https://i.ibb.co/b5d41HB/jesse.png

Means towards the regimentation of minds are a form of power; and such forms of power that are less explicit or more easily dissimulated include means towards the regimentation of minds.

Obvious power is also obvious targets; there is in many cases an inherent tendency – or an incentive even, if you will – towards such forms of power that are more easily dissimulated, represented as something other than what they are, or otherwise further remoted from explicit awareness in the minds of it’s targets, in relative terms as compared to other forms of power. Similar in a way to how a statue has an ‘incentive’ to be a pile of rubble instead; such being a more stable orientation of it’s molecules, in response to the vagaries of the universe thrown at it over time. An expression of entropic forces in the civilizational sphere, in essence.

Which processes are of course also not without consequence, since all power has a flavor, different forms being more or less given to different ends.

Both proponents and detractors of civilization all face the same problem, which is the coordination problem. In particular here, the construal of social networks and organization that do not suggest themselves to broader perception. Or in more prosaic terms, conspiracies.

The jedi mind trick of ‘multiple independent sources’ who ‘care only for scientific truth’ all just ‘coincidentally’ happening to agree with each other on a single particular set of philosophical prepositions, when of course none of these adjectives are true in reality, is a seminal example of this dynamic. The enforced and self-reinforcing networks of preordained consensus under the guise of ‘spontaneous convergence’.

The world isn’t run by newspapermen or university professors.

The world is run by insiders of a loosely held patronage network spanning intelligence agencies, banks, tech companies (i.e. private intelligence agencies), military contractors, pharmaceutical entities, intergovernmental organizations, and organized crime.

Name them.

Are the consensus manufacturers “king” or are they “faces of power” (of “occulted princes”)?

They can be one or the other but not both.

Which is it, ye Purveyor of Structurally Schizophrenic Ideology?

It’s a parodic Bildungsroman, is what it is. It depicts a failed attempt to become an adult. It asks the right questions and gives the wrong answers — insincerely. Chekhov would say that’s just fine.

At the end of the day, one simply can’t avoid leaving clues, though. Tthe ability to exercise power would not be possible in the first place without at least some kind of interface.

Where decisions are made by consensus, consensus manufacturers are king. Who runs the New York Times? Who runs Ivy League unis? Who spends millions of laundered debtbucks on local county and state DA appointments to stuff the business ends of the governing bureaucracy with politically reliable apparatchiks? These are all faces of power.

Popular governance is an environment where occulted princes destroy open princes, in the name of popular governance.

There are naturally significant differences in the selection mechanisms for what kinds of organisms come to hold power in such environments; what kinds of power, more or less given to what kinds of ends, that predominate, in particular.