The Crisis Continu(e)(ou)s... The Shocking Mass-Media’s Paratopia in the Era of Dromocracy

Abstract: Starting from a current ambiguous collocation and from one of Denzel Washington’s statements regarding the urgent need for mastering the seemingly paradoxical art of avoiding misinformation when you have to be informed, our paper tries to reveal the way in which, using the mass-media, the nowadays rulers are manipulating the news in order to achieve their goals, more or less visible, by usurping the scientific self-constitutive discourses Therefore, using the second part from one of the Academy Awards winner’s short interview, we make the transition towards some contextualized concepts such as Paul Virilio’s "dromocracy” and Dominique Maingueneau’s "paratopia” in order to reveal that space beyond the space where the strings of power articulates with the nervous endings of the fourth branch of the government’s interface, The Press, which is no more the fourth estate, the guardian of a dying democracy.  

Keywords: paratopia, dromocracy, mass-media, speed, shocking events

1.     Introduction

Inspired by the conference’s title (Mass-Media in the Context of the Global Crises), this paper tries to reveal the mechanisms through which mass-media is being used by the governments and the barely visible centres of power behind them in order to achieve their goals. Therefore, we call on one of Dominique Maingueneau’s concepts, paratopia, which is based on self-constitutive discourses, like Science or Literature, for example. Further explained in the third chapter of this paper, paratopiais "a place beyond places”, and can be related to dromology as one can draw from Paul Virilio’s thought on speed replacing the actually physical space. Keeping in mind that the function of discourse analysis resembles the archéion, "a Greek term [which] represents an interesting polysemy: ‘source’, ‘principle’, ‘command’ and ‘power’” (Maingueneau & Cossutta, 1995, p. 112), one could adapt his/her actions according to the truth to be found behind the hidden agenda of the people in power which is being disseminated through the mainstream media’s corrupted channels in a falsified self-constitutive discourse.

Structuring a statement and structured by it, paratopia is both that which we must liberate ourselves from through creation, and that which creation intensifies. On this basis, one can contemplate diverse types of paratopia that can merge. It can take the face of whoever is out of place where he stands, of whoevergoes from place to place without attachment, of whoever cannot find his/her place. Paratopia diverts equally from a group (paratopia of identity), from a place (spatial paratopia) or from a moment (temporal paratopia) (Maingueneau, n.d.).

The second concept we call on for revealing the way in which the self-constitutive discourses are being usurped by the people in power through mainstream media is dromology, more specifically dromocracy,a derived term which better fits our purpose. "In fact, there is no ‘industrial revolution’ but only a ‘dromocratic revolution’; there is not democracy, only dromocracy; there is not strategy, only dromology” (Virilio, 2007, p.69). Further discussed in the next chapter of this paper, dromocracy

establishes and reproduces standardized forms of assembly and disassembly for the systematic integration of human energy into specific infrastructures. "Factory work must not escape the dictatorship of movement. It reproduces the enclosure on the spot, in the obligatory and absurd kinetic cycle... a condensed machine of the logistical glacis”. This is the design of corporeal discipline in the pursuit of the image of speed [not the image of truth as Foucault might prioritize it] in which "the class struggle is replaced by the struggle of the technological bodies of the armies according to their dynamic efficiency: logistics”. Indeed, the exercise of political authority in and through the dimensions of the body-in-motion appears for Virilio in its most extreme and comic form in those performances of collective singularization that are Marxist state stadium pageants. Their choreographies of motor functions move according to the party line, now a literal grid (Bratton in Virilio, 2007, p.14-15).

Once the theoretical frame settled, we begin our journey through the nowadays mass-media’s paratopia in what Paul Virilio names the dromocratic state with a semantic issue. In Romanian, "the continuous crisis” collocation’s equivalent is "criza continuă”, which is an ambiguous one and needs to be contextualized in order to be properly understood. Therefore, due to its syntactic homonymy, one has to establish if there is a verbal phrase (noun + verb) or a noun phrase (noun + adjective) and that is why we had to juggle a bit with those punctuation marks in our paper’s title. But from the nowadays world’s perspective there is no need for contextualization because the crisis continues as we are living in a continuous crisis.

Another interesting aspect is that it would not be a problem if we only stick with the crisis term’s etymology. The term’s etymon can be found in Greek, and even further back in Proto Indo European (Harper, n. d.):

Crise, crisis, "decisive point in the progress of a disease”, also "vitally important or decisive state of things, point at which change must come, for better or worse”, from Latinized form of Greek krisis "turning point in a disease, that change which indicates recovery or death” (used as such by Hippocrates and Galen), literally "judgment, result of a trial, selection”, from krinein ”to separate, decide, judge”, from PIE root *krei- "to sieve”, thus "discriminate, distinguish”.

As a turning point, any crisis comes with an opportunity to do things better than before. The problem in nowadays world is that those turning points are coming as an avalanche as they were predicted at the beginning of this century (Coleman, 2007):

"Future shocks” is described as a series of events which come so fast that the human brain cannot absorb the information. [...]Science has shown that there are clearly marked limits to the amount of changes and the nature of them that the mind can deal with. After continuous shocks, the large targeted population group discovers that it does not want to make choices any more. Apathy takes over, often preceded by mindless violence such as is characteristic of the Los Angeles street gangs, serial killers, rapists and child kidnapers.

This aspect of daily life is visible to anyone, given the fact that after the "pandemic”, which ended abruptly, came the Russian "special operation” in Ukraine, with all its spectrum of gloomy prospects. In parallel, the effects of the pressure generated by the policies adopted in order to fight against the "global warming” are already being felt. Regarding the aforementioned aspect, it is interesting that the terminology has been renamed on the fly into "climate change” [1], because there is a fracture of logic between the ideology and the realities to be found on the ground[2]. The problem is that the mainstream media abdicated almost entirely from its basic principles which were established by the Constitution of the USA, for example. Therefore, nowadays, the Press is no more The Fourth Estate but The Fourth Branch… of the government (Powe, 1991).

This aspect is being underlined by the double Academy Awards winner, Denzel Washington, in an ad hoc mini-interview on fake news, as the actor was the subject of several situations when false information about him was being discussed in the mass-media. "If you don’t read the newspaper you are uninformed. If you read it, you are misinformed” (Washington, 2022). The conclusion is that the long-term effect of too much information, from the mass-media’s perspective, leads to the need for being the first who gives the news to the people. The speed becomes the most important thing in nowadays informational war, regardless of the truth. "Get it out there! Sell it!” (ibidem).

Going further on this path, it helps to try walking through Umberto Eco’s fictional woods, taking into account his view on narrations and narratives:

It has been said that artificial narrative is recognizable because it is more complex than the natural kind. […]The intertwining of exact references to the real world is very strong in the artificial narrative, therefore the reader cannot perceive where he really is (in a real or fictional universe, our note). It happens, thus, to project the fictional model onto reality, to make people believe in the actual existence of the fictitious characters and events (Eco, 2004, p.121-129).

Read in this key, perhaps that cheeky Chinese bat could have had an intercourse with that unlucky pangolin, leading to... etc. and so on... Adding to that, if we consider what has become an internal crisis of an artificial state formed on a civilizational fault line (Huntington), it could be interesting to recall Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog (1997), highlighting the fact that the media is being used to the fullest in nowadays information warfare. Well, we can go even further back in time, to the Network (1976), another dark satire, screened by Sidney Lumet, which revealed the modern mass-media’s soiled undergarments.

2.     Mass-Media in the Dromocratic State

From what we discussed in the introductory part of this paper one can infer that the most important characteristic of today’s media is speed, even if this is being detrimental to the truth. Speed is the foundation of Paul Virilio’s concept of dromology, a term which derives from the Greek word "dromos”, meaning "speed”. The French architect and philosopher observed that space becomes problematic in the 21^th century because of the unprecedented acceleration in the development of the communications and transport technologies. The agglomeration of people in the urban areas as a consequence of different kinds of migration (even that which happens vertically, in what Virilio names VHB – Very High Buildings) leads to an alienation of the individual in nowadays society. As an example, Virilio thinks that those who are living in VHB are equally alienated as those illegal immigrants who are being transported into shipping containers, from one continent to another. This phenomenon affects time as well. As a consequence of acceleration, time is compressed and, in the end, due to the computerization of every aspect of nowadays life, everything is measured and affected by what he names "the balance of computerized terror”. This "balance” leads to the loss of memory, a loss of one’s past and future at the same time. The end result of this process in a way of living in some kind of a perpetual moment (2007).

On the one hand, during some decades in the last century, Virilio offered some solutions in architectural development as a response to the challenges mentioned in the previous paragraph. The most spectacular one, the oblique architecture, seems to be integrated into the new project in the UAE, the smart city of NEOM, which already started to be implemented, as The Guardian (2022) informs us. In the Introduction of Virilio’s work, Benjamin Bratton explains: "The image of ‘the polis’ as a dynamic, vehicular landscape is both Virilio’s initial architectural solution and his eventual theoretical warning. ‘Dromology’ […] is this government of differentiate motility, of harnessing and mobilizing, incarcerating and accelerating of things and people” (Bratton in Virillio, 2007, p. 8). On the other hand, Virilio warns us about the unprecedented acceleration of the governmental processes which are being defined by the term of dromology, along with its derivate, the dromocratic state.

The maneuver that once consisted in giving up ground to gain Time loses its meaning: at present, gaining Time is exclusively a matter of vectors. Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place, and the question of possession of Time has revived that of territorial appropriation (Virilio, 2007, p. 149).

Hence the EU's current mad rush to maximize the capacity of the high-speed microprocessor industry, to give just one example to date. Whoever is faster wins, based on probabilistic calculation and the consideration that failure will not be capital in a fluid, ever-changing world. However, a bet won in this way brings power on all levels, being it political, military, economic or social. Therefore, it should be no surprise the fact that the press has also bought into this phenomenon, as the mass-media is a key cog in the machinery of this kind of government. Because the territory has given way to the projectile, to use Virilio's metaphor, there a new need on the part of the population emerged, a need that must also be satisfied with the help of the press, which has lost its status as the guardian of democracy. Virilio's predictions have thus already become fact, as we can observe, starting with the "nine eleven event” (2007):

In fact, the government's deliberately terroristic manipulation of the need for security is the perfect answer to all the new questions now being put to democracies by nuclear strategy - the new isolationism of the nuclear State that, in the U.S., for example, is totally revamping political strategy. They are trying to recreate Union through a new unanimity of need, just as the mass media phantasmatically created a need for cars, refrigerators… We will see the creation of a common feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection; this latter will progressively come to the fore and become the target of the whole merchandising system (Virilio, 2007, p. 139).

A current illustration of this type of governance can be seen with Alexander Dughin, who applies Virilio's theory to the current state of affairs in Ukraine. However, we do not need to go that far, because we, Romanians, also had a pontocchio [3], for example, who also lied with the nonchalance of a professional actor. Dughin explains that this type of "mercurial comedian” was not randomly chosen as a leader, but precisely because of his existential fluidity, which fits the interest’s glove of those who manipulate the government’s interface. Using Virilio’s concept, the Russian philosopher explains the role of speed in the process of nowadays ideological, political and military events, events which are being pushed forward through the ubiquitous mass-media, the trumpet of the "accelerated propaganda” of the ideas which are far from what we know to be at the foundation of the Western liberal democracies (Dughin, 2022).

What follows is war, and the aggressors are portrayed as victims and the saviors as executioners. The important thing is to control the information and if everything goes according to the globalists’ plans, a quick resolution follows, after which the neo-Nazi structures themselves are just as quickly eliminated. Almost the same thing we saw in Croatia during the break-up of Yugoslavia. First the West helps the Croatian Nazis – the neo-Nazis – and arms them against the Serbs, then cleans them out in turn so that no trace of them remains. The important thing is to do everything very, very quickly. Neo-Nazism appeared quickly, played its role quickly and disappeared quickly, as if it had never happened. This is precisely Zelensky's secret. The mercurial comedian was not chosen as ringleader by chance. His psyche is volatile and prone to rapid change. The perfect politician for a fluid society. One moment he says and does one thing, the next moment he does something completely different and no one remembers what happened a second ago, as the speed of information flow is constantly increasing (Dughin, 2022) [4].

Therefore, the speed of information flow and the chameleonic typology allows for a fast passage through the inadvertencies in this dromocratic world. The image found on MedhyHidayat’s blog is worth a thousand words, as the Chinese say” (medhyhidayat.com, 2022):

3.     Nowadays Media’s Paratopia

Discussing about spatiality in the literary discourse, Dominique Maingueneau points out the existence of three instances: the person, the writer and the inscriber: the person refers to an individual of a certain private life and marital status; the writer is defined by a certain trajectory within the institution, and the inscriber assumes the forms of enouncing subjectivity in the text ("scenography”) and the scene imposed by the genre of discourse (novel, comedy, novella etc.). The different types of investigation are reducing the analysis to only one of these instances, even if they are, in fact, inseparable. Paratopia is the spontaneous deviation ("clinamen”) that allows this trinitarian identity to function (2007). 

Consistent in its principle, paratopia takes its diverse figures according to the time period, society and types of discourse concerned, exploiting the rifts that never cease to open in society. In seventeenth-century Europe, for example, the protection of those in power made a parasite of the prototypical figure of the literary man. In the eighteenth-century, the self-appointed "Republic of Letters” designated a paratopic network, a "Republic” that crossed geographical and social borders. Paratopia characterizes at the same time the "condition” of a self-constituting discourse (religious, aesthetic, philosophical, etc.) and that of all the creators who construct their identities by way of it: it only becomes such as it assumes in a singular manner the constituent paratopia of the self-constituting discourse from which it derives its creative identity. The creator thus appears like someone who has no reason to be (one should interpret this in a double meaning). In fact, the creator must use this vulnerability to build the territory of his work (Maingueneau, n. d.).

The connection could also be made with Jacques Lacan’s Borromean knot. In this sense, the paratopia of the "shock media” would be that place beyond place where the person, writer and the inscriber of the directives that apply globally are meeting. This happens in a "harmony” orchestrated by the mainstream media as a mere instrument of the governmental propaganda [5]. Nowadays, as Virilio (2007) underlines, political, social and military disputes are no more resolved through "traditional” inter-city duels, wars between nations or conflicts between naval empires and continental powers. All of those are being replaced by

an unheard of opposition: the juxtaposition of every locality, all matter. The planetary mass becomes no more than a "critical mass”, a precipitate resulting from the extreme reduction of contact time, a fearsome friction of places and elements that only yesterday were still distinct and separated by a buffer of distances, which have suddenly become anachronistic. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1915, Alfred Wegener writes that in the beginning the earth can only have had but one face, which seems likely, given the capacities for interconnection. In the future the earth will have but one interface... (Virilio, 2007, p.152).

In our opinion, this possible interface would be the paratopia of dromocracy which is accelerating through the last shreds of the overwhelmed liberal democracy and towards a totalitarian "brave new world”. This paratopia could be linked to Jaques Lacan’s Borromean knot, as he "emphasized the primacy of language as constitutive of the unconscious, and he tried to introduce the study of language (as practiced in modern linguistics, philosophy, and poetics) into psychoanalytic theory” (The Editors of Encyclopaedia, 2022). An image of what the paratopia is can be inferred from the following schema:

4.     Free Press’ Governmental Censorship

Moreover, recent research shows an interesting correlation between the role of the modern journalist and the typology of exercising power and control. We have already mentioned the black satire Network (1976), which points out how a television station cynically exploits viewers’ thirst for the sacred, a thirst that is revealed to them by a modern "prophet”, a former TV presenter, who dies in his live comedy show, on air, shortly after he is revealing to viewers how they are grossly manipulated, accompanied by the audience’s laughter. A little more recently, some concerned researchers warned of the danger posed by the new journalism, and particularly by the new journalists who are becoming part of a deviant elite[6] that ensures, by promoting articulate behaviour, the functioning of all organised areas of society. Another cinematic illustration of what happens to the nowadays hungry devourers of shocking news and how this hunger is being fed is the film Nightcrawler (2014), where the main theme is portrayed by the character playing a stringer, illustrating the harmful symbiosis between the unethical journalism and the insatiable demand for shocking information of today’s media consumerism-oriented people. Arriving first on the scene of a crime after a night of chasing "the pray” and trying to beat the police and paramedics to it, the main character stages the scene in order to get the most out of the story he will sell for profit to a TV station. The need for speed, for being the first who "gets it out there, no matter what”, as Denzel Washington pointed out, combined with the overwhelmingly avalanche of shocking news is being also revealed by one of Tucker Carlson’s insights:

Time for a confession, right off the bat. There were times, we will admit it, back in the dark ages of cable news, when we'd milk a single news event for weeks. In some cases, and we're talking to you, O. J. Simpson, for months and months and months. There just wasn't that much going on. So you couldn't afford to waste a good story. That is not the problem we are having these days. The problem now is the opposite of course. There's too much going on and some of it is terrifying (Carlson, 2022).

Well, it is all right, but there are always voices which are not tuned in to the governmental propaganda which is being carried out by the mainstream media, which, as we underlined at the beginning of this article, is no more "The Fourth Estate” but "The Fourth Branch”. An interesting and very powerful metaphor can be found in The Tin Drum (1979), an adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff from the same title novel by Günter Grass, where a child beating his tin drum achieves the performance to bring down to cacophony an entire Nazi orchestra singing for the great future of the "millennial Reich”. A study carried out by Israeli and Australian researchers reveals the methods through which the government tries to shut up those voices, as we can read from their abstract:

The emergence of COVID-19 has led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy. To counter the perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities, some supporters of this orthodoxy have moved to censor those who promote dissenting views. The aim of the present study is to explore the experiences and responses of highly accomplished doctors and research scientists from different countries who have been targets of suppression and/or censorship following their publications and statements in relation to COVID-19 that challenge official views. Our findings point to the central role played by media organizations, and especially by information technology companies, in attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures. In the effort to silence alternative voices, widespread use was made not only of censorship, but of tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position. In place of open and fair discussion, censorship and suppression of scientific dissent has deleterious and far-reaching implications for medicine, science, and public health (Shir-Raz et al, 2022).

Those tactics used for shutting up the "heterodox voices” are summarized in the following table:

The research protects the anonymity of the respondents and the researchers used "a purposeful sampling method”. Nevertheless, we can observe that these tactics were being used against all the voices which criticized the governmental propaganda, carried out by the mass-media’s trumpets, being it regarding the "covid crisis” or, nowadays, the "war in Ukraine”. In the previous major "crisis”, these tactics were being used against great personalities as Luc Montagnier, who discovered the way in which HIV functions and got a Nobel Award in medicine for that, or Robert Malone, one of the specialists who invented the mRNA technology, or Judy Mikovits, who linked the murine endogenous retroviruses to chronic fatigue syndrome, or even Didier Raoult, the co-founder of the most important research facility on Mediterranean infectious diseases in Marseille.

Well, trying to summarize Virilio’s theory in a humorous manner, space would aloud but time is already compressed to its limits, or at least this is how we perceive it now, therefore we are only pointing out some aspects of the matter regarding professor Raoult’s battle in his attempt to temper French authorities’ exaggerate measures in relation with the "pandemic crisis” [7], as we can read from an article in The Guardian (Clement, 2021):

The French scientist who promoted the discredited hydroxychloroquine treatment for Covid-19 backed by Donald Trump faces being pushed out of the infectious diseases institute he founded, amid concerns from key members over its role in feeding conspiracy theories and an investigation by regulators into its clinical studies.

It is true that, legally, Raoult is no more eligible to continue his activity in the institute he co-founded and in academic research centers, due to his age (69, whereas the limit is 68), but it is common sense in the academic and research community that valuable members are being allowed to perform even after that limit. He asked to continue as a part timer, but his request was cynically denied (Clement, 2021):

Jean-Luc Jouve, the president of the AP-HM’s medical commission, told the French newspaper that Raoult had requested to continue in his position at the hospital on a part-time basis, but that his proposal would not be accepted. "There are more than enough teams at the IHU to make up for his departure”, Jouve said.

We cannot end this section without mentioning another aspect of the dromocratic state’s paratopia, a comical one, this time, if it were not also harmful in its consequences, namely fact checking. Becky Anderson, a CNN's anchor, opening a debate at the World Government Summit, is literally asking the leaders debating the issue of world government: "Are you ready for a new world order?” The You Tube fact-checker warns the viewers with a reference to Wikipedia, which says: "The New World Order is a conspiracy theory which hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government”. "Clean filthy” new world order, "Don Steve” [8] (Caragiale, 2011, 5), to contradict the very officials who are speaking openly on the subject.

Another interesting fact is an experiment made by Dan Diaconu, who published on all his social media platforms a shocking news launched by a group of hackers who broke into Ukrainian government’s servers and allegedly found about an infected blood transfer from NATO to Ukraine. The bomb is not the news itself which, as the author mentions, could be manipulated either way, as an intoxicating misinformation manoeuvre, but the puerile way in which the major social media platforms argued the censoring of this news (Diaconu, 2022).

5.     Conclusions

In conclusion, we recall Herbert Gerjuoy’s words cited by Alvin Toffler in the Future Shock: "The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who does not know how to learn” (as cited in Toffler, 1973, p. 402). The awareness of the existence of this paratopia of the dromocracy supported by the propagandistic mainstream media is therefore a necessity, and everyone’s ability to adapt in order to be able to access viable information has become an emergency. However, filtering the accelerated media bombardment is becoming increasingly difficult, leading us towards radical choices. If at the end of his memorable novel, Moromeții, Marin Preda notes that "time was already running out of patience”, today the situation is exponentially worse. Another quotation from Preda can give us the solution: "He will win who has the patience to wait without being tempted by pride to act, when time is not favourable to action” (1955, p. 349).

Although a metaphoric conclusion to this paper would be enough for those who are aware of Basarab Niculescu’s hidden third [9] or Petre Țuțea’s way of thinking about the method [10], both of them operating in the logic of contradiction [11], we should elaborate a more down-to-earth conclusion. Therefore, witnessing the nowadays "pandemic” of the so-called "sudden deaths”, keeping in mind the way in which those in power are trying to usurp the scientific self-constitutive discourse, as one can also draw from the fourth chapter of this paper, and remembering an image [12] which speaks a thousand words about what the Romanian journalist Ion Cristoiu names "presa de La jgheab” ("the Water-Through Press”) [13], some ideas about how to resist to the avalanche of shocking news shouted through the ubiquitous mainstream media’s channels could be inferred from this paper also.

One of them is, obviously, to seek for those journalists who did not betray their purpose of existence and who are struggling to make their voices heard through the overwhelming deceit and disinformation present in nowadays mainstream media. As an example, the most recent scandal comes from the news about James O’Keefe, the founder of Project Veritas, who is about to get the axe for exposing Pfizer executives bragging about their misconduct in managing the research and production of the mRNA "vaccines”. Another one is Adrian Pătrușcă, former chief editorialist at Evenimentul zilei (The Daily Event), a mainstream journal in Romania, who wrote a lot of good articles during the "pandemic”, readable in the small hours of the day but lost into the bulk of shocking news and propaganda during the day. Consequently, Pătrușcă moved on to Active News, a traditional publication where his voice is to be heard without any obstacles. As anywhere in life, the middle way is the best way for anyone, and being able to average out from all the news on the market pays off in the end. In order to do that, though, one needs adequate filters which are as effective as one’s life experience and relevant reading background are.

The common sense in dealing with the assault on the people’s minds and hearts through the governmental propaganda embraced by the mainstream media is to be draw also from Maingueneau’s thought regarding paratopia and self-constitutive discourses:

"To clarify the notion of «self-constituting discourses», one can start from a commonplace observation. Philosophers or scientists are not supposed to appeal to the authority of journalists when they deal with philosophy or science; on the contrary, when a debate is organized in the mass-media about important problems, particularly ethical problems, journalists request the intervention of priests, scientists, philosophers or writers” (Maingueneau, 1999, 175).

Nevertheless, the problem is, at least in Romania, that the majority of journalists who became "experts” in vaccines and covid during the "pandemic” are now big time "experts” in warfare and diplomacy and will probably be "experts” in climate change issues soon. The biggest problem is, though, that usurping the legitimacy of the self-constitutive discourses, too many physicians, public figures and even priests were somehow determined to appear on the mainstream media channels to promote an experimental gene therapy as a safe vaccine. Notorious is, for example, the TV show in which the Romanian Army’s spokesman did not intervene in a debate over a supposed aerial fight in the Ukraine’s skies, a fight which turned to be actually a video game sequence (Nicolae, 2022). This "need for speed” in "getting the news out there”, in "selling it”, would be only ridiculous if it was not deadly harmful for a lot of people nowadays.

Last but not least, as a knot of noetic revival, it would be interesting to make an analysis of dromocracy, of the dromocratic state, from the perspective of sacred and profane space and time, as Mircea Eliade viewed them, but that perhaps on another occasion. The waters are parting in the end of times. The Way, the Truth and the Life is within reach of those who do not want to become part of the alienating probabilistic interface theorized by Paul Virilio.

Endnotes

[1] "Climate change” that has dethroned the commandments of Moses in the eager minds of the comrades interested in selling their "green” products on good ol’ green cash, considering that one of the promoters owns a company that sells solar panels. See the recent ritualistic breaking of the "Tablets of the Law” on Mount Sinai at COP27 and their "replacement” with the new "Ten Climate Commandments” (Surkes, 2022).

[2] The founder of The Weather Channel, John Coleman, explains the phenomenon in a CNN interview, revealing the funding mechanism for the "global warming” theory's promoters. Among other things, Coleman points to a petition launched in 1998 rejecting the "global warming” theory, signed by 31,000 American scientists, including 9,000 PhDs in atmospheric science, earth science, climatology, ecology etc. The conclusions reached by the signatories of the petition are totally contrary to the official narrative (Watson, 2017).

[3]Victor Ponta, a former Romanian PM. This type of politician is, nonetheless, common in nowadays political environment.

[4]This matter could be further debated, as Sven Milekic, for example, writes that the HOS members/camps were financed by Croatian diaspora (Milekic, 2020). Although Dughin’s affirmation regarding the help of the Croatian neo-Nazis by the Western powers could be broadly discussed, the emphasis of the citation is on the typology of a chameleonic politician like Zelenski, "a mercurial comedian” who endorses Paul Virilio’s views on dromocracy. Furthermore, the beginning of the citation could be contracted into one of the well-known slogans from George Orwell’s 1984, "War is Peace”.

[5]Discussing the impossibility for the Western democracies to control masses by force, Noam Chomsky uncovers the veil of the world in which we live today, when government "has to control what you think. […] One of the ways you control what people think is by creating the illusion that there’s a debate going on, but making sure that debate stays within very narrow margins. Namely, you have to make sure that both sides in the debate accepts certain assumptions, and those assumptions turn out to be the propaganda system. As long as everyone accepts the propaganda system, then you can have a debate” (in Barsamian, 1992, pp. 7-8).

[6] "The higher immorality of the power elite is also possible because the elites do not have to win the moral consent of those over whom they hold power. Instead, according to Mills, a passive society simply trusts that the elites will act on behalf of the so-called public interest” (Bonn, 2017).

[7]The problem lays around the "gain of function” term, which, basically means that a virus is genetically modified in order to serve a purpose (Bleau, 2022). In this sense, we have to remember Klaus Schwab’s remark: "The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world” (WEF, 2022). 

[8]"Curat murdar, coane Fănică!”, a genial oxymoron used by Romanian writer, Ion Luca Caragiale, in his memorable play O scrisoare pierdută/A Lost Letter, translated into English by Cristian Săileanu (Caragiale, 2011, 5).

[9]The hidden third links the different levels of Reality. Its theological equivalent would be The Holy Spirit keeping together the life on earth after Christ’s Ascension.

[10]"The method is nothing else but the logical form of the poor seeking man who abandons the power of the revealing God. (…) This method, a [presumed] way towards the truth, belongs to the man wandering in nature, always limited in his craving for cracking the puzzle, but the inspiration belongs to God” (Țuțea, 2013, 36).

[11]Trying to draw a bridge between science and ontology and using Galilei’s axioms as a model, Niculescu elaborates the axioms of transdisciplinarity: "i. The ontological axiom: There are, in Nature and in our knowledge of Nature, different levels of Reality and, correspondingly, different levels of perception. ii. The logical axiom: The passage from one level of Reality to another is insured by the logic of the included middle. iii. The complexity axiom: The structure of the totality of levels of Reality or perception is a complex structure: every level is what it is because all the levels exist at the same time” (Niculescu, 2006, 150). In other words, the Western logic of non-contradiction (tertium non datur) works only on our level of Reality and does not cover all the aspects of our world, which are to be imagined and thought in the logic of contradiction (the hidden third) for the whole picture.

[12]The first image represents a UK newsagent's stall, where the front pages of all the newspapers are almost identical, indicating the alignment of the press with the government propaganda (NasulTV, 2021). The second image is reinforcement (Polo, 2023).

[13]"With the «At the Water-Trough» metaphor we have pointed out a cruel truth regarding our press. In every newsroom there is an employee, appointed by the publication’s mogul to take over and sign (often without even reading it) the article produced in the Secret Service's laboratories. Taken from «the Water-Trough», those about the corruption scandal tendentiously gloss over a few truths: (…) (Cristoiu, 2023).

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Sorin Suciu/ Universitatea Sapientia, FSTU, Tg. Mureș