The Covid Inception

In the 2010 Christopher Nolan film, Inception, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character asks the question: 

“What is the most resilient parasite? Bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? Or is it an idea - resilient and highly contagious? Once an idea has taken hold of the mind it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea, fully formed and understood sticks, right here. Such an idea can grow to define you or destroy you.”

The film Inception chronicles the endeavors of Dominic Cobb (DiCaprio) a unique type of professional thief who steals information by infiltrating the subconscious mind of his targets without their awareness. In the film Cobb and his team of lucid dreamers are hired to plant an idea into the subconscious mind of a business rival of their employer, Mr Saito (Ken Watanabe). The implanted idea is ruinous to the victim’s own interests but if it is planted with sufficient skill, he will take it as his own and it will eventually come to define him. The movie’s plot rests on the notion that skilled manipulators can consciously enter other people’s dreams and steal their secrets or implant ideas. Of course, its just a Hollywood film and we all know such things cannot really happen any more than the minds of fully conscious people could be taken over and manipulated by external agents. Imagine that.

80 years before Nolan released inception the godfather of modern Public Relations, Edward Bernays, had already concluded that something close to inception was possible. Bernays was part of the Committee for Public Information which was a propaganda agency that had been set up by Woodrow Wilson to enlist public support for America's participation in WWI. During his time on that committee Bernays came to realise that society functioned by way of an intelligent minority influencing an unsophisticated majority in systematic ways using specific tools. He came to believe that “It is possible to regiment the mind of the public every bit as much as an army regiments their bodies.”

In his 1928 book, Propaganda, Bernays wrote,

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...''

Between the two wars, Bernays became a guru of the advertising industry where his greatest achievement was breaking down traditional taboos and getting women to smoke (what a guy). In time Bernays came to consider television as the one of the most effective tools available for the conscious manipulation of the masses. This is because television (and film) provides so much engagement for so little effort on the part of the subject. The Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan agreed but took things a step further by claiming "the medium is the message”. McLuhan’s idea was that communications media affect society not just by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. And the defining feature of film and television is passive consumption, or more generally, passivity. McLuhan never lived to see social media but if he did, he would likely have understood it to be an extension of the film and television paradigm, only this time as a form of isolated passivity.

In the film Inception, the target victim, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), is the young heir to a business empire that Mr Saito wants broken up. Cobb and his team have been tasked with implanting the idea of breaking up his father’s empire into Fischer’s mind. This requires Fischer to be heavily sedated so an elaborate plan to achieve this is concocted. As the story evolves, we find that Fischer’s mind has been militarized to defend against incursions of the kind Cobb and his team are trying to perpetrate. Upon entering Fischer’s dream, various unexpected events confront the assailants which almost derail their project. A locomotive appears out of nowhere charging down a city street, nearly killing them; gangs of gunmen pursue them through different dream layers. Cobb’s team manage to avoid these dangers by alerting Fischer to the fact that he is in a dream. They tell him that they are there to protect him and that the way to avoid his captors is to agree to enter into another dream with them, a dream within a dream.

Through this layering process they present the ‘implant idea’ to Fischer in both positive and negative formulations in different tiers of the dream, eventually implanting the simplest and most innocuous version of it at the deepest layer of his consciousness where it takes hold and begins to grow organically. This process is described early in the film when the character Eames (Tom Hardy) explains to Cobb: 

“If you’re going to perform inception, you need imagination. You need the simplest version of an idea - one that will grow naturally in the subject’s mind. It’s a very subtle art.”

Bernays could not have said it better. And this is exactly what has been done to us over the past six months:

• First, our televisions and social media feeds drove a mortal fear of coronavirus into our subconscious minds through exaggeration and misinformation, triggering a collective hysteria.
• Then a barrage of ‘experts’ numbed our conscious minds with conflicting statistics and medical information beyond the critical appraisal of the average citizen.
• Lastly, came the implant idea - masked as medical advice and dispensed under ‘doctors orders’: total submission to authority.

This is how an idea, absolutely ruinous to our future, gets to take hold of our collective consciousness. The implant process has been particularly brutal for us because it had to be performed while we were awake. To ensure it worked we had to be given shock treatment. All public gatherings, sports and entertainment were cancelled. Travel was banned. People were placed under house arrest and subjected to a media blitzkrieg. Social contact was severely curtailed or outright prohibited. Schools and workplaces were closed, and we were all anesthetized with a flood of government cash. Frightened and alone we relied on the media for information. What we got was misinformation and sensationalism together with pre-packaged memes about the “new normal” and “we’re all in this together” as well as injunctions like “trust the science” and “follow the rules”. All of it delivered with hypnotic repetition.

While this psychological operation was being perpetrated against us, a small coterie of Tech, Pharma and Finance firms led by the World Economic Forum were busy pulling off an economic coup d’état. Just listen to Klauss Schwab making the formal announcement (here).

“The changes we have already seen in response to COVID-19 prove that a reset of our economic and social foundations is possible…the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.”

When owners of the world tell you that they are resetting society, you better believe them. According to Schwab the 4th Industrial Revolution is upon us and this is what it looks like: millions out of work, 100’s of thousands of business shut down by government edict, mandatory vaccines for all, digital surveillance of everyone and representative governments pushed to the brink of bankruptcy. What was once extreme has now become mainstream. It’s not a pretty picture but it rapidly becoming normalized.

Amidst all the carnage resulting from this radical reordering of society we are supplied with upbeat messages about how there is a technology solution for almost every problem: vaccines in lieu of treatments, Zoom in place of travel, Amazon rather than the high street, Uber Eats as a substitute for dining out, edu-tech instead of schools, and privately owned crypto currencies in place of government fiat money. How lucky are we to have all this as our new normal? Who would have thought on New Year’s Eve 2020 that our governments could do what they have done to us and get away with it? But they have. And apparently, most of us are happy with the situation.

Recent polls suggest that roughly 70% of the Australian population believe our leaders have done a good job (perhaps with the exception of the Victorian Premier). For such folk almost any form of government repression is acceptable if it protects us from the dreaded covid menace: social distancing, forced isolation, business and school closures, mass unemployment, digital tracking, face masks, vaccines, night time curfews, soldiers on the streets, and who know what next – perhaps personal microchips and home inspections? For the majority of folks, it’s all necessary and it’s all OK. No facts, no information, no reflection, or persuasion will make them think otherwise.

The implanted idea has taken root.

In the movie Inception, Cobb never knows if he’s dreaming or in reality so he relies on a totem to identify which state he is in. His totem is a spinning top which, in a dream, never stops spinning. We don’t need such totems ourselves to determine whether or not we’re living in someone else’s narrative, but we do need some useful heuristics to determine if we are thinking clearly or in the grip of a mania. Some tell-tale signs that you are being played include:

• Engagement of primal emotions 
• A complete loss of perspective
• Solutions with no risk benefit analysis
• Appeals to authority
• Moralizing

Any one of these indicators on their own should be a portend of deception but if you see all of them at once you really ought to “wake in fright”. Of course, we see all of these devices at work in the public narratives around covid, so if you think that you’re somehow being manipulated by all the fear mongering, statistical exaggeration and authoritarian responses to the pandemic, you’re right. You are being manipulated. You’re not living your own narrative but a toxic one, created and fed to you by people who mean to take advantage of you. 

It’s worth noting that Christopher Nolan’s film is in fact a very clever allegory of the whole movie making industry and its ability to implant ideas into people’s minds. Each of the main characters in the film represents one of the key roles in the movie business: producer, production designer, director, actor, and audience. In Nolan’s allegorical structure, Fischer represents the audience. He’s the ‘mark’ who is being implanted.

Inception uses dreams as a metaphor for the narratives that govern our waking lives and in it, Nolan shows how various meta-narratives and sub-narratives combine to create our conscious perceptions. In the film Cobb’s team creates landscapes and environments within which a subject’s dreams can occur but the details are always furnished by the subject themselves with their own projections. This is a critical observation of Nolan’s. Subjects must actively engage with the narrative in order for it to be effective. This creates unpredictability for the interlopers in the movie, but it is also the basis upon which the inception takes hold. It’s the subject’s own projections that make the implanted idea feel like it is organic. This is why ‘controlling the narrative’ is the central maxim of every public relations campaign.

What we have with Inception is yet another example of life imitating art. Perhaps this phenomenon is so common because it is artists who discern the zeitgeist ahead of everyone else. The 4th Industrial Revolution was always coming, and authoritarianism has always been the repressed animus of liberal democracies. Perhaps we should not be surprised that a mis-informed and frightened public should embrace both when the right conditions are created. For those who don’t know or don’t remember, the penultimate scene of Inception depicts Robert Fischer advising his most trusted confidante that he plans to break up his father’s empire and ‘be his own man’ – just as Saito had wanted.

Welcome to your future.