Bullshit Blowback

The latest crisis in Georgia is an example of Western "elites" building echo chambers feeding them their own delusions

After the predictably catastrophic proxy war in Ukraine and the West’s open and obstinate complicity in Israel’s Gaza Genocide, we must – if we want to maintain our own sanity – accept as an empirical fact that, as a whole, Western “elites,” across their feeding domains of politics, the economy, culture (broadly understood), and the mainstream media, have no human compassion or moral constraints (an ethical issue). And at the same time and compounding the effect, they are also incapable of being restrained by foresight and caution simply with a view to their own success or failure. In short, they are not only vicious but irrational, too (a cognitive debility).

Instead of rationality, they display a consistent pattern of being delusional with hubris, constantly overestimating their own standing and capacities, mistaking their wishes for reality, and, in general, misreading the global room we call humanity. Clearly, a complete theory of this epidemic of Western “elite” delusion is beyond a short essay. There is no doubt that is has something to do with having had it too easy for too long while wielding too much power far too easily: Hegemonitis, as some observers have aptly called this syndrome.

But that is a general explanation. Regarding more specific features, there are, of course, many. Yet there is one factor I would like to highlight because it is usually overlooked: Bullshit Blowback. Its essence is not complicated: Post-Cold War Western “elites” – to restrict a longer history to its latest distinct phase – have spent a third of a century on fostering a specific type of echo chamber playing back to them their own hubris and ignorant prejudices about the “rest” (i.e., most) of the world.

But before we address the self-inflicted cognitive debility of Bullshit Blowback, it is important not to lose sight of the other side of Western “elite” destructiveness, already mentioned above, namely their abysmal moral failure: In the West, we live with, and under, establishments and leaders that feel no discomfort when inflicting enormous suffering on their fellow human beings. They either are or mimic psychopaths in that their behavior shows no signs of ordinary empathy.

It is, if you wish, the defining quality of “Genocide” Joe Biden and Antony “Butcher” Blinken that they stay the course – yes, that’s what they are doing; the rest is theater – no matter how many pictures of Palestinian children with their faces and limbs torn off we all have seen. Likewise, German chancellor Olaf Scholz will publicly fantasize about how the last months – of an Israeli genocide that his government has supported with a fervor second only to that of the USA – show how the surviving Palestinian victims must learn to live with the Israeli perpetrators.

That is not “tone deaf,” but something entirely different. Scholz is using his well-honed “automaton” image to conceal and get a free pass on something much worse than being a little stiff and gauche: For him, Palestinians are not entitled to having ordinary human reactions to the immense suffering and horrendous injustices that Israel has inflicted on them. But if you deny other human beings the elementary right to own their pain and resist and rightly abhor those who cause it, then you are denying their humanity itself, because you are treating them, literally, as if they were inanimate, insensitive things: It is things that can be broken time and again, and still be pushed around.

Now, what about the cognitive debility and the role that Bullshit Blowback is playing in it? Let’s summarize, once more, the results of one of its main outcomes, the proxy war in Ukraine. Remember, that’s the one that was supposed to ruin Russia, bring Ukraine into NATO, and reinvigorate the West? Here’s what it has done in reality: Russia will defeat Ukraine and the West, Ukraine will not enter NATO and will be lucky if it survives as a rump state that has had neutrality forced on it (all at horrendous cost in lives, things, and territory, of course) instead of choosing and exploiting it for advantages with the West and Russia.

Russia, meanwhile, is emerging stronger than ever since the end of the Soviet Union; the West has been revealed as weaker than Moscow or anyone else is likely to have guessed before 2022; the West’s loud and primitive attempt to isolate Russia internationally has only accelerated Russia’s rise as one important de facto champion of the “rest” (that is, most) of the world, and, last but not least, China and Russia have built – or rather, cemented – a Eurasian de facto alliance that has the potential to make America ordinary – and very dispensable – again.

And all of the above is the optimistic scenario. No, really. Because the pessimistic (and all too realistic one) is escalation to World War Three, more likely with than without nuclear weapons.

So much for what we can observe – in just one, if particularly prominent, case of a classical West-high-on-itself fiasco. We are, of course, lucky that a morally monstrous (yes, that’s the word, no hyperbole) West is also, it turns out, stupid. Imagine so much viciousness and brains, too. Yet why are Western elites so deluded? How can we explain their extremely, unusually disturbed relationship with reality? An arrogance fostered over generations by roughly 500 years of exploiting the “rest” still plays an important role. But since that is a long-term phenomenon – albeit one that is nearing the end of its end now – it cannot explain the peak stupidity we are witnessing right now.

There is, in addition, the highly infectious mental disease – with its ground zero in 1970s/80s America – of neoconservatism (Or neoconism? After all, we usually say “Nazism” not “National Socialism”). Its victims – and they include many who don’t know they are afflicted – notoriously hallucinate that they have left the “reality-based community,” and they have. Except, reality does not care. Sheer ignorance also helps. German Foreign Minister Annalena “360 Degrees” Baerbock may be an extreme example of that factor at work, but she is not alone.

Yet there also is Bullshit Blowback, the West’s creating and operating a system of echo chambers that provide constant delusion feedback from the periphery to the center. For the usual location of these echo chambers is on the dependent margins, for instance in Georgia or Ukraine. Societies, in other words, that are far enough removed from the reality of life in the West as it really is – call that real-existing neo-liberalism, if you wish – to still idealize it.

But more important than the situation of these countries as a whole is that of their local urban, mostly middle-class-and-up “elites,” or at least parts of them. Let’s call them Bullshit Blowback partners: They are crucial to the phenomenon of Bullshit Blowback and must have certain qualities. First, a substantial share must be able to speak English reasonably well (the West is lazy and needs its self-importance feedback in its own lingua franca). Second, they must be able to fluently reproduce cultural codes with which Western “elites” feel comfortable. Next time you read a Washington Post or New York Times article gushing about young “activists” in “civil society” in Tbilisi or Kiev, for instance, note the background: often enough it’s the type of coffee shop or hip restaurant the correspondent knows from home, or, at least, a nice enough copy. Sometimes a club or exhibition will also do.

Third, and most importantly, to serve well, Bullshit Blowback partners also must flatter, preferably, it is true, out of sincere if misguided conviction (it’s just the purest kick) but pretending will do as well in the encounter between the Western Bullshit Blowback consumer and the local partner. Yes, that simple, that crude. The West, whose highest compliment to any place is to call it the current capital of itself (aka the so-called “free world” or, a parochial variant, simply “Europe”), loves to hear, again and again and then some more, how good and superior it is. Its elites have an insatiable appetite for rather unsubtle adulation, not unlike, in that respect, those of traditional colonial empires basking in the glory of their self-assigned “civilizing missions.” There has always been opportunity in telling the masters what they want to hear – in particular about themselves.

The interactions produced in the unequal but intense relationship between Western “elites” out for their next fix of Bullshit Blowback and their partners on the side of the dependent peripheries are, of course, polymorphous. So much so that attempting a full taxonomy would not be useful. But we can learn much from concrete examples.

Take, for instance, the current conflict – hopefully abating – over, in essence, an NGO transparency law in Georgia. Much attention has been paid – and rightly so – to the brazen interference by various Western, in this case especially EU, politicians in the country’s domestic politics. Germany’s Michael Roth, Lithuania’s Gabrielius Landsbergis, and Estonia’s Margus Tsahkna (to name only a few) think it’s perfectly normal to join and incite demonstrations in another state’s capital.

And not a state that is some kind of tyranny. Georgia has a legitimate, elected government. It may not be a perfect democracy, but the leader of the Western pack, the USA, is, at best, and increasingly authoritarian oligarchy, while its EU sidekick is infamous for its built-in and well-maintained “democracy deficit.”  The controversial law Georgia’s government tried to pass is legal. Period. As with every law, the citizens of the country it is made in have a right to protest against it. How that government and those citizens then come to terms is for them to figure out. But no foreign state has any right to join the protests. Neither does a supra-state run by unelected bureaucrats, i.e. the EU. So much is obvious. Or should be.

But what about the protesters who see nothing wrong with receiving that sort of outside support? Do they not have “agency”? Is their only responsibility toward their own protest, come what may? Do they not have an obligation to actually – as citizens that they aspire to be – draw a line against arrogantly meddling foreigners? How is it correct to complain about a “Russian Law” (it is not, by the way), that is a perceived foreign influence, but invite and reward foreigners from other countries when they join the protest’s side and thus disrespect both Georgia’s sovereignty and those Georgians who do not support the protests? Spoiler alert: it is not.

Accepting this degree of outside support and thus influence in a conflict inside your country is wrong, wherever it comes from, because it degrades your own society’s ability to come to its own answers to its own questions. When you do it, you create a rift between yourself and your fellow-citizens because you display – if you understand it or not – fundamental disrespect for them, treating them as lesser members of the community because they are less aligned with the foreigners you feel comfortable aligning with. You are, in short, selling them out, and again, it does not matter if you can look that rather ugly fact in the face or not. What matters is that they can – and will – see it. That is a path that leads nowhere good. In the worst case, to separatism and civil war. Don’t believe it? Look at Ukraine.

But what even the critics of such dishonest and self-defeating strategies do not pay enough attention to is another effect: The prancing Western politicos high on their latest “color revolution” trip (a historic city center preferably in winter, after dark, or well-fumigated by the smell of burning tires and a touch of tear gas; enthusiastic crowds who don’t know any better, wrapped in mass-distributed EU flags; a  speech giving you that “Kennedy in West Berlin” high; a brave march when you know you would never be touched by the police because that would be a scandal – you know the drill…) are not merely annoying. Unbeknownst to them, they are also very symptomatic. For having its own bullshit about its own “value”-“garden” superiority echoed back to it by those too inexperienced or dependent to know better is one way in which the West has made itself so very, very stupid.