Opinion is a vast merchandise that everyone possesses and uses. Its
production involves a large portion of the economy, and its consumption
takes up much of people’s time. Its main characteristic is clarity.
We hasten to point out that there is no such thing as an unclear opinion.
Everything is either yes or no. Different levels of thought or doubt,
contradiction and painful confessions of uncertainty are foreign to it.
Hence the great strength that opinion gives to those who use it and
consume it in making decisions or impose it on the decisions of others.
In a world that is moving at high speed toward positive/negative binary
logic, from red button to black, this reduction is an important factor in
the development of civil cohabitation itself. What would become of our
future if we were to continue to support ourselves on the unresolved
cruelty of doubt? How could we be used? How could we produce?
Clarity emerges when the possibility of real choice is reduced. Only
those with clear ideas know what to do. But ideas are never clear, so
there are those on the scene who clarify them for us, by supplying simple
comprehensible instruments: not arguments but quizzes, not studies but
alternative binaries. Simply day and night, no sunset or dawn. Thus they
solicit us to pronounce ourselves in favor of this or that. They do not
show us the various facets of the problem, merely a highly simplified
construction. It is a simple affair to pronounce ourselves in favor of a
yes or no, but this simplicity hides complexity instead of attempting to
understand and explain it. No complexity, correctly comprehended, can
in fact be explained except by referring to other complexities. There is
no such thing as a solution to be encountered. Joys of the intellect and
of the heart are cancelled by binary propositions, and are replaced with
the utility of “correct” decisions.
But no one is stupid enough to believe that the world rests on two
logical positive and negative binaries. Surely there is a place for understanding,
a place where ideas again take over and knowledge regains
lost ground. Therefore, the desire arises to delegate this all to others who
seem to hold the answers to the elaboration of complexity because they
suggest simple solutions to us. They portray this elaboration as something
that has taken place elsewhere and therefore represent themselves
as witnesses and depositories of science.
So the circle closes. The simplifiers present themselves as those who
guarantee the validity of the opinions asked, and their continual correct
production in binary form. They seem to be wary of the fact that once
opinion — this manipulation of clarity — has destroyed all capacity to
understand the intricate tissue that underlies it, the complex unfoldings
of the problems of conscience, the fevered activity of symbols and meanings,
references and institutions, it destroys the connective tissues of
differences. It annihilates them in the binary universe of codification
where reality only seems to have two possible solutions, the light on or
the light off. The model sums up reality, cancels the nuances of the latter
and displays it in pre-wrapped formulas ready for consumption. Life
projects no longer exist. Instead symbols take the place of desires and
duplicate dreams, making them dreams twice over.
The unlimited amount of information potentially available to us does
not allow us to go beyond the sphere of opinion. Just as most of the
goods in a market where every possible, useless variety of the same
product does not mean wealth and abundance but merely mercantile
waste, an increase in information does not produce a qualitative growth
in opinion. It does not produce any real capacity to decide what is true
or false, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. It merely reduces one of these
aspects to a systematic representation of a dominant model.
In reality, there is no good on the one side or bad on the other. Rather
there is a whole range of conditions, cases, situations, theories and practices
which only a capacity to understand can grasp, a capacity to use the
intellect with the necessary presence of sensibility and intuition. Culture
is not a mass of information, but a living and often contradictory system,
through which we gain knowledge of the world and ourselves. This is a
process which is at times painful and hardly ever satisfying, with which
we realize the relationships which constitute our life and our capacity
to live.
By canceling out all of these nuances, we again find ourselves with a
statistical curve in our hands, an illusory course of events produced by a
mathematical model, not a fractured and overwhelming reality,
Opinion provides us with certainty on the one hand, but on the other
it impoverishes us and deprives us of the capacity to struggle, because we
end up convinced that the world is simpler than it is. This is totally in the
interest of those who control us. A mass of satisfied subjects convinced
that science is on their side, that is what they need in order to realize
the projects of domination in the future.
(from the pamphlet “Articles from Cananero” published by The Anarchist Library)