From Flies in the Spiderweb: History of the Commercialization of Existence—and Its Means, by Jorge Majfud

A neurology of propaganda

Caveman strengths; cybernetic weaknesses

(16 neural fossils)

The central idea of this chapter could be summarized as follows: what helped us survive as a species for thousands of years has become our greatest weakness. These ancestral traits are exploited as vulnerabilities by the current social power structure. Today, organized economically and culturally by the capitalist system (especially financial and consumer capitalism). Just as industrialization (not necessarily capitalist) represented a strength and human progress just three centuries ago, it has now become one of the main factors of capitalism, which has quickly become the only social system in history capable of casting doubt on the existence of the human species and even the rest of life on the planet.

But beyond this reality that turns a virtue into a weakness, we will briefly focus on some characteristics of human psychology that were once developed to benefit us as a species and are now exploited by an elite of cannibals against us. Although individuals tend to have an overly generous image of themselves and believe we are rational beings, we are generally the opposite. In the individual, familial, social, and political arenas, we tend to act on irrational impulses, much more like the behavior of a soccer fan in a stadium than that of a scientist observing and manipulating mice in a lab or a calculator determining the concrete dosage and the amount of iron needed for a reinforced concrete beam.

Let’s review those constitutional components of our ancestral psyche, those ahistorical traits our species developed for its own survival and that each historical moment (in our case, the capitalist system) exploits to the fullest for its own benefit, like a spider extracting the juice from flies trapped in the web where their own desires led them. I understand this is a personal list that can and should be improved by other contributions:

1. Fear and desire

Our societies are shaped by the commercialization of life, which, in the United States, existed long before (what was the slave system if not that?) but began to radicalize into its current forms in the early 20th century. The market and its media pulpit are based on two basic and primitive feelings that made the survival of the species possible: fear and desire. Two strengths that are now weaknesses. For the market, desire focuses on its sexual impulse (without sex, neither cars nor songs are sold) and on the promotion of fear.

In hijacked democracies, politics is a market, not only of power but in service to the financial market. Therefore, fear and desire are also its two fundamental components. Desire (utopia) has been a bastion of the left, just as fear (dystopia) has been for the right. Since we are in a clearly dystopian historical moment (we no longer try to imagine a just and happy world, but to save it from social and climate catastrophe), the right sells more easily.

This is what is happening across much of the West and, in particular, in the ideological center of that commercialized world, prone to the irrational narrative of commercial propaganda and religious sermons, detached from all evidence. Hence, for example, election deniers are usually right-wing parties. What is more denialist than a religion or consumer culture?

Political ads from the American right focus on instilling fear of immigrants, “gender ideology,” and any group perceived as weaker for some reason: the threat from below (translation: the fear of those below). The ten million illegal immigrants, the most selfless workers in the country, collectively have a much lower crime rate than the rest of society, but they are the perfect target for the fear industry because not only can they not lobby like the Florida mafia, but they also don’t vote. On the other hand, “gender ideology” is not a recent evil that will destroy humanity, as these politicians claim, but is older than the pyramids of Egypt: it is the age-old machismo, with its need for power and its sexual fears. If they knew that the European aristocracy wore wigs, tights, and high heels (a symbol of masculinity, due to their use in horseback riding by the Arabs), that upper-class boys were dressed as girls until recently, as in the case of President F. D. Roosevelt, and that the colors pink and blue for gender were a recent invention of American stores, they would fall over backward. Or, more likely, they would deny it.

In politics, as in the market, there are two fundamental engines: fear and desire. Even more so in a culture based on consumption and a mercantile and success-driven system, almost always presented as if it were a natural organism governed by a single law, the Law of Supply and Demand. This same culture feeds on the idea that both the market and its primary Law are logical, abstract, and universal expressions; not a system and a law regulated and directed by a hegemonic ideology and its different local policies.

Capitalism promotes desire and punishes pleasure. Desire is at the root of all commercial advertising, but the fear market is also important, from the sale of private security services to antivirus software. In politics, as a strategy and creator of reality from fiction, fear is even stronger than desire or hope. Looking at the most important phenomena of the last two hundred years, we could say that perhaps the left focused more on liberal claims regarding the desires of the underprivileged, from the abolition of slavery to the claims of sexual, racial, or national minorities. Fear, on the other hand, has been the central component of fascism, which not only, in the name of freedom, required the individual to submit to a leader or an ethnic or nationalist group, with the gaze always fixed on the past (a common factor with religions) to save their existence from the “dangerous others” whom we must fight and invade before they do it to us. That is, the real fear of the upper class adopted as the imaginary fear of the lower class against others even lower, due to their economic, military, numerical, or legal status: peasants, artisans, Jews, blacks, Indians, immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, the poor, the homeless… The middle class has always feared a possible revolt from below more than a constant and natural dispossession from above, which is why fascist fear takes hold so easily every so often, even among those at the very bottom who have risen a step to the lower middle class.

Art, though with a different purpose, is also full of works that combine these two powerful engines of psychological and social life. The most raw examples are found in fairy tales and stories about mysterious beings on all continents. In ancient Greece, this fear-desire impulse was illustrated with satyrs. A thousand years later, the oldest surreal story we know today as the tales of the Brothers Grimm but which preceded them by many centuries, is that of Little Red Riding Hood. Like in a dream, this story (especially in its original versions before the Brothers Grimm and Disney sanitized it with bleach) mixes sex, cruelty, mystery, deception, and death in ways as implausible as they are powerful, as evidenced by the age of the tale: in 2023, the innocent Little Red Riding Hood will turn a thousand years old, surviving the danger of the wolf in the forest and in the country house. But of the erotic pair fear-desire, the first term represents the moralization of others to repress the second pair, which leads to temptation and the breaking of the prohibition. The prohibition represents civilization, the law, civil or religious. Self-denial, self-repression, renunciation are these same laws internalized.[1] For these same reasons, in public expressions, from literature, cinema to political sermons, fear is the visible face of the moon. On the other side is desire, the need for transgression, for change.

Fear and desire also fill detective novels, mystery stories, commercial films, and even art-house cinema. Crimes, rapes, beauty and the beast, vampires sinking their teeth into the sensual neck of the defenseless woman… Not to mention the always recurring ancient Greece, with its sexual stereotypes: rational men had small penises, like Michelangelo’s David or Adam, while the dangerous and lazy satyrs of the forest (Dionysian, irrational fantasies) were depicted with penises the size of a pack mule. The same perception is evident in the letters of 19th-century white slaveholders, who feared that the liberation of Black slaves would lead to the mass rape of white women, when the reality indicated the opposite: not only did Black men suffer under the whip and the gun, but the rapes were committed by the masters and employers against their Black female slaves or servants, who were almost always underage, as was the case with the Founding Father of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, and practically all other honorable slaveholders from Canada to Argentina. This pornographic fear-desire led to the lynching of thousands of freed Black people after the Civil War in the United States. Preventive—and legal—lynchings, as recommended by the educator, feminist, and first female senator from Georgia, Rebecca Latimer Felton, who in 1898 advised lynching Black men who won elections in North Carolina, arguing that the more educated and politically involved Black men became, the greater the threat they posed to the virginity of white women.[i]

The same pattern has been exploited for generations by the powerful pornography industry, which thrives on depictions of Black men with white women. In other words, the fear of power opens a release valve in its own imagination. It is the tradition of the festival that breaks social rules and overturns the political order once or twice a year, in contrast to the need for ritual, which, both in religions and psychological tics, requires the repetition of a certain order to feel some control over the uncertain future, the unexpected, the feared, and what is truly beyond control.

 According to Stephens-Davidowitz in his analysis of Big Data (Everybody Lies, 2017), women consume twice as much pornography featuring violence against women as men do. It’s unnecessary to clarify that this does not imply any moral or ethical judgment, as it refers to psychological phenomena.[2] One of the characters in my novel Crisis (2012), one of those characters detested by their own author, summarized it this way: “In the end, after all this nonsense passes, the bored housewives, the proper feminist professionals, desire a man who will humiliate them in bed. Only then do they recover their forgotten orgasmic capacities, desiring everything their education and good morals abhor…”[ii] It’s in the index of any Freudian book: in fiction, in folk tales, sex has been covered by a thick layer of symbolism, as in dreams. It must be added: covered by the most visible and repressive term: fear.

This constitutive factor of fear and desire also has an explanation in the deepest prehistory. In 2008, psychology professor at the University of Michigan (a member of the Biopsychology and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory) Kent Berridge observed that dopamine, originating from the nucleus accumbens (a central area of the hypothalamus) and motivating animals in their search for pleasurable rewards (food, sex, drugs), is also responsible for the production of fear. Once the Michigan team inhibited dopamine production in mice, not only did their desire for rewards decrease, but so did the anxieties produced by fear, simultaneously. The same team managed to identify the areas of the brain that are actually related to fear and desire, and found that they were separated by mere millimeters.[iii] Both pleasure and fear are responsible for the survival success of the species.

Once again, it is no coincidence that the powers of the moment, from classic authoritarian regimes to liberal democracies dominated by market ideology and a small number of feudal lords called corporations, have exploited and amplified these two constitutional reactions of each individual for their own benefit. From political speeches to massive advertising campaigns and, more recently, the algorithmic dynamics of social media.

2. The Attraction to Bad News

We’re driving on a highway and, suddenly, another damn traffic jam. We’re annoyed by the inability to move at maximum speed. We vent that anger by imagining and insulting someone who, in trying to go faster than everyone else, ended up scraping another car and, as a result, hundreds, if not thousands, of other responsible drivers have to move at a snail’s pace for ten, twenty minutes. When the flow of cars begins to return to its normal speed, we suddenly see two or three wrecked cars on the side of the highway.

What is the most rational thing we can do in this situation? The police and paramedics have already taken care of the situation. There is nothing we can do to help someone who is no longer there or someone whose life will be forever marked by that place and, above all, by that day which will return again and again for the rest of their days. The rational thing for us to do is to look ahead, focus on the traffic, and avoid another accident…

But no. It’s impossible not to look at the tragic scene. A person lies on the ground, apparently covered by a sheet or something similar. Another is being carried on a stretcher to the ambulance. Why do we have to look at a scene that from the start promised nothing good? We look once, twice, three times until, by inches, we almost hit another car, whose driver was also looking at the wrecked cars and the bodies on the side. The rational thing is to focus on the road, on the heavy traffic of the highway, but we choose the irrational: to look at the bad news, the crime reports, the updates on the latest war.

We do the same thing every day. News programs dedicate entire sections to accidents, murders, shootings, wars, and all kinds of toxic information that in no way serves to reduce crime in a city or, doubtfully, to raise pacifist awareness in the rest of the world. From a political, ideological point of view, it will be used to amplify or minimize a reality, but in any case, the building material comes from the deepest human nature.

This fundamental irrationality has no exceptions because it comes from our genes, which evolved over tens of thousands of years thanks to this attraction to bad news. Back then, this attention-attraction to bad news had a utility for the survival of the individual, the family, and the group. If people had focused more on what was going well, perhaps they could have lived better, but to survive, they had to pay more attention to the negative: a beast prowling around the village; a foreign tribe approaching ours; a stranger coming near the farm; a plague that took the neighbor or a city on the other side of the river.

For hundreds of thousands of years, our survival depended on paying attention to bad news, not good news. It didn’t make us happier, but evolution doesn’t care about our happiness, only the preservation of the group or the species. Those who, by genetic accident, were born with the ability to be happy with little died before reproducing. Those who were obsessive, sometimes paranoid, sometimes fanatical about some impossible story, were more prepared, more alert, and took the women left by the happy, naive ones. And they reproduced like rabbits.

The culture that later emerged in complex societies, societies of hundreds of millions of individuals, tried to correct this genetic reality that, for hundreds of thousands of years, had emerged from smaller tribes. It was probably the first contradiction between our good prehistoric genes and our bad responses to the new reality of the first civilizations. But the remnants of the attraction to violence, along with sex, remain and are the primary material for work in a hyper-commercialized culture and a civilization based on consumerism. Among them are the media, which have ceased to be a public service and have become a business. In countries composed of several countries, like the United States, local channels, often owned by national conglomerates, prioritize crime reporting.[3] National or international networks don’t do anything very different: they report wars or promote the eternal fears that sooner or later lead countries and peoples to wars or all kinds of civil violence, almost always with a strong racist, classist, or nationalist component (largely, three variations of the same).

But if this negativity helped us as a species for fifty thousand or hundreds of thousands of years, in our time it not only serves to poison our lives but also allows a few companies (in this case, in the information industry) to reap all the benefits by exploiting, amplifying, and translating into monetary gains a constitutional weakness of the human species that, for the most part, goes unnoticed.

In the United States, the mecca of media controlled by private corporations, the business of this evolutionary weakness is unquestionable. According to the Center for Communication and Social Policy at the University of California, by 1998, television programs centered on violence already accounted for 60 percent of all programming, and the trend was on the rise.[iv] By 2012, Indiana University recorded that 70 percent of television programs for children contained violent content.[v]

This same research concluded that children could consume non-violent programs if the market were capable of creating them. In other words, beyond the easy exploitation of human weaknesses by market ideology and its profits, there is something called education and culture that could translate ancestral energies into a higher level of civilization, essential for the survival of individuals and the human species.

3. Toxic Masculinity

This prehistoric reality can also be observed in the repeated persistence of certain elements in the new digital culture. One of them, for example, consists of thousands of short videos about a boy who is bullied by a bully, often defending the vulnerable woman. The boy is sometimes a prisoner, a beer drinker in a bar, or a pre-university student. The boy is good. That is, he is either us or a member of our tribe, who are always good and are attacked without reason.

The formula is not an invention of TikTok or of videos from other social networks. It already existed in the era of cinema and Hollywood films, like Rocky Marciano. The same formula has been in practice for thousands of years. For the purposes of this study, let us recall the speech of Andrew Jackson in 1832 and many other presidents, newspapers, magazines, and television channels: “we were attacked without provocation”; “we had to defend ourselves”; “we will never forget.”

After receiving mockery and several humiliating blows from “the other,” our tribal hero (our alter ego) reacts and ends up delivering several devastating blows. The spectators, without exception (neither religious, nor political, nor ideological, nor social class), enjoy it. We enjoy the violence and justify it as the only way to respond to a prior aggression. Beyond whether we judge each situation separately and it is reasonable to think this way, what matters for this analysis is the popularity and repetition of the same formula with few variations. Why? Because the scene appeals to basic, primitive, prehistoric instincts, which say a lot about ourselves, who are unwilling to be analyzed in this way.

The masculinity of the gladiator, of the tribal warrior (later sublimated in the idol of soccer and the genocidal general of some distant war) was functional for the salvation of the tribe, of our group against the group of others. In the more complex societies of recent centuries, it is merely toxic masculinity that produces more problems than solutions. Like patriarchy: if it was ever justified in some form of feudal organization, for centuries it has been an obstacle to the functioning of more contemporary societies.

The software that once served a system called Windows 95 has now become an obstacle, if not a virus. Thus, the genetic software that once served a human survival system is now a virus, an obstacle to progress or, simply, the organization of a functional society that aspires to survival as a species.

4. Sadism and Pleasure. The Weak Must Be Eliminated

For millions of years, nature has used pleasure to drive individuals to take risks, to invest energy that initially did not result in any gain, unlike defense or alertness in the face of imminent danger, which we discussed earlier. An action that does not provide an immediate benefit must be rewarded with pleasure. This has been the case with sex (thanks to genetic diversity, faster evolution and, therefore, more effective adaptation to environmental changes were possible) and, very likely, we can speculate, it has also been the case with sadism and mockery.

Sadism, the pleasure derived from others’ pain, is another primitive impulse that has leaped from the marginal corners of civilized society (from the dark corners of some poor neighborhood or the illuminated corners of some rich office) to the screens of the entire world.

Except in the secret prisons maintained by dictatorships and democracies, this sadism is not about the physical sadism of torture, but rather a low-intensity sadism. However, this low intensity is the requirement to keep those dark energies within the legal and even moral frameworks of societies. At the same time, these two factors (low intensity and legality) turn sadism into a ubiquitous and transparent phenomenon, so much so that it becomes normalized and spreads until it becomes a global and transcultural phenomenon.

Like the previous reflexes, this weakness is also exploited by the market and by those in power. With an added incentive: in a ruthless world where all individuals are desperate to find a source of survival, sadism, the bully is no longer a gratuitous exercise but often transforms into a source of income. I’m referring to the YouTubers who have developed and multiplied this market. The YouTubers, whether they are millions of failures who spend years trying to make a hundred dollars or those few successful ones who make thousands of dollars with each video mocking someone else, still represent and are part of the lower strata of the power pyramid. At the top are the platform owners, the big investors who find better utility in this culture of permanent mockery and insatiable frivolity. This empty culture provides a sense of freedom and satisfaction, not unlike what a drug addict might feel. In fact, several studies show or demonstrate that the overstimulation of video games or similar limitless activities is as addictive as cocaine. This culture of emptiness and perpetual entertainment not only avoids critical thinking in a sufficient percentage of society (especially among the young) but also destroys their habit of unfragmented thinking.

Another virtue that in the past must have served to save the tribe from the burden of the weak and to reproduce the genes of the strongest has now turned into a toxic weakness, exploited by the powerful of the moment according to the rules and laws of the dominant system (capitalism), in favor of their own class tribes and against the rest of humanity.

5. The Need to Fight: My Tribe or Theirs

In the 21st century, identity politics has colonized both the left and the right, from the demands of majority minorities to the fanaticism of the hordes of minority majorities, from race and gender consciousness to racism and nationalisms. Although the phenomenon is new, it is not something entirely novel. The cultural war around identities has the force of visibility and the most primitive instinct, like identification with a tribe, a clan, an emotional center, whether religious, political, or sports-related.

The problem in complex societies, like modern ones, is that it serves to invisibilize larger conflicts through arbitrary opposites like city and countryside, civilization and barbarism, which the educator and later Argentine president Domingo F. Sarmiento made famous in the 19th century and which, even in the 21st century, makes even the poorest and most marginalized peons feel identified with their landowners, just as slaves identified with their masters to the extent that most African Americans today carry the surnames of their ancestors’ owners and not a few fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. In other regions, like South America, peons identify with a culture, such as that of the gaucho, which leads the overwhelming majority of them to vote and be unconditional supporters of their wealthier employers who monopolize the top spots on electoral lists, while hating the poor members of the opposing party who identify with the cities. The same goes for the North and the South, whites and blacks… The exploitation of the master over the slave, the defense of the interests of those above and those below, becomes invisible or disappears. A rural peon and an industrial peon become players on rival soccer teams, while the general and the soldier identify with the common cause of fighting the other army composed of other generals and soldiers they don’t know.

On the other hand, apart from this arbitrary and irrational but millennial grouping, it is very likely that there is a universal conditioning of human beings to mobilize through preaching, sermons, harangues, and the more recent “motivational speech.” Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain how traditionally, peasants have gone by the thousands (militia) to die in the wars of the nobles, of the elite who received and still receive the material and moral benefits from the spoils of their own and foreign lands. It is possible that the dynamic proselytism-action also has its roots in the long prehistory of humanity. That is, the vulnerability of the basic emotions described earlier, especially the negative ones like fear and anger, to the narrative of the chief or the leader of the family (the father), of the clan (the patriarch), of the tribe (the chief), and of the nation (the religious leader, the political leader).

None of the aforementioned groups, nor any of the administrators of the narrative-power of each, have disappeared. Just as a child learns to obey the word of the father (though in this case, it is a justified obedience) with periods of rebellion; just as the various tribal and religious leaders had the power to send entire peoples to war, so do our more civilized societies function with varying degrees of violence, depending on the historical moment of the inverse Progression curve. In all cases, the power of direct physical coercion, as in war or in a torture chamber, has been far less persistent and less ubiquitous than the omnipresent force of narrative. Through the narrative established by a prior tradition, a leader or a group articulates the comprehensibility of the world for the rest of their people, pushing them toward periods of greater peace or to war. Beyond weapons, the abstraction of money restricts and amplifies the freedom of one group over others, but social cohesion (for example, to carry out an act of collective fanaticism like a massacre or the defense of their own enslavement) almost always stems from the narrative of power. In some cases, counter-narratives to that power have reproduced that same cohesive power but on a smaller scale.

This is likely because for hundreds of thousands of years, both the understanding of the world and the organization of society were not based on any rational analysis but on the emotional acceptance of a totalizing narrative, generally myths, simple legends, and more complex religions. Within this framework (which, for example, in medieval Europe was Christianity, while in the then-first world, the Arab and Persian world, it was Islam) the unifying narratives later became economic theories, racial ideologies, and ideologies of various kinds. All supported by propaganda. Propaganda acts as a missionary factor of the general framework, most often confirming it (the politically correct) and less frequently questioning it (rebellions, revolutions).[4]

In the chapters that make up the sections of this book called “History” and “Posthistory,” we will delve into more detail on this phenomenon.

6. The Need (and Obligation) to Believe

For at least fifty thousand years, myths and legends explained the world, organized groups, tribes, societies, and promoted non-existent futures—like all futures.[5] Common sense was reserved for immediate things, like keeping a vessel horizontal so its contents wouldn’t spill. For everything beyond, from society (mostly invisible, incomprehensible, and uncontrollable) to life after the death of the individual, there was imagination. Not individual imagination but collective imagination. In fact, the Neanderthals were surpassed and, to some extent, exterminated by the prehistoric Westerners, the Cro-Magnons, due to their realism, their inability to imagine fantasies at the same level as our direct ancestors.

It is perhaps for this evolutionary reason (if things had been different, we wouldn’t be here) that the need to believe in the impossible can be explained. Ramses II living forever; Moses parting the Red Sea in two; Noah placing a male and female of each of the billions of animal species on a wooden boat; Nostradamus predicting the fall of the Twin Towers centuries in advance… Beyond the millennial tradition (for some ancestral and perhaps neurological reason) of occupying children’s intellects with fairy tales and more commercial fantasies like Santa Claus and the Three Wise Men. Isn’t it simpler to tell children that their parents bought the gifts? Why this need and this pleasure in lying? Why all this expenditure of time and energy setting up scenes and false stories for children, if not for a conditioning that goes beyond cultures to the roots of a shared past?

Why? Because the impossible was called miracles, and miracles are not a product of uncontrollable chance but of divine intervention, of an absolute power with a superior human intelligence but devoid of higher emotions, with which one could establish a dialogue and negotiation. But that dialogue could not be rational. The superior intelligence of all and each of the gods and goddesses also lacked a single superior feeling or emotion. On the contrary, the gods reproduced the same human miseries that concerned humans: jealousy, selfishness, theft and legitimized plunder; racism and sexism without feelings of guilt; desires for revenge and extermination; promises of wealth, power, and eternal health to enjoy them. Perhaps some moments in the Gospels reveal an exception to this rule, such as the feeling and prescription to love even one’s enemies; a prescription that was never, ever taken into account by their most fanatical followers, but quite the opposite. Generally, the gods were not much different from the Superheroes of 20th-century American popular culture: they all had superpowers, but not super intelligence and even less super feelings.

Therefore, the dialogue between the gods and the suffering creatures had to be based on faith, as faith is rooted in the deepest component of the human and animal psyche: the fear-desire. Moreover, in some cases, as in the biblical Genesis, understanding became a symbol of sin, the forbidden fruit. In not a few cases, as in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, doubt, the lack of faith was considered a danger (sin) that had to be eradicated through conversion, the threat of hell, and persecution or proselytism to prevent the contagion of bad examples from others.

This ancestral component (the need to believe in an impossible or improbable story) must be taken into account, like all the others, to explain contemporary phenomena. In this case, not only political, ideological, and commercial propaganda but even the most spontaneous fake news. Otherwise, it would be impossible to understand why, according to the studies we will see later, fake news are six times more likely to go viral than real news. One might think that fake news are funded by large conspiratorial organizations, which in many cases is true, but that does not explain why in the rest of the cases, when there is no organization behind it, the fake news spreads more and faster than verifiable news. Traditionally, it is a phenomenon similar to the rumor, the village gossip spread by a modest neighbor. It is possible that the suspicion or perception that the story is not entirely true triggers and enhances its viral nature.

7. The Literature of Power

When Homo sapiens left the trees first and the savannas later to enter a new complexity created by themselves, the cities, they had to learn and adapt to the new rules of the new nature. Something similar is happening now: sapiens are leaving the three-dimensional cities to enter a new nature with its own laws. What has not changed is their vocation for power, when they have it, and for justice, when they lack that power. That ancestral need to turn others into “happy slaves.”

Since the most primitive societies needed a unifying myth for a more complex exogamous functioning, the struggle to manage the foundational and teleological narratives, the means and propaganda were created simultaneously. Religions brought these two components to maturity thousands of years ago with proselytism and punishments for those who strayed from the dominant dogma of the victorious totem.

For thousands of years, stories were the primary means of transmitting knowledge, whether moral or practical, usually through emotion and aesthetics. They still are. Now, if the unifying myth (religious, ideological) had the functionality of organizing unity and power in a society, the instrument to capture the individual’s attention lay in its opposite, in novelty. This instrument is central both in literature and in news production. The goal of both is to capture attention with a referenced fact, a fact that is transmitted by the word and announces an important or vital event or describes it as past, that is, exposed to contemplation once stripped of the anxiety of uncertainty and danger. A story, a novel, or a film must capture the reader’s attention and curiosity with the aim of delving into some human passion or, simply, to increase consumption. But while the goal of fiction and honest journalism is not to deceive the reader, the goal of propaganda and advertising, whether consciously or inadvertently, is precisely that. It is likely that in the origin of the stories told by our ancestors in Africa and later in Asia, fiction and non-fiction were one and the same. The greater sophistication of written history must have distinguished one from the other until, ironically, they were deliberately reunited with the development of modern technology. Religious narratives remained the exception, as the distinction between fiction and reality never depended on material facts but on faith.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the Catholic Church reached a new level of sophistication in understanding and producing propaganda. Not by chance, this instrument developed by the Vatican at the start of the great expansion of European powers across the world had a proselytizing and imperialist root. The narrative shifted from tribe and nation to a global narrative. On June 22, 1622, Pope Gregory XV issued the bull Inscrutabili Divinae, which established the “Congregatio de propaganda fide,” an office known as “Propaganda,” whose area of action was those countries where Catholicism was not the majority.

One of the Catholic Church’s enemies, Protestantism, from its inception made intensive use of theological propaganda through the new technology of movable type and the mass publication of books and pamphlets.

Shortly after, in the secular era of the European Enlightenment, this function, freed from myths or religious beliefs, shifted to the press and secular ideologies of reason, liberty, and equality. In any case, both in their prehistoric and religious periods, the media responded to the political power of the time, whether it was an absolute monarchy or a democratic republic. It is obvious that in a democracy, the media and propaganda are more important than in a personal dictatorship, as they must overcome more institutional obstacles. Concentrated powers have always been able to easily buy the dominant media, but they have not been able to as easily buy democracies, which is why they have used the media to manipulate democracies and adapt them to their interests. History shows that democracies have always been an obstacle to concentrated powers, which in our Western world have been, for at least a couple of centuries, the great capitals.

The seizure of indigenous territories by the Thirteen Colonies, the purchase of Louisiana without consulting its population (that is, the indigenous population), the taking of half of Mexican territory, and later, overseas expansion, could never have been carried out without this mechanism of conviction or unifying fanaticism, such as the myth of Manifest Destiny, invented by a journalist, John O’Sullivan, in the mid-19th century. Later came other myths, such as the myth of white genocide at the end of the 19th century in Australia and the United States, to justify the genocide of Black peoples around the world, a myth that inspired Adolf Hitler in Europe.

For all of this, the hijacking of technological innovations in media by the elites in power at the time was always necessary. It would suffice to recall one of the most classic and influential hijackings in history, such as the hijacking of the sacred books of the great religions. Without entering into religious and theological evaluations, one could say that the most effective narrative manipulation apparatus were books like the Bible and ideas like “we, the chosen people of God,” which justified various political actions against other peoples, not to mention the Quran and the realization of the Muslim empire during the European Middle Ages. Later, the same Bible, and especially the monopoly of its interpretation by the Roman Empire first and then by European nations, justified the Crusades against Muslims and various massacres in Europe against other Christians and in other continents against pagans and idolaters, which served as moral support for the sword and cannon of the superior race.

In this last case, the hijacked technology was Gutenberg’s movable type printing press, which began by democratizing culture and continued by legitimizing the militaristic barbarism of European colonizers. In fact, pocket books emerged as practical war manuals for the battlefields. The same goes for newspapers in the 19th century, radio and television in the 20th century, and especially the internet in the early 21st century.

In 1833, The Sun in New York began selling newspapers for a penny (a phenomenon known as the penny press), which made newspaper production far exceed previous levels. By the mid-19th century, the rotary press was perfected, enabling the spread not only of fake news but also of foundational myths like the myth of Manifest Destiny. The self-congratulatory storm of fake but patriotic news, largely originating from the government itself, became an addiction impossible to stop. Various newspapers began baselessly accusing Mexicans of offending the honor of the United States, calling on all young men to enlist as volunteers to fight thousands of miles away from the taverns where they got drunk on cheap liquor and patriotic songs. Once the theft of more than half of Mexican territory was accomplished, accompanied by massacres and rapes, there was no shortage of artists promoted by the complicity of the next generation. The most iconic painting of the period was “American Progress” by artist John Gast, completed in 1872. A kitschy allegory depicting a blonde, sexy woman (white women never fully expose their breasts, like the fleeing Native woman, but suggest them delicately behind a tunic that never quite falls) floating in the air, representing civilization. In front of her, wild beasts, Native Americans, and darkness flee, while behind her follow light, agriculture, and technological progress, such as the railroad. In one hand, she carries a “school book” while in the other, she unrolls a telegraph wire.

By then, the latest invention was the telegraph. Samuel Morse had discovered this technique of transmitting signals in binary code in 1838 and, in 1844, had successfully transmitted the first message from Washington to Baltimore: “What God hath wrought.”[6] By 1880, there were over a million kilometers of telegraph cables worldwide. Samuel Morse’s brother, Sidney, wrote him a prophetic letter: “Your invention, measured by the power it will give man to carry out his plans, is not only the greatest invention of this age but the greatest invention of any age. I see… that the surface of the earth will be interconnected, and every wire will be a nerve, carrying to different parts of the world the knowledge of what each is doing. This invention is invaluable!”[vi] Soon, Samuel Morse would be recognized as “The Peacemaker of His Time.” In 1858, after completing the transatlantic cable between Washington and London, President James Buchanan confirmed the same optimism, never devoid of messianism: “May the Atlantic Telegraph, under the blessing of Heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument designed by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilization, liberty, and law throughout the world.”[vii] To avoid disappointing expectations, the telegraph soon became another tool for new wars.

But the maturation of the power of the press would come with the hijacking of the Cuban War of Independence and the Spanish-American War in 1898, alongside the invention of yellow journalism. Three years earlier, on February 17, 1895, from the New York World Building, the tallest building in the city, Joseph Pulitzer had flooded the streets with a million copies of the New York World featuring a comic strip about a character named Mickey Dugan. On May 5, the homeless, barefoot, drunk, and foul-mouthed boy appeared dressed in a yellow tunic in the first full-color comic strip the world had ever seen. What was new was that the old was now represented in a mass medium. At the time, foul-mouthed and drunk children were not uncommon. Boys became men with whiskey at home, and men became brave with more whiskey in taverns. Soon, the lying boy would move, likely for money, to William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. As quantum physics proves, for a time, the character continued to exist simultaneously in his old home and the new one.

But the New York World and the New York Journal also dedicated more serious pages to politics and the coming war. The competition between the two was a fight to the death, so they had to resort to sensationalism and the fabrication of facts that inflamed primitive emotions like anger and patriotism. The New York Press, a modest newspaper in the city, dismissively labeled the persuasive work of the two major newspapers in the country as “yellow journalism.”

When the illustrator Frederic Remington asked William Randolph Hearst to return home due to a lack of news (“there is no war here,” he had reported), Hearst ordered him to stay: “you furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.”[viii] Fake news, big private businesses, and wars have always been intertwined. The enemies, Pulitzer (the future paradigm of ethical journalism) and Hearst (the future media mogul pro-Hitler), were businessmen and knew that nothing sold better than war, misinformation, and the exacerbation of tavern patriotism. By early 1898, the New York Journal had sold an impressive 30,000 copies per day. By the time the war against Spain broke out, which wasn’t really a war, the Journal was selling over a million copies a day. By then, it could reduce the price of the newspaper by half (one cent) in an effort to attract “less sophisticated” readers. Among the favorite stories that would later be reproduced in hundreds of other local newspapers across the country, the most appealing were those that depicted the Spanish as barbaric criminals, depraved men pursuing defenseless, nearly naked Cuban women. This war wasn’t the first war in which the media justified the ends, but it was the first in history encouraged by the media in pursuit of increasing their sales. The absurdity reached such proportions that other minor newspapers, like the St. Paul Globe in Minnesota, began advertising themselves as “The latest news. Reliable. No fake War News.”[ix]

When the telephone replaced the telegraph, as it had to, history repeated itself. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell got President Rutherford Hayes to accept the first telephone in the White House with the number 1, the national code for the United States today. Bell’s company became AT&T. An extension of this form of voice transmission was Marconi’s radio, which began with wireless communication and continued with the broadcast of the same wave to more than one receiver. According to Marconi, radio was going to be “a herald of peace and civilization among nations.”[x] Marconi himself sold it as a tool of communication and propaganda to the British for their colonial wars and to the Belgians for their brutal capitalist exploitation of the Congo (which, under the supervision of King Leopold II alone, left ten million dead), and to the Russians and Japanese so they could fight each other.[xi]

In 1906, the first radio program was broadcast in the United States. Soon, political speeches were reduced from one hour to ten minutes. The American politician who best knew how to use the new medium was Franklin D. Roosevelt. In Germany, it was the Nazis. Hitler not only drew inspiration from the racist tradition of slaveholders and theorists like Madison Grant, but his propaganda minister learned from the books of Edward Bernays. Hitler had no doubts and didn’t beat around the bush: “When a war is unleashed, what matters is not being right, but achieving victory.”

Bernays systematized propaganda just as his uncle, Sigmund Freud, had systematized psychoanalysis. His theories and successful practices not only inspired the Nazi propagandists of the Third Reich but also served to sell one of the biggest fake news stories of the 20th century: the idea that the democratically elected president of Guatemala was a communist, which the CIA used to protect one of its favorite companies. They succeeded not only by replacing Árbenz in 1954 with a military coup (similar to the one in Iran in 1953) but also by producing a series of military dictatorships that, over the next forty years, left more than 200,000 dead in that small country alone. All, as always, in the name of democracy and freedom.

More recently, during the war in Ukraine, Western media and governments accused Russian media of being part of the Russian government’s propaganda. Direct censorship, as in China or Saudi Arabia, is not the business of Western media or megacapitalists, who always justify their abuses of power with the argument that they are the defenders of freedom. Although history shows that the defenders of “free enterprise” have almost always supported dictatorships or unpopular policies, for linguistic reasons they cannot be against “freedom” in the abstract while defending the freedom that truly matters to them. Who could be against freedom in the centuries of the Enlightenment paradigm? If we convince the majority of those at the bottom that when we speak of freedom, we are not referring only to our freedom, the business is a done deal. No different from the American slaveholders who invented the Republic of Texas in 1836 to reinstate slavery in that Mexican territory and then continued expanding slavery westward, always under the narrative of freedom. Just as when the slaveholders spoke of “freedom,” they meant the freedom of “the free race” (a detail lost in the translation of their speeches into primary and secondary school textbooks, films, and mainstream media), the hijackers of democracy after the Civil War in the United States, that is, the big businessmen and corporations, began to refer to “freedom of enterprise,” which led to the establishment of dozens of dictatorships in Latin America from the late 19th century to protect it, first from the Indians, the Blacks, and the poor, and then from the witch of communism, which they themselves created twice, first as a popular reaction and then as an illusion designed in the CIA offices in Virginia.

Western censorship has always focused on true propaganda, that is, the inoculated idea that leads a significant majority to think and act according to the interests of an elite to which they do not belong, nor do their own interests. The great explosion of this strategy occurred with the independence of the Thirteen Colonies, promoted by an elite of enlightened philosophers who fought against a monarch across the ocean but also did not want to fully implement their own ideals, such as “We the People” and “all men are created equal.” Similarly, as we exposed in The Savage Frontier (2021), the obsession with union arose from the fear of territorial fragmentation and the social and racial fragmentation on which the entire idealistic discourse of the Founding Fathers was based. A central part of all propaganda is not only convincing a group of people to do something they would not do on their own but, in the long term, convincing them to think in a certain way until they become its main defenders. For this, the colonization of language is of central importance.[xii]

One of the mechanisms by which this semantic colonization is carried out consists of the fossilization of a narrative in unconditional support of a dominant dogma. It is much easier and more immediate to inoculate a dogma into a social group (like a mosquito inoculating a parasite into another animal) than to remove it from the collective unconscious. For example, during the early years of the Cold War, the power of Latin American communists and the possibilities of Soviet interference on the continent were virtually irrelevant. Washington and the CIA knew this. Nevertheless, the Agency planned the narrative of “the fight against communism” and, not without irony, “against foreign influence” to destroy democracies and plant puppets in friendly dictatorships, just as it planted articles in the mainstream press. Once the CIA acknowledged that it had been a fabrication, the believers who had little or nothing to gain from this dogma continued to be its greatest defenders and passed it on to the next generations. Something similar happened with the more recent invasion of Iraq. Once Presidents George W. Bush and José María Aznar acknowledged “the intelligence error” regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam Hussein, apart from his alleged links to Al Qaeda, the majority of American consumers of the conservative network Fox News continued to assert that the existence of the prohibited weapons was real.[7]

Just as Franklin D. Roosevelt won four presidential elections thanks to his mastery of the radio, John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election against Nixon thanks to his better mastery of television, and Barack Obama did so in 2008 through his mastery of the internet, and Donald Trump in 2016 through his mastery of social media.

The birth and development of the internet were no different from all the communication media that preceded it: communication tools and military instruments, means of deliberation and oppression. Media hijacked by the powers that be.

During the war in Ukraine, those of us who held NATO responsible for the military escalation that led to the Russian invasion were immediately accused of being “pro-Putin,” even though we directly and explicitly denied it multiple times. Newspapers like Le Monde in Paris echoed this form of moral censorship, diverting the focus of criticism away from the root causes.[xiii] Almost unanimously, the large and respected networks of Western governments, such as DW, PBS, and BBC, along with numerous private corporations, presented only one viewpoint: that of the Ukrainian victims. This viewpoint was based on an irrefutable moral fact (innocent victims are innocent victims), but, like all claims of objectivity, it consisted of a selective representation of reality to conveniently distort it. Perspectives contrary to NATO’s interests were conspicuously absent.

When the congresses of certain countries have questioned mega-platforms like Twitter or Facebook for allowing hate speech or failing to control the massive production of fake news, their owners have always defended themselves by claiming that they are not “the arbiters of truth.” Once again, the Anglo-Saxon mask covers and distracts from reality. To mention just one recent conflict, let’s recall that platforms like Twitter accompanied every link to RT with the warning, “This tweet is related to a site dependent on the Russian government.” Of course, in all other cases, they do not label or mention the affiliations of Western media with aligned governments. Major opinion-forming networks, such as Fox News or CNN, responsible for supporting massive wars and concealing their crimes against humanity, are not more independent because they are private; on the contrary, their empires do not depend on readers but on their million-dollar advertisers and the powerful interests of their micro social class. Their news should be preceded with the warning: “this media outlet is affiliated with or serves the special interests of lobbies, corporations, and transnational entities.”

To a large extent, channels that do not hide their affiliation with a government, a union, or an ideology are more honest than those with international reach and devastating influence that pose as independent and champions of journalistic objectivity.

Moreover, media objectivity does not exist, and neutrality is mere cowardice, if not cynicism. What exists and should be valued is honesty, finally acknowledging which worldview we support and whether that worldview depends on our personal interests, class interests, or something broader called humanity.

The war in Cuba in 1898 (print media), the destruction of Guatemalan democracy in 1954, the failed invasion of Cuba in 1961 (radio), the destruction of Chilean democracy in 1973 (print, radio, and television), and so many others, were direct products of PR manipulations (Press release) and media used as propaganda tools were complex operations but much simpler than the reality we face today. The internet has increased the diversity, reach, and complexity of the same manipulation of public opinion. With the internet and social media, the participation of the reader has increased the idea of consumer freedom and independence.

The central reason for the manipulation of public opinion (of its emotions and feelings) must be sought in the empire of corporate powers. All political and social campaigns require money. The more money, the more media power. The fact that today a handful of men in the United States possess as much wealth as half the country’s population is not a minor detail. That wealth depends on and grows with investments, and one of the most important investments, on which their very existence and the world order depend, lies in investments in public opinion. For example, by attributing their own practices to their adversaries: the danger lies in the propaganda of socialists, unions, etc.

Artificial intelligence will exacerbate this situation.

8. Give me an enemy, and I’ll make you my vassal

On the other hand, it is also possible that we retain cultural and even genetic remnants of all that history, just as we retain the allergies of the Neanderthals, who were disappeared or eliminated by our ancestors 40,000 years ago.[xiv] I am referring to the need to relate to an enemy. Even more than the tribal feeling of belonging to a group, tribal paranoia requires an enemy. This is the constitutional reason behind every flag, every array of symbols, whether they are stickers on cars or tattoos on arms and the back of the neck. Otherwise, if someone feels part of a confederated group, why would they need to wave their flag at us on a street in Jacksonville or Philadelphia? The same reflection applies to any other fanatic of racial or nationalist sects on any other continent, a fanaticism that those in power know and exploit very well, whether in personal dictatorships or in the dictatorships of hijacked democracies.

I believe it is not far-fetched to think that the evolutionary adaptation to protect the tribe has left the legacy of a permanent predisposition to antagonism, to the combat of some other. The problem is that this “tribal legacy,” now expressed in fascism, Nazism, racism, and all their variations, has the same effect as our antibodies in a hyper-hygienic world: the antibodies begin to recognize our own body as the invading enemy and attack it, producing all kinds of serious illnesses that end up killing us.

The “need for an enemy” or for “an antagonist” permeates almost all social interactions in today’s digital world. Consequently, it is exploited and maximized by corporations whose goal is economic profit, “free competition” (on a large scale, read “the elimination of competition”).[xv]

This operates at the popular level, that is, in basic, primitive, reptilian emotions. But the same logic works and dominates at the higher levels of society and power, where it truly has a concrete benefit.

“The enemy never rests… Your mission is ours.” Thus, and on the front page, Lockheed Martin, a private company that sells war weaponry (always referencing the “right to defense” and “national security”) advertises in the New York Times, in case there is any other buyer besides the government. 50,000,000,000 dollars in search of new enemies. On December 31, 2021, the Wall Street Journal published an extensive analysis. The title alone begins with a question and ends with the answer: ”Who Won in Afghanistan? Private Contractors. The U.S. military spent 14 trillion dollars ($14 trillions) over two decades of war; those who benefited range from major manufacturers to entrepreneurs.” After the new military fiasco in Afghanistan, and after such a fortune invested by Washington in war companies, in the merchants of death, it is urgent to find a new enemy and a new conflict. Before a major adventure with China, the option is clear: continue violating the treaties of non-armament expansion of NATO to the East, pressure Russia to react by deploying its army on the border with Ukraine, and then accuse it of attempting to invade the neighboring country. Hasn’t this been exactly the story of the treaties signed with Native Americans since the late 18th century?

As Edward Snowden reveals in his book Permanent Record, based on the NSA documents he himself leaked, the “Black Budget” of 2013 consisted of 52.6 billion solely for the Intelligence Community composed of 107,035 employees (of which 21,800 were outsourced contracts). According to Snowden himself, “most of the intelligence work has been privatized.”[xvi] Something that journalist Ross Gelbspan had already warned about in 1991 as a process initiated by Ronald Reagan while promoting any conservative group to Intelligence offices.[xvii]

9. The Leader

The leader is the depository of what in economics is known as “rational ignorance”: we cannot investigate or know everything, so we make uninformed decisions knowing that the benefits of more information are less than the costs of an uninformed decision. For this, we must delegate our decision-making power to someone who knows something about the subject. The problem is that in major social issues, the costs of an uninformed decision always exceed the costs of a greater effort of investigation.

In politics, in the formation of public or collective opinion, individuals often delegate their decision-making power to a leader. In religions, this functions as a repository for all possible errors: if we don’t know what’s best, let’s do as the leader or prophet says, who is never wrong. After all, they are either God or a messenger of God.

In politics, it’s no different. Leaving our decision-making power in the hands of a Leader X relieves us of moral and intellectual effort, but the price is supporting and defending them, helping the leader to help us, regardless of whether they or we are wrong.

When in 1971 inflation in the United States approached seven percent, President Richard Nixon decided to go against the conservative-mercantilist dogma of his own party and its loyal voters and imposed price controls. Gallup polls and surveys from Columbia University in New York showed that the announcement of price controls had no impact on Democratic Party voters, who had long been in favor of such measures, but among Republican followers, support for price controls rose from 37 percent to 82 percent in just a few hours.

This constitutional weakness is distilled in fairy tales, where the poor peasant, the humble artisan dreams of one day reaching—or imagining every day—the blessing of royalty. Cinderella who finally marries the prince, the office worker who reads magazines about the Rich and Famous. In recent centuries, this has been exploited by political realism, by U.S. governments like that of Ronald Reagan, and by almost all the puppets planted by Washington and private transnational corporations in the Republics south of the Rio Grande since the 19th century.

10. We are exceptional, the chosen people

No one can love an abstract and largely fictional entity like “the homeland” or any country in the same way they love a person or a specific group of people, like family or friends. We may like a place, our own home, but there’s a difference between that and feeling love. Love for a country is a fabrication, a cultural and ideological product, and a narcissistic sublimation that, as Bernard Shaw said, “patriotism is the conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born there.” This paradox is even clearer in the sudden patriotism of immigrants who were not “born there,” who, upon arriving in a global superpower, wrap themselves in its flag, all in the name of “love for this great country” and similar rationalizations that assume that martyrs for human rights and their assassins have something in common that unites them and must be loved and defended with the patriot’s life. It’s not love-love. It’s self-love. Patriotism is the reflection of self-love in the mirror of altruism.

Long before countries existed with their flags (some taken from a religious sect and others, like that of the United States, from a private English company), as we conceive them now and for not many centuries, from before the Sumerians and Egyptians to the Bible and the various nations that followed (Romans, Pygmies, English), each tribe, each people considered themselves “the true men,” “the people chosen by the gods”—by their god or gods, it goes without saying—”the evolved race,” “the civilized people,” or “the correct culture.” In all cases, it was an arbitrary and merely arrogant declaration of superiority and special rights of one people over others. If for some material reason that people, nation, or country managed to subjugate others and impose their own fantasies, the belief of having been favored or chosen by their gods proved itself, and those who questioned it were not only associated with the losers but with evil—the devil, the dangerous ideology, the enemy.

It’s unnecessary to clarify which American nation has played this role in the last two centuries. After gaining independence from Britain to break the European empire’s agreement with Indigenous nations and thus cross the Appalachians to exercise their “right of exploration” and take by gunpoint the lands of the savages who “were too selfish and didn’t want to share them with the whites,” the Anglo-Saxon settlers dedicated themselves to repelling the defenses of the dispossessed and calling attack the Indigenous defense and defense their own attacks.[xviii] After President Andrew Jackson, known by the nickname “Indian Killer,” signed the last law for the Removal of Native peoples, on December 4, 1832, he addressed Congress and reported: “The Indians were completely defeated, and the band of discontent was expelled or destroyed… Although we had to act harshly, it was necessary; they attacked us without provocation, and we hope they have learned a healthy lesson forever.”[xix]

This psycho-cultural pattern would repeat itself countless times for at least two centuries: (1) we intervene, invade, take, and subjugate, legitimized by our laws; for ourselves and for the world, we repeat: (2) “we were attacked without provocation”; (3) “we had to defend ourselves”; (4) “we will never forget.” Later, the self-victimization due to the misunderstanding of inferior races, peoples, and cultures found its echo in the flattering poem by the Englishman Rudyard Kipling, which went viral in 1899 during the U.S. invasion of the Philippines: “The White Man’s Burden.”

The idea of an exceptional nation (blacks and other inferior races were not part of that nation) matured and articulated its ideology in the myth of Manifest Destiny, invented by journalist John O’Sullivan in 1845. Not coincidentally, this new narrative emerged shortly before President James Polk fabricated, out of thin air, a war against Mexico, based on a supposed offense and following a forced “they attacked us first,” with the goal of taking all Mexican territory stretching to California and thus bringing “the blessing of slavery to the rest of the world.” To the north, it had not been possible. In Canada, they had been defeated in their previous attempt to obtain the Fourteenth State, and even Britain had responded by burning Washington in 1812, which was later sold to historians as an unjustified aggression, supported by enslaved blacks who were cast into the verses of the National Anthem as unpatriotic traitors. To the South and West were the inferior races. O’Sullivan himself wrote in 1852 that “this continent and its adjacent islands belong to the whites; the blacks must remain slaves…”[xx]

According to the new dogma of Manifest Destiny, God had commanded the superior race to expand westward. For this, they needed to invent more advanced war machines, like the Colt-Walker revolver.[8] This cult of American exceptionalism was simultaneously confirmed in one of its still-dominant cultural traits: its anti-intellectualism. Especially after the “Founding Fathers,” the generation of enlightened intellectuals, had already died, and in 1829, a military man with minimal education and maximum fanaticism, named Andrew Jackson, refounded the country in the cult of the power of arms and the “conquest of the frontier” by the superior race, lovers of freedom.

This imprint of Protestant violence, divine wrath, the gun-loving and capital-thirsty Jesus at any cost, would have multiple translations, but all very similar. In 1897, shortly after being appointed Assistant Secretary of the Navy by President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend: “I am in favor of almost any war, and I believe this country needs one.”[xxi] Roosevelt was another aristocrat who never overcame the trauma of his parents paying another young man to go to the Civil War in his place. During his years at Harvard, he took up boxing, but it wasn’t enough to calm his white male complexes. Before reaching the White House as president, he often posed dressed as Daniel Boone in New York studios and repeated, every other day, that those who did not dare to go to war in distant lands were not men and did not honor the Teutonic race. Reluctantly, President William McKinley sent the USS Maine to Havana to silence the voices that doubted his masculinity for not wanting to start another war. A decision that, although not the original intention of the president, would end up provoking the war against Spain that the new yellow press of Pulitzer and Hearst desperately desired. War and power are addictive. Finally, McKinley would acknowledge in 1898: “We need Hawaii as we need California; it is Manifest Destiny.” Shortly after, McKinley received a visit from God, asking him to also save the Philippines with another invasion, which would not only leave 200,000 dead, the invention of the sport of hunting blacks, and new forms of torture, like the submarine, but also an interesting access to the markets of the always-desired China. On June 17, 1902, soldier Robert E. Austill wrote to his friend Herbert Welsh: “Our compatriots in America are asking us to kill all the men here and rape the women to improve the race on these islands.” This was not an exception but a repetition found in dozens of similar letters from his comrades. In 1914, the progressive President Woodrow Wilson, after intervening in the Caribbean and Central America, declared: “I am going to teach the South Americans to elect decent governments.” This was almost a copy of the future words of Henry Kissinger on September 12, 1971, when the CIA failed to make Salvador Allende lose the election, as it had in previous opportunities, and he stated: “I don’t see why we should stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.” The CIA director, Richard Helms, responded with the solution: “A sudden economic disaster will be the logical pretext to justify military action.”[xxii]

Throughout the 20th century, and before the medieval return of the 21st century along the same path of capitalism, the superheroes of American pop culture, the products of the cultural industry and commerce, expressed and reproduced this primitive impulse, highly effective and, not by mere coincidence, easily consumable. All the classic heroes (all white men with a hidden frustration) like the Lone Ranger, Superman, Batman, Captain America, or the Hulk possess a dual personality, that is, what they are and what people believe they are. In no case are they distinguished by their intelligence, which is a radical reversal of the positivist and scientistic literature of the previous century, represented by detectives like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes in England or Edgar Allan Poe in the United States. In fact, the superheroes are often quite foolish and naive, that is, very different from their original and manipulated origin in Zorro, who, aside from not being an Anglo-Saxon hero, operates from the margins, not from the center like all his successors.[9] Like Moses, none of them have a father or mother but stepfathers or substitutes. But in the commercial superhero, not only has the father disappeared but also God. The superpowers of religious leaders that once derived from God have now passed, in a moment of maximum abstraction, to the material and mechanical superpowers of the masked hero (the hero with two faces, the dual personality). He is the extreme representative of the alienated individual, without spirit and almost without intelligence, in the same way that, although religions insist that their gods are the maximum intelligence, creators of the Universe, they never demonstrate it: miracles are expressions of power, not rational demonstrations of a phenomenon. Like any father, he does not need and should not give too many explanations to his young children about the reasons for his decisions. It is the authority and power that is exercised and protected by avoiding any dialectical exposure, any hint of questioning.

Imperial governments and their angels, the secret agencies like the CIA, were the real expression of these secular superheroes, demigods of material power capable of seeing everything, hearing everything, intimidating, imposing their narratives, and disposing of the lives of millions of people, deciding on the death of their infidels (“who want to take over the world”) above any human justice. Demigods, superheroes with special powers: the power of capital and technology, inaccessible to the rest of mortals.

In Anglo-Saxon culture, and especially in Anglo-American culture, problems are solved by force. But since muscular strength is never exceptional in any race, except for exceptions like Hercules or Samson, and despite the exceptionalism of a race considered superior, the special powers of the superhero were necessary, fantastic sublimations of weapons. The cult of weapons was born during slavery (just as the police emerged from slave militias) and was consolidated with each dispossession of peoples “on the frontier,” that is, the rest of the world: Indians, Mexicans, Latin Americans, Filipinos, Africans, Asians…

The confession of Theodore Roosevelt in 1897 (“I am in favor of almost any war, and I believe this country needs one”) was neither new nor the last of its kind. To mention just one more example, it would suffice to recall the words of then-Senator, later President, and responsible for the atomic bombs on Japan and other even worse wars in the region, Harry Truman. “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we should help Russia; and if it is Russia that is winning, we should help Germany; in that way, we will let them kill each other as much as possible,” Truman affirmed, with the conviction of leaders, in 1941.[xxiii]

11. Ancestral Pornography, Intellectual Obesity

Aside from the big news of the “external threat,” the other element of survival always came from within. That is, the conflict of possession and control. Probably one of the most important centers of conflict within the group was sex. This is why any deviation from rigid norms like exogamy or monogamy was always a powerful magnet for public attention and, therefore, a valuable product for capitalist media. In some cultures more than others. Especially in more repressive cultures like the Protestant one.

On May 22, 2022, the world’s richest man, African American Elon Musk, lost $10,000,000,000 (ten billion) dollars, that is, the entire economy of Haiti in a single day, due to the suspicion of an inappropriate sexual incident. According to various sources, a flight attendant at SpaceX had received $250,000 to refrain from revealing that Mr. Musk had proposed having sex with her. For the same reason, the powerful director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, had to resign from his position and his aspirations for the presidency of France when, in 2011, he touched the buttocks of a maid at an American hotel. In other words, the fate of millions of people decided in a bedroom (in a first-class airplane seat, in a hotel bed) as in the Middle Ages.

The obsession with sex and the repression of all things sexual is characteristic of Protestant-Anglo-Saxon culture, which is why a president can launch a bloody war without congressional authorization (and without UN approval, although this is a symbolic detail), as George W. Bush did, but cannot have an extramarital affair, as his predecessor, Bill Clinton, did. War is something that happens far from the village. Sex, even if it occurs thousands of kilometers away, has something to do with us, with the tribe. The history of the United States is full of similar examples, but let’s briefly look at the case of President Clinton.

Just as in 2016 one of the most corrupt congresses in Brasília impeached the president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, on unproven corruption charges (or, in any case, quite minor ones), in February 1999 the U.S. Congress sought to remove President Clinton for sexual sins of which many of its members were just a stone’s throw away from throwing a stone at the adulterer. But Clinton’s defenders were more cunning than Rousseff’s.

In 1999, the U.S. House of Representatives approved the impeachment process of President Clinton for his sexual scandal with intern Monica Lewinsky. The decision and certain removal of the president went to the Senate, dominated by the Republican Party. For this, two-thirds of the votes were needed, a number assured by the manifest intentions of the senators who wanted to see the president exiting through the back door of history.

With nothing left to lose, the president’s defense hired Larry Flynt, the mogul of global pornography, owner of magazines and producer of adult films. Almost immediately, Flynt paid for a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering a million dollars to those who could prove similar stories to the president’s, involving members of Congress. Thousands of calls and recordings came in immediately. Flynt didn’t even bother to listen to them.

Fearful of public scandals, some legislators began confessing infidelities to their wives. The most important voice in favor of impeachment, the Speaker of the House and representative of the ultra-conservative state of Louisiana, Bob Livingston, mysteriously resigned on the same day the vote was to take place. Since then and to this day, Bobby has been dedicated to lobbying in Washington (that is, visiting legislators in their offices and inviting them to parties to talk business). Suddenly, the condemning majority in the upper house became a minority. Ten Republican senators voted in favor of pardoning the Democratic president. From the obligation to stone the adulterer, legislated in the Old Testament, it shifted, in a few days, to the love of the New Testament: “Go, son, and sin no more.” The president was pardoned.

But it is likely that this excessive obsession with sex and, above all, with the sexual stories of others, has an even deeper ancestral root than the repressive Anglo-Saxon culture itself. It may be a component developed over many thousands of years of evolution, something that social networks and the rest of social power exploit without realizing it.

The Oxford Internet Institute conducted a study on 22 million tweets and concluded that, during the analyzed period, users had shared more false and conspiratorial information than true information. The researchers labeled these news items as junk news (“junk news”).[xxiv] Singer and Brooking took up this metaphor and summarized these observations as follows: “just as junk food lacks nutritional value, these stories lack informational value. Like junk food, they have been made with artificial ingredients and overly sweetened to make them tempting.” At the end of 2009, sociologist Danah Boyd gave a lecture in New York titled “Streams of Content, Limited Attention” in which, prophetically, she observed: “Our bodies are programmed to consume fats and sugars because they are rare in nature. Similarly, we are biologically programmed to pay attention to stimulating content such as information that is brutal, violent, humiliating, shameful, and offensive. If we are not careful, we will develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. At some point, we will find ourselves consuming content that is harmful to us as individuals and to the rest of society.”[xxv]

 On the other hand, there is also a need to believe in a reality that one desires, regardless of whether it is real or not. In other words, there is a deep need to lie to oneself to deny a painful reality, especially when it has not yet manifested itself clearly. This psychological mechanism of denial is common in cases of complicated or terminal illnesses. Not only the patient and their family members but the entire medical structure invests enormous resources with the sole goal of keeping hope for recovery alive. The same, we can speculate, occurs in social psychology.

The combination of two ancestral impulses, (1) the threat of the other, of the other tribe, and (2) the ancestral tendency to consume news that breaks the routine, initially for evolutionary survival reasons, was turned into a product by capitalism through one of its main instruments: the media.

Social networks only reinvented this traditional obsession with sex and the dirty, taken to the extreme by puritan culture, for example, through “shitposts (shitposts),” that is, extremely negative and offensive memes.[10]

12. The Ping-pong Culture

Another constitutional weakness, ancestral and probably universal, is the ego. For a long time, it could be expressed in (1) physical disputes, which later translated into medieval jousting and, later, into football or any other sports-tribal fanaticism in the 20th century, and (2) dialectical disputes, the battle between two egos that need to be right about anything they assert and uphold in political or nationalist tribalism. Perhaps the first ancestral weakness better represents the subjects, and the second the masters, although in matters of power they have nothing of masters or leaders but in their mere psychological constitution. Few, if any, can resist criticism from someone, for example, on a social network like Twitter or Facebook. Even when it comes to friends, mere acquaintances, followers, or any individual who has been on good terms with the offended party due to a trivial opinion. The dialectical dispute usually ends in insults and one of the worst enmities that any civilized person can imagine. This love-hate mechanism is amplified, like alcohol, by the media distance that turns our “virtual friends” into tribal enemies.

The virtual distance of digital media easily turns “one of us” into “one of them.” The other, even if they continue to belong to the same ideological bubble, is always an “imperfect us,” an almost-other who, at the slightest dialectical or ideological difference, automatically becomes an absolute enemy. The only reason lies in the sensitivity of the wounded ego, that is, the complex of the ancient tribal leader who has been questioned by the words of a beta male, a candidate for alpha male.

Now, the complexity of this ancestral nature is complicated a thousandfold because in the political or ideological battle (the battle for power), a fundamental argument is never truly lost or won, as it is at this frontier where politics and religion overlap. Factual discussions can only be limited to very precise and narrow data (inflation, crime rates, or inequality), none of which could affect the partisan faith of those involved. Suppose we are in a meeting, and suddenly someone presents factual data that goes against the proposals of a political party, whether in government or in opposition. No one would change their allegiance, affiliation, or sympathy, just as no one would stop being Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, or atheist because someone appeared with the worst possible evidence against any of these beliefs. There is no discussion that could be of any value, even though humanity has invested centuries in this absurdity. This only proves one aspect of our human condition.

In this sense, no rational idea holds any value. It is a matter of emotions, and the stronger and more widespread the emotion (usually a negative one), the better for those in power. Being furious does not mean being right. At any other point in history, this would be a truism. Not in our time. A characteristic of the current social media culture is the “culture of argumentation.” In Spanish, a “discusión” in a family context often has a negative connotation, implying a dispute or fight. In English, “to have an argument” (dispute or fight) is incorrectly translated as “to argue.” On social media and beyond, the “culture of argumentation” is a mix of the two interpretations, though we wouldn’t risk much by saying it’s the empty game of a dialectical struggle. Something like a discursive ping-pong. Just causes are never lacking, and for this reason, it is impossible or very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. But it is useful to observe the fundamental characteristic of the new culture to understand where we stand in the mire.

It is very likely that, due to our evolutionary adaptation over at least the last hundred thousand years, it is impossible to completely eradicate our propensity for conflict. Those who don’t have problems create them. This is a reason to think that even if, in the future, humanity no longer needs to work to survive due to automated technology and a universal income (assuming we don’t destroy the planet first), individuals and societies will always need a certain level of conflict, a struggle against an adversary or a problem. Otherwise, what happens at the cellular level to antibodies might occur: in an excessively hygienic environment, they don’t stop their fight and, instead of combating infections, they turn to attacking our own bodies, as is the case with allergies, some forms of arthritis, and other contemporary issues. The same can be predicted when we analyze the future of societies.

But there can always be an option B. In this case, it would be the redirection of conflictive and combative energies toward just causes. Instead of fighting others over the color of their skin, their language, their sexuality, their economic status, or their lifestyle preferences, we could channel these energies into more creative struggles, such as the fight for social justice, artistic creativity, and scientific innovation. After all, what is the passion for soccer if not the sublimation of hunting and war? This controlled sublimation on the playing field often spills over into the stands in a much more primitive expression of violence. To illustrate this, one need only consider the brawls in some Buenos Aires stadiums or the vandalistic fury of hooligans in Europe. Of course, this possible solution is, for now, a utopia. The irrational reaction is a return to prehistoric, tribal instincts, masked with high technology. To make matters worse, the media and the market exploit these ancestral impulses, just as fast-food chains and soda companies have become multibillion-dollar corporations by exploiting a biological condition that dates back to prehistory: the overvaluation of fat and sugar.

Shortly before the 2016 presidential elections, a Twitter account associated with white supremacists claimed that the New York City Police Department had uncovered a pedophilia network linked to members of the Democratic Party. This rumor grew when, in November, WikiLeaks published emails from John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, which were interpreted through twisted religious lenses. An anonymous user on the 4chan network claimed that the phrase “cheese pizza” (pizza with mozzarella) was a reference to “c. p.,” meaning “child pornography.” The same emails revealed that John Podesta had corresponded with the owner of Comet Pizza, James Alefantis, a chef who owns two restaurants and an art gallery in Washington DC, is affiliated with the Democratic Party, and identifies as gay.[xxvi] These kinds of hermetic codes, more typical of the Middle Ages, are common among the social media platforms frequented by the “alt-right” (the post-Tea Party far-right), according to which a hot dog or frankfurtermeans boy, “cheese” girl, “ice cream” prostitute, and “nut,” apparently, black person. All of this, as is tradition in the repressed, sectarian, and religious far-right, is overflowing with sexual content and fixations.[11]

According to the fevered imagination of these internet crusaders, the place where these criminal acts against minors were carried out, accompanied by satanic rituals, was a small pizzeria named Comet Ping Pong, located at 5037 Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC.

Days before the election, on October 19, in a rural town near Columbus, Ohio, candidate Donald Trump had declared in his speech, surrounded by cameras and microphones, that he would “totally accept” the election results “only if I win.”[xxvii] On Tuesday, November 8, he received nearly three million fewer votes (two percent of the total) than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, due to the electoral system inherited from the era of slavery, Trump became president. However, he continued to insist for years that the election had been rigged because many illegal immigrants had voted for Clinton. Naturally, the same logic, but with more “stamina,” was used to explain his defeat in 2020 against Democrat Joe Biden. Naturally, his followers bought into (an expression that originated in the United States and is now used even in Latin America) what they wanted to believe, culminating in the violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Donald Trump’s victory on November 8, 2016, did not calm the spirits of his supporters. Quite the opposite. One example was Pizzagate, which occurred shortly after the election. On December 4, Edgar Maddison Welch, a resident of North Carolina, traveled to DC, entered the Devil’s pizzeria, and fired his AR-15. Once he had created terror, he began searching for the basement where children were being abused (a kind of concrete bunker, as depicted in an Instagram image) but found only narrow storage rooms with cleaning supplies. According to Welch’s statement to the police, his mission was to save children, though he didn’t care that at that moment there were families with children enjoying a peaceful time. Although he claimed his intention was to conduct an investigation and raid the place on his own, and although his actions revealed or confirmed no suspicions, neither Welch nor the thousands of consumers of 4chan and other digital cults stopped doubting the truth of his delusional reality.

All the allegations were debunked by the police department itself, but this did not calm the spirits of the white racists or make them change their minds about what is true and what is fiction. On the contrary, anonymous chat platforms like 4chan and various fake news outlets, such as Your News Wire, worked to normalize and confirm this false story.[12]

Consistent with the same tradition and like the covers of TIME, sexual scandals that could end the Universe must have concrete faces. For this reason, QAnon and other digital cults need stories like Pizzagate. In the United States, the consumption of child pornography is punishable by years in prison, but the imagination of pedophiles (from the letters of slaveholders who feared the end of their legal supremacy to pseudo-feminist women like Rebecca Latimer Felton) has at least two centuries of history and is not punished. It is rewarded and vindicated.

Today, the specialty of major media outlets, for professional reasons, is not usually fake news, as was the invention of the attack and sinking of the USS Maine in Havana in 1898 by the yellow press of New York, but rather the manipulation of real news. In the Age of social media, the direct creation of fake news has returned, with one key difference: its creators and promoters are not powerful media directors seeking to boost sales. Their primary motivation is their own fanaticism, meaning they are the first to convince themselves of a fiction before convincing others, much like the history of religious proselytism. The benefits accrue to other social levels, which at least raises the suspicion that, in addition to being a natural consequence of socio-economic degradation, it is also a natural outcome of a macroeconomic plan, such as neoliberalism. Without giving too much credit to the owners of the world’s largest capitals and attributing to them a detailed intentionality in the current cultural catastrophe.

13. The Urgent News

According to one historical account, in the year 490 BC, the Athenian athlete Pheidippides ran forty kilometers from Marathon to Athens to announce that the Persians of King Darius I had landed at Marathon. Another version mentions that the Athenians had sent him to Sparta to request help against the invasion. Along the way, the hero reportedly encountered the god Pan, who reproached the Athenians for their neglect due to their Olympic ego. In later versions, the impossible feat of Pheidippides is recounted, claiming he ran 230 kilometers in a single day from Sparta to Athens to announce the Greek army’s victory in the battle, after which he died.

Assuming this event actually occurred, it is nonetheless embellished with the necessary components of any myth that withstands time. Beyond the classic divine rebuke of a people on the brink of catastrophe, beyond the predictable and necessary tragic element of the protagonist’s death in fulfilling a moral mission, what endures is the importance of the news, whether in a real or imaginary community.

From prehistory to the present day, predictable and routine events lack impact both on the attention of individuals and communities as well as on their memory. The survival of individuals and the human species has always depended on extraordinary events such as natural disasters or the more frequent threats from other tribes and nations. In the face of a natural disaster (a hurricane, a volcano, or an earthquake), a people respond with humility for their own sins before the wrath of a god, but in the face of threats from other humans, they must respond with more intense emotions, such as outrage and the call to arms.

As Professor Joseph Campbell, author of the classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), might have said, the archetype of the story fits perfectly into many others. For example, that of the silversmith Paul Revere of Massachusetts, 1775, during the colonists’ rebellion against the administrators of London. The silversmith and amateur dentist, like many other rebellious colonists, was in economic decline and suffering from the economic recession of the time. According to this foundational myth, Paul Revere rode through the night to warn of the arrival of British troops. The famous phrase “The British are coming (The English are coming)!”, though repeated in schools, high schools, and the press, is another of the many American myths. At the time, all the whites in the colonies, including the modest silversmith, were considered English. English businessmen. English colonists. Englishmen in the land of savages… For centuries, the true enemies had been and continued to be the “Americans,” a name then reserved for the indigenous people, the true enemies of the colonists and the primary reason for the American Revolution of 1775-1783. The myth presents and portrays Revere riding for hours on a horse he never owned to deliver the crucial treasure to his people: the great news.

The lesser versions of these stories are the countless gossips, the bearers of rumors, the announcers of important deaths, of scandalous infidelities. All of this is part of the genetic and psychological material of humanity (on novelty survival depends), but, at every moment, the powers that be have been able to capitalize on it in more elegant and powerful ways than the mere rumor from a neighbor gossiping about a woman who entered the mayor’s house late at night or the troubled son of the town doctor who got the maid pregnant—who turned out to be a friend of a friend. Old stories of injustices, needless to say, but which have played petty roles independent of any real social struggle, of any human progress toward less-pain.

“No news, good news (No news is good news)” is one of the most popular sayings in English. That is, news is only news if it’s bad. Beyond the cultural factor, this has a much more general root, likely embedded in the evolutionary biology of the human species and any other species. The orbitofrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate gyrus are the areas of the brain that carry the perception of the new toward consciousness. When a stimulus is repeated too much, this traffic is interrupted until the stimulus (for example, a background sound) disappears and becomes perceptible by its sudden absence.

Probably, medical research is among the few types of news with a somewhat positive profile that is published and consumed in the media (research on the current state of the environment is exactly the opposite). However, the very idea of news and science are incompatible. The resource of “a new scientific study shows that…” is heresy for any scientific community. “If you eat more avocados and drink less whiskey, you’ll extend your life by 2.4 years.” Etcetera. News needs to sell novelty, but no scientific study that is published aims to be the final word. In fact, it’s common for it to be an advance subject to further testing by other scientists, to whom scientific publications are truly dedicated. That is, when it’s not research funded by mafia-like corporations, such as big pharma.

The need for news and to pay attention to exceptional events, not routine ones, is at the root of our survival instinct. And the powers that be, in our case those at the top of the capitalist pyramid, exploit it like no one else to their advantage. Not the gossipy neighbor, the rumor-monger, or the trafficker of scandals.

14. The Oracle

We are made of the past. We inhabit the cities of the dead, and their ideas inhabit us. However, unlike the physical universe where its future (the trajectory of a comet, an eclipse) can be calculated with precision, the human universe cannot. The difficulty in predicting the human future lies in the unstable, non-deterministic variables, and these largely stem from the fact that our present is not explained solely by our past but also by our ideas about the future. As in quantum physics, the observer modifies the observed phenomenon. Once our analysis of the present changes, so does our vision of the future, and in turn, our present actions that will impact the future, and so on. We are sitting in a classroom because we’ve met years of prerequisites but, above all, because we have a life project.

The other constituent factor lies in the fact that we can see the past better than the future. The idea that the future is ahead and the past is behind is an imaginary construct that stems from the movement of the human body: we walk forward, rarely backward. The same when driving a car. If we add to that the fact that since the ancient Egyptians, the representation of time ceased to be circular and became a line on which we walk toward death, since then every great civilization has fossilized in language the idea of time as something that comes to us from ahead and goes behind. However, not all cultures and civilizations understood time in the same way. For those cultures more contemplative than obsessed with action, like the ancient Greeks or the Quechua or other American and Asian peoples, time was circular where everything repeated: what happened once will appear before us again. In other cases, it was like a flowing river. The observer could look downstream, that is, they could see the past, which naturally was ahead, while the future was something in process that came from behind and could only be guessed by its rumors without any precision.

Hence the anxiety about the future. In all religions, the future matters more than the past. The past condemns but does not determine. In the future lay pain, death, reward, or punishment beyond. One way to act upon it was through morality. The good are saved, the evil are condemned. However, no human action was an absolute guarantee of a desired future. How to completely please the gods? How to win a war? How to achieve prosperity?

In the case of the ancient Greeks, this anxiety was directed toward the oracle. This is where the semantic shift of the idea of a prophet in the Christian tradition, as it passed through Greece, originates. In the Old Testament, prophets are not fortune-tellers but social critics, like Amos, who pointed out the social injustices and moral corruptions of their people. Today, the word prophet is more heavily loaded with its Greek meaning: the prophet is someone who can divine, see the future, and thus help people act upon the present. Typically, this type of prophet aligns with the myth of Cassandra, the goddess who could predict the future but (due to a curse from Apollo, the god of reason and truth) no one believed her.

In the secular world of humanism and the Enlightenment, the prophet became the philosopher of history. Particularly, the economists.

Today, economists, burdened by the deterministic world of the sciences and the material needs of business, presume that economics is a semi-hard science. Hence the many equations and graphs that never serve one of the central objectives of economics, which is to predict the future. They don’t call it economic philosophy but Economic Sciences, yet, like the CIA avoiding supposed terrorist attacks, they never or almost never predict the major economic crises that their most prominent professionals create. The case of economist Nouriel Roubini is often mentioned, as he was one of the few economists capable of predicting the 2008 crisis in the United States, while the rest of the experts in the field insisted on the solidity of the economic fundamentals. This is like saying someone won the lottery because they played a number they dreamed of the night before, and they call that coincidence a premonition and attribute it to an intervention from beyond. The proof is that the same Roubini predicted another catastrophe for 2012, and it never came.

The same Roubini, at the peak of his fame as a prophet, described his prediction method as a holistic perception, free of mathematical formulas, more like someone who “uses their nose,” he said, to evaluate “a big enchilada” made of history, literature, and economic variables, which is why some economists described his method as akin to that of a shaman, that is, a sorcerer or fortune-teller that the industrial and post-industrial world often calls primitive.

In any case, the future, its prediction, or action upon it remains one of the most important themes and justifications of economics, as it was in the case of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Keynes, or Milton Friedman: we are at point C (the present, which not everyone understands) and to reach point G (pleasure, prosperity, the future solution) we must first pass through point F (the painful changes). In almost all cases, from the Great Depression, through Soviet economists to the magical formulas of neoliberalism more recently, a specialty of economic experts, especially those with the ability to create the future rather than predict it (IMF, World Bank), has been at least catastrophic.

In any case, one thing seems clear: the future, the anxiety about the future, is another constitutive element of the human condition. That is, it is another ahistorical component of history, and both orbit each other like two stars, like two tango dancers.

15. Propaganda by Repetition, Censorship by Forgetting

Looking at the political changes in different countries around the world, I suspect there is a psychological rule that weighs on political and cultural phenomena: those who, in their early adolescence, lived under a certain political regime, will soon become supporters of the opposite. This phenomenon (if it is indeed true) I have observed in different countries in Latin America, the United States, or Europe, although reality is so intertwined with different dimensions that each case becomes a particular one. Just as Chomsky managed to demonstrate that there is a Universal Grammar rooted in the human brain, it is very possible that there is a political and ideological dynamic in the neurological nature of every human being. This says nothing about justice or the logic of power, but it does say a lot about why individuals and peoples are capable of mass behaviors that the logic of circumstances cannot explain. But this is not the central theme of this book. Let’s return to the analysis of propaganda.

Information is a process that appeals to the rationality of the consumer, to put it in modern terms. On the other hand, both (commercial) advertising and (political) propaganda target the unconscious, the most primitive instincts. In the case of advertising, it is desire, plain and pure, like sexual desire; in the case of propaganda, it arises from two basic and primitive emotions, the first more basic, primitive, and powerful than the second: fear and hope. Advertising and propaganda target the unconscious, the most primitive instincts, the reptilian brain that lies deep within all of us, beneath the rational cortex: hunger, sex, fear.

But, although actions arise from this deep unconscious, no one wants to admit it. No one wants to accept that their political ideas, for example, those deep passions from tribal prehistory, are not based on reason, let alone on a logical analysis of reality. Therefore, these irrational decisions are rationalized with elements and discourses that refer to and appeal to supposed rational thoughts, to external facts, and not to individual dreams and nightmares. All of which they call Truth.

From a philosophical and analytical perspective, there is a spectrum whose extremes are occupied on one side by critical thinking and on the other by propaganda. In psychological terms, propaganda finds fertile ground among conservative groups, as they are the ones who have been intellectually trained from a very early age to believe. Faith in what comes from above is a virtue, while questioning a given order, a revelation, is seen as the work of dark forces that seek to change moral values and turn the world upside down. Faith is a virtue in itself. If logic contradicts the story of Noah, the more virtuous the believer who believes it while denying any possibility of the evolution of species from a small number of animals saved from the universal flood.

Without a propensity to believe, no propaganda can succeed. Skepticism is not its strength. A single contradiction could destroy a scientific theory, but a thousand contradictions will never destroy a religious text. Quite the opposite. If one believes despite logical and dialectical contradictions, they have passed the test. Belief is based on fragmented and repetitive discourses, like a rosary, like a Sunday sermon in any church, whether Catholic, Protestant; whether a Muslim mosque, a Jewish temple, Buddhist or Hindu. For any form of critical thinking, doubt is necessary. This is not to say that the left cannot harbor dogmatic individuals with a religious form of thinking, but rather that the left or progressive groups are more trained in the articulation of unfragmented thoughts, in more sophisticated and holistic theories and narratives in their explanation of reality.

To the psychological dimension, we must add the historical dimension, which depends on a cultural process. In this sense, to understand our time, it is necessary to compare it with two major previous periods that, although they developed in the West, were spread through the colonization and imperialism of European and North American powers in recent centuries. One is the Middle Ages, and the other is the Modern Age. Our time resembles the former more than the latter. Our time reacts to and distances itself from the latter, dominated, in its intellectual and institutional elite, by the philosophies of the Enlightenment that introduced secular governments and struggles for equality against their own dominant colonial powers. We are approaching the former, a new Middle Ages where reality is increasingly less material and factual and increasingly more virtual, where social epistemology moves away from rational analysis and admiration for the scientific method to understand the world and societies and moves closer to medieval faith as a way of creating its own reality through fragmented, repetitive discourses typical of sermons and propaganda.

But our Neo-feudalism is not the feudalism of a thousand years ago. Although the religious paradigm begins to replace the secular one, a new dimension foreign to the Middle Ages emerges: the believer is not a selfless worker, an austere vassal. They are a consumer of both material and virtual realities. They are a consumer of excitements. They are a pornographic spirit who needs to buy a reality to replace their own, a story they know is false but want to believe is true. The only flaw of such a product is not that it is false, but that it is not believable. It is no coincidence that new deep fake technologies are primarily used in politics and pornography; both are closely related.[xxviii] On the other hand, sophisticated technologies to deceive people are not strictly necessary when a large portion of the population is not even sophisticated.[13] This, which might be read as an insult, is merely an observation about the two major poles of opinion creation: education and media entertainment. As access to information has been democratized with the internet, the solution has been to lower the level of education in favor of an increase in entertainment, that is, in distraction. Societies are sick because they have moved away from art and closer to amusement.

In past centuries, this distraction was largely exercised in circuses and churches. I am not making a judgment about the metaphysical truth of any religion but rather its political use. The more social misery, the more social injustice, the more prayer and donations. Reality did not change, but its perception did.

Postmodernity meant an abandonment of the paradigm of critical skepticism, analysis, and reason as substitutes for authority and a return to religious faith as the legitimization of truth or a representation of the world (shortly before, and during the Modern Era, occupied by faith in science and technology).[14] We have progressively entered a new Middle Ages, albeit illuminated with neon signs and plasma screens. To the hyper-fragmentation of narratives, to the repetition of prayers and advertising rosaries, we must add the logic of image consumption. Although in its early days the internet meant a timid return to written culture, it did not take long to return to images and, even more, to images as a way of creating junk sensibilities (as false as fake news) and something akin to disjointed thinking. Just as the bas-reliefs of Gothic churches told stories to an illiterate and brutalized people, worn out by work outside and sermons inside, the internet, through its “influencers” on YouTube or TikTok, are the new shepherds of a McDonaldized world. But if history rhymes, it does not repeat itself. That religious faith has undergone some significant changes.

According to PEW, religious affiliation in the United States has declined, from 63 percent in 1970 to 38 percent in 2018. This does not mean that the religious spirit has given way to critical thinking, but quite the opposite. Faith has migrated from traditional churches to digital sects like 4chan. The most contemporary “War on Science” explains why only four out of ten Americans trust science.

In the Protestant world, everything is atomized, even monotheism, which brings us back to the pre-Christian religions of the Teutonic peoples. One of the new sects, one of the most well-known and powerful in terms of followers, is QAnon. This sect, born from an alternative social network dominated by Nazis and fascists, called 4chan, fulfills the requirements of a centuries-old Christian tradition. For QAnon, as for the Christians of the Middle Ages, the world is ruled by the Devil, and the devil is not concerned with the outrageous ambitions of capitalists who concentrate all the wealth of the impoverished and frustrated faithful but with something related to sexuality. Something horrible, like pornography, homosexuality, and, worse, pedophilia. Their cause and banner, defined as “The Great Awakening” (Deep State), knows nothing about imperialist massacres and abuses around the world, nor about the theft from workers in the most powerful country in the world, but about those things between the legs that, according to them, God condemned because Creation came out a bit flawed. Since our century follows the Political Century, witches and heretics can no longer be burned but political opponents, that is, leftists, progressives, and liberals (in American terminology). Since our century comes after the great trauma of the Second World War, old Nazi theories can no longer be repeated (not yet) and even less so European traditions from previous centuries about Jews eating children on Friday nights and more recent American traditions about the sexual potency of Black men who could deflower all the innocent blondes, some tempted by pleasure according to the pornographic imagination of the masters, and for whom lynching was recommended just in case.

16. The Curve of Excitement

One of the most repeated phrases among voters of the so-called “Free World” is that they prefer a “businessman” as president, because he is someone who knows how to manage a company. We won’t revisit the obvious fact that a country is not a business, nor are its citizens employees, which explains the utter failure of so many presidents who were “successful businessmen.” The exceptions of the capitalist system, the “successful men,” are promoted in all media as proof of the system’s virtues. Even during slavery, there were Black slave owners, but no one in their right mind would present these exceptional cases as proof of the slave system today. Another cliché deeply rooted in popular narrative is the assertion and belief that citizens vote for “someone who represents them,” for “someone who resembles them,” or for “someone who understands their needs.”

Not without irony, this majority of industrial or service workers who barely make ends meet, who hardly have health insurance, who can only exceptionally afford vacations in the hated Mexico and don’t even have enough savings to retire decently, who mostly live in debt (whether for the sin of studying or for being lawnmowers with the Confederate flag on their trucks) passionately and furiously vote for billionaires like Donald Trump—because he truly represents them.

But this is not just a curious peculiarity of Republicans in the United States. For some reason, the Senate and the “House of Representatives” are full of millionaires. In fact, 66 percent of senators and more than half of the representatives in the lower house belong to the top one percent of the country’s wealthiest. When the conclusion is that the poor need the rich to represent their rights, anyone would reasonably understand that there is a very fine and persistent propaganda effort at work, like the one in the 19th century that led slaves to defend their masters to the death.

One must either accept it or fight a war already lost; to a large extent, social media is entertainment. That is, among other things, political distraction material. There are other spaces moving in the same direction. The path of money and power. The path of dehumanization.

New technologies, like Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality, are not so different from their predecessors. Overstimulating the consumer’s senses is what humanity has been investing in for the past 150 years through new media, from the rotary press in 1843 to the internet, passing through radio, cinema, and television. All of them act on the senses. In reality, the investment of so many millions of dollars to develop augmented reality technology for various uses, whether military or mere entertainment, is not so different from the old and until recently forbidden effect of marijuana. Users of Augmented Reality and marijuana smokers report exactly the same thing: an increased sensitivity to the world as we know it. In Mozambique, where (at least in the 90s) marijuana was a wild herb, a Cuban doctor friend said that after his first “Mueda cigar” he could hear jazz, and a Swiss journalist friend assured me she could feel the moonlight on her skin. For my part, the absence of electric light in the abandoned cities of the Portuguese settlers was more impressive (let’s say, exciting) than the excess of lighting in Western shopping malls.

Like any drug, consumption produces an effect opposite to the desired one: insensitivity, anesthesia, if not depression. The effect produced by this overstimulation may be similar to that of alcohol and other stimulant drugs, represented by the Gaussian curve: after a rise toward euphoria, comes the descent into depression. In many cases, at this point, the individual becomes aggressive at the slightest stimulus contrary to their desires. From a sociological perspective, we are at that historical moment when the need for antagonism and combat is no longer a private matter but a collective one, with a reality augmented by social media. Like everything collective, it has a political translation, and power knows it. The phenomenon has migrated from a bookish struggle in the rational cortex to an emotional struggle in the reptilian center. That is, from an ideological translation, it is a shift from the left to the right; from a sense of collectivity and solidarity for others who do not directly and immediately benefit me, to the tribal combat of “the losers” who want to take away what belongs to us by our own merit: some privilege that sets us apart, elevates, and distances us from the common folk.

Like insects, we are dazzled by neon lights. We believe ourselves superior to the mwani of Mozambique for the simple reason of appearances. But the strategy of investing in new and better technologies to excite the senses is old and does not consider what both the Enlightenment and older cultures took into account: the elevation of the intellect (sometimes referred to as spirit, knowledge, or enlightenment). Only the excitation and over-excitation of the senses is futile. Its ultimate destination is addiction and the need for ever-increasing stimulation and, finally, depression. To prevent this from happening, it would be necessary to modify the genetic code of human beings, a result of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and adaptation—and this would never be possible without running an extremely high risk of self-annihilation as a species.

Art and thought require a certain austerity of means. When too much is invested in special effects and artificial plot twists in cinema, the viewer’s ability to feel and reflect is destroyed. This was essentially the proposal of the so-called “Imperfect Cinema” in Latin America, as a critical alternative to the dominance of Hollywood. The same happens in philosophy, in the sciences, and in democracy in general: when the means become the ends, the spectacle, the entertainment, the distraction, critical thinking comes under attack, under the bombardment of distraction and fragmentation. This is what happens on the Internet, on social media, to the point that not only a book but even a more austere medium like radio (often an instrument of political manipulation, especially in the 20th century) becomes a pause to the anxiety of interrupting a reflection or a perception due not only to the anxiety of stimulation but also to the urgency of expressing an opinion on practically everything, that is, nothing.

The freedom of the photocopier

As we have seen, the media, communications, and religious, political, and ideological ideas have a neurological basis. But the way this inherited condition functions or is manipulated and exploited to the extreme by the market or by a personal dictator depends on a culture and a historical paradigm, that framework from which perhaps—if we are not too optimistic—only radical critical thought can escape to some extent. Psychosocial manipulation is also not limited to a simple advertising agency and a consumer audience but depends on an ideological and civilizational system.

Let us briefly look at a current example. The most important factor in the monetization of a YouTuber (domestic video producer, called a “creator”) is their own analysis of the popularity of their videos, data that the platform itself provides in detail. In this sense, all experts agree on the need to see “what the audience wants” so that “the creator” can focus on that topic, that aspect, and that style. This is then sold as a response of supply to demand. Over time, “the creator” of content will have specialized in satisfying a specific audience that was not created by them—just as the fleeting popularity of phenomena like the Minions was not a decision of the global children’s guild but rather a publicity campaign that cost nearly a billion dollars.

The artisanal video creator, without the capital of Universal Studios and McDonald’s, will educate and develop themselves based on this demand without realizing that the demand, the audience’s sensitivity, was previously created by a mega digital industry that, in turn, is framed within the paradigm of its time, that is, within capitalism and post-capitalism, which considers success to be popularity, money, and the commodification of existence.

All very creative.

From Flies in the Spiderweb: History of the Commercialization of Existence—and Its Means, by Jorge Majfud

Majfud, Jorge. Flies in the Spiderweb: History of the Commercialization of Existence—and Its Means. Humanus, 2023, 2025, p. 17-25

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[1] Regarding the tension between ethics and aesthetics, between religious renunciation and the Dionysian experimentation with the world, we paused in Critique of Pure Passion (1998).

[2] A possible discussion about how this consumption encourages or perpetuates macho violence remains open, but far from the logic that leads to prohibiting and criminalizing the consumption of pedophilic images.

[3] Various studies show that local channels dedicate between 25 and 50 percent of their news to coverage of violent crimes, which creates the effect of making the population believe that crime is always on the rise, even when it is decreasing in police statistics. (Lipschultz, J. H., Hilt, M. L. (2003). Race and Local Television News Crime Coverage and O’hear, M. Marquette Law Review Marquette Law Review Violent Crime and Media Coverage In One City, etc.)

[4] In The Narration of the Invisible (2005) we referred to this factor as “a narration of a virtual reality [a] logos that makes the world intelligible for the subject reflecting on it. It is what we will call ‘metaphysical space’ […] a narration about metaphysical space with the corresponding use of a progressive definition of semantic boundaries, of defining as clearly as possible the limit between C(+) and C(-) […] what is seen in the metaphysical space of speculation as if it were an objective observation that a chronicler makes of a sports event or a scientist makes in their laboratory […] Language arises from physical space and only through metaphors and signic transfers can it reach to describe metaphysical space. However, in a reciprocal and symbiotic manner, metaphysical space will act on physical space in the form of myths, ideologies, cultural paradigms, etc.”

[5] Currently, this idea is attributed to the great historian Yuval Harari, although it is not difficult to find similar proposals in the history of thought. In an article titled “The Bombardment of Symbols” (Alai, May 20, 2008) we cited the study of a group of Spanish researchers who had arrived at the core of this idea: “the extinction of the Neanderthals more than twenty thousand years ago —those gnomes and big-nosed dwarves that populate the traditional tales of Europe— was due to a fundamental inferiority compared to the Cro-Magnons. According to José Carrión from the University of Murcia, our Homo sapiens ancestors possessed a greater symbolic capacity, while the Neanderthals were more realistic and therefore inferior as a society. No one would believe in the myths of those ancestors of ours today, although their utility resembles that of Ptolemaic geocentrism, which in its time served to predict eclipses”.

[6] That same year, in the United States, the fixed drum of rotary printing was patented. Around the same year, two other Samuels invented the six-shot drum, the Colt Walker revolver. In 1847, the captain of the Texas rangers Samuel Walker, after patenting, along with Samuel Colt, the most perfect killing tool, died from the shot of an obsolete shotgun fifty kilometers from Puebla, Mexico, where he had gone to defend his country from the Mexicans who did not want to cede more territory to the cause of slavery.

[7] In April 2022, former President George W. Bush added a new confession, one of his many Freudian slips: he admitted that the Iraq War was “completely unjustified; a brutal invasion” (The Guardian. “George W Bush accidentally admits Iraq war was ‘unjustified and brutal’ in gaffe”. May 19, 2022. )

[8] In reality, neither Samuel Colt nor Samuel Walker invented the revolver, but they patented it in 1836. Walker died in 1847, the same year his dream of commercializing a super-powerful revolver became a reality with the invention and trademark Colt-Walker. Someone, probably a woman, shot him from a balcony in Mexico, with an obsolete shotgun, as a way to avenge the massacres and rapes of the invaders chosen by God in the War of Dispossession.

[9] Superman was born in the 1930s, that is, during the Great Depression, as a champion of the working class against the plunder of the millionaires, but this perspective is quickly demonized by the owners of the major press and the cultural industry, like William R. Hearst, with his pro-Nazi and anti-communist campaign, which is why Superman quickly moves to the center and begins to fight against the “bandits” on the margins, those who “want to take over the world”—a world that already has an owner.

[10] It is interesting to note through a simple Ngram analysis how, as verbal expressions have lost sophistication, at the same time insults and expressions of frustration like “fuck” and “shit” have exponentially increased in usage in English-speaking societies since 1960. Something similar can be observed in other languages, such as Spanish.

[11] The delirium of “overinterpretations,” as Umberto Eco would say, continued with the analysis of stars and crescent moons in the restaurant’s signage, which can be found in “satanic drawings” as well as in the Turkish flag, the American flag, or the flag of South Carolina. A heart-shaped logo from the St. Jude Children’s Hospital that appeared on the business’s website was considered a secret pedophilic symbol. Then a photograph of Obama playing “Ping Pong” with a child was added. Ping Pong → pizzeria → Cheese Pizza → Child Pornography → devilish rituals. Another of the “irrefutable proofs” was a photograph of the owner of another restaurant, L’Enfant Cafe-Bar, who appeared wearing a T-shirt that said “I ♥ L’Enfant” (in French, “I love the child”). Half of Trump’s voters believed that Hillary Clinton had participated in orgies with minors at this pizzeria.

[12] In 2018, Your News Wire was renamed NewsPunch

[13] With the rise of deep fake videos where we see well-known politicians saying things they never said, various labs have responded with other software that detects this manipulation, mainly based on details such as the fact that there are few photographs on the Internet of public figures with their eyes closed, which is why deep fakes fail to realistically reproduce their blinking. Of course, in technology, it’s all a matter of time (see Condie, Bill, and Leigh Dayton. “Four AI Technologies That Could Transform the Way We Live and Work.” Nature, vol. 588, no. 7837, Dec. 2020, pp. S126–28).

[14] Postmodernism ended, among other things, the revolutionary spirit of the humanists of Constantinople and, much earlier, the critique of thinkers like the Arab philosopher Averroes or the Englishman Adelard of Bath, translator of scientific works from Arabic and one of the first modernus in the 12th century.

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[i] Majfud, Jorge. La frontera salvaje. 200 años de fanatismo anglosajón en América Latina. Rebelde Editores, febrero 2021, p. 161.

[ii] Majfud, Jorge. Crisis. Colectivo Cultural Baile del Sol, 2012, p. 61.

[iii] “Thin line between desire and dread: Dopamine controls both”. (2008, July 14). University of Michigan: news.umich.edu/thin-line-between-desire-and-dread-dopamine-controls-both/ Ver también: Baumgartner, H. M., Cole, S. L., Olney, J. J., & Berridge, K. C. (2020). Desire or Dread from Nucleus Accumbens Inhibitions: Reversed by Same-Site Optogenetic Excitations. The Journal of Neuroscience, 40(13), 2737–2752. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.2902-19.2020

[iv] McChesney, Robert W. Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times. New Press, 2016, p. 34.

[v] “New study finds that violence doesn’t add to children’s enjoyment of TV shows, movies”. Indiana University. (2012): newsinfo.iu.edu/web/page/normal/18805.html

[vi] Bachman, Frank Puterbaugh. Great Inventors and Their Inventions. United Kingdom, American Book Company, 1918, p. 222.

[vii] Schlenoff, Daniel C. “50, 100 & 150 Years Ago: Ads Go Subliminal, Wrights Soar and Continents Connect.” Scientific American, Aug. 2008, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/50-100-150-first-transatlantic-telegraph/.

[viii] Creelman, James. On the great highway: the wanderings and adventures of a special correspondent. Boston, Lothrop, 1901.

[ix] Singer, Peter W., and Emerson T. Brooking. Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media. Eamon Dolan Books, 2018.

[x] Idem.

[xi] Idem, p. 32.

[xii] Majfud, Jorge. Narracion de lo invisible. Una teoría política de los Campos semánticos. Editorial Académica España, 2018.

[xiii] Bourcier, Nicolas, et al. “En Amérique Latine, Les Accents pro-Poutine De La Gauche.” Le Monde.fr, Le Monde, 27 Mar. 2022, https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2022/03/27/en-amerique-latine-les-accents-pro-poutine-de-la-gauche_6119309_3210.html.

[xiv] “Neanderthals Boosted Our Immune System.” Www.mpg.de, 2016, http://www.mpg.de/9819763/neanderthal-genes-immune-system.

[xv] Majfud, Jorge. “La libertad vigilada de los Libertarios. ALAI.” ALAI, 22 Apr. 2022, http://www.alai.info/la-libertad-vigilada-de-los-libertarios/.

[xvi] Snowden, Edward. Permanent Reocrod. Picador, 2019, Pg. 113.

[xvii] Gelbspan, Ross. Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The Covert War Against the Central America Movement. South End P, 1991, p. 22.

[xviii] Alter, C. (2016, April 29). “California Rejects John Wayne Day Because of Actor’s Comments on Race”. Time: time.com/4312343/california-john-wayne-day-race/

[xix] “President’s Message. Message From the President of the United Stales, to the two Houses of Congress, at the commencement of the Second Session of the Twenty-Second Congress”. David V. Culley. Indiana Paladium, Volume 8, Number 49, Lawrenceburg, Dearborn County. 22 de diciembre de 1932. No. 49.

[xx] The United States Magazine and Democratic Review. United States, Langtree and O’Sullivan, 1852.

[xxi] “Crucible of Empire” PBS. http://www.pbs.org/crucible/tl7.html

[xxii] “Allende Wins”. National Security Archive. (2020, September 4). nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-04/allende-wins

[xxiii] “Harry S. Truman: Decisive President” The Lightning’ Strikes in War. Alden Whitman. The New York Times, 27 de diciembre de 1972, p 46-47. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/12/27/84161748.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0

[xxiv] Howard, Philip, et al. Social Media, News and Political Information during the US Election: Was Polarizing Content Concentrated in Swing States? 2017, arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1802/1802.03573.pdf.

[xxv] “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media.” Danah.org, 2022, http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html.

[xxvi] “Dissecting the #PizzaGate Conspiracy Theories (Published 2016).” The New York Times, 2022, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/10/business/media/pizzagate.html.

[xxvii] Diamond, Jeremy. “Donald Trump: ‘I Will Totally Accept’ Election Results ‘If I Win.’” CNN, CNN, 20 Oct. 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/20/politics/donald-trump-i-will-totally-accept-election-results-if-i-win/index.html.

[xxviii] “La Pornografía Política”. Rebelion.org, 1 octubre 2016, rebelion.org/la-pornografia-politica/.

From Flies in the Spiderweb: History of the Commercialization of Existence—and Its Means, by Jorge Majfud

Majfud, Jorge. Flies in the Spiderweb: History of the Commercialization of Existence—and Its Means. Humanus, 2023, 2025, p. 17-25

Ideology and Intervention: A Critical Review of Jorge Majfud’s The Wild Frontier