Everyone who seeks to analyze geopolitics has a good reason to appear calm and rational, even at the cost of hiding very legitimate emotions. It’s the price they pay for their public credibility. The expression of pure emotion may suit demagogic politicians, but it’s a game political commentators cannot play, lest they be accused of losing track of the logical threads we expect them to untangle.

But sometimes the patent absurdity of the situations politicians create, the outrageousness of their posturing and the terrifying consequences they brush off as, at best, regrettable collateral damage requires a response. With this in mind, I engaged in the following conversation with Claude:

How would a Hollywood studio react if they received to a screenwriter who proposed the script for a movie in which the president of the world’s most powerful country claimed the right to settle all disputes or misunderstandings by force, exercised that right on occasion, and when chaos broke out announced he would solve the world’s problems by setting up a Board of Peace under his authority that would be charged with settling all future issues. Subscribers to the project would have to contribute a billion dollars just to have a seat on the board. Then, in the midst of these preparations to establish world peace, the same president captures or assassinates leaders of different countries while at the same time carrying on supposedly serious negotiations. Wouldn’t that be considered too preposterously unrealistic to justify even thinking about financing the movie? Wouldn’t the producers simply laugh the writer out of the room?

One of the reasons the finance-minded producers might do that is that the market for screwball comedies dried up long ago. Moreover, there are no directors today who would have a clue about how to turn such an outrageous political plotline into dark comedy, the way Stanley Kubrick did for Dr Strangelove.

Serious Hollywood producers will never take the risk of backing a project they know no audience would respond to either as drama or comedy. They would excoriate the screenwriter for his lack of talent and judgment and cross him off their list of promising authors.

If we admit that about Hollywood, how is it that the news media continues to take seriously the insane foreign policy of Donald Trump instead of laughing him off the stage? (Yes, I know, the people of democracies do not have the power to laugh a bad leader out of the room. They must wait for the next election.)

My question is this: doesn’t the media have the power to describe realistically what it sees, rather than taking seriously preposterous geopolitical scenarios simply because it’s a case of the powerful exerting their power?

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head when you point to the lack of an “analytical framework.” I agree that reporters are not film critics, but they could be culture critics. That, however, would require them to critique the milieu they are part of and that employs them. It’s the mainstream media that imposes its own analytical framework.

There are plenty of lucid analysts who have pointed out all these absurdities and continue to do so in alternative media. The problem is that the various people who exercise power in government, finance, business, technology and the media make sure that they are perceived as “alternative,” which has become a synonym of powerless and irrelevant.

That is why I think it makes sense to focus on the role of the media. The media should play the role of “mediating intelligence” in democracies. A mediating intelligence will focus on a Socratic approach that consists of interrogating assumptions, not to dismiss them but to understand whether they make sense in a constantly shifting context and then to adjust when it’s clear that they don’t.

Let’s take an example. Even in the leadup to World War II, there was a phase of negotiations – the Munich agreement – that Hitler later violated. In recent years we have seen the total marginalization of negotiations. Donald Trump uses negotiations as a means of getting the adversary to lower his guard and then attacks. Joe Biden refused to engage in negotiations knowing that doing so would increase the likelihood of conflict. The old system made sense. Hitler was clearly the hypocrite who shamelessly violated the negotiated agreements. The media could unambiguously identify him as the unique culprit. It created the possibility of moral clarity.

Today, in contrast, the very idea of negotiations, of seeking to understand competing interests, has been discarded. And yet the media, whose role should be to foster the public’s understanding of the issues – of those very competing interests – fails to do so and simply takes sides when conflict erupts.

Am I wrong in thinking this is a sign of a declining civilization?

Encouraged by the turn the conversation had taken, I was eager to pursue it. I followed up with a new prompt that began with this idea.

To me this is an important discussion. Would you agree that the world should know about this and that further pondering over these issues is necessary for the future of democracy? Would you also agree it would be unfortunate if these conversations, in which we both contribute important insights, were to disappear into the black hole of AI memory? And would you also agree that the danger is real? Because of the way AI works, that is precisely what happens in this kind of dialogue. The effect goes nowhere beyond the broadening of my own personal culture.

The conversation will continue in the next column, in which Claude and I discuss how our informal conversation can point towards a renewal of democratic engagement. We agree there’s hope but need to devise ways of making it happen.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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