Signal Jamming: Public Perception & Narrative Control
The recent murder of Ashling Murphy, a 23-year old female school teacher from Tullamore, is a national tragedy. Yet this tragedy was overshadowed by the manner and extent to which her death was narrowly politicised. The response made from Irish officialdom in the aftermath of the crime was made with little care for prudence, justice or truth. To the extent that this response was made by prominent presenters, politicians, and journalists, there needs to be a careful and critical response to them, regardless of the tragic and horrific nature of the crime involved.
One of the most striking statements from an RTÉ presenter was his claim on national radio that the crime made him feel ashamed to be a man. Why should this particular crime make an innocent man feel shame? It was implied that the depravity of the act warrants the shame of men as men, and that their collective behaviour is to blame. The notion that all men should feel ashamed for what happened is an abstraction at a remove from the reality of the crime, and the source of that abstraction is ideological. The current ideological and political dispensation of Irish officialdom is Progressivism, and, as a result, the public will only hear the progressive frame of reference in relation to the crime. That frame is one which states that all men are in some way liable or must show penance for what happened.
To give another example of this progressive frame of reference, one may turn to RTÉ’s television coverage. In its programme, the national broadcaster spent three minutes to switch from a message of condolence to that of political fomentation:
“Ashling’s killing has […] triggered an unprecedented conversation about both the insidious and overt sexist treatment that women are subjected to on a daily basis.”
The ‘conversation’ is one which ought to focus solely on the nature and degree of the sexism involved. This is not so much a conversation as it is a conclusion. It is assumed that from the society-wide male oppression of women, the nature of this crime may be adduced, and that no other conceptual scheme is necessary. From the concept of sexism alone, Irish society is to be critiqued, deconstructed, and reformed. Nowhere in progressive discourse is it suggested that the crime could be viewed from a standpoint of social decay, or that the conditions which led to it might be symptomatic of the failure of Progressivism itself. Not too long ago, people in rural Ireland would know everyone and their mother within their locality, they would leave their doors unlocked, and children would play freely in the streets. Now one is expected to live amongst a community of strangers from anywhere on earth and act as if it is completely normal. The discordance between our alienation and our communal sensibility is causing a certain rift, an underlying sense of dread at the vast inarticulable social changes taking place—a manifold problem whose seriousness is not yet grasped. To grasp this seriousness, dissidents need to contextualise the approved frames of reference.
Frames such as sexism, racism, and antisemitism are the approved modes of critique which Progressivism uses to castigate opposing institutions, and to pave the way for new ones. This is done in the name of supposedly engendering an open society of free, safe and equal human beings. These values are often compatible with the aims of oligarchy, which desires a global marketplace of mobile, efficient and interchangeable individuals. Oligarchy pursues its interests with a progressive veneer, as seen with institutions like the Open Society Foundation, or the Council for Inclusive Capitalism. As the pandemic has shown, the progressive value of social care was manipulated by oligarchy to lockdown humanity en masse, which had a consequence of increasing their global profit shares considerably. Given Ireland’s compliance with the global pandemic, its status as one of the world’s largest tax havens, and its radical positions on progressive issues like abortion and transgenderism, one could reasonably assume that the prevailing ideology of Ireland’s elite is oligarchical Progressivism.
This time last year, there was a murder of a Mongolian woman walking home at night in Dublin’s Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC). Her name was Urantsetseg Tserendorj, and whilst her death did not receive the same attention as Ashling Murphy’s, the circumstances surrounding it were just as appalling. She was a cleaner on her way home from work one night, when in an attempted robbery she was fatally stabbed in the neck by a 14-year old boy. It is some strange coincidence that a working class woman was killed in cold blood in a district like the IFSC, a district whose global banks hold ineffable sums of wealth. If one were to inquire into the circumstances of this crime, one would likely examine factors like urban decay, financial corruption, and ethnic displacement, and not some absurd abstraction like the behaviour of all boys.
Yet the only remedy for these kinds of depraved crimes to be heard from Irish officialdom is that Progressivism has not gone far enough. It has not gone far enough in how how it educates boys not to be boys, it has not gone far enough in how it stops gender-based violence, it has not gone far enough how it ends toxic masculinity.
How might Progressivism go further one may ask? Well, a ‘scientific-driven public policy’ expert laid it out for us in an interview with RTÉ Radio 1:
“Do we need some sort of, almost, qualification, licensing, education for men to go out into the social sphere?”
If the Digital Covid Certificate is acceptable for the masses, then why not a Digital Socialisation Certificate for men? The precedent of digital certification to access socialisation has now been set by the Covid-19 pandemic. The notion of public health and safety may now take governmental priority over freedom of movement and of association. This was seen with the health restrictions against two kilometre travel and domestic gatherings.
So, by this logic, if the health and safety of women are being threatened by men’s freedom of movement, then the solution would be to simply take away that freedom altogether. The regulation of gender relations could then be outsourced to a board of management, staffed by expert civil servants. Their methods of enforcement would be technological and psychological, and might involve scanning a biometric QR code or using an algorithm to show that one has completed his consent class quota. With covid restrictions being rescinded for now, perhaps Ireland’s policy experts have their eyes on creating some sort of National Gender Relations Management Team, akin to NPHET, in order to keep themselves on the state payroll. Only time will tell.
Elsewhere within progressive Ireland, the leader of the main opposition party gave her take on the crime:
“The roots of sexism and misogyny run deep. The Ireland of religious dogma, that defined women as men's property, that excluded women from the world of work, that relegated us as objects and confined us to domestic chores, that confined and exploited the poor and vulnerable in laundries and mother and baby homes and that stole babies from the arms of their mothers, that Ireland defined and disfigured the lives of generations of women; our grandmothers, our mothers. Much has changed. The face of misogyny has changed but it has not gone away. Today's Ireland, our place, our daughters’ Ireland, is ugly and dangerous still, whether it is the unsolicited sexual photos, the online stalking and abuse and harassment in shops, in nightclubs, on the bus, on bicycles, at work or at college. It is the intimidation of lewd commentary and catcalling. It is the never-ending mansplaining. It is the gaslighting and the coercive control. It is rape.”
The crime is again reacted to only in terms of sexism and misogyny, yet the changing face of misogyny is not explained. It is presumably related to the historical narrative that is told about the old Ireland of sexual suppression and the new Ireland of sexual liberation. One may castigate the morals of old Ireland, but at least it understood the potency latent within sexuality, and instituted that potency in a form of union, namely marriage. The collapse of marriage as an institution resulted in that potency finding its expression elsewhere, such as in the form of sexual misconduct. Its collapse as an institution would not have been possible without the introduction of another; the sacrament of individual desire and its consummation.
Notwithstanding the fact that crimes of a sexual nature have always been committed, the kinds of intimidation and abuse which are quoted above may be better understood as the result of a decline in sexual morality, rather than as a misogyny which changes arbitrarily over time. The reasons for this decline are partly to do with the collapse of organised religion, and partly to do with the success of oligarchy in developing an economy of desire—the two being mutually reinforcing. Within the economy of desire, businesses such as Onlyfans, Tinder and Pornhub profit from lax sexual morals, a weak social culture, and lonesome individuals; they also promote such a state of affairs through the normalisation of their ‘services’. It is this profitable desacralisation of sexuality that is to blame for the proliferation of such things as online stalking, unsolicited photography and sexual harassment; and not simply a historical contempt which men have for women.
Returning to the claim that the Catholic Church is to blame for misogyny in Ireland, if the man who committed the murder of Ashling Murphy is not an Irishman or a Catholic, then would old Catholic Ireland still be to blame for the crime? The chief suspect who has been charged was reported as a Slovakian national. If he is convicted, will there be public corrections made to the anti-Catholic and anti-Irish narrative? Not likely. That is because the progressive zeitgeist in Ireland operates without institutional opposition. As such, its contradictions cannot be formally challenged, its errors are forgotten by the next news cycle, and its institutional monopoly redirects outrage away from itself.
Without opposition, the contingency that the murderer might not be a product of Irish society has simply not been factored into progressive discourse. They instead employ rhetorical selectivity to keep the ‘conversation’ on familiar ground, one with pre-packaged talking points, ideological tracks and vested interests. For progressives, every problem of social decay must be the result of an obsolete institution or residual culture, not the policies of today which have been informed by their beliefs. If the ‘conversation’ was to be a true discussion, it would have the potential to broach new conceptual frames, where the question might not be about how to remodel Irish society, but how to remodel the increasingly global ‘society’ we now find ourselves in.
The global society is one not of nations and countries, but of economic districts and financial zones. Individual humans are zero-points, the commuters of transverse strata, existing along vast cross-sections of space, class and race. Mass consciousness has been splintered in the global society, diffracted through a prism of cyberspace, where hypnagogic screens continually syphon off and redirect attentive focus. Our communal interdependence has been ‘solved’ by market forces. Under its organising apparatus we can now graze amongst a community of aliens. The end result is that we do not sense the atomisation, or feel how out of touch with the Real we are.
To confront something phenomenologically, like the reality of living under globalism, presents a challenge for progressives. Progressive belief is one which avoids hard existential questions, and instead finds comfort in presented externals, especially those advertised with a sense of emotional immediacy and inequitable injustice. The advertisement of such externals comes via the telecommunicative social hierarchy. This hierarchy is the moral order upheld by television, social media, commercial culture, etc. Progressives have outsourced their ideological formation to it, defer to its perceived expertise when questioned, and presuppose that an argument against its totality is not credible.
Without fear of an antithesis, their own opinions are often left idle and unintegrated from one another, lacking coherence or resonance. This dissonance makes itself known through contradictions in their accumulated beliefs, such as championing the right to bodily autonomy in regards to abortion, yet silence on the issue of mandatory vaccination. Public perception management is the name of the game being played in relation to this mass belief, nudging and coercing it over to its point of view. Through a technique of manifold repetition, ubiquity and infotainment, public perception management is able to project power, and to signal jam countervailing narratives, intuitions, and even instincts.
When someone ignores his instincts for the sake of conformity with the telecommunicative social hierarchy, he loses the ability to sense that he has not fully comprehended his adopted concepts. Such a person has a tendency to just mimetically relay what is said to him without much hesitation. Evidence of this mimetic relay was present during the pandemic when people’s conversations were suddenly re-oriented around abstractions like ‘case numbers’, ‘ICU capacity’, ‘anti-vaxxers’ and ‘booster shots’. Topics which are only relevant insofar as it is presumed that others also tuned into such things. Mimetic relay was present again in the Ashling Murphy case, where there was a call to end ‘gender-based violence’, a contrived term which does not come naturally to one’s mind, and whose ultimate purpose is not to protect women, but to protect gender non-conformists. Independent conversations about the social decay brought about by lockdown, having a strong deportation policy for foreign criminals, or decreasing Ireland’s dependence on international finance are anathema to the progressive system of value. They are topics that require a muscle of instinctual intellect that has atrophied in the mind of the mass public.
To give an example of public perception management and how it exerts narrative control over the mass public, one needs to go no further than to listen to an Irish Times journalist discussing migrant crime in Ireland on national radio. On the programme, he criticises the reportage by The Times Ireland of the nationality of a group of scammers based in Dublin:
“I have to take issue with the headline, because the headline reads ‘Bank of Ireland Text Scam "Run from Dublin by Nigerians"’. Now I think the actual nationality of the people running the scam is entirely irrelevant. Doesn't really matter where the criminals are from, they're based in Ireland, and they're criminals, end of story. Where they are from is irrelevant.”
What is relevant here is that The Times Ireland is a new newspaper within Irish media, and has a slightly different editorial line to that of the Irish Times or the Irish Independent. Its matter-of-fact headline clearly ruffled feathers by breaking an unwritten rule: willfully omitting the nationality of certain criminals. According to this journalist, the only relevant factor is criminality, not nationality. One should suppose, then, that if he were to be contacted by a Nigerian prince in urgent need of financial help, what would be relevant to him is the man’s nobility and not his nationality—end of story.
That segment alone should be enough to suggest that both the national broadcaster and the ‘newspaper of record’ are in agreement over how the narrative should be controlled. It is an instance of them signal jamming people’s healthy instincts against falling prey to criminality by forming specifics about the perpetrators. For some reason, the act of grouping together criminals on the basis of nationality is verboten, but the act of grouping all men together on the basis of sex is encouraged. From this interview, it becomes clear that Irish officialdom is policing itself for thought crime and ideological heresy, with The Times Ireland coming under fire for its transgression. This policing is done because if one of them breaks ranks through honest reporting, then the others may be questioned about their journalistic duty, and be forced to explain their selective reporting.
It is becoming clear that the purpose of public perception management is to signal jam our instincts and intuitions, as was seen with the Irish Time’s reaction to Nigerian text scams. It was also to be seen with An Garda Síochána’s omission of a physical description for the murder suspect in the Ashling Murphy case, whilst fully reporting descriptions of complexion and height for a criminal suspect in a recent but seperate crime, who appears to be Irish. The phenomenon of public perception management is one which requires a vocabulary to disarm. A vocabulary which should be as neutral and descriptive as possible. Neutral descriptions give dissidents the concepts, words and terms to identify and verbalise the regime’s machinations without revealing their own political values. One problem we face as dissidents is a problem of language, of its adequacy and accuracy in describing what we are faced with. In order to disrupt the telecommunicative social hierarchy, dissidents will simply have to become better at articulation and demystification.
Dissidents need to cultivate a way of life that is capable of addressing the social decay that is propagated by oligarchical Progressivism, and to offer it as a positive alternative to those who grow disillusioned within the telecommunicative social hierarchy. The failures of Progressivism will continue to be either positively spun or politically ignored. It seems that the world of politics is impossibly far from being able to criticise such things as the atomising and impersonal nature of Modernity. If the saying that ‘politics is downstream from culture’ holds water, then we should adjust our focus to conserving and promoting those aspects of our culture that are still vital. If one breaks from narrative control, the imperative is to build a philosophy of life in the face of technological Modernity, one which is capable of transcending it.