The following topics constitute the structure of the digital reputation of a public figure, and are either solid props to ameliorate or sustain it or accursed arms to destroy it. The young technocratic masses of our age feel they do not have some place in our modern economical and political structure, and that they are foredoomed to material poverty and invisibility, and by reason of this they eagerly applaud social media personages who appear before them relishing lyrical pleasures, e.g., a costly goblet of wine, a pied dash, a Cuban cigarette, or a bottle of whiskey with more peripeteias than them.
Conscious of this, we can hoist the reputation of any politician, public figure or facebrand by showing them vanquishing the blows of Fortune by means of the said symbols of pleasure, or rather of accidental happiness. We only need to select the appropriate digital social platform to do this. On the other hand, it is possible to destroy the reputation of those figures by showing them tasting such pleasures in a vicious manner. For one thing is an unparalleled shirt being the guerdon of some virtuous effort, that is, the effect of a cause, and another is the same shirt being a bait to allure covetous folk.
We can read here and there, through Facebook, YouTube, the drama of Plato, and in pink magazines, myths on the necessity of a complementary love. Without love, e.g., as the Knight of the Rueful Figure states, we are like “a tree without leaves and fruit, a body without soul” (Don Quixote I, 1). Only certain kinds of Hyperborean Nietzschean beings or aquiline men have the power to exist “ringe´d with the azure world”, as Tennyson wrote (The Eagle).
In accordance with these beliefs, the propagandist must display the propinquous public figure he is managing either accompanied by an impressive damsel or by a polished gentleman. We will select a medium of communication with a great capacity to reflect facial expressions of love. The persuasive attraction of an enamoured couple lies in the fact that a couple is the unconscious demonstration of our biological and economic powers, as some urban myths say. Public opinion thinks as follows: if the famous entrepreneur, for instance, has a person who suffers and joys for him, then such a figure is worthy of goodness. Contrary, it is feasible the destruction of the reputation of this celebrated man by showing him in solitude. People believe egoism or misfortune are the grounds of a solitary soul.
We are living under the influence of the rationalist and mathematical mentality born two centuries ago, whose principal desires are to discern and dominate matter. But the average man of our days is not interested in the set of sciences that permit us to instill our caprices amid the discontinuities of metals, rocks, waters, etc., but in the rough ostentation of power. Power without science is a mere blind bunch of techniques more or less useful to forge chairs, tables, windows, pipes, railings, fabrics, gutters, etc. For this reason YouTube, for example, offers swarms of videos dealing with the prole stance so-called “do it yourself”. The proletarian, industrial, technocratic, and effeminate masses, who mistake the scientific method with an “unboxing”, are bigots of every pseudo Thoreau dispensed by social media.
Therefore, a propagandist will show his client sweating and handling mud, water, nails, hammers. Some poetic lines, worded by the historian William H. Prescott, who compares the Spaniard and the Anglo-Saxon races, were a harbinger of that mentality. The lines extolling the Anglo-Saxon civilisation run thus: “They patiently endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of liberty with their tears and with the sweat of their brow, till it took deep root in the land and sent up its branches high towards the heavens” (The Conquest of Peru, book II, ch. 1). To destroy the reputation of an enemy we must simply show him as a delicate being unable to do harsh works. People imagine delicacy is intelligence, and that intelligence is a devil. Has my reader seen the thousands of memes saying that knowledge without some pious morality is just vainglory?
Institutions representing the dreams of a nation are the badges of democracy, but these social deeds resolving what is true and what is false are the symptoms of “demolatry” (Lippmann). Nowadays idols are depicted by logotypes. If I say without a modern epistemological back, that is, a celebrated logotype, that 2 plus 2 is 4, people will distrust me. But if I affirm that 10 minus 5 is 3 backed by the logotypes of Google or Nike, people will believe me. As Carl Rogers has referred (On Becoming a Person), people have the valour to say a triangle is a circle if the masses affirm it.
Then, by dint of certifications, logotypes, signatures, “likes”, a propagandist can hoist the reputation of a rascal. And, of course, LinkedIn, being the house of professional cupidity, is the adequate place to gain the credulity of the highbrow. On the opposite side, we can break down the reputation of our antipodes by saying they are not recognized by some official institution. Intellectual independence is regarded as a trait of charlatanry in an epoch of dataism.
There are two kinds of political morality, as Walter Lippmann says (A Preface to Politics), which are represented by two sorts of men: the boring conservative routineer and the improvident inventor. The former admires old, shaggy ideas, and the latter is the champion of living ideas. Old ideas need to be defended by ontological conceptions, and new ideas need to be fomented by cosmological possibilities. Ontological conceptions are the source of bureaucracy, of homogeneity, and cosmological possibilities are the causers of anarchy, of heterogeneity. Every digital boor spends his time carding a delusory consumerist personality through Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and so himself is turned into a “neoburgher”, that is, a lover of bureaucracy.
In consequence of this, a propagandist could raise the reputation of one of these techno-boors by displaying them paying permissions to drive cars, to live in his own house, to breathe. People are bemused by these deeds of piousness, which are the symbolizations of their poor notions of “money”, “order”, “triumph” and “solidity”. In their sight, a man who disdains these social trifles is a poor devil.
In bygone days people wished in earnest to be part of some powerful institutions, such as official religions, well arrayed labor unions, universities with the “victor’s wreath”, etc., because these materializations of human ideals gave some metaphysical orientation. Our ancestors lived as religious believers and died believing, lived as Marxists and died because of their leftist creeds, and lived wearying their brains with the logic of Aristotle and died regarding themselves as an inference from the Holy Ghost. But our modern masses are different, are so feeble. If today a government commands them to be Jewish and at the same time conspicuous eaters of swines, and tomorrow to be neo-Nazis, bigots of Mohammed and eaters of opium, they will obey without a jot of recrimination.
Then, our propagandist will wave the reputable wisdom of his client by producing him partaking in some social group that considers itself as a minority. But one will always be a minority if one obeys the vital and philosophical principles of many social institutions. One who, at the same time, is a Buddhist, a vegan, an indigenist, a feminist, a naval engineer, and so on and so forth, is a minority by dint of variety. Then, how can we select which social minority could be the flag of our client? Ecology and animalism are, I think, the two most neutral social movements. On the contrary, to impair the reputation of our rival we could affirm he is just interested in frivolous issues of the master class.
In short, lyrical pleasures, romances, proletarian utilitarianism, official certifications, bourgeois responsibility and the old galuth mentality, are the six principal topics of our modern digital public opinion.