The PAX Manifesto
By Harris Pollitt
We are a people who oscillate between two extremes, mania and apathy, our minds wandering, our hearts vacant. Bereft of direction, we watch as our collective attention is fragmented into a myriad of destinations; we must 'buy this, hate that, and repeat’ until numb we roll over, our collective capacity for engagement exhausted, our will spent.
And why not? What is the point in engagement? Why even bother? After all, the world is large, and I am small.
Our people's descent into this nihilism will not be mourned but exalted; there will be no posthumous words told of the decisive battle and forced surrender. Our capitulation was a blissful relinquishing of autonomy—an effortless, painless release from the noise and tumult of choice.
For what is choice when compared to peace and comfort, and why should I care about the answer?
These words came to me while reflecting on a film that crept in during the twilight days of the 20th century, a piece of art whose shadow stretches over all the years of my life, and I now see it reflected grimly before me. I am, of course, talking of the 1999 masterpiece The Matrix, whose seamless blending of theology and trench coats inspired countless aesthetic imitations. Sadly, the most significant imitation is not of style but of form, specifically the form that the human informational environment takes. The Matrix depicts a world in which human beings exist within an environment that is shaped to control them, where all information is meticulously curated to fit a preordained narrative, and where choice is but an illusion. Far from a violent Orwellian boot to the face, this brave new world is defined by tranquillity, a subtle use of force that is barely perceivable yet all-consuming.
The Matrix is not a dystopian fantasy; it is a bleak reflection on how our informational environment can be utilized as a means of control. And it serves as a sadly poignant indictment of the malaise in our political media systems, which we do not control but that determine what we see, think, and, most crucially, feel.
Understanding this phenomenon is simple, with the system very kindly articulated by its architect Walter Lippman. Long before Chomsky climbed aboard Epstein's jet to warn us about wealth inequality and manufactured consent from a more lofty height, Lippmann, in his role as head of the US’ public information committee during WWI, was becoming deeply cynical about his fellow man, or as he lovingly labelled him, the ‘Common Citizen,' and his ability to engage properly in the democratic process. We were too emotionally driven, our thoughts too erratic and fundamentally unable to compute the deviation between our imagined reality and the objective one before us.
We do not react to the world around us but to the world within us; our actions and political engagement are dictated to us our choices made for us. Through this concept of our pseudo-environment, Lippman correctly arrived at the fundamental truth of political engagement: if you control the picture, you control the person, and in a grand demonstration of his paternalistic egalitarianism, he set out to do
exactly that. Forthwith Lippman neatly divided the social fabric into two specific classes: one of elites meant to lead and one of the cattle meant to follow, with a media system designed not to educate but to indoctrinate and bewilder.
Sadly, it is not hard to become similarly despondent about our ability to function within a democracy. Though painful, each one of us is a few taps away from immersion in a community that insists critiquing systemic abuse is tantamount to totalitarianism yet kisses the boot that crushes their fellow citizens' necks and cheer as they see masked men round up their delivery men, their landscapers, their neighbours. All in the name of freedom. Though the loss of critical faculties may seem to be a core component of the mass hysteria that typifies the WWE-style political rallies hosted by the clerics of the far right, this issue does not discriminate based on red or blue. I have watched many an American leftist (if such a thing truly exists) who rightly condemns Bush for causing the deaths of over a million Iraqis yet ignores the bombing of Libya under Obama because “he’s part of my team. Clearly this issue transcends political alignment and points to something more innate within human nature; whether left or right, the appeal of politics is not based in reason but in our desire and our identity.
A tragic irony exists in this: a tendency that unites us all fuels our polarization. The appeal of a synthesized reality is universal, and the media orators of this quagmire continue to play their role as sports pundits, admonishing the other team and its fan base, entrenching the divide. This is not an environment that fosters engagement, nor is it meant to. As our democracies devolve into parlour games, we become spectators, cheering on command and waving our little flags. We are in a fight we aren’t even aware of, and we’re getting our heads kicked in.
In the time since this article commenced, we have witnessed this machine fell yet another political career. As Kier Starmer’s light dwindles and speculation is cast over his successor, I find myself wondering how we are to reconcile his fall. Far from a postmortem of the tenure of Starmer, I believe it is more important for us to reflect on the comfort we all found in tearing him down, because he was, well, boring. He failed to inspire or connect with a narrative that we all crave; we could not bask in the nostalgic promise of Blair's dawn nor feed on the effortless rage of the Lowe-farrage axis. No, instead Starmer's Britain was gray and utilitarian, as John Curtice states, “He does not have a narrative, a story of his long-term objectives, and that is what we needed." There was no exaltation of dawn’s brightness to guide us, and in doing so, Starmer failed to grasp what the English have been craving: belief.
Ironically, Starmer's greatest crime was summed up poignantly as a sneer from across the Atlantic. “He’s no Churchill, is he" said the man in the White House. And he is exactly right. Our nation yearns for a figure to make us believe once again that we can be delivered from our current crisis. Starmer did not give that to us, so we found it elsewhere, allowing a sea of AI videos and foreign interests to wash over our shores and our minds, feeding us the same simple stories of blame we have been craving since we first opted to believe Johnson and Farage over a decade ago.
In that choice we signalled something fatal to our political class: that our consent could be manufactured rather than earned, that public opinion was not to be discovered but created, and that we were willing to cast aside our critical faculties for the protection of an easy narrative. In the coming years this lesson will come back to haunt us, as the billionaire-sponsored rise of the machines is already demonstrating our future will present each of us with countless opportunities to relinquish autonomy in favour of algorithmic comfort. Our contemporary choice now to believe in easy lies will soon evolve into a relinquishing of our hold on information and truth itself, and with truth goes choice.
At PAX, we perceive this danger and are drawing lines against it; it is our conviction that knowledge has an emancipatory capacity that is not the sole right of political, business, or academic elites, but instead knowledge is for the people. Our future is not yet written, and if we wish for it to remain our future, we must become its authors. Our narratives are defined by independence from both trillionaires and data centres alike. We the people shall mandate our future, and our voices shall write our history.
We are PAX.
You are PAX.
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