The Deep State

Is there a deep state, and if so, what are its politics?

You all know mine: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … s#p2187045

And you all know that in regard to things like this – moral and political value judgments – my argument revolves as much around how we come to embrace one frame of mind rather than another given the arguments I make in my signature threads. Which revolve around three main components: dasein, conflicting goods, political economy.

So, sure, if anyone is willing to go there, let’s do it.

You know, given particular contexts.

It is possible that there is a deep state but how it works and whether it exists is what most people who are curious wonder. Curious people don’t wonder about the politics until they start believing that there is a deep state.

So how does it work? It is possible that this is all imagined but still exists. What I mean is that the deep state is not even conscious of its own existence, it just is. That forces are able to exert their influence on the government and at times still be at odds with each other - kinda like factions within the deep state. I believe that if there is a deep state that it does not even care about politics - it is just a self-serving interest that manipulates the powers that be.

I find it difficult to explain but sometimes we perceive things that are there, and they are…but…some of these things are not organized groups that are out to get us.

There seem to be a few theories about the deep state and I think that the conspiracy theory itself has been around for a long time but just with a different name in the decades and centuries past.

Yeah, this sort of thing is nothing new.

Thats like asking if there is gravity.

Deep state simply means influential nonelected officials which number in the hundreds of thousands. E.g. people who have held jobs in the Pentagon for six decades, who know infinitely more about all kinds of operations than any elected official could possibly come to learn.

Such people naturally have the sense of being the real government, knowing far more than any president, especially about methods.
All large empires have such a layer to them. In Rome it was tied to the priests of Saturn, who controlled the treasury. Like our own deep state, it remained shrouded in silence.

Oh yes, then there is this, the more obvious answer and one that I would be more inclined to believe despite what I have already said.

Everyone is trying to exert some influence anyway.

I think what you designate as the deep state is what I would simply designate as bored rich people. Who get in “cahoots” with parts of deep state simply because that is very interesting.

There’s long records of British nobles simply screwing around with the citizenry, causing wars and food scarcity and doing all kinds of intense stuff just because they can. Because they’re just extremely bored, because thats what happens if you’re born into a life of absolute wealth, meaning wealth you can literally not possibly exhaust.

I see such things as a psychological phenomenon. Just imagine you have sixty trillion dollars at your disposal, and you are bored. Contemplating that situation actually explained a lot to me.

The official definition of deep state is the one I gave, unelected officials with far more experience and knowledge than elected officials. People who invariably shun the limelight, because for them the opposite is the case as what I the case with those standing for election - the less is known about their existence the better it is for their employment prospects.

It is all excruciatingly pragmatic and franky banal. There is nothing truly intellectually “deep” or mysterious about any of it, at least not in the absence of illusions.

if you mean is it the case that the people who have the most money have the most control over the shape of society then i think that’s true but its also not anything new

Who said that?

Did you read what I said about the deep state?

i dont know.

no.

Okay then

:confused:

Any agenda a rich person may have must be in terms of the logistic capacities of the state. The deep state is the deep end of logistics. That’s a kind of ‘abyss’, inside of which preemptive protocols are always being developed. This is a Prussian invention according to war historians, ‘proactive pre-emptive diplomacy’, an intricate chain of military and diplomatic movements to form a concerted pressure ‘on the ground and in the head’ - no one I know knows what precisely the protocols were then, or no one has published it online or any references to it - what is known is that it forced other nations to try to understand what was happening and adapt to the new rules, which were coming into being as rapidly as the technological advances that were happening at the time. You need to see deep state as a scientific layer to politics, and understand how weird scientists are - how separated they often are from what most people call human sentiments about the world. If you dont know any nerds you can probably not relate too well to the nature of the deep state. I think it may actually be a neanderthal quality. Just a different type of brain structure, more aimed at long term thinking, complete thought-processes - which is what lost out to the more fragmentary way of reasoning that characterizes the hominid that came to dominate. So - any agenda a rich person may have, it must be filtered through the nerdlike structure of the mechanism of superpower. You need either nerds or actual Germans.

Fitting, but jesus, I nearly spat my coffee out. Pretty much the last thing I was expecting to read.

:laughing:

It was kind of like a jack in the box.

Dude, sometimes I wonder whether you write like this to see if anyone is paying attention.

What I want to know is how I go about building nerdlike structures.

Thanks for the awesome read though FC - very enjoyable and insightful.

In a way yes. I appreciate the eye.

To add a simple overarching portrait of the situation: the deep state as I described it is the engine that performs all the nitty gritty technical labor that capacitates a modern power. Whatever ‘driver’ is ‘behind the wheel’ of a state, be it a financial oligarchy or a legitimate polity or a combination, is entirely dependent on what the engine is able to perform. The pride of the deep state is thus deep - it relishes not to be fucked with. It likes revenge, it likes to demonstrate its capacity, to put people in their place. Generally Id say it does so with extreme restraint, as the worst fear of any engine is to be overextended. Once wheels grind out of place, there is not really a way of coming back into form. So this is the hard core of the deep state, a power-lusty but not extravagant body of technocratic capacity. It likes to anticipate rather than to initiate. It initiates by the principle of ‘if the way is clear we go forward’ - a method also taught to IDF soldiers for hand to hand combat by my own sifu, incidentally. It means defense is always up, and it is a springbock defense system; a lever that is pressed by being attacked, something that will veer back forward once pressure relents or loses precision.

This is what the financial powermongers have to contend with; they live in a kind of opposite universe - money is used to spending itself freely and to expect ever greater returns, the sort of risk management that the deep state requires and relishes would be pathetically inappropriate in the financial arena, where risks are the stuff of life and movements are much too fast to be anticipated like the evolution of technology and its implementation can be anticipated. There is of course a kind of deep state to modern finance given its technocratic backbone, but this is a very small and extremely specialized ‘community’, comparatively, even though it wields massive resources (fiberoptics across the ocean floor, quantum computing efforts, satellite chains,) - and due to the explosively short term logics of finance this deep-finance has no power to do anything but serve its larger community. It is not actually like the deep state, though its workforce shares important qualities with it and probably taps from the same pools.

To relate this grit of technocracy to the desires of financial elites, we have intermediary agencies in place, including much of the known clandestine services - these agencies tend to form a kind of diplomatic ‘veil’ between the entrenched deep state and the financial elites - and in general, elected political leaders and representatives are prepped for power by these relatively well known agencies. Strangely, one of the main functions of security services is the knowledge that exists of them in the public domain - they represent ‘knowledge of the unknown’ memetically hovering over the operational abyss, translating insanity into practicality.

Besides crony capitalism, do think the deep state exploits people in other ways?
Is there any way we can get our countries back?

I think I understand what you’re saying, that there is no monolithic deep state, but there are individuals and small groups of rich and powerful people who’re sometimes able to manipulate government behind the scenes for power and profit.
Sometimes these individuals’ and factions’ interests converge, sometimes they conflict.
Interesting take, I think there’s quite a bit of truth to it.

So for you, it’s more unelected veterans in government and the military than it is financial and political interests outside it.
To what degree do these veterans conspire together for power and profit against the welfare and/or wishes of the people, and in what ways?

I concur with Fixed. Only the totally subdued and deluded could believe there is no deep state in the US. What makes it an issue is that it is like an insecure subconscious of a government with a child-like will of its own independent of the elected officials and belligerent in its own wishes. It rules without morality, principles, or responsibility - totally self-absorbed (and many still argue that the subconscious mind doesn’t exist either).

In the US getting a government position is a guaranteed job for life - so performance is of minimal concern - favoritism rules. I think that has been intentional because it grows the government exponentially through time - leading eventually to a communist state void of any actual democracy (despite rhetorical pretenses).

I imagine the deep state is no more or less controlled by government leaders than the conscious mind controls the subconscious mind. The Chinese are known for being particularly talented at manipulating a subconscious mind - a type of hypnosis - undetectable influence - “the invisible enemy”.

The influence on the deep state is invisible to the deep state - always being controlled from outside influences (public and insider media) - not from the top and always believing that it has the real truth and better wisdom.

Yeah, FC’s explanation of this is logical

If we have no real proof of this all we can do otherwise is make a guess.

But again: this sort of thing is nothing new.

or as FC puts it:

I just wrote something vaguely sensible just now, but too long and frivolous. My lucid mood has left me!! Or the subject is sort of exhausted with observers remark about the subconscious and China. That’s very good. Ill revisit later.

It is not bad but it does not directly address the OP which is what I would suggest the entry point to the conversation in any thread would be. At least he agrees to the most logical answer in the thread. He deserves some credit for that.

:laughing:

I am just going with the last presented theme outside this thread, which is we are not allowed to chill out anymore. Yep, apparently, we are allowed to be brain dead but we are not allowed to chill out - shit, this reminds me of real life. I wonder whether any of that is connected to the deep state, like what I mentioned about being at odds with each other. Of course, I am only messing around because to hell with the critics, I am keeping my sense of humor.