Every day in my article
comments and social media I get people warning me that this or that journalist,
activist or politician is “controlled opposition”, meaning someone who pretends
to oppose the establishment while covertly serving it. These warnings usually
come after I’ve shared or written about something a dissident figure has said
or done, and are usually accompanied by an admonishment not to ever do so again
lest I spread their malign influence. If you’ve been involved in any kind of
anti-establishment activism for any length of time, you’ve probably encountered
this yourself.
Paranoia pervades dissident circles of all sorts, and it’s not
entirely without merit, since establishment infiltration of political movements
is the norm, not the exception. This article by Truthout documents
multiple instances in which movements like the 1968 Chicago DNC protest and
Peter Camejo’s 1976 anti-establishment presidential campaign were so heavily
infiltrated by opaque government agencies that one out of every six people
involved in them were secretly working for the feds. This trend of infiltration
is known to have continued into the current day with movements like Occupy and Black Lives Matter, and we’d be ignorant not to
assume that this has been at least as rampant in online circles where people
organize and disseminate ideas and information.
So it’s understandable that people are extremely vigilant about
prominent figures in dissident circles, and it’s understandable that people
feel paranoid. Over and over again we see shining anti-establishment movements
fizzle or rendered impotent, often seemingly with the help of people we once
trusted, and it’s hard not to get frustrated and become suspicious of anyone
who starts shining bright in antiwar, leftist, or other dissident circles.
The trouble with this paranoia and suspicion is that it doesn’t
seem to function with any kind of intelligence. I have received such
“controlled opposition” warnings about pretty much every prominent dissident
figure in the English-speaking world at one time or another, and if I believed
them all there’d be no one in the world whose words I could share or write
about, including my own. I myself have been accused at different times of being
a “plant” for the CIA, the Russians, Assad, the Chinese Communist Party, the
Iranian mullahs, the alt-right, Trump, Pyongyang, and the Palestinians, which
if all true would make me a very busy girl indeed. Since I know I’m not a plant
for anybody, I know for myself that such accusations don’t come from a place of
insight with any degree of reliability, and I’ve therefore had to find my own
way to navigate this confusing landscape.
So since I know that
infiltration and manipulation happens, but I don’t find other people’s
whisperings about “controlled opposition” useful, how do I figure out who’s
trustworthy and who isn’t? How do I figure out who it’s safe to cite in my work
and who to avoid? How do I separate the fool’s gold from the genuine article?
The shit from the Shinola?
Here is my answer: I don’t.
I spend no mental energy whatsoever concerning myself with who may
or may not be a secret pro-establishment influencer, and for good reason. There’s no way to know for sure if an
individual is secretly scheming to sheep dog the populace into support for the
status quo, and as long as government agencies remain opaque and unaccountable
there will never be a way to know who might be secretly working for them. What
I can know is (A) what I’ve learned about the world, (B) the ways the
political/media class is lying about what I know about the world, and (C) when
someone says something which highlights those lies. I therefore pay attention
solely to the message, and no attention to what may or may not be the hidden
underlying agenda of the messenger.
In other words, if someone
says something which disrupts establishment narratives, I help elevate what
they’re saying in that specific instance. I do this not because I know that the
speaker is legit and uncorrupted, but because their message in that moment is
worthy of elevation. You can navigate the entire political/media landscape in
this way.
Since society is made of narrative and power
ultimately rests in the hands of those who are able to control those
narratives, it makes no sense to fixate on individuals and it makes perfect
sense to focus on narrative. What narratives are being pushed by those in
power? How are those narratives being disrupted, undermined and debunked by
things that are being said by dissident voices? This is the most effective lens
through which to view the battle against the unelected power establishment
which is crushing us all to death, not some childish fixation on who should or
shouldn’t be our hero.
Have no heroes. Trust nobody but your own inner sense-maker. If
someone says something that disrupts establishment narratives based on what you
understand those narratives to be, go ahead and help throw what they’re saying
into the gears of the machine. Don’t make a religion out of it, don’t get
attached to it, just use it as a weapon to attack the narrative matrix.
This by the way is also a
useful lens to look through in spiritual development, if you’re into that sort of thing. When
you enter spiritual circles concerned with enlightenment, you’ll see all sorts
of debates about what teachers are really enlightened and which ones are just
pretending, and these conversations mimic precisely the exact kinds of debates
you’ll see in marginalized political circles about who’s the real deal and
who’s controlled opposition. But the truth is there’s no way to know with
certainty what’s going on in someone else’s head, and the best thing to do is
to stop concerning yourself with who has and has not attained some special
realization or whatever and just focus on what they’re saying. If a spiritual
teacher says something which helps you notice something you’d never noticed
before about consciousness or perception, then use what they said and maybe
stick around to see if they have anything else useful to say. If not, move on.
There’s no reason to worry
about what journalists, activists and politicians are coming from a place of
authenticity if you know yourself to be coming from a place of authenticity. As
you learn more about the world and get better at distinguishing fact from narrative, you will get
better and better at seeing the narrative matrix clearly, and you’ll come to
see all the things that are being said about what’s going on in the world as
weapons in the battle of narrative control. Pick up whatever weapons seem
useful to you and use them in whatever ways they’ll be useful, without wasting
energy concerning yourself with the individuals who created them. Call the
bullshit what it is and use the truth for what it is.
Or maybe I’m fulla shit!
Maybe I myself am being paid to say these things by some powerful influencer;
you can’t know for sure. All you can know is what’s useful for you. If you
really find it useful to try and organize individual dissident figures into “hero”
and “controlled opposition” boxes, if that genuinely helps you take apart the
system that’s hurting us all, you’d know that better than I would. But if you
find what I’m saying here useful, pick it up and add it to your toolbox.