Dear comms. guy,
I write you in full knowledge that no one besides [Brutus] and myself and the rest of the cabinet is as sensitive, not to mention as frustrated, as you are about a glaring problem that our infant country faces: its nonexistent clarity of purpose.
I cannot begin to tell you all the hours its own executors have spent trying to make sense of the various and often conflicting sets of motives, prejudices, and ideological loyalties that have coagulated under our purview. In addition to being overwhelming personally, it awards untold strategic advantage to the enemy. It would be easy enough if we were merely an immovable object resisting the unstoppable force, but that staid dichotomy is not enough.
Traditional societies instill unity and confidence among its citizens through a reliable set of tools: a just cause, a moral authority to embody it, and eloquence to persuade the multitude of its justness enough to want to sacrifice anything within its reach for it. And none of that is a given if the moral authority lacks visibility and heroism. What I know to be certain is that ours is not a traditional society, it is not moved by any one “cause,” and is not (and should not be) judged by conventional heroic standards. How we are seen—or rather not seen—by all who care to watch should be guided by this reality.
My proposal of a minimalist approach to public engagement will give off notable bad impressions. Primary among them is a distrust of our own citizens, a hesitance toward personal responsibility, and a fear of public scrutiny. And yes, invisibility offers some personal conveniences, but the overall principle still holds.
Our pariah status limits the control we have over information. Often we must try to get ahead of the shoddy, willfully untrue hearsay someone else is distributing at our expense. And certainly we don’t want incidental exposures on our part of potential, not easily dismissed evidence that we don’t know what we’re doing most of the time. We have, then, an internal and an external problem. The internal problem is finding a seamless way to remind the people in our charge that we exist and are here for their benefit and not the other way around. The external problem is in fostering a kind of “mystique” that makes us more foreboding than may actually be the case on the ground.
But a two-pronged problem requires a two-pronged solution. Roughly speaking, the internal demands one of science fiction, the external of horror.
By “science fiction” I don’t mean finally implementing the much-needed improvements to our technical infrastructure that restores wifi access to the 25 percent of people within our borders who don’t have it. Rather I mean the dissemination of information, through all other available means, by way of “automatons.” Not literal robots but the next best thing: willingly compliant talking heads who find no shame in submitting their voice and presence to the thoughts and imperatives of others. People who can be depended upon for succinct, earnest referrals of our party line goods, and scriptwriters of a similar ilk to feed them those goods. I’m not such a believer in the individual spirit to deny that these people cannot be found even here. Scour your networks.
By that measure, the “horror” strategy appears more challenging, but it comes with strong foundations. “Invisibility” is not synonymous with “absence.” In fact it often lends to a heightened presence. The most generous thing I’ve heard about us from the outside is our being a “ghost republic,” not least of all because “republic” is doing so much work by any historical standard of the word. It is wise, I think, to lean into that peculiar notion. We do not live in a society but rather dwell among the land, casting long shadows and suffusing the air with an icy mist of disquietude.
It is the “others” who comprise the elite of the haunted republic. We have clusters of people so isolated, so left to their own devices, that they have assumed customs that are as unique to themselves as they are foreign to their neighbors and the authorities. To the extent that I understand them, they are such places that enemy forces go into any one of them with no hope of coming back out. What fate greets them there is not for me to speculate, and my faculties at the present time offer me no reason to discourage these conditions beyond telling our more polite citizens to politely stay away. A little-acknowledged truth of humanism is that one word distinguishes civilization from barbarism: permission.
So how do we carry ourselves in light of this? Consider the kind of person who can tolerate “subhuman” behavior to the extent that they can confine it and accommodate for it. Assuming you had a normal, rich childhood, you’ve been among them without taking much notice, the knights-errant of our age, the senators and counselors of a fallen species: carnies. People as resourceful and committed to the sustainability of their immediate surroundings as they are off-putting to the people who would deign to enter them.
You might say that carnies come with carnival barkers. But that can’t be conjured overnight, and is only needed to lull those who have not given over to the carnivalesque as we have in the near-term and, if we keep our nerve, may perpetuate in times of peace, conjuring a civic soul out of this republic of ghosts.
And before I forget, in answer to your specific question: no. And I’ve informed the relevant departments that restraint is no object when it comes to documentarians.
[Tiberius]