Operation Mindfuck 2.0

Douglas Rushkoff
Medium.com

ropaganda used to mean getting people to believe stuff. Now it means getting them to question what they believe or whether there’s any truth at all. However disorienting this is, it may not be all bad.

The term “propaganda” originally referred to a 17th-century committee of Roman Catholic cardinals that sought to propagate the religion through foreign missions — the marginally and only temporarily benevolent face of European colonialism. In modern times, public relations guru Ed Bernays revived the term to describe the way Woodrow Wilson’s administration convinced Americans to support U.S. involvement in World War I. Propaganda was about telling the same story through so many media channels at once that there appeared to be only one story.

Today, however, the primary goal of government propaganda is to undermine our faith in everything. Not just our belief in particular stories in the news, but our trust in the people who are telling the stories, the platforms, and fact-based reality itself. Facts are, after all, the enemy of beliefs.

What many of us forget is that this new style of influence through disorientation is really an appropriation of the counterculture’s techniques. This is what the Situationists were doing. So were the hippies and “heads” of the 1960s.

Before Watergate anyway, it felt as if the press and the government were on the same side, telling the same story to us all. There was no way for the underfunded counterculture to compete with mainstream reality programming—except by undermining its premises. The flower children couldn’t overwhelm Richard Nixon’s National Guard troops, but they could put daisies in the barrels of their rifles.

Taken to the extreme, this sort of activist satire became Operation Mindfuck, first announced in 1968 by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea in their Illuminatus Trilogy. The idea was to undermine people’s faith in government, authority, and the sanctity of consensus reality itself by pranking everything, all the time.

The idea of Operation Mindfuck was to break the trance that kept America at war, blindly consuming, and oblivious to its impact on the rest of the world. Destabilize the dominant cultural narrative through pranks and confusion. Say things that may or may not be true — but probably not. But maybe. 

Levitate the Pentagon as an act of protest. Publish conspiracy stories about Jackie Kennedy walking in on Lyndon Johnson sexually abusing the exit wound in JFK’s head when his body was being transported back to Washington, DC.

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1968: The Birth of New Conformism

"... the movement that emerged in response to postwar conformism was to realise a new form of conformism. In the period between 1970 and 1990, most of the ideas associated with the countercultural movement became absorbed by mainstream society. The 1960s obsession with individual self-fulfilment and emotional and personal issues was thoroughly written into society’s cultural script.

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Frank Furedi
Spiked

From the standpoint of history, 1968 represents a brief interregnum. It did mark the end of the apathetic era of the 1950s. But it also foreshadowed the era of depoliticised conformism that kicked in in the early 1970s.

To understand the meaning of 1968, one has to understand that, during the late 1940s and 1950s, Western societies were haunted by the legacy of the interwar era – an era in which the social structure, and the largely liberal values on which it was purportedly based, were called into question. Such was the postwar fear of drawing attention to what amounted to a crisis of legitimacy that critical thought was banished to the margins of intellectual life. The marginalisation of critique and dissent was aided by the postwar boom, which served to distract society from the political impasse prevailing over public life. The Cold War was useful in this respect. It reinforced the mood of political passivity, channeling the public’s attention towards uniting against an external enemy.

But suddenly, out of nowhere, the 1960s countercultural movement appeared on the scene. To many at the time, it seemed as if the world had been turned upside down. As the head of the conservative Adenauer Foundation in West Germany put it, ‘The revolt of 1968 destroyed more values than did the Third Reich’. The 1960s countercultural movement succeeded in forcing significant sections of society to question the values that underpinned their daily existence.

The highpoint of the countercultural moment was the revolt of French students in May 1968. Their revolt, which helped mobilise French workers and precipitated a general strike, appeared to many as the precursor of an era of radicalism. With good reason: in the months after May, student protests proliferated, the civil-rights movement grew further, and mass demonstrations against the war in South-East Asia continued to dominate the headlines. Yet, in spite of what appeared to be a building momentum, the radical moment soon passed away. By the early 1970s, the counterculture had become de-radicalised, and it gradually entered the mainstream in the form of youth culture.

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