Written: Jan 13th 2022
Back in Plato’s day, there was only one wise guy wise to the fact that he could get away with a lot if he claimed to know nothing. By the time I was a kid in Coney Island, the news had trickled down, through books like Illuminattus, published in the same year as the second presidential debate, between Johnson and Ford and not that different from debates between Obama and Romney. But back in the day of the first presidential debate, between Kennedy and Nixon, the American public got to see what it was like for two people to think they did know something, understood more or less how their institutions worked, and had a plan for the country. Not long after that Kennedy at least received a rude awakening, when he learned that even as the President he couldn’t see the US Nuclear War Plan.
Daniel Ellsberg remedied that, sharing the real Nuclear War Plan with Kennedy, who had eventually been given a fake one. He could do that because he had written the real one. Many years later he shared other information with people who he really believed were entitled to know it. This almost got him killed but played a key part in bringing down Nixon, another guy who thought he knew something.
He had some more important secrets to share, but he couldn’t hold on to them while he was running from the government, and somewhere along the way the general public ended up believing that they knew nothing, and could no nothing, so by the time he was able to reveal them anyway, in the Doomsday Machine, and by the time Assange and Snowden tried to invoke his precedent, tried to tell the public and the courts about crimes that were being committed against them, there was no-one left to think that now they know.
Militaries internally employ a great deal of technical jargon such as ‘orientation’ and ‘situational awareness’ derived from the more cybernetics influenced side of Postmodern thinking. They also make use of modern thinking such as game theory, which requires agents representing the world and making decisions within it. Military language presumes a metaphor of chaotic collective exploration and motion, within which we presume the impossibility of clarifying the situation adequately to make use of a courtroom process. What would ‘‘reasonable doubt’ mean from someone who hadn’t established that they know which way they’re going? The military mindset centers on stimulus and response, action and speech-action. When we bring its radical skepticism into our public affairs, we don’t presume that we could credibly carry out a free and fair election. Military language embeds the ideological assertion that man does not survive by thinking. When we bring it into our military contracting process, it cements a commitment against thought, a commitment to look at what thought calls for and get it backwards.
Military jargon sees the world as a system of control systems with certain human capacities such as situational awareness granted as applying to elect troops as additions to its major working metaphor of springs. For compatibility with the military, the MBA curriculum and other jargon of the professional/managerial class implicitly makes analogous assumptions, for instance by treating markets as consisting of alpha and beta with the latter determined in terms of an assumed correlation between the prices of assets and a ‘market’ which they deviate from as if on springs. This is a different system of metaphor from that which would have been used by more traditional investors, who would have thought in terms of concrete questions about what might go wrong in their proposed plans and how much they would be likely to bring in if their plans came to fruition. The latter is a natural fit for the language of commercial accounting and civil law, but not to that of military jargon, which would regard a court as having too slow an OODA loop to provide credible civic defense.
OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It’s a bit of Air Force jargon developed by John Boyd. It doesn’t leave room, within it’s jargon, for courts adjudicating ownership of assets via contract disputes. It imagines that delay tactics will make disruption of the context of the decision inevitable, rather than the dispute resolving. The Professional Managerial Class, inheriting such assumptions, runs Boeing under the assumption that credit flowing to it from the federal government and if need be the federal reserve need not be in any sort of correspondence to expected ability to repay. The common sense of the ideology is that it would have to be rolled over.
Doing business with the military is conditional on using its language, which assumes a world where people are trying to be used instead of trying to make decisions, and who think it’s wise to maintain that they know nothing but are only following orders. The function of bureaucracies locks in uniform truth standards among its participants, leading to the propagation out from the military ethos which precluded making one’s own decisions and being intentionally accountable for their outcomes. Instead, not sticking out is the norm to be approached.
The managerial class is the extension of the professional norms of the military industrial complex throughout the top ranks of the sectors of the economy deemed militarily important during the Cold War. Being crypto-military, explicitly claims, through its jargon, that the way to receive value is by applying force, a-la cybernetics. This paradigm contrasts strongly with the jargon of the bourgeois, who talk in terms of ownership and profit, a-la Classical Economics and Commercial Law.
