“The intellect … develops its principal strengths in dissimulation, for this is how weaker, less robust individuals preserve themselves, it being denied to them to wage the battle of existence with the horns or sharp fangs of a beast of prey. This art of dissimulation reaches its peak in man: here deception, flattery, lying and cheating, talking behind the backs of others, keeping up appearances, living in borrowed splendour, donning masks, the shroud of convention, playacting before others and before oneself—in short, the continual fluttering around the flame of vanity is so much the rule and the law that virtually nothing is as incomprehensible as how an honest and pure drive to truth could have arisen among men.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in the Nonmoral Sense (1873).
Not too long ago, after Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the 2024 presidential race, the Exhibitionist Despondency Olympics kicked off. Having long denied themselves the feeling of shame, even while having succumbed for ages to deeply shameful antics, myriad disappointed liberals recorded themselves weeping, crying, and screaming when confronted with their loss.
Simulacrum archeologists of the future might, like many of us now, look back at this with a wry smile and consider the strange ease with which people can surrender themselves to public self-abasement. Ted Kaczynski famously observed that masochism is built into contemporary leftism, and here we had a prime example of how this masochism might play out.
The contorted countenances of libtards were not the manifestation of much deep feeling, however. I mean the kind of feeling that might give rise to self-examination. The time between then and now has shown this. Typically, there was an odd mismatch between the emotion emitted and the expressions on their faces. Those shrieking masks did not reveal the existential angst I’ve seen in the aftermath of real-life troubles experienced by people I know—people who have seen their hermeneutical anticipations skewered by reality. In those pixellated videos, there were just so many performed emotions. It is a dangerous thing, it seems to me, to identify too strongly with the mask you are wearing. It is a dangerous thing to become a mere simulated self.
A friend of mine on X asked why people publish TikTok videos of themselves in various states of apparent distress, and my response was that it was probably because such people don’t know how to feel anymore—how to really feel. At least, this seemed true of the many examples of unhinged charlatan grief I witnessed. There was no inwardness to it. There was only emoting, as faces became emojis concealing—well, nothing. In one rant by John Oliver—he was ranting, as is his wont, over the way Donald Trump had made good on his promises—I saw the same strange display of rage without real rage. Rageless rage. Decaffeinated rage. I didn’t mean to watch John Oliver, mind you. I try to avoid him like the plague. Unfortunately, someone else included a clip of one of his meltdowns in their analysis of certain contemporary political happenings.
When fake emotion is taken up by a similarly unfeeling and always-emoji-ing audience, the resulting tsunami of fake emotion, validated by an invisible mob of viewers, is enough to convince any emotionalist that they’re alive. Outwardly, they are whitewashed tombs while inwardly being decaying corpses. I don’t mean that they can’t be resurrected, only that they have sacrificed themselves to idols and reaped the rewards of that misstep.
The effect of confirmed fake emotion implies a valid cause even if there isn’t one. The surface becomes a substitute for substance, just as a placebo substitutes a cure. To have substance, you need inwardness.
In this attempt to perpetuate and confirm upset, I’ve noticed the distinct presence, in many cases, of dissociation. It’s almost like a psychotic break. Participants in the 2024 Attitudiniser Panic Olympics were not confronting the deeper reality, the truth of what they lost, or even the truth of what they had gained. Emotion became a flight from feeling. They denied, by their manic gesturing and demoniac impersonations, the fact that the political information complex has been so absolutely, obviously wrong; it has provided only a steady stream of lies.
It wasn’t Harris who lost the presidential race, it was legacy media. It wasn’t leftism as a coherent political ideology that lost—because there was never such thing—but leftism as an addiction to self-declaration-by-clichés. Leftism as it once was, incoherent but at least clear on its aims, no longer exists as a web of ideas but rather as a way of curating identities through a deep commitment to fiction.
Anyway, the whining Olympians were still, and maybe they still are, operating at the level of the simulacrum, unable to come to terms with the deep story. I saw people, including some of the more astute people on the losing team, commenting on the fact that far too many liberals have offered only false explanations for their loss. But these were not the only reactions, or even the main reactions, from American leftists. And it seems that many more are intent on living the dream, which amounts to living in a nightmare.
Conspiracy theories suddenly veered leftward. Even as libs lied about their feelings by generating the semiotic equivalent of an emotional contagion, they resorted to rhetorical coping and seething. They reenacted variations on the Principle Skinner meme. Instead of coming to terms with how wrong they’ve been on concrete realities, they concluded that everyone who voted for Trump must be ‘crazy’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘a nazi,’ ‘racist’, ‘garbage’, and the rest. This coping strategy has never worked, but certain defaults are difficult to uproot. They firmly believe that they hold their views as individuals, not as dupes of propaganda. Ordinary Americans are, quite understandably, sick of this, as are those of us who don’t live in America but have been similarly subjected to the products of the liberal sewerage production plant that is the American media engine. The leftist simulacrum has been crumbling for some time already, but we have just witnessed proof of a desire that many of us have. We want a total simulacrum implosion.
Despite not being an American, I have skin in this game. As my own country, South Africa, clings to its own brand of insane propaganda, I see in America—I mean, in what I can see of America from where I am via the devil’s electric nervous system—the dim hope that perhaps the propaganda can lose its grip and be robbed of its power. If the propaganda machine here in my country fails sufficiently, we stand an actual chance of avoiding full-blown communism. It is a dim hope. There’s no telling just yet which way things will go.
Anyway, in this vein, although it will seem a leap from what I’ve written so far, I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently, even before all this happened, about an aspect of the animated movie Madagascar (2005), the seriousness of which is often missed because it is played for laughs. In that film, as you probably don’t need to be reminded, we meet the rather pathetic, narcissistic celebrity character: Alex the Lion. He lives in an entirely artificial environment called a zoo. In this zoo, he gets to eat a tasty substance called ‘meat’. He doesn’t know where ‘meat’ comes from. He doesn’t know anything more about it than that he likes to eat it. As the story moves on, through a series of improbable events, Alex and some of his herbivorous friends end up in Madagascar. The artificial is replaced by the natural. And, without the guardrails of artificiality, Alex discovers that the substance he called ‘meat’ is the result of the killing of animals. The truth becomes undeniable. He cannot escape it. His best friend, Marty, a zebra, starts to look very tasty indeed to Alex. Shenanigans ensue.
We have in that zoo and the land of Madagascar two decent examples of what sociologists, after Peter Berger, refer to as plausibility structures. Plausibility structures are the realities—social frameworks and environmental factors especially—that make certain beliefs plausible to people in a society. They are created and maintained through social interactions, institutions, and cultural norms, supported by specific material conditions, like the presence of legacy media. Alex the Lion, in my chosen example, believes what he does about meat because of the plausibility structure called a zoo. The zoo, as a plausibility structure, conditions and informs what he regards as important, valuable, understandable, and the like. Later, he believes that meat comes from prey because of a different, better, truer, plausibility structure called Madagascar.
As Berger clarifies in his book In Praise of Doubt, the fact that plausibility structures contribute towards what he and Thomas Luckmann (regrettably) called the “social construction of reality” doesn’t mean that our perceptions of reality are merely and in every case fictional; rather, they always require interpretation. Read Hans-Georg Gadamer. Interpretation is inescapable. And yes, it’s important to know that sometimes we interpret things wrongly because of how our mimetically reinforced plausibility structures filter reality. They can help us to see the truth, certainly, but they can also hinder.
Keep in mind, then, that plausibility and truth are not the same thing. At the extremes, something untrue may seem plausible while something true may seem implausible. Also, when one simulacrum collapses, this by no means implies that the opposite system of beliefs is any less unreal. It just implies that, under current conditions, the opposite system of beliefs is more plausible. Given that our beliefs require various conditions of possibility (i.e. various supporting conditions), some societies can encourage beliefs in outright lies while others might encourage the pursuit of truth. I find this idea fascinating, even essential to consider. After all, it reminds us that an unpersuasive truth is likely to remain unrecognised.
To a certain extent, I think it is like truth to be naturally persuasive if we just give it the time of day. But, as I’ve suggested, the dominant plausibility structure we all live in and with—typically invisible to us, typically overlooked—is now essentially artificial. Our proneness, no matter our political predilections, is to adopt a simulacrum against the truth. The degree to which we can filter out reality now and the sheer scale of our reality-scapegoating is nothing short of astonishing. Illusions are so pervasive that they provide significant pressure to believe them. Truth is screened out, and so the usual pressure truth supplies is not so easily felt.
Remember: legacy media outlets rendered it implausible that Trump would become the US president in 2016—and yet, he won. In 2024, the same legacy media outlets again tried to render it implausible that Trump would become the US president—and yet, again, he won. Only this time, as a reminder that time has indeed moved forward and not merely reverted to a previous state, Trump didn’t just barely win but was undeniably triumphant.
Looking at the American election map of 2024, keeping in mind the population distribution discrepancies, we learned that using only state lines to indicate ‘Red America’ is utterly misleading. Red America is most of America, not even by just a little bit. And so the story that we were just looking at the spread of a tiny ‘basket of deplorables’ is no longer even remotely believable to anyone with enough integrity to think for longer than a few seconds. There are no blue states, just several blue cities telling everyone—not just Americans but anyone exposed to their or similar media—what to think and how to live. And of course, the blue cities are the most artificial worlds of all. This doesn’t inherently redeem Red America, but it does suggest that the people more likely to be in touch with the real are precisely those whose lives are less confined to artificiality. Spending less time online seems to have the wonderful side-effect of encouraging disbelief in a bothersome plausibility structure that lives by likes, shares, and subscribes.
And what we’ve seen now, echoed in the millions of angry-teary-twisted faces of masochistic libtard performance artists, is the fact that almost all attempts at leftist narrative control, which all of us have had in bucketloads, are failing. Over the last decade, it has become evident to more and more people that public relations, since its inception at the hands of Edward Bernays over a century ago, has always been about plausibility management. Yes, PR is plausibility management. Recently, though, and now especially, we’ve started to be able to imagine a world in which plausibility management doesn’t work as well as it used to because the truth, albeit still filtered, keeps showing up when it gets sidelined or squashed by PR people.
Sociologists like Berger and philosophers like Charles Taylor suggest that one of the defining features of modernity is that our given plausibility structures are easily relativised, challenged, and even overthrown. Everyone gets—if you’ll excuse my verbifying of the anime notion—‘isekaied’ by modernity. It is unlikely, probably impossible, that you will live your life without having your beliefs called into question as your given plausibility structures get constantly overhauled.
One redefinition of this phenomenon is to refer to it as postmodernity, which most take to mean that truth is entirely relative. But what we are seeing in the relativising of plausibility structures is something else. Most of us who live in the real world most of the time notice this because we haven’t been pampered. We notice the way that truth keeps showing up despite the apparent flimsiness of plausibility structures. It’s not that truth is relative but that everything is relative to truth. Truth doesn’t change, even when the world becomes complicated. Truth is the ultimate relativising force: it keeps inserting itself into our lives until our plausibility structures fail.
Maybe you can already see where I’m going with this, but let me spell it out. If you love truth, if you desire to let the world be made in conformity with the truth rather than merely with the latest mimetic vibe, this is one of the jobs you can do. I take it as my job, and it’s at least part of the reason I write. It is not enough to merely respond to ‘misinformation’ with ‘correct information.’ The very label ‘misinformation’ is just more propaganda. What is needed is a full-scale, unending assault on bad plausibility structures. The thinkers I have most admired, people like GK Chesterton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Simone Weil, Martin Heidegger, CS Lewis, Hajime Tanabe, Marshall McLuhan, and René Girard, among others, are those who have made every effort to not just point out what’s in any picture we are looking at but to point at and critique the frame itself.
We may take wrong turns and make mistakes in this critique of plausibility structures. We may sound like postmodernists at times. We will certainly be accused of anarchism because, of course, what I am proposing is anarchic, even if I have Jünger’s Anarch in mind rather than a standard anarchist. Perhaps some anarchy is needed, if only for a moment or two. But we have seen—those of us who have been more than usually awake, at least—that totalitarianism is not just likely but inevitable when plausibility structures are too easily believed. We have seen the political left veer repeatedly into a totalitarian drift, with its calls for censorship and harsher punishments for petty grievances, as more and more its focus has been on power and not on truth.
So we have to get good at noticing the conditions that make any given belief plausible, including those of our own beliefs. Like Dom Cobb speaking to Robert Fisher in that famous scene in a café in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, we need to point to those conditions around us that make the dream seem real. We have to be able to speak in as reasonable a way as possible, gently, with nuance and attention to complexity, and without losing sight of what is true, about what is right, what is good, commendable, and holy. Then, perhaps, those around us may realise that they have been living within a plausibility structure that is, in its very essence, a dream. Have you noticed that the cross-pressures of our time make belief in the transcendent more possible? Have you seen that the insistence of exhibition in our time de-naturalises actuality and favours potentiality, making room for turning ourselves into our own advertising objects? Have you noticed that so much of what we have learned about history has been heavily mythologised around easy scapegoats? What’s happening beyond the obvious that may make the obvious less plausible?
We will have to be attentive to training our attention in this way and allow us to question whatever needs to be questioned—questioned, not just mocked or dismantled, in leftist fashion—to figure out what’s shaping our perceptions. We will need to learn what things in our world render our own beliefs plausible. We will need to interrogate ourselves. We’ll need to be brutally honest.
I think of a recent news story—a shocking, sad, terrible story—about a pit bull dog mauling a baby to death in Ohio. The baby’s grieving mother said, “I will never understand why.” But most of us do understand why. You can try to be kind and loving, and you can try to create the best possible environment for the pit bull to grow into a kind, loving creature. But you cannot change its nature. You cannot undo generations of genetic manipulation, which have turned those dogs into fighting, hunting, killing machines. The plausibility structure you have built might convince you that the dog just snapped one day, but this is untrue. It is the destiny of pit bulls to do what they were bred to do. And in this, there is a terrible parable: if you will not critique flimsy plausibility structures, reality will strike with unbearable ferocity. In the long term, brutal honesty is better than brutality.
There is, I believe, no time like the present to shift the Overton Window back to focusing on what is most foundational, what is most real, and what is most supportive of a life of deep flourishing. Any victory on the side of the truth can only mean that there is more work to be done. I say this because I do not believe for a second that substituting legacy media with a platform like X or Substack is really the answer. I don’t doubt that we cannot—in fact, we should not— immanentise the eschaton. We cannot have perfection, but we can still strive towards it. I also don’t doubt that what the world needs now, as I have said, is a total simulacrum implosion. Every single lie needs to die so that the main distinctions might be not between the political right and the political left but between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between a life that is meaningful or meaningless, and between virtue and immorality. The main distinctions will not be political but metaphysical. And only those who love truth stand any chance of achieving the kind of integrity that has made great men great.