Power is a consensual hallucination running on a substrate of real and irreducible anarchy — that’s what fascism at its most intelligent understands, and its why fascists tend to win. People are humans, humans are gregarious hierarchical apes with hardwired paleolithic morality,
and most of them like to be told what to do. Even more, they like other people being told what to do. The more things come unstrung, the more precious power will seem, from the majority perspective, since it promises that something can be done —
in a way that ordinary people understand (deliberately, charismatically, and in keeping with ape-band intuitions of ‘justice’). As the situation gets more desperate, the masses will become even easier to manipulate,
and the mesmerists will get ever better at what they do, which is to deepen popular delusion. Dysfunction deepens dependency, which exacerbates dysfunction.
Eventually cybernetics achieves what politics cannot, as runaway dynamics propel the collective power-dream into catastrophe, complicated by unintelligible things slanting in from outside. Then it gets really interesting …
Nick Land, On Power
Nick Land, On Power
