BULLSHIT IS THE FIRST CASUALITY OF WAR

Losers in Hormuz

by Nix Jeelvy

There’s rarely something new under the sun and therefore, there’s rarely something new in the sciences that describe things under the sun. Therefore, I’m sure that the phenomenon I’m about to describe and name has been described and named by older thinkers and given a better name. Nevertheless, with the readership’s permission, I’d like to say that we live in the era of rule by bullshit, or bullshitocracy, which is to say an era where the predominant method of rule is the wholesale disruption of reality by undermining the population’s ability to tell truth from falsehood and then seizing the initiative in the thus formed chaotic information space by being the loudest voice while the pig-headed ignoramuses who still believe in Aristotelian truth are busy debunking your bullshit.

The undisputed champion of rule by bullshit is none other than Vladimir Putin, who rules Russia not so much with an iron fist as with a flexible definition of what truth is. As described in Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing is True, Everything is Possible, the method of rule in Russia is to inundate the population with multiple contradictory narratives, each containing truth and falsehood in various amounts with the primary aim not so much of deceiving them, but primarily of confusing them. The volume is as important as the falsehood, and the goal isn’t to turn the population into true believers, but rather to turn them into cynical non-believers who find belief itself a laughable proposition. In such an environment, since nobody believes anything, nobody has any means of coordinating resistance to the regime which wins by default.

Of course, whilst Putin is the champion, there are numerous contenders for second place. By tenure and intensity of bullshit, the silver medal ought to belong to Viktor Orbán, prime minister of Hungary, as widely known as he is wide (and he is wide indeed, being one of those very few national leaders with the girth of a nation). Faced with a serious challenger for the first time in his 16 year rule, and the ire of the Hungarian people after 16 years of graft, corruption, self-enrichment, protection of paedophiles and even a scandal involving zebras, he has elected to run an election campaign not against his opponent but against - Volodymyr Zelensky, who’s the President of another country, ineligible for any office of the Hungarian state. Hungarian infospace has therefore been flooded with AI slop picturing Zelensky frog-marching the opposition or Ukrainian soldiers in Nazi uniforms executing Hungarians, because that’s totally what’s at stake, rather than Orbán and his cronies spending some time on a much needed prison diet.

Now, while Orbán wins on duration (now thankfully truncated) and intensity, the big points for impact have to go to Mr. Donald J. Trump, bullshitter-in-chief of the once great nation of America. He represents an interesting case in it that he is a relic of the previous era, when bullshit mostly came from individual bullshitters who bullshat on the strength of their own charisma, instead of relying on a state security apparatus to flood the zone with bullshit on their behalf. Old school bullshitters aimed to circumvent the natural skepticism of people, whereas bullshittocrats aim to weaponise these skeptical instincts in order to destroy people’s ability to believe anything at all. In this sense, it’d appear that Trump would be the weakest of the bullshitocrats, were it not for the fact that he has ignited the age-old American yearning for fanatical devotion for a cult leader. In a sense, MAGA is a very old phenomenon, being a millenarian protestant doomsday cult. In another sense, it is a new phenomenon, being a secular and political doomsday cult.

The uniquely American characteristics notwithstanding, MAGA has moved to corner the information market, just like United Russia and Fidesz before them. The first move was to seize Twitter and turn it into a right-wing disinformation plantation, where Russian and Israeli agents, both of the paid shill and useful idiot variety run rampant, working their magic and flooding the zone with bullshit. The subsequent steps, which followed the takeover of the US federal government by MAGA, have been taken by the Ellison family of Oracle notoriety. They’ve bought TikTok as well as the major American news networks on behalf of Trump. Incidentally, it was Oracle and the Ellisons which built China’s Great Firewall, which represents the Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to keep the media consumption of their thralls free of anything that may go against the tenets of extractive oligarchy with clownishly corrupt characteristics.

Larry and David Ellison: their investment strategy suggests that they despise you

As a result of MAGA’s blitz of the media and subsequent implementation of the tried and tested firehose of bullshit strategy, Americans seem to have completely lost the ability to tell truth from falsehood, and have relocated from reality to hyperreality, precisely as predicted by Jean Baudrillard. Indeed, so powerful is the hyperreal that the commodity markets have stopped reacting primarily to commodities and started reacting to the bullshitter-in-chief’s bullshit pronouncements.

The behaviour of the commodity markets in particular is interesting because the American bullshitocracy has somehow managed to recreate Soviet style shortages by means of capitalism. In terms of economics, the process is simple. When the price signal is disrupted, consumers of a particular good or service no longer receive good information as to its availability (supply) and will therefore not adjust their consumption thereof (demand). Whether the disrupting mechanism is a government fixing prices or commodity traders joining a secular millenarian death cult is irrelevant. If oil ought to, in light of the actual supply, be $120 a barrel and is trading at $93 a barrel, then the demand won’t shift to accommodate the real availability, nor will supplier increase (or decrease) operations in order to profit from this rising price. Thus this bullshit-based price signal distortion, which is driven in no small part by market manipulation on part of the turbo-corrupt Trump regime, will eventually lead to oil shortages even greater than what we’d have seen from just the closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

And here, in the doldrums of economic theory, do we find that nemesis of bullshit, reality. While bullshitocracy can truck on for a long time, it will always eventually run aground on the shoals of reality. Usually, reality will arrive in the form of a war, because war is a conflict between two organised polities and a bullshitocracy which goes to war is pitted directly against an enemy, i.e. an organised political group which by definition does not share the delusions necessary for the orderly functioning of a bullshittocracy. Less glamorous are economic factors, or as the Russian saying goes, “there’s a war on between the TV and the refrigerator.” No matter how many times Trump declares that the Iran War is over, the Strait of Hormuz is a real, physical place, closed down with real, physical drones and missiles and real, physical oil cannot exit it and make it to world markets. This creates real, physical shortages which may or may not be reflected in the price of oil which is after all, a social convention and therefore vulnerable to bullshit.

It is telling that the absolute champion of bullshitocracy himself, Vladimir Putin, ran aground on the shoals of Ukrainian reality, with his two-day special military operation degenerating into a drawn out, four-year war of attrition, in which curiously enough, it was the larger state that has been mostly attritted away. The reason for this blunder by the supposed master strategist is rather simple. He believed his own bullshit about Ukrainians being a "brother nation" which was kidnapped from the "Russian World" by evil CIA westerners unleashing the dark magic of a colour revolution.

Putin after 4 years of truth bombs

Orbán seems to have fallen prey to the same unfortunate tendency, but more in the sense that while he and his Fidesz gargoyles have kept believing the bullshit, in the average Hungarian home, the refrigerator seems to have won the war against the television.

And now we come to Donald Trump, whose bullshit has failed to persuade the Iranian government. Feeling empowered by the "Fracas in Caracas," he came to believe that he could effect regime change with "surgical interventions," not realising that America was allowed to kidnap Maduro by willing Venezuelan co-conspirators (tellingly, only Maduro’s Cuban bodyguards fought the American forces). Regardless of how much he lies, the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and oil remains in short supply. No matter how hard he tries to manipulate the markets in order to stave off a recession or indeed, a depression, at some point physical reality must rudely insert itself into the conversation. And no matter how much he would like to chicken out, declare victory and go bother someone else, the Iranians have no interest in ending a conflict they believe they’re winning, and for that matter, neither do the Israelis.

The past several years have not been kind to us Aristotelians. We have seen our precious postulates of A=A being shredded away before our eyes by people whose idea of reality is the shared delusion of society. We have stubbornly clung to physical reality whilst the rest of the planet has elected to believe in faeries and ghosts. But now, our time has come. War, that disagreeable yet munificent uncle of reality-based politics has decided to disrupt the friendly family get-together and very rudely bring reality in from the cold. Because war, because it is the utmost political act and the political act with the utmost consequences leaves no room for bullshit. War turns lies into a luxury because guns, bombs and bayonets are real in a way that no social medium or television programme is. Some damned fool or other once said that truth is the first casualty of war. Perhaps, in a bygone age when men lied but still knew what the truth was. In our time, however, it is bullshit, not truth which is the first casualty of war.