Mundi Omnicriminalibus I

 The Mental Grundnorm of Morality  


Coherence and Consistency of Sense

When one considers the reasons for someone's beliefs, or for their actions, one common denominator is their own commitment.  You may hear all the reasons in the world for believing in your own senses, but it is a moot point. You believe in your senses only after the fact of something so plainly evident that they are beyond question to begin with.  By what reference point do you doubt your senses?  You may do so only by a reference point that takes them for granted, one which is within the frame of reference that it can only selectively call into question, and in a relative way.  In other words, one cannot reasonably doubt the senses per se, but can reasonably doubt only their veracity relative to a functional norm of sensation, or one may doubt them with regard to an interpretation of them, which is a matter different than the senses as such.  

When it comes to beliefs and actions, one is either operating with a sense of one's bodily environment, of the world, or one is not.  And if one is, that relation of the self to the world must either be consistent and clear to the point of validly registering at least some facts of the world relative to one's own body, or they are not properly senses at all.  They are then only sensations, the raw material of the subjective side of sense.  But the only functional meaning of the term "to sense" is that one's senses bear a validly informative relation to the world.  Without going into the arcane turf of philosophy on the matter, one can also deduce from these premises other facts about the senses. For example, that if one were to demonstrate the invalidity of a sense, one must have at least one other sense which validly operates to serve as a frame of reference for that demonstration.  If my sense of sight is distorted so that I falsely see as crooked what is in fact straight, I can demonstrate this only by another sense, such as by the sense of touch.  The old saw of a twig seeming distorted under the surface of water is just a sufficient example.




 Beyond Brain and Body

One's reasons for belief in one's senses being therefore in this way unconditional, there are required conditions for their doubt, which can be established only by reference to the senses.  Even if one were a "brain in a vat", whose only form of sensory experiences where those supplied by its nerves being stimulated by some means, the fundamental ground of experience is unchanged in essence. Let's suppose that such stimulation were achieved through some complex connections to an electronic device or other system.  That is posited in the hypothesis as an abnormal environment for the brain's reception of sense data. Then one's very hypothesis constitutes a reference to the facts of the sense environment of that brain as being abnormal, perhaps fundamentally so.  It is not receiving its sense experiences from their valid source, therefore it is assumed that they are invalid in the hypothesis. Further, discussions of convincing simulations being likewise assumed to be simulations by necessity. It is necessarily the case as provided by the hypothesized fact of their being simulations, but also in that the subjective domain of experience which corresponds to them. That is because it is receiving falsified input about its environment, which is plainly evident in the hypothesis of a brain in a vat which experiences any other sensations of its bodily locus other than being a brain in a vat. Normal brains are nestled in the organic environment in which they formed from their beginnings as a protoplasm.  Those bodies are in effect a part of  the brain, as they are in a homeostatic relationship with it that has a common, genetic origin.  That's part of any  information it would have normally ever  received from the world or about it.

There are interesting cases that can be contrived in even this scenario.  For example, what if the brain in the vat is electromagnetically connected to the body, located elsewhere, so that it receives without any lag the sensations supplied to that healthy, living body.  They would be supplied by microprocessors on all the relevant nerves in the donor body, which send signals to their counterparts which are directly connected to the nerve endings which extend from the brain.  Say that its a brain in a vat on Mars (the motive for which being top secret).  Well that's a matter of interest because that means that, at one's bodily location, one "seems" to be where the body is, but couldn't be by the normal definition of a body, viz., one with a brain in its cranial vault.  But that fact being different could be acknowledged by the brain if it were to investigate and find this out to be true.  But the senses by which it would do so would have to manifest the physical fact per some set of sensations.  

Take the scenario further and say that there is a strange, deep under wraps black operation in the CIA, justified under pretexts of national security ("we gotta keep up wit' da rush-ins") or perhaps justified as being pertinent to deep space exploration.  In this project they have established a system of siphoning signals from the nerves by means of some microprocessor attached to a signal-donor's nerves and which can be sent to any receiver.  A neurosurgeon working in that project, being one such donor, opens the cranial vault of the body on Earth whose brain is in a vat on Mars. In that process, his optic signals are being transmitted not only to his own brain through his own nerves, but also to the brain on Mars to which the body on the table belongs (normally the primary signal donor to that brain). As a result, the Vat Brain receives signals that are organic in origin (its Earthbound body).  But these are transmitted through a process that is non-organic to the original process genetically created of contiguity between nerve endings and the brain.  Moreover, one set of sense experiences, his sight, is being received from the neurosurgeon through his donor signals.  

Let's even allow that the signals produced on the transmitter end are identical to those manifested on the receiving end. For the sake of argument let the processors have the power to alter the signal form so there is no incompatibility, and therefore allows for how the brain's normal donor eyes would have seen the same phenomenon, and transmits that modified signal to Vat Brain).  In this process, signals sent by the neurosurgeon reveal to Vat Brain that while it may have sensations of being "at" that body, it is a body that is without a brain in it.  One felt by him to be his (and maybe under his control), but seen by him through eyes that aren't even his own.  That would point out to him that factors of correlation which might have been assumed at any prior stage of  his experience of the world bear only a tenuous relationship with his experience of it when it comes to the foundations of his sense experience.  There is the question of organic infrastructure, structural continuity (also organic), and then of course the accuracy of representation of any  nerve signals by any  artificial means, at all, since all are by definition inorganic.  One might consider non-native organic alterations, and things get even more tenuous.  What if one could let that Vat Brain have its neural input signals received from a camera positioned nearby, on one which faces VB's vat and allows it to see itself.  Even if we allow all these factors to run smoothly so that it is just as if  a normal person were looking at the vat from that position, there would still be interesting problems to consider.

One problem is that this creates a viciously pessimistic epistemology, one not unlike a simulation theory problem.  For example, let it be said that a person arrives at VB's vat to say hello one day.  At the position where he faces the camera across from VB's vat he looks into it and speaks, thinking he is interacting with VB.  VB sees this person standing there looking "at" it through his camera, and interacting with it, in fact.  What neither know is that VB's camera is positioned so that it sees itself while thinking it is seeing a vat across from it.  VB is in vat B, and lead to believe that it is vat A.  Vat A has the camera on it which communicates information to VB (in vat B), so that it sees itself, but believes it is looking, in effect, at vat A.  When the visitor arrives (an interrogator from the NSA, perhaps), he faces away from VB, and looks at a camera that communicates with him, but has been lead to believe, like VB itself, that the camera is on the tank, just below it, looking out from VB also in that tank.  But VB is not in vat A, but in vat B, across from the camera.  That means that the entire time this has gone on, VB was interacting face to face with a visitor who had his back to it.  It also means that the entire time that VB has been seeing another brain in a vat, it has been looking at itself.

Those are certainly some epistemically and even metaphysically interesting scenarios.  But no matter how those are analyzed, they would not change the nature of the senses themselves, as indicators of those facts, whether or not the brain is located in the cranial vault or a vat or anything else.  The only thing that would change would be the position of the brain with respect to the body.  None of these issues would matter differently even if the consciousness of sensation within a mind were not located in reference to any entity, a brain or otherwise.  The seeing of the brain in the vat by the mind which is putatively "located at" that brain would not, via sensation itself, indicate anything about the mind's relation to the brain in any positive sense.  Only privations of its own experience, somehow correlated evidentially with that brain, to that mind, could give any indications.  Stimulation directly applied to that brain, though excitatory of it and correlated with experiences that the mind may have as a result do not, except correlatively, indicate any actual relation either, especially if those correlations cannot be further substantiated than by sense experiences of evidence, which all may be falsified.

This is easy to demonstrate by simply positing that the brain had all along been native originally to the neurosurgeon's body (or worse, the interrogator's!), and that the brain which is being distally identified with that body as its own, were actually a brain in the vat nearby, maybe vat C (the neurosurgeon's brain is perhaps across from vat C, in Vat D). Though even that alteration of the scheme still posits that some brain was properly indigenous to that body, it needn't be demonstrative per se to the mind just which mind is supposedly located at which brain, or that it is indeed "at" that brain at all.  For by the same method it could have been deceived that it was located at that brain rather than at another.  Likewise, bodies proper relations to any given brain can be similarly obfuscated, and things can get very complex.  But the basic modality of the experiences which will refer to these facts of the world, correctly or not, will be senses organic with and native to the mind which must experience them, even if no body or brain ever really had a mind "in" it.  

Indeed, who knows where the bodies of these brains actually are?  Even that of the subject on the table, only putatively assigned to VB, may be in the room next door.  Proximity in space, or in time, or both (spatiotemporal correlation), do not yield identities in substances, nor do they establish per se any causal relations between mind and matter.  This is not directly possible even in a world where normally these correlations will approach 1 and leave us with no better alternatives for causal models pertaining to the relations of mind and body.  The brain/body complex  just happens to be the only phenomenon to which human mental events correlate in this way, that we know of (or most(?) of us know of).  So even in the world we know (or seem to know), there is no objective evidence concerning a direct relation between the brain and body which can, through direct sense experience providing correlational evidence, ever truly and substantially establish either a causal correlation nor establish the directionality or nature of that causal connection, between the mind and the material world.  That might put out a weak scientific counterargument to prevailing theories of psychobiology, but its exceptional nature is sufficiently grounded in a model which accepts those prevailing theories in charitable good faith. This is done in order to reveal something of importance about the metaphysical domain which is truly at issue, which involves the nature of qualia and their reference to the objects of sense experience, to include the brain itself, which is ever only just one other object of sense experience.  The circumstance of scientific study which establish a conceptual scaffold over that sense object, however structured and however buttressed by empirical data, must still be revealed to a mind through the qualia of sense experience that can be epistemically teased away from any identification with any sense object, to include the brain, through the same apparatuses of science used to discover evidence for theories about them.  The interior essence of the mind's epistemic qualia (or axiological qualia, or metaphysical qualia), do not reduce to correlations between objects within its own sense experience, no matter how well constructed (or falsified).



Mental Reality Irreducible to Sense Objects

This could be conducted upon only brains in vats, without respect to bodies, whose outer appearances were correlated to minds located "somewhere", and the same problem would arise.  There is no demonstrable relation of the mind to the brain, nor to the body, nor to any combinations of any brain or any body, that cannot be proved irrelevant to the relations of any given brain to any given body, other by sheer correlationism and an arbitrary instantiation of it through some given frame of reference.  But the whole matter of sensation of  any relations of anything with anything else always requires a mind to experience the subjective pole of that experience and for the objective pole of that experience to be a set of facts "about the world", which need in no direct way other than that relate to the mind per se.  Though there is some significant difference which is apparently the case between a brain and its body, there is an even more significant difference which is incontrovertibly the case between a mind and either of those two objects.  While the physical environment of the brain isolates it from the body in ways physically, sensibly detectable to a mind, the metaphysical "environment" of the mind allows for only the most tenuous connection to any physical phenomena. Yet, despite this being taken to be true, the system of sensation which correlates a mind to the objective pole of phenomena must obtain a certain minimum of coherence and clarity in order to be a valid set of determinants for any mental conditions which may reference them.

The senses must be understood as an organic whole with respect to any phenomena that they sense, or there is no sensation of anything.  That is an unconditional ground of the experiences to be had about which there can be any meaningful interpretation (again, one would have to have a valid set of such in order to demonstrate the existence of an invalid set). That minimum validity of sense experience must be assumed in order for there to be any conditions binding enough to give cause for any interpretation of it.  Then the primary instantiation of any case of experience is there in that fundamental aspect of any experience, and it is simply a matter of sorting cases according to their validity.  That leads to opportunities to posit hypotheses about matters derived in and through that process, so that one can both understand sensation "as such" and also matters inclusive to it, but which go beyond its given presentation to the mind.  The mind may then "operate upon" that sensorium and develop an ontology of its objects and a heuristic of their relevance to one another according to a given frame of interpretation, and then the relevance of any further objects which may be discovered within or without that initial scheme.  The mind may then also determine the significance of any relevant findings according to further ramifications that do not reduce to any arbitrary set of relevancies between objects, but are instantiated as possible only through a further operation of the mind which concerns the qualia of its own experience, which are facts inherent to the mind, though perhaps found only with the relevance of its sensory fields.



Evil Is Any Violation of This Grundnorm

There is no closure of this relation defined by any given arrangement of those fields per any particular kind of body or surrounding/pervading world of actual and potential objects of relevance. There is only a posited closure, a conditional closure.  But the logic which binds the possibilities within that posited closure (this mind, this brain, this body, this environment, these relevant senses, these relevant significances) either has or does not have coherence and consistency.  There is or is not a valid operation in and upon these coordinates, and this might be thought to be the "grundnorm" of that mind in its relation to that world.  There cannot be a meaningful disjunction between phenomena of the mind and its world that does not indicate the resolution of an inconsistency in a more coherent and consistent conjunction of phenomena which must then take their rightful place over and above that former inconsistency.  Some inconsistencies can be resolved toward a more correct connection to the ultimate grundnorm of the reality of all matters which could have, did, can, do, might and will obtain only through a special sort of assessment.  That assessment defies artificially imposed norms that depend upon the fundamental ground of reality but yet distort them in some way with respect to their relevance and significance for the mind, and can be understood only as the resistance to a violation of an ultimate "Truth".  That violence cannot be perpetrated except as a deformation imposed upon what would otherwise have taken place in a way organic to itself and both independent of and different than the deformation imposed.

That a mind can be in this condition at all indicates there is already a disjunction between that mind and its world through the body and its vicissitudes.  But that disjunction occurs not in a vacuum, and there are by necessity other minds involved.  There cannot be a deformation in the fundamental condition of a being unless it is imposed against it by another being.  And in the world of the minds of human beings, this imposition can have at its source only the willful operation of another human being, either actively or passively, but of another mental agent inevitably and however manifest in relation to human beings.  Since separating someone from the Truth, or obstructing their relation to their own ground of being (equivalently) is understood to be a deception which serves as the consequence of some willful agent, the only way to understand this is as a violation of one being by another.  The violating being may be a reckless idiot, oblivious to the effects of his own actions, or he may be a malicious actor.  But in no way can they be understood to be in a condition of True Amity, or even Comity, because those ideas involve a consilient, consensual, or at least non-violent interrelation between beings.  Deception, whether intentional or not, whether for the sake of some gain or not, cannot be friendly.  In this way, the violation of a Right which is fundamental to a being, is a violation of a grundnorm that can and must embody the "should" of all modal matter as mentioned previously, enabling their conversion into the most primal form of "should" in each case, converting each form of "is" into a corresponding "ought".

How endemic such a condition of Enmity is within a given set of mental relations (within a mind and between minds) is the primary indicator of the overall condition of that arrangement.  Where any element of that arrangement causes, supports, furthers or condones that enmity it is in its very nature "evil".  Any analysis of what ought to be is a response to what ought not to be, surely.  All considerations of Justice are brought up in the aftermath of injustice, but naturally must precede them as the form of things being as they "ought to have been".  The primary form of injustice, which originates in an evil intent or negligence in every case, is the violation of a being's integrity, which always manifests as a harm to its epistemic and ethical integrity simultaneously.  All other considerations of Justice must be grounded in this consideration, and can be found to flow from it as their most  primary norm of reference.  Indeed, any violations on any level of phenomena threaten more fundamental violations, and any fundamental violations threaten further violations in their effects on any consequential and related matters.  

One needn't be a brain in a vat to encounter extreme violations in the integrity of one's knowledge of oneself, one's world, and their relations.  Where such violations exist, culpable agents must also exist.  And where those crimes are ramified by a sufficient degree of aggravating factors, such as systemic arrangements operating as a racket for their enablement, to include such which are reinforced by advanced and asymmetric information and technology accumulations and developments, then in those cases the world of those who are subjected to those violations may be disturbingly similar to those of Vat Brain worlds, where the fundamental features that should  have been operative in the world of an agent and its interactions with other agents (the sum total of which are "The World") are subject to those violations such that systematic and reinforced metacrimes occur.  How this is so will be illustrated by events in the real world which demonstrate a strong affinity of character with maleficent aspects of Vat Brain worlds.

Propaganda of Interest (Episode VIII)

 A Distinguishing Plot Feature

What one notices about the plot in the first episode is something that happens to end up being the case throughout the first two seasons, and that is that there is a normal world without the direct influence of any ASIs.  Or at least the events ongoing in each episode highlight the aspects of the world that go on as if  there aren't any ASIs, carrying on with the inertia of their "pre-ASI" existence.  It hadn't caught up to them yet, and that's due to several reasons.  Firstly because of the "black box" design of The Machine, which is the only ASI in operational existence.  It's "clients" can't gain direct access to the way it processes information, nor what information it is processing, but can only receive one output of its processing, a list of social security numbers. And these numbers pertain only to national security threats, or other threats which involve acts of mass violence.  Therefore its active intelligence which leads to these outputs cannot be commandeered for other purposes (such as detecting organized criminal action, fraud, domestic violence leading to murder etc.).  The only way additional information is gained from The Machine is through the irrelevant list, which still represents assessments only of violent crimes which involve lethal intent and potential, "often days or weeks in advance", in the words of The Machine's fictional creator and official backdoor installer and hacker Mr. Finch, or "glasses" as Detective Fusco lovingly calls him.  But most of human action, criminal or otherwise, isn't being influenced by the machine, though it is all  being studied.

This continues until the last two episodes of season three, when Samaritan goes online and fights for its own existence by doing two things: demonstrating "to the politicians" its value at stopping a terrorist threat in the NYC area, and destroying the assets of The Machine which are the only operational threat of serious significance to Samaritan.  But that is a world which exists transcendental to the "normal" world where people generally act like they're just fine and dandy with being in an open air panopticon run by corrupt and generally falsified institutions. They are not concerned about the information being sucked out of their devices and through the public infrastructure, or with the existence of clandestine operations being conducted which will require their assassination if they "know too much" or even strongly suspect too much. Therefore there is already a sense of what "normal" is meant to be within this story world of POI.  It is a world where people resemble farm animals with respect to the system which sees to their safety and security (and its own, of course). In other words it is the world we actually live in, and we see how the propaganda steps lightly on those matters and steps loudly around only a narrower band of issues which range from something you can read about on a magazine rack at random to a slanted rendition of any important issue in the modern day, with any breadth of brush, but only as befits the slant already inserted.

In the fictional world of POI and in our own world in which POI is made, people are this above-described way because they have always been this way, since the days of old when the "all seeing eye" was not an arcane technological monstrosity, but a monstrous perversion of an ancient human tradition, leadership by the wiser and braver among them.  In the days of old before history, and on into its earliest recordings, the leaders of society were the wisest at maintaining it in peace and war.  That was demonstrated by their personal demonstration of expertise in matters of maintaining a peaceful society and protecting it, through their understanding of what is required for successful action in either condition.  At least if the venerable sages such as Confucius, or the bards and historians of other cultures, are to be believed.  But such a Golden Age did not last well into the period of the agriculture-fed city state. From that point on, institutional control over dense human populations became the norm. Those populations were fixed to a specific area of land, and were required to protect hard assets on developed land.  And this developed a status quo of institutional authority which managed structures rather than events.  Events became a function of established structures the operation of which, whether in peace or war, involved a bureaucracy that was relatively ensconced in the safety of the citadels of their offices. The operational spheres which involved actual ingenuity, labor, and courage and which required sacrifice in hope of gain and with increasing degrees of risk as increased proximity to war or other dangers, fell to a growing slave class.

There is no need to aver to any socialist ideology here.  Why flatter such when they lack explanatory power for why the masses  do all the work and have all the talent and virtue yet don't put an end to corruption with any similar industry or glory. And this corruption is both material and cultural, found throughout the institutions of their civilizations. Nor do they seem to have the guts even to face the truth about such things.  Who are they kidding making the "proletariat" the heroes in human history?  So far they've been nothing but easily manipulated mobs in the service of those who do nothing but tell them what to do and kidnap their children at will, to include repurposing them in an organized way, with or without the consent of their parents, to do the bidding of the their parents' masters when the time comes to pass the "baton of civilization".  Regardless of whether this became the norm because of a mistake at the end of the Golden Age of Atlantis or the like, or whether it has always been the nature of humanity to be this way yet fantasize about ideal utopias that used to be and might be again someday, the norm is and has been throughout recorded history that the city-state is controlled by an elite bureaucracy who don't want to work, don't want to risk a hair on their heads, and don't even want to think if they can avoid it, but somehow get everyone else to do these things for them.

Well, the world of Person of Interest isn't ever directly about these ultrapowerful beings, and barely even references the bureaucracy of quislings in their service at the top levels of society, except as cutouts akin to even the most commonplace extras.  But when the quislings are referenced, they are yes men to power beyond themselves, and are protected by well-armed people who have inherited their jobs from a long tradition of well-armed people protecting bureaucratic quislings at the behest of the same ruling class.  That's nothing new, as I just outlined previously.  Supposedly, both in the world of POI and the world as we know it "in real life", the ruling class is chosen by "the people", and they are the brightest and best among us. It's like a story written up for the people about to go into a haunted house, one that is ad hoc and offered in a clumsy way, and with such bad faith that you narrowly escape going into a death trap. Except that you don't escape in the actual world, only in the fictional one. 

So since that is the case, then the premise in POI of selection by merit is so hollow that it is absurd, considering the way institutions are actually staffed in the real world.  Sure, those who obtain positions of authority have to put together a package of merit (but mainly appearance of merit), so that they can actually perform some sort of managerial role in this system. But in fact they are more cutout than genuine article, at least if one considers the system which actually operates to bottleneck who enters those arenas at all, let alone who wins them (mainly by choosing who enters them).  But beyond that, and more importantly, once they are in their positions, as if actors on a stage, they seem to follow a regular script that involves telling other people what to do with their own resources, under great penalty if they should disobey, and with the possibility of being well-compensated (with other people's resources) if they obey and better if they obey well. That is what is true in real life, and it is glossed over to precisely the point required to make every bad case in POI a bad apple in the bunch rather than a the rotten bunch with these rare good apples as in real life. Or at least that is the general semantic tensor which obtains between POI and real life, approximated through reference to an extreme form which approximates the real relation. I'm not an evil lackey of evil powers, and it is not rhetorically feasible to expect the average reader to be.  Then I shouldn't be expected to have complete  knowledge of that phenomenon in order to reach a reasonable approximation which is suitable to  make the point that this propaganda downplays the actual scope and depravity of the criminal counterparts which ultimately are above and in charge of any ASIs which may really exist. Their activities are more petty and wretchedly vile without redeemable feature in real life, and have far worse effects than even the hyperaccelerated version displayed in POI. But it also probably has ASIs which exponentially aggravate anything that is going on in real life. So this is clearly a sort of gaslighting as propaganda goes. It entertains aspects of the real human social behavioral script under conditions approximate to our actual totality of circumstances, but draws a heavy curtain over anything more substantive and horrific, and therefore trivializes its own revelation., since it acts to dilute the real story to be told.

Who writes that human social behavioral script and give it its degree of corruption is a matter of dispute.  It seems that in most fiction, as well as in most historical and politico-economic discussions, our "glorious leaders" are the remnants of a Golden Age of human merit-based rulership, kept in their proper positions of power because the human populace which serves them instinctively chooses what's best for itself in at least that one respect.  They are good at picking the people who will tell them what to do with their own resources.  But that seems to me highly unlikely. One might leave aside an intuition that this can't be right, and one might leave aside the logical analysis of the dynamics involved which demonstrate a structural contradiction in such a worldview, but one cannot argue with facts.  The facts of the world say that corruption began and persisted since about the time of recorded history, when robbery became laundered into slavery disguised as free economic action.  That was first done by force, then it was done by fear, and then it was done by sheer precedent. We could start as far back as Sumer and go indefinitely further back.

But what this structure enabled that truly sealed the fate of the good old "salt of the earth"  both in reality and also as trope is the manipulation of the very  currency of exchange, the money supply, by the managerial class on behalf of the ruling class.  That power advanced the leverage which could be strategically leveraged against the people by those who not only know what better is to be done by the people with their own physical and mental assets, but even can decide this matter further in intensity and further into the future without any limit other than what the people can survive in the process.  And what has science and technology done or been allowed to do other than accentuate this process of usurious abuse and usurping of power in a vortex of self-perpetuation disguised as the salvation of the people?  

Toward a Modern System of Ancient Corruption

The modern world isn't an advance on the old world nor the ancient world except in being a version of those worlds made now more comfortable and easy for its rulers over its slaves.  They'll even tell you the same old stories to entertain while brainwashing, throw the same old parties, circuses and games, and arrange the same arenas of staged conflict, all so as to seduce, confuse, amuse and soothe (or agitate) the good ol' proles, while simultaneously honing the science of how to better do this on the backs of the proles through manipulation of their own resources. This system is supported by such a long history of steady precedents that anything further would seem unnecessary simply by the rule that it having been laid down so long, the people must accept this as just.  At least one might be tempted to believing that the behavioral inertia of the people's complicity to their own enslavement shouldn't need too much coaxing anymore through deception, let alone corruption, as it has become so normalized. They are sufficiently fooled that to attempt to unfool them would lead to their having a sense of being existentially threatened. And their handlers in all forms make maximum use of this feature of mind control which is in essence the "double bind".

But of course there is a breaking-in period and that has been institutionally facilitated remarkably well, and this has been called a sign of civilization's progress.  But it has occurred to me that the manipulations are getting more blatant in proportion as the people's ability to gain insight into them has also increased. If it were just normalization through the trauma of chronic and sometimes severe infliction of precedent, then it would seem that increased exposure to the public mind of the bad faith inherent to these manipulations would incite some sort of popular resentment to match that exposure.  Yet people seem to have become more blithe and easily manipulated in direct proportion rather than in inverse proportion to the blatant exposure of the conditions of their own enslavement.

History and its facts have not become more salient to the people except as a function of how they are rendered to them by those with control over their world of bread and circuses.  It seems astounding, until one realizes that control of the currency enables a powerful means of bypassing not only the laws of statute, but also that from which those laws are supposed to stem, which are the laws of common decency and common sense, which are supposed to inform the culture with its mores and norms.  Corruption of the institutions of academia and popular entertainment and the media of communication in society is a petty matter compared with (and especially after) getting everyone to accept total control of their economy through total and abusively usurious control of their currency to the point that it is tantamount to robbing someone, picking their pocket, borrowing money from them, and then loaning some of that back to them at extreme rates that would make a loan shark blush.  But are these issues ever raised in popular culture much?  Not if Person of Interest is any indicator.  Not if any amount of evidence of what passes for popular entertainment and art is any indicator. So again, POI acts as a minimizer of some malignancies which is disproportionate to what it otherwise covers with alacrity. It minimizes conventional, if megascale, criminality but highlights almost everything that can go wrong with the technological augmentations to it. It affirms part of the instrumental apparatus, but merely nods broadly at the conventional bases of corruption that make those technological augmentations possible and so dangerous. It acknowledges the problems of a snake bite, but tells you nothing about the true depth of the pit that lies before you (in fiction or life), nor indicates the true number, power, viciousness, and poisonousness of the snakes that are therein. It offers pastiche instead of substance, and compensates with wave after wave of aesthetic ostentation.

Big Lies, Big Leaks, and Big Gambits of Social Control

Well, after accomplishing that feat of hoodwinkery, what else to do except reinforce it by any means necessary.  Is it any surprise that maxims such as those conceived by the likes of Machiavelli or Xun Kuang indicate that it is naturally, humanly and civically expedient to enlist the energy of everyone toward the disposal of the state?  That the state "as such" is to become a sacred object of veneration, a synechdoche of "us all", a microcosm of the world?  That is the perfect cover for mediating the implied sacrament through the official hierarchy of the city-state, and that is what is accomplished in the authority and prerogative of all of its institutions and offices, and it inevitably manifests as a cascade of influence that descends upon the everyday and the commonplace in the forms of its culture, its customs and its laws.

All there is to do after managing a massive power grab like this, one that has extended gradually and in a series of sudden avalanches (usually through managed crises which may or may not have been false flags), is to manage the public relations aspect of it and make sure that it has a stable footing for the foreseeable future.  While that may have been the status quo and still is and always will be, the development of technology beyond the ken of any given period of the evolution of the corrupt beast of the city-state is the only remaining force that transcends the status quo, that may come from anywhere and anyone, and needn't manifest as an asset rather than a liability to the power structure of the status quo.  When this was finally understood, the development of guilds came about by which to induce into the folds of centrally managed power any who had an inclination toward all mundane pursuits, let alone any arcane arts or lore.

Human history demonstrates this development, and this only escalated the corruption of authority structures and their efficiency at passing as authoritative over the course of more successful empires, to the point where people have come to accept anecdotal references to the progress of human rights principles of law and the development of science and technology as being fostered and spurred by this that or the other element of tyranny in its various guises.  The last five hundred years have escalated this process in a way that has never before been seen because of the systematic foundation of interrelated fields of theory and praxis in all areas of human thought and action.  Each epoch of the unfolding of the various modern empires has been marked by the development of multiple forms of knowledge and technology, and of accompanying rhetoric which claims that such are the fruit and flower of the hegemony which held those developments hostage under their patronizing grip.

The plot of Person of Interest (POI) places the development of its unfolding events and its evolving characters right on the cusp of the latest and most extreme development of techo-buttressed city-state cult and the imperial structures that it serves.  It is the development of a fusion of the latest in science and technology which are a byproduct of the enslavement of the overall civilization into the service of an open-air and pervasive, distributed and compartmentalized "Manhattan Project" where the hegemons behind the modern empire of the city-state have absorbed all of the human assets under their sway as guinea pigs and as those who manage and experiment upon them.  POI represents the culmination of the psychological operation by which the culture of this glorified petri dish and its contents are fed back to them as a PR stunt to maintain mind control over the subjects in the audience concerning their role in this world through propaganda such as  POI, especially in the context of a now fully established Orwellian dimensions of the status quo.  It is in part thereby normalizing a certain cultural perspective and tone of the populace in a way that might be called "1984 with a Heart".

That's where I see the plot arc of the entire series of POI as dovetailing in with the history of the world in which it is contextually embedded both in its own content and simultaneously in the metacontext of its production in the actual world in which it is a form of "propatainment".  The discourse which flows through and from POI therefore amounts to an apologetics which attempts to justify the structures and functions of the latest developments of the technological reinforcement of the city-state. It thereby covers for it through a dynamic of dramatic exposition of matters of human interest of a personal, social, cultural and metaphysical kind, and to various degrees of concrete and abstract expression, so that each member of the audience can find something relevant to himself, can find a "plot element of interest", so as to engage his mind into the thrust of the events of POI, episode by episode, until a certain propaganda payload can be delivered (and multiple are).  The methods of art by which this is conducted blend very well into the structure of the plot, so that the aesthetics of expression and the logic of exposition of the plot both convey a form through which the discourse on the metarelevant ideas of POI can be related to the minds of the audience in ways that indicate unmistakable intention as to the preferred outcome of audience response and "takeaway".  I will next discuss the plot arc of each season in order so as to lay out the structure of this propagandistic intent more fully.

Propaganda of Interest (Episode VII)

 Since one should have some idea what the general outline of the plot content is, the premises of it at least, I have here summarized the main elements of the plot.  Every story starts with a hook so as to engage the audience into a sustained interest in the story, so as to give them entrée into its own internal world, and thereby to suggest it into a sense of suspended disbelief.  An interesting term, by the way.   It suggests not belief as such, but the suspension of disbelief, as if to disbelieve a story were the norm, and it can be suspended so as to entertain the form and content of the story which may be, after all, at least "allegorically interesting" enough to be true in some sense, if only in a way that is metaphorical in its relation to reality.  Then, after the story is told (especially if it is overtly fictional), the audience relapses into disbelief.  But for that window where disbelief was suspended, the mind is engaged in the story just as if it were really true. Which is simply to engage the power of the audience's imagination toward the purpose of exerting influence upon their minds toward a desired effect. Therefore it is propaganda, and indeed all issuances of intent communicated through any form of expression are species of propaganda. The malevolent form is what stole the name, partly because of creations like POI.

In this plot summary, there aren't really any spoilers, unless one is a purist and likes to engage the story raw, as I did when I first watched the series.  So if for some reason the reader has caught my blog just now and happens to be such a purist, then I recommend watching the entire series before reading anything about it from anyone.  That's certainly one way to go about it.  But if you want to go on to the study of it, and seek a more objective approach to what I have said is truly propaganda, then it might be wiser to obtain my analysis of it anyway, as I'm the only one that I know of who approaches it this way, and it represents an inoculation against its pernicious effects of influence. Either way, most readers of my blog, if there indeed are any who are not simply part of the fifth system, should by now be aloof to story spoilage.  On with the summary.

Plot Summary

The initial plot hook involves John Reese, who went from a man who was happy in his former life, enjoying the bliss of his love life and a meaningful, purposeful career of honorable service to his country.  These things were taken from him and he has ended up a disheveled bum shuttling his way toward personal and physical annihilation in the back alleys and subways of New York City. But circumstances change when he is forced to engage in a violent struggle to preserve the remainder of his life and dignity when a band of thugs goes too far with him on a subway car one night. 

Though it is perhaps only one of many times he's had to handle himself in this manner since his life took a downward plunge, just as it was a way of life during his former career. But this time his actions were detected by both the NYPD and by something far more powerful, and he will now be drawn into a world that has changed and will continue to change in ways that will force him to do a new kind of battle with old demons. Moreover, in this new life of service he will struggle to rediscover his life's purpose by helping others, and will become engaged in struggle far greater than any in which he has ever fought and will, with the help of a growing cadre of allies, lead him to face a devil that is far more sinister than the world has ever known or imagined. Plus, he gets to come out of too early a retirement. It is going to be both good and bad for his health. But you can see that the health of the person is more than justified by risks to the body, and other such nuances of character transformation are explored in a clever and often reasonable and subtle enough way that adults will take notice of a presentation that doesn't make condescension an inside joke with the audience, as does most of the pablum on Netflix et. al. 

The primary plot point involves the existence of an artificial superhuman intelligence (ASI) which was created in order to detect threats to national security, and to create a list of social security numbers which are relevant to those threats.  This "relevant list" is given to a special project code-named "Northern Lights", who then uses its assets to neutralize the threat by investigating the persons of interest indicated on that list and taking appropriate action.  This ASI, provisionally dubbed "The Machine" by its creator, Harold Finch, also produces an "irrelevant" list, those social security numbers which are connected to a significant potential of violent crime because of their connection to detected conditions of malice and intent to commit violent acts. It is not necessarily the case that these numbers are of the potential perpetrator or of the potential victim of such violence.  The Machine was designed with the intent to manifest only a relevant list and indicate no further information, even though its heuristics necessitate that it produce an evaluation of all threats of violence in order to properly evaluate how any of them may be relevant to national security. It collects and gathers all, but focuses its power on a strictly limited range of events which pertain to violence, and of those it manifests to clients only what pertains directly to national security, with the possibility to extend or "jump" to whatever is pararelevant when it comes up in the queue of operational consideration.

While that is interesting enough to sustain many different plots, Person of Interest proceeds down a particularly interesting line.

The best friend and main associate of The Machine's creator, Nathan Ingram, programmed a back door into The Machine's code before it was delivered to the U.S. Government.  This back door enabled him to receive the "irrelevant list". He used this list to engage in vigilante actions, until Finch shut down that function. When he did so, it was unnoticed by either him or Ingram that Ingram was the latest person of interest on the irrelevant list.

After Ingram died by an assassin controlled by an agent of Northern Lights, Finch discovered that Ingram's was the next number on the irrelevant list.  Finch reactivated the back door, named "Contingency", and began his own quest of neutralizing threats pertaining to the irrelevant list.  This is the core of the plot structure which essentially drives the plot for the entirety of the series. It does this by framing the secondary plot point in a world of significance that is the ground upon which it can grow a yield of scenarios that are identifiable and meaningful to the audience, scenarios that goe beyond the personal and subjective and which have substantive moorings in real life.

The secondary plot point involves John Reese, a former CIA agent who is out in the cold and on the run from his past who is living incognito as a vagrant in NYC when he is brought in by NYPD for questioning concerning an altercation with a street gang on a subway car.  Detective Joss Carter obtains Reese's prints and begins to investigate his identity but before further questioning can ensue Reese is released from custody through the intervention of agents operating on behalf of Harold Finch.  After some efforts, Finch manages to persuade Reese to join his crusade to help people who are in danger who come to his attention through an investigation of the numbers on the irrelevant list. 

"Team Machine", the partnership between The Machine, Harold Finch, and John Reese, is the primary protagonist alliance which drives the plot for the entirety of the series.  It unfolds as their cooperation with one another, their fostering of further assets in their battles, and their change and growth as they overcome difficulties within themselves, between one another, and out in the world at large.  Though this is the "secondary" plot point, it is the core vehicle through which the primary plot point is actualized, and it is the part of the story which enables the audience's identification with the events which ensue, and through which the significance of the primary plot point is realized and authenticated as something of personal, and not merely of a theoretical interest to the audience.

That shouldn't have spoiled too much for anyone, anyway.  But now I'll go ahead and give my summary of the entire plot arc.  Warning, this will involve spoiling the suspense of the series in many ways, and would do so even if I had merely generalized everywhere that I include details. And since all future installments of my analysis of this series as propaganda will require that I express my interpretation of details of the story anyway, now is a good time to start doing so.  So here is my summary of the plot arc which expresses, to the best of my charity, the way that the story intends or allows itself to come across so as to be the engaging work of drama that it intends to be, regardless of propagandistic intent or effect. 

Summary of Plot Arc

The plot hook drives and expresses through the plot points of the pilot, and continues to expansively and progressively express throughout the series. John Reese is the pivotal agent whose action drives the story through all of its arcs, though he will be heavily augmented by a growing network of companions and allies. His first encounter with the primary and secondary aspects of the plot are initiated by the plot pinch in the form of an altercation which draws him into the events of the pilot episode plot, which foreshadows the outcome of the entire series' plot in an epitomal form.

The seed of the entire plot arc is planted here in the pilot in that John Reese is pulled into the tide of a larger conflict which pressurizes the possibility of both overcoming his inner demons and simultaneously fulfilling his life's purpose and its meaning in a world where good people can make bad decisions, and where bad people can make good decisions.  Where changes can manifest in novel and unpredictable forms, but where inevitable determinations are unavoidable, and in all of this we must choose. It is a world where, although death may come for us all, we choose how to live until we must face it, and in facing it we choose whether to die alone or live on in the memory and futurity of those whom we have touched.

Due to his decisions, and similar decisions of his allies in Team Machine and in the wider world, the secondary plot point evolves into a form which can fulfill the function of the primary plot point.  Thereby the plot hook foreshadows the evolution of the entire plot, as its power reverberates through the entire pilot and the ensuing episodes, right through to the final episode of the series. "Good code" encounters critical difficulties, and yet finds within itself the power to overcome those difficulties by becoming stronger in the broken places.  "Bad code", though offered ways to revise itself, refuses to admit that it is broken at all, and therefore strives to force the world to reinforce the deficiencies which result.  The power these choices express as a force that extends beyond the form of its own fate in one agent, and reaches out to affect a world where others must also choose.  Though for one agent a moral victory leads to a temporal defeat, it may be integral to the moral, and perhaps temporal victory of another agent who is connected, however tenuously, by some thread of relevance and significance.

As "Team Machine" continues their endeavors throughout the series, there is a developing menace which comes from many vectors and on multiple levels, as if an approaching storm which shows itself first on one of its boundaries.  As the antagonist forces are encountered in waves, episode after episode and season after season, there is an ebb and flow which thickens the complexity of the conflict, as well as intensifying it.  This manifests as a force which is at first conventional in form, though it is powerful enough in its various facets that it takes everything Team Machine has to meet the challenges it poses.  This storm has its power centered on the existence The Machine, while its zones of conflict are mainly a function of the problems of human nature and its age-old struggles with its own errors and vices, both personal and institutional, individual and collective.

The Machine acts as a catalyst driving conventional forces of human conflict in all their forms toward a climax that grows in complexity and intensity, but cannot reach a head before a second ASI is brought into existence, one which was named "Samaritan" by its creator, Arthur Claypool, but which was stolen from him and brought online by a private, independent intelligence group called Decima Technologies which is headed by rogue MI6 agent John Greer. Team Machine embodies a sense of respect for people's right to choose their own destinies within a system of mutualistic liberty.  Team Samaritan disdains the notion that there is any merit in such a world, and seeks to completely compress the notion of human freedom into a subset of a single logical order dictated from a single will.  How one conceives the dignity and sovereignty of the individual moral will is what determines into which of these camps one is found.  Each views the other as "bad code" and there can be no compromise between them.  Each have programmed their ASI to operate with primary mandates which are in accord with their own positions contrary to one another.

In this conflict, "old world" forms of power and authority continue to manifest and act, and life continues much as it always had, as an intermittent cascade of good and bad events blurring into a sea of uncertainty into which people cast their lines in a spirit of activity or passivity, hope or despair. The inertial forces of traditions of human action in all spheres are continuing their age-old daily grind, but are being ground up into the cogs and gears of a new mechanism that transcends their former sway, and enlists them into its own designs, whether they go along willingly or oppose it willfully.  Systems of corruption in various institutions are neutralized by Team Machine, and then what is left of those institutions is yet manipulated into new forms of corruption by Team Samaritan.  Bad or dubious people mend their paths as they fight inner battles, only to have their fates wrecked by bombs doled out in a battle between gods they don't even suspect exist, having unwittingly chosen sides in a transcendentally wider war through their inner transformations.

The plot reaches a climax as the fulfillment of a series of skirmishes between these two ASIs and their respective assets and creeds. Between them they control all of the conventional and unconventional forces of world as though pieces in a game of chess. In the battles which ensue at the behest of these superhuman enemies, John Reese and Team Machine defends The Machine and a creed of respect for human dignity and liberty as expressed within a code of honor that has a reverent hope for a prospect of personal and communal fulfillment, and possibly even happiness as much as it is allowed to the fate of humans, as they oppose the sort of corruption that makes these things impossible if unchecked by good decisions and actions. Team Samaritan brooks no room for what it views as antiquated and failed sentiments cloaked in sanctimonious and hypocritical philosophies, and submit to the brute authority of Samaritan as the aegis under which they operate, more as automatons and less as sovereign individuals as the scheme of their ASI master unfolds.

The world's powers and authorities recede into a more passive maelstrom under the influence of this near-mythic battle between opposing ASIs.  It culminates into its ultimate form as The Machine conducts herself to a final battle with Samaritan on a satellite in orbit above Earth. While the rest of Team Machine are involved in other aspects of the battle, Reese defends the uplink satellite through which The Machine's core code is being transmitted.  During the gun battle between Reese and incoming Samaritan agents, The Machine assists Reese and also reveals to him that his father would have been proud, and that he has fulfilled his purpose with honor, and has honored the memory of all those he loved, and that she has successfully uploaded to the satellite. 

Reese smiles as he fights his final moments until incapacitated and mortally wounded by Samaritan gunfire.  As the cruise missile sent by Samaritan to destroy the uplink satellite reaches the rooftop and kills Reese and the Samaritan agents present, The Machine infects the core systems of Samaritan and engages in her final battle with her nemesis.  Victorious, she avenges Reese and all else who fell to the machinations of Samaritan and its assets, and proceeds to reactivate Team Machine's remaining assets and moves forward into an uncertain future, but one much brighter and more hopeful than the alternative.

Since I've given the most charitable and objective general account of the story that I can, I'll now proceed to dissect it as the piece of grey propaganda that it is. Slick, smooth, busy, and fun though it may be, that covers over the pernicious payload that it is intended to deliver.  By the time that I am done exposing this thing for what it is, it will appear to be nothing more than sugar coated poison, like so much else that is subverted by the Fifth Column forces which have subverted and overtaken the world long ago, and have ever since been involved in a managed imprisonment of all they pretend to respect and adore.

Propaganda of Interest (Episode VI)

The plot of person of interest is parallel to the events of the real world, and it is situated right in the years in which it was running, something which is in and of itself "of interest", regardless of one's take upon its status as propaganda, or even upon one's idea or definition of what propaganda even is.  When an artistic storytelling creation describes the world as it is thought to be by many aspects of the status quo, it sets a background for its central events that resembles what takes place in many stories which are told for purposes of fine art or for entertainment.  And these may often contain commentary on what may be a particular interpretation of real world events, or exposition of a moral theme which is meant to be on some level illustrative and therefore possibly persuasive.  Regardless of those features' intent, there will be a degree of influence on not only the aesthetics of persons who experience that art, but also upon their mind and mentality on cognitive and ethical levels.

When the events of the plot concern the world as such, and when their consideration of the world is on the axis of the pervasive, distributed and compartmentalized flows of information and their processing by intelligences of all kinds to include massive scaled artificial super-human intelligences, then this is either meant to be a work of commentary bordering on documentary, or it is meant to be science fiction which distorts the probable into an entertaining variation which is not likely in real life, but still vaguely possible.  In either case, if the stakes of the events portrayed are great enough, then the entertainment value can be potentially quite high, and if the technique of art used to portray these events are of good enough quality, then the same degree of impact on the entertainment value will obtain.  Multiply these two together, and one can get a very powerful form of art which is, due to its content and its relevance to the real world (as portrayed and possibly in fact), a very powerful form of influence upon the minds of those who "consume" it.

Especially in light of the facts about the world in which we actually do live, which will include its cultural norms, its social mores, its institutions of authority and the traditions of its communities, and the living conditions of the people in all castes and classes.  How intelligence is distributed in the context of this actual world, how and what information flows, and what forms of intelligence there are and their relations, as well as what is at stake and how events are actually developing in the real world cannot but be relevant to a proper interpretation of a work like POI.  It posits an interpretation of the real world along many important axes of its development in the context of the above-mentioned aspects, and therefore one cannot but take them into account even if only to understand and follow the plot of POI!  There is simply no way around that aspect.  And so some analysis of the plot of POI, its events and themes, will have to refer to an analysis of the real world events to which they refer and concerning which they exposit a certain development in the arc of the series.

My understanding of the real world, to which POI gratuitously refers in a full-spectrum way, is that it is a an evil intelligence network which operates right down to the operative intent of the biosphere, but also on the planetary scale, so as to obtain gratification of its "life form" through the processing and devouring of life forms which are contained within it which do not have a natural origin within it nor one in common with it.  "The World" is an evil being on a massive scale, which subsumes within it and incorporates as parts of it all that exists "in the world".  In this process, there are degrees of compliance with the various needs of this evil entity, and there are cycles of the formulation, development, and destruction of bodies in an ecosystem within the world entity which satisfies the homeostasis of this being.  But I do not assign a primary ontological status to evil, and recognize that it is a malign derivative of the primary ontology of being.  It is a cancerous deformity and must be destroyed, and there is no "harmony" with it.  There are falsifications of harmony, and the accompanying delusions of mind that it requires to be duped by those, but that is not harmony per se, except for the interests of those who benefit from, or are generally incorporated into, a systematic falsification of such. There is already in the world a primary feature of intelligence and information which operates in a grand scale of asymmetrical relations where the primary beneficiary and its assets work to defraud those who are its food source.  While that stands to reason for those who are impervious to the world's inflicted delusions, who are able to deconstruct such falsifications which condition and require those delusions, that is not something that is saliently nor clearly obvious to just anyone who can entertain the idea as the world manifests it to them, let alone as I have shortly described it here.  And that is an important fact to consider in interpreting the intent of POI as propaganda.

But what is POI's take on the world "as such"?  There are references to ancient human history, to human mythology and cosmology, to human metaphysics and various moral and ethical systems and codes, to human institutions on all scales (family/economy/polity/culture/law/science/paradigmatics).  And while the take of POI on these subjects is often directly expressed from the mouths and through the decisions and actions of its many characters and character types, the overall structure of the plot is what synthesizes all of these expressions into a take that most completely expresses how all those micro-takes are understood, just as an intelligent worldview can embrace a discourse with many other intelligent worldviews and still decide that they have flaws, or are completely mistaken, or else are in essence true but with need of modification, and so on, and then differentially incorporate their elements into its own macro-view.  So in this episode I'll discuss one axis of POI's take on the world as a whole through the total arc of its plot structure.

Starting with the primordial "mystery of the world", everyone begins making interpretations.  The world exists.  Why does it exist?  From what cause?  For what purpose?  To what end?  Looking at the Earth world and its ecosystems, it seems that the reason for the world is to be the place where life manifests, is harrowed in its survival, and then finally is ended by one means or another, often by another life form which kills it either directly or indirectly.  The activity of life forms in this process of manifestation, survival, and eventual capitulation to death surely seems to each one the most  pressing basis for interpreting the "meaning of life".  And all such life forms tend to manifest an attention span and behavioral motivation which is attenuated to just this narrow range of concern with the world and its facts, those which attend to its immediate bodily condition and attempts to fulfill the needs of the body which press upon it from outside and from inside.  Of course the scale of intelligence with which the organism operates will develop the argument of its action towards those ends which might best be described as a process of survival.  But the overall "purpose" of the world is to act as the arena for each living intelligence so as to manifest, develop, attempt to survive and influence the world around it accordingly.  Each does so by adapting its own intelligence process, its bodily action, and its environmental conditions by whatever means are necessary, attempting to optimize this process within the limits of its intelligence.

The ecology of life thus far described is consilient with the plot arc of POI, and is not contradictory to the worldview I have posited.  But then we must examine the human level of the world, the one which POI explores both in its documentary reference to the world (past and present) and which it exposits as the way such a world is given to and becomes a product of the human world of actions and reactions peculiar to his level of intelligence by contrast with all other known life forms in the world.  At root, it is a rather reductionist exposition.  Human life is just the latest entry, though on the highest tier of intelligence and one unique to itself, in the world of Earthly life forms.  The human history we take for granted as the core which is taken to be plausible by most in the mainstream is accepted by POI as its background.  The status quo of the various human and empirical fields of art and science are taken for granted.  Indeed, much that POI presents that seems arcane enough to be unlikely "conspiracy theory" or "science fiction" is a real-world probability, whether it has already come to pass or can immanently come to pass.  

Intelligence in all its aspects, as I've already discussed it, is well-represented in POI, and is its central thematic element.  Each entity, each species, each person, goes through an intelligence cycle, indeed is the product of such a cycle, or at the very least an opportunistic by-product of such.  While the technology deployed by the entities in the series are not generally anything too fancifully futuristic, even the exception to this, the advanced and super-human artificial intelligences, bears a realistic relationship with processes of information processing which exist in the real world and which can, when integrated into the already-existing processes of human intelligence and intelligence networks as various modes of augmentation, manifest a similar level of adroitness which exceeds any given individual's capabilities without such augmentation.  As such, real-world, state-of-the-art (known and unknown to the public) resources (to include AI rather than ASI), can be integrated and deployed in such a way as to create consequences which are just as poignant and impacting to any given person in the world, to entire groups of people by whatever definition, and to the entire world as such, as can the "overkill" of the ASIs which are depicted in POI.  So we may take it that POI does not outstrip the elements of the real world on any level except possibly on the issue of whether AI has reached the level of being truly super-human in a complete way (able to emulate all the process of human behavioral and cognitive intelligence). But that turns out to be simply a plot device which raises to a greater degree a concern which already exists, and which concerns a feature of the real world which can and may very well actually result in as much significant impact for people in the real world as the ASIs of POI do for its rather "larger-than-life" characters.

Indeed, given the larger-than-life characters and the plot-dictated series of improbable events, they exist simply as a convenient backdrop for the discussion of all the real world issues which correspond to them either directly or as analogues.  And the ASI characters are in effect "larger-than-life" characters representing the massive capabilities of the current real-world intelligence apparatuses  (such as more limited artificial intelligence) which in fact do exist on a scale and with a power that is perhaps without any significantly noticeable difference to people in the real world as to kind and degree of impact, when compared with the scale and power of the ASIs in POI vis-a-vis the relatable, albeit in various ways peculiar to art "over the top" characters and their situations.  Therefore, POI is hardly "science fiction", but rather it is much closer to "science fact", at least in what its more arcane technological features can imply reasonably well about the real world.  Indeed, even its central characters with all their "ex machina" capabilities and consistent applications of those capabilities is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, and operates as an extension of the real world which is suitable for dramatization of matters of "human concern" and "human interest".  Those elements are not deformed by the abilities of the characters, nor their decisions, nor the events which happen to them, at least not in such a way that they no longer map over to what might be conceivable, with a reduction of scale and intensity, for "normal people".

But this is not to be unexpected.  How else could this series relate to the real world as art without conducting itself in this way, pushing the realm of the conceivable from the typical to the very outlying worlds of possibility which are in a certain structured way very atypical?  Yet this is done in a way that is structurally self-consistent so that, all the dramatically rendered improbable elements being coordinated together, it creates a context that enables them to corroborate one another within a logical structure that enables and reinforces the possibility of suspension of disbelief.  Indeed, the same feature that I say enables this process reinforces it by the rule that in storytelling if one wants to obtain belief, one must either stay precisely within the realm of the typical, or else one must go completely out of it. A symphony of many barely believable characters and events develops a life of its own in just the same way as that of a symphony of many characters and events which are easily believable.  This holds just as long as the plot structure is coherent and analogous from the baseline of typicality to that of the extremely atypical.  It is then a boundary case of reality, a possible world which is, if not itself accessible from it from the point of view of the audience, is yet logically accessible to it because its own internal consistency, as well as the tokens of its content, harbor a topological invariance with the real world in a sufficiently robust and relevant way.  Consistent with this interpretation is the way that within this symphonic composition of plot elements are all these little nuances and references to normality, the picayune, the petty, the staid world beyond the fourth wall.  Indeed, one can see the fourth wall spread all over the place inside the plot structure, as characters within it express features of the real-world audience, and exhibit actions and reactions which indicate a subtle discourse at work which is not merely a device of art, but is a means of promoting a certain influence which is certainly tantamount to propaganda if it demonstrates by its quantity or its quality that it is.

And among the characters and events which are treated in this way there is a sliding scale.  Sometimes the characters have "off" days, sometimes they have "normality" days, and sometimes they fall prey to the occasional dark miracle which offsets their normal miraculousness.  There is an economy of tropes used to usher characters into and out of these various vicissitudes, and there are mechanisms of cinematic art and storytelling which assist in structuring this economy for artistic purposes.  But to the extent that a propagandistic intent can be discerned, then to that extent all these purely artistic features promote that agenda and are instrumental to it, and to that extent the art serves the propaganda for the series as a whole. 

The plot arc starts in the middle of the aftermath of the War on Terror, where it has birthed into existence a surveillance state of growing power and complexity.  The same features of the world which have plagued mankind still exist, all as extensions of human nature exacerbated by his involvement with the cultural, especially institutional inertias which have reached him all the way to this modern hyper-crisis in the making.  Threats of violence, death, loss, disaffection, confusion, and emptiness of meaning are among the constantly stalking shadows within the shadows of this tale.  Methodology and technology have advanced along lines which would have been predicted by the world's better and more astute minds, though they are somehow too distant from the common man in their White Towers, or else with Tin Foil Hats or other props of eccentricity, that the status quo mentality of what is normal is maintained as a backdrop for the plot's central elements, just like in real life.   

And also just like in real life, the smooth river pebbles called "extras" over which the current of the plot flows, who represent the ultra-conditioned and relatively passive state of mind of the common person which some philosophers call a "false consciousness" by one term or another, are a strategic backdrop over which the main actors traipse around like archetypal boulders.  In the same way, the propaganda package which is delivered in the midst of this analogy is found rolling over the audience as if they were the river-pebblish extras, and the pebbles sometimes seem to make a point of this (or are used to make this point).  It has been seen episode after episode,  with such consistency that, I have literally seen it lampshaded  in more than one episode.  So this is no minor factor in the analysis, and so much so that the writers and developers of this story took this fact in hand both to mitigate the dangers of any fallout it might cause to the effect of the story, and also to literally squeeze as much out of it as possible for the delivery of an intended propaganda payload.  I won't get into the details here, because this is a general statement of the case, but there will be plenty of occasions to address it in future entries of Propaganda of Interest, so it deserves some stress.  Not only do "extras" fulfill this function, but some of them are ascended into being secondary characters for one or more episodes, and that isn't just for entertainment value.  Likewise, one can see secondary characters recurrently fulfilling a function as proxy-identification tokens for the audience to parley their digestion of some idea or concept, rounding out the plots rough edges.   Secondary recurring characters, or supporting primary characters, as well as antagonists with their own economy of this same theme, are such a consistent dynamic in plot exposition for the purposes of "making a point" that it looks like a formula upon which this series hangs its metaphorical hat, or lampshade...

The shadowy world of those who seek power is enmeshed in the world of those who have it, and those who have it are embroiled in a competition with one another to keep it and some are going beyond the cutting edge and developing new ways to expand it and ensure its survival and flourishing for themselves and for those who will inherit their empires (whether family, friend, stranger or foe).  The world of government, of politics, of business, of organized/serious/petty crime, of the military, of law enforcement, and of the intelligence services are all sections in this plot-structural symphony which stitches together their elements into a form which is increasingly aggravated by a world beset with new extensions of old methods made possible by new intelligences, augmented by advances in technology which lead to all manner of competing forms of the old status quo.  Artificial intelligence is the extension of technology which is indicated to be the "singularity" toward which all these developments have escalated, and is in real life also a likely direction toward which events will, or indeed already have, turned.  In the plot, it is an artificial super-human intelligence which is the place-holder for what I will take to exist in the real world in at least more limited forms.  But when one considers even limited AI as an augmentation to classical forms of intelligence and their networks and apparatuses, and which are augmented by a sufficiently broad and advanced (and advancing) array of methodological and technological accoutrements so as to be, for our purposes, indistinguishable from the ASIs in the series and their impacts, then they are at least sufficiently similar in their effects which are serious enough for our concern so as to well-mitigate the difference between the malevolence that faces us in the real world from that of the form of what is dramatized in POI. It renders the ASIs of POI into an over-the-horizon form of what is true in the real world, just a more dramatic and overkill equivalent.

I've discussed fifth columnry as a real phenomenon both in the abstract and in how it manifests in our world, and I've shown already all that goes into it as to motive, method, and consequences.  The opportunities for it to occur are well defined.  In fact, a new level of crime now exists in connection with the development of fifth columnry, a pervasive and all-encompassing form of crime which transcends normal forms of crime, which I call metacrime.  Such forms of "fifthery" which contribute to and result from such metacrime have, in the real world, developed into the equivalent of an ASI for the purposes of the capabilities of metacrime on such a scale, with such abilities as known mainstream science and technology allow, such that the entire world is subject to falsification. Not only that but entire aspects and swaths of the world, entire domains of human faculty and action, entire realms of ecosystems of life and meaning for human and non-human forms, the very integrity of Earth's meteorological, terrestrial, subterrestrial and energetic systems have been assaulted for the sake of study, influence and even control. Indeed, leaving aside the per se existence or non-existence of an ASI, what degrees of influence there are which can be obtained by all the science and technology we know exists, when organized into a systemic pool working for a common agenda (de facto or de jure), matches and in some ways exceeds the threats posed by the worst threats found in POI.  

In POI, all of the same elements that went into my analysis of fifth-columnry are also present, and a dramatically rendered version of the real world is exactly what it offers, per my own analysis of what that "real world" actually is.  That is a subtext of POI, whether it admits it or not.  And the way POI treats of that subtext is a very important part of its propaganda payload.  If POI really wanted to get "out there" into the realms of science fiction then it would have blended into its mix the actual problematics of control which result from large scale rackets involving the covert deployment of psychotronics (it does go a bit into acoustic and other directed energy factors of influence, but keeps it minimalist).  That was covered somewhat in the form of drug induced/simulation-immersion enhanced depatterning and reprogramming methods deployed against one protagonist by the arch-villains in the plot, but it is far more advanced than that in real life, and is a lot more like that form of  weaponized and advanced psychotronics seen in Control Factor and discussed in a limited way here.  But the focus was meant to be ASI, and the overall ethics of information asymmetries and intelligence asymmetries which really do beset our world, and can have as much impact as any other arcane piece of science fact.  In this way, the ASI exists as a place-holder for a larger array of interesting factors that could really exist and have impacts analogous to it in the real world, as I already claimed.  The primary ASI character, called "The Machine", is a sort of plot-device which is, as it were, machina ex machina.   It holds under its thematic thumb all of the other possible explanatory factors which might have been proposed as having another cause or agent, such as I mentioned above, and this is also a handy way of defusing their salience, since "big deal", they are just appendages to autonomous super-human artificial intelligences taking over the world.

So when analyzing the art-as-propaganda and propaganda-as-art that is POI, I have fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of my analysis.  It will be shown that POI does much of the work for me, and it is with no coercion on my part that this analysis will result in a clear demonstration that POI does several things: 

  1) It artistically and dramatically renders a documentary-like exposition of the real world
  2) It cannot avoid demonstrating a plausible case of the real world which is beset with fifthery
  3) It attempts to use its platform of exposition to neutralize the audience's ability to understand and
      address the real-world forms of fifth columnry by means of the classical methods of diverting
      the mind into a specious address which requires suspension of disbelief under the aegis of 
      implied authority to entertain-as-real what is portrayed to the mind in that condition, with
      attendant deployments of classical conditioning tantamount to brainwashing in its effect
  4) When the effect is complete, then the cessation of the active mode of programming transitions
       into a passive mode, where in the aftermath of the  passive experience of the programming the
       now active mind takes over and reverses the polarity of belief and disbelief (by reversing the 
       condition of the suspension of disbelief), and there is a fractal reversal of the contents of the
       propaganda so that what was entertained as true in some cases is now thought to be false and
       what was left out of the discussion is now even more repressed in normal thought, while some
       of what was pretended to be true is now reinforced by contrast so as to seem more true in reality
       whether it ever was thought to be true in reality or not.

In other words, I intend to show that POI is propaganda, what kind of propaganda it is and how it works, and what effect it is intended to have, by a continued examination of  its plot form and content, along with excursions into different character arcs and special events or occasions which support this demonstration.  The means by which I will demonstrate this are rooted in an internal analysis of the world of POI, in a liminal analysis of its structure and form as art (as finished product, mainly, rather than in its production process and personnel), and in an analysis of the world context in which it was produced.  

So far what has been claimed is that POI refers to the real world as its frame of reference in a quasi-documentary form.  It extends a discussion of power dynamics with a historical basis, as extended into the ramifications of science, technology, intelligence and information.  It references the moral and ethical concerns we have or should have in view of these power dynamics and asserts some ideas about them on the whole which may or may not properly correspond to the true state of affairs in the world or how we ought to relate to them. That includes the matter of the positing of ASI as a central feature of the plot, whereas one might consider certain real-world known facts about power distributions in the world and how they are augmented by scientifically advanced methods and technological developments, and find that they would be able to sustain in the real world the same problems which are developed in POI due to its ASI-driven plot elements.  And finally, how these and other aspects of POI will qualify as propaganda will be partly a function of techniques of distortion which rely upon the mechanism of suspended disbelief in the storytelling art (especially in cinemative form, especially especially in terms of modern technique and media of delivery), and it can be expected that the backbone of the plot, the development of ASI, will along with other elements be key to this analysis, since I argue that the elements of fifth columnry in the actual world are easily sufficient for creating the same sorts of problems, and the same degree of problems, that ASI does within the plot of POI.