, like a woman who looses her idealism, ends up in perfectly selfish amorality.

The new mood of reader comments that you see in upmarket newspapers reflects a swing toward the yang (more on the history of this here). So people aren't falling for the emotional tricks anymore, they have improved their sense of smell, they know the elite are manipulative ideologues and they are building mental shields against them. This yang swing is both marvellous and dangerous, dangerous because it is looking for leadership and might one day be exploited by characters such as Hitler. It's not just a Western thing, the rising popularity of Mao in China reflects for the search for greater paternalism.

It's quite entertaining to see this yang swing sweep across the newspapers, because the elite are responding by trying to turn up the temperature of their yin messages. You see this in Giuliani's article, it's really quite brilliantly written and seamless. By seamless, I mean he doesn't say anything self contradictory, he just talks around the subject in a vague sort of way that inspires you, he doesn't use any sort of rational argument to convince you, so your only defence is to reject the premise directly.

Yin politics and journalism offers deeply emotive presentations of even the simplest arguments, and this emotion only clouds the issue. For example, after difficult negotiations, German and French politicians are now "insisting" that European banks participate in a "voluntary" roll over of short dated Greek bonds, but of course that sentence makes no sense at all, either something is voluntary or it not! It's a political game of emotional messages that confuses everyone and keeps the crisis endlessly ping ponging back and forth. It has no intellectual discipline at all.

Now because banks are being forced to take a hit on Greek bonds, the Credit Ratings agencies are lowering their ratings on Portugal, assuming banks will be forced to take a hit on Portuguese bonds as well. Writing about this in the Financial Times, Peter Spiegel says:

Anyone who thought the controversial decision by Moody’s to downgrade Portuguese debt this week was about Portugal missed the point. It was really about Germany.

Sure, the decision featured warnings that Lisbon had a tough row to hoe in order to meet debt and deficit targets in its €78bn bail-out programme.

But the real message from Moody’s is the same one being delivered to European capitals by the financial markets: if Germany is going to insist that private bondholders bear a chunk of the pain for a new Greek bail-out, we must assume that private bondholders are going to have to pay up for other bail-outs, too.

So, dear investor, abandon ye peripherals while ye may.

But look how confusing Peter Spiegel's presentation is, a one line point about precedent is stretched across four disjointed emotional paragraphs, it reminds me of the way my mother used to present ideas. Peter Spiegel is one of the senior guys at the FT, but he is what Arnold would call a "girlie man". Believe me, it goes much deeper than his presentation, sometimes he rivals Giuliani for mindlessness.

Do you see this yin elitism is the very opposite of hard headed Chinese pragmatism? The Western elite are stuck in this sort of wish washy sea of muddle headed emotion which is toasting the world, and the people are revolting against it. Sometimes the people's angry "garbage" comments go a little far, but all in all the new realism of the un-politically correct brigade is a big step forward intellectually.

I hope you can also see from this article that the many articles you see in Western newspapers about the dangers of China etc are absurd, the Western elite are not only completely corrupt but also completely mad, and the greatest threat to the world is probably the breakdown of America.