SHEEP: ROGER WATERS, GEORGE ORWELL & VENKATESH RAO

MUSIC IN PHASE SPACE EPISODE 39

SHEEP

Written by Roger Waters and originally titled “Raving and Drooling“ Sheep is about the mediocre and religious mass who don’t want to get their hands dirty, just want to remain in the sidelines, avoiding troubles. Sheep are producers, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create (since their compensation is set by Pigs operating under conditions of serious moral hazard). They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out. Sheeps have two ways out: turning Pig or turning into bare-minimum performers.

It includes suburban and neourban, Red and Blue, containing Boomers and X’ers. It includes bluetooth headsets favored by Red State farmers. It covers McMansions, insecure suburbia-dwelling Dodge Stratus owners and Bed, Bath, and Beyond shoppers. It includes gentrifying neighborhoods and ghost-town malls. It includes Netflix and chill.

Venkatesh Rao — Premium Mediocre

With a pattern of consumption that publicly signals upward mobile aspirations, with pretensions to refined taste, while navigating one of the biggest sleight of hands in history. The one in which we’re paying premium for stuff we used to get for free. Airline services, food delivery, Banking, Televison, News, Thrash Collection, School fees. Just kidding.

As short a time ago as February, the Ministry of Plenty had issued a promise (a “categorical pledge” were the official words) that there would be no reduction of the chocolate ration during 1984. Actually, as Winston was aware, the chocolate ration was to be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week. All that was needed was to substitute for the original promise a warning that it would probably be necessary to reduce the ration at some time in April.

George Orwell 1984

Sheep enjoy hyper-realities like Starbucks’ Italian names for drink sizes, and its pumpkin spice lattes. There are more important things, such as making rent. But at least pretending to appreciate wine and cheese is necessary to not fall through the cracks in the API.

Notably, in the bridge of the song, a parody of the Biblical Psalm 23

“The Lord is my shepherd…“

is spoken in the background, by means of a vocoder, with the words changed to suit the subject of the song

“Through quiet reaction and great dedication, Master the art of karate”

A brief lesson in animal husbandry before we get to the other stuff: Sheep and goats were some of the first animals domesticated by humans (chickens were in there, too), which makes a lot of sense. They work very well for both a nomadic and a more sedentary agricultural lifestyle. Certainly, they are what farmers call “easy keepers:” low maintenance and high return.

The issue is that sheep are on almost everyone’s menu. To survive, they must react instantaneously to a threat, perceived or real. Their philosophy is “run away now; ask questions later.” They don’t have much of a defense arsenal beyond this, other than glaring and stamping or bunching up in a corner if they’re trapped and can’t run.

This last actually makes a lot of evolutionary sense. Predators like wolves and lions operate by isolating and stalking an individual, hoping to separate it from the herd and pounce on it. When a whole herd is crowded together, it is very difficult to see where one sheep ends and another begins. Bunching significantly improves the survival chances of any particular sheep.

Sheep can learn things. They know their names; what the grain bucket means; when it’s a friendly car pulling in the driveway and when it isn’t. They also can be taught to walk on a lead and to pull a cart. They are friendly and talkative and like to get their ears rubbed. They are soft, and they don’t smell. It’s easy to see why they have been part of the human experience for thousands of years.

“Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away; only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air“

However, sheep have gotten a bum rap for stupidity. Unlike their wily goat cousins, who are perpetually plotting mischief, sheep take a very dharmic approach to things: if it doesn’t affect me, why worry? Rather than stupid, they are incurious.

If they come to a locked gate, they just turn around and head off in another direction (again, unlike goats, who are the Houdinis of livestock and who, once free, will tap-dance across the hood of your car with gay abandon on the way to ransacking your tomato plants).

Sheep have actually been rated above cows and slightly below pigs on animal intelligence tests (although I must admit being unclear how one tests the intelligence of farm animals. None of them seem capable of higher math).

Redefining Venkatesh Rao’s losers The Sheep are people who have struck bad bargains economically — giving up capitalist striving for steady paychecks and internalizing emotional content of artificial consequences.

Born of a vanishing old middle class and sandwiched between the crypotobourgeoisie above and the API below. They are totally alienated from decision-making process while they enjoy the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden, cupcakes and froyo “truffle” oil on anything and extra-leg-room seats in Economy.

Venkatesh Rao — Premium Mediocre

Their lack of interest leads to Blissful ignorance and post truth, often leading them to allow corporate products of the Military Industrial complex to get away with murder who then lead them to violence and war

“Meek and obedient you follow the leader down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.“

Sheep like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players, and enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to Game A than the Pigs. They do have a loyalty to individual Sheep, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot. Having made a bad bargain, the most rational thing to do is slack off and do the minimum necessary. Doing more would be a Dogs thing to do. Doing less would take the high-energy machinations of the Pig, since it sets up self-imposed up-or-out time pressure. So Sheep pay their dues, does not ask for much, and finds meaning in his life elsewhere.

Free Range Sheep: Reverse Reality Distortion

In a world where actual mobility is both difficult and strongly dependent on luck, but there is a widely performed (only dogs sort of believe in it) false narrative of pure meritocracy, and still the most rational thing to do is slack off and do the minimum necessary it pays to appear to be striving, but not to actually strive.

we live in a more complex age than even the most prescient French intellectuals foresaw. One in which an emerging, not-quite-there-yet middle class must put on a show of substance for two other classes that need to believe it already kinda exists: Boomer parents and universe-denting Big Man entrepreneurs.

Venkatesh Rao

And below? There lies calls the terrifying structural boundary of our times — the API. You either tell robots what to do, or are told by robots what to do. To crash through the API, and into what Venkatesh Rao terms the Jeffersonian middle class, is to go from being predator to prey in the locust economy.

Pigs need Sheep to pretend that their playbook for a post-scarcity digital utopia is working as designed. That the exceptional outcomes Pigs enjoyed can become commonplace. Sheep cheerleading suitable for Instagramming At the same time Sheep will pretend there is a strong deterministic, learnable, and predictable relationship between striving and success; between legible merit and desirable outcomes. This will boost the morale of the heroic Pigs. Because the New Economy isn’t there yet. And building it is hard work. And signs that the plans aren’t working as smoothly as you think makes it even harder.

The entire economic engine requires sheep to avow belief in the reality of meritocracy and pretend luck plays little to no role. To proclaim loudly that you think it’s mostly luck is, ironically enough, the best way to make sure you are excluded from the lottery. You may be a goat but you’re no sheep

So Sheep fake it till you make it. Unless they don’t. Remember Sheepskin is likewise used for making clothes, footwear, rugs, and other products. Sheep tallow can be used in candle and soap making, sheep bone and cartilage has been used to furnish carved items such as dice and buttons as well as rendered glue and gelatin. Sheep intestine can be formed into sausage casings, and lamb intestine has been formed into surgical sutures, as well as strings for musical instruments and tennis rackets. Sheep droppings, which are high in cellulose, have even been sterilized and mixed with traditional pulp materials to make paper. And let’s not forget lanolin: the waterproof, fatty substance found naturally in sheep’s wool and used as a base for innumerable cosmetics and other products.

In other words, Sheep have a dressing for the lifestyle they’re supposed to want, in order to hold on to the lifestyle they can actually afford — for now — knowingly paying too much for obviously inferior products and experiences, paying a premium merely to present a facade of upward striving, participating in maintaining a false consciousness while trying to engineer a stroke of luck.

The false consciousness at the heart of it is manufactured for the benefit of a parental generation that is convinced it has set the kids up for success. That despite everything, their kids are alright; it’s only others’ kids who are all about participation trophies, narcissism, and entitlement. So the false consciousness is one manufactured for the benefit of parents who desperately want to believe that they succeeded as parents and that their kids are thriving

Venkatesh Rao

Marxist Theory: Group & Status illegibility

You scratch my delusion, I’ll scratch yours. I’ll call you a thoughtful critic if you agree to call me a fascinating blogger. And we’ll both convince ourselves that our lives are to be valued. Sheeps are too smart to fool themselves. They enter into social contracts which require them to fool each other.

venkatesh Rao

Sheep dynamics are largely driven by Lake-Wobegon-effect snow jobs, (Garrison Keilor’s Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.”) which obscure pervasive mediocrity and create cohesion and social capital bolstering redemptive life scripts (“I am special” stories)

Social clubs of any sort divide the world into an us and a them. We are better than them. Any prospective new member who could raise the average prestige of a club is by definition somebody who is too good for that club.

If your status is clear, and the status of the club is clear then either your status is higher, in which case the club will want you, but you won’t want to join, or your status is lower, in which case the opposite is true.

Sheep are far too smart to fall for Hanlon Dodge maneuvers as individuals. We have to understand the penchant of individuals to sort themselves into groups that share interest and beliefs. You need to work them in groups to get them behaving in sufficiently stupid ways.

You also need to hook their own survival instincts, introducing a certain degree of complicity. Divide-and-conquer tactics are about forcing a real-world valuation event, using unbalanced incentives to harden a fault-line into a schism during which such real deficits and fictitious surpluses are exposed,

Until the last few years, it made sense to talk in terms of a red Sheep and a blue Sheep when describing political affiliation. Enter memetic Sheep. We define memetic Sheepas a group of agents with a memeplex that directly or indirectly seeks to impose its distinct map of reality, along with its moral imperatives, upon other minds.

While The creation of the red and blue Sheep by Pigs were certainly far from monolithic, in the current decade any claim to a single theatre of justification is problematic. An establishment Sheep who squabbles with the right must contend with mockery from the dirtbag left.

Meanwhile, the dirtbag left endures critiques from Social Justice Activists (SJA), who in turn are criticized by the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW).

Sheep share, to varying degrees, a few characteristics. Most are unscrupulously optimistic: They see social problems as soluble through large-scale adjustment. They see themselves as spokespeople for larger groups, whether that be “regular people” or “the marginalized.” At the same time, they see their existence, or their prime value, as under threat.

Anybody can join a group and will be supplied with reams of anecdotes to support that group’s positions. Grassroots and underground media production keep the group up to date on opinions, with wildly different perceptions of the same event.

The postmodern condition is not necessarily one of relativism but one of fragmentation. Lyotard defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward What we would call Pig metanarratives,” which are narratives that totalize all knowledge and experience. These grand narratives, once broken down, give way to what he calls little narratives. Remember divide and conquer?

This fragmented array of narratives has caused a reality crisis, for without some semblance of a consensus reality, constructive cooperation becomes extremely difficult which is perfect for Pigs because it allows them to extract whatever is left of Game A.

The bad Pigs have the ability to manipulate public opinion but they only do it for the things I disagree with, the stuff I agree with is totally authentic and organic, a consequence of people finally waking up and seeing the truth”

Thanks to the pigs This results in a situation where conflicting parties cannot even agree on the rules for dispute resolution. Moreover, there is lack of agreement on what the conflict even is. Collective understanding problems of what reality is amplified by collective action problems of what reality should be.

The alpha and omega set the range. The alpha can be tempted away into the illegible middle of a higher-ranking group, with more murky room to climb, while the omega might get sick of being the whipping boy and move to a higher relative status in a lower group.

Venkatesh Rao

If you know you belong in the range (“that dude is cooler than me, but I am definitely cooler than him”) the uncertainty allows you to join. And your fealty to the group, and the group’s to you, will be in proportion to the legibility of your status. If either happens, a new alpha or omega emerges through a succession battle. Social groups grow from the illegible but stable center of the status spectrum, and leak at the legible but unstable edges.

Virtue Signaling Social Proof and Social Capital

Sheep sometimes “trying to signal something about their own values: that they are pragmatic, appropriately cynical, in touch with the painful facts of everyday life but they usually do it in a way it makes it “indistinguishable from the thing it was designed to call out”. Its “smug posturing from a position of self-appointed authority.” It’s often used to try to show that said Sheep is above virtue signaling and that their own arguments really are sincere”.

Social skills are information skills, since nothing tangible is produced besides an effect on others’ minds. Social skills, such as virtue signaling, joke-telling ability, playing an instrument, sports, capacity for skillful expressions of sympathy, praise, teasing and criticism are behaviors whose effectiveness is determined by the reaction of a group and can create value.This value accumulates as social capital (the grand narrative of the group).

Political arguments have become indistinguishable from moral arguments, and one cannot challenge political positions without implicitly possessing suspect morals. This makes sheep life an exhausting and unproductive game to play, and it makes sheep consciousness intractable. A further barrier to class consciousness is its tendency to spread to previously apolitical interests, from football, to coffee, to rideshares.

Remember Pigs pay attention to what you have, and how well you bargain with it. Not who you are. But among Sheeps, status is real, and it matters. Redistribution and appreciation/depreciation happen. Net outflows happen when an entire group is made victim by another individual or group

The First key feature of Sheep groups

There is a never-ending sequence of little skirmishes within sub-groups, where people gain or lose status in specific situations. Without external interference, these skirmishes work to keep the group at the edge of stability. They fault lines remain in a fluid state, widening and narrowing as the group saga evolves.

Venkatesh Rao

Until Pigs step in to exploit the precarious equilibrium. Sheep group dynamics offer a natural exploit: almost anyone can be made to ally with, or turn against, anybody else, with no need to manufacture reasons. Almost any sub-group can be played off against any other sub-group, since there are no absolute loyalties.

The second key feature of Sheep groups

Sheep group successes and bill of rights are effectively inflated, while responsibilities and blame are discounted. Sheep apportion credit for successes and failures (Rights and responsibilities) in ways that don’t balance the books. A successful group systematically overvalues its capabilities and develops a blindness to its weaknesses.

Self-perceived status is the only available basis for dividing up credit or blame. If everybody believes they are above average (with everybody else supporting that delusion), they will assign more of the blame to others and less to themselves.

Venkatesh Rao

Also they will assign more rights to themselves and more responsibilities to others. So if you take a person’s culpability for a failure is taken at their own valuation, you will have a net deficit in the total accounted-for blame. Also if you ask someone about their rights and responsibilities the net deficit will also become obvious.

Conversely, with a success, the sum of self-perceived credit attributions is greater than the credit. So as Sheep groups accumulate a history, internal valuations of earned credit rights and are steadily inflated, and assessments of culpability as well as responsibilities run a deficit.

Sheeps have a genuine sense of honor but their survival instincts are buried under a layer of denial. They also have significant empathy for the sheep in their perceived flock, and a natural solidarity, so they don’t like to pull tricks on others. Rather than make unfair claims directly, they make their unfair claims via deluded assessments of their own in-group status.

When they do pull tricks they prefer to victimize faceless groups or institutions rather than individuals. When they do victimize individuals, they try to dehumanize their victims first (simultaneously lowering the victim’s status to balance the books, and reducing their own empathy so they don’t feel bad). Often, allowing a “s/he deserves it” rationalization.

Venkatesh Rao

Sheep Spirituality

Sheeps see themselves as spiritual, not religious.

They may still participate in the theater of temples and icons, especially if those external objects are suitably aestheticized to symbolize their inner experiences. But they ultimately look inwards for significance.

Venkatesh Rao

Their “spirituality” manifests as a yearning to be indivisibly part of something bigger than themselves. They satisfy this yearning by looking for pools of positive collective emotions into which to dissolve their sense of self.

Atheist Sheeps call it belongingness. Theist Sheeps might describe it as oneness with the divine. It is this capacity of intellectual abstraction from “religious” to “spiritual,” and the emotional capacity for dissolving identities into groups, that allows Sheeps to convince themselves that they are more evolved than the Dogs.

This difference between Dogs (ritualistic) and Sheep (spiritual) is that the anger caused by an act of betrayal might be soothed by a symbolic act of contrition that restores emotional balance to the moral universe, and perceived relative status.

Whatever emotions Sheeps cannot resolve among themselves remains as unprocessed, private negative emotions. These they are naturally inclined to view as sinful, since their god is shared positive emotions. Looking around, in the Pigs, they find trusted sources of non-involved, healing emotional capital.

To the Sheep the Pig effectively presents a priestly mode of divine agency. This puts them in the position of being able to grant absolution to Sheeps for their sins. In the theater of Sheep spirituality, the Pig must add only inevitable-seeming events that have material consequences.

Guilt is the one emotion that Sheep cannot always resolve for themselves, since it sometimes requires quantities of forgiveness that mere humans cannot dispense, but priests can, as reserve bankers of the fiat currencies of Sheep emotional life. And so with every divide-and-conquer betrayal, instead of blaming the Pigs who govern the social order, they look to them for absolution and emotional healing.

Back to The Music

In the Album Animals sheep go with the flow until they finally realizing the rut they are in, being led to the slaughter by the false “good shepherds” (the pigs), deciding to do something about it: to learn karate and start a revolt. In the aftermaths, the dogs died and sheep appear to be finally free.

But there is no happy ending: Near the close of the track, the sheep revolt and kill the dogs, but then retire back to their homes, as if they are waiting for a new pack of dogs to control them. Ironically, a kind of new tyranny is established, and the sheep are told to go on about their lattes and obey the orders, almost like the situation that they fought so adamantly and sacrificed so much to abolish.

Have you heard the news?/The dogs are dead/You better stay home/And do as you’re told/Get out of the road if you want to grow old”

Pigs on the Wing Part II”

You could say that Game A has engendered a society in which The Gemeinschaft, a society of subjective binding, has been replaced by a Gesellschaft, a society of contractual binding that alienate us from self and other. In a Gesellschaft individuals to treat one another as instruments. In Buberian terms, they engage in I-It relating. By doing so the individual transforms himself into an instrument, ready to be used by the other.

The final point, or — that Waters offers, is revealed in the final song of the album, “Pigs on the Wing Part II.” The song is one acoustic guitar, like its counterpart, but the vocals are double-tracked, to suggest a sense of intimacy.

You know that I care what happens to you.

And I know that you care for me too,

So I don’t feel alone,

Or the weight of the stone,

Now that I’ve found somewhere safe

To bury my bone.

And any fool knows a dog needs a home

A shelter from pigs on the wing.

The dog is offering some sort of advice. Having not allowed the theaters of justification to crush his spirit, and make him submit to the cold claws of competition, he is still humanized, unlike others within his class of “dogs.”

The comfort he derives from the closeness of his relationship with another person acts as ‘a shelter’ from the conditions of ‘boredom and pain’ that are created by the desensitized pigs”. All three classes are mad and suffer, no matter their position. The system doesn’t change, it seems impenetrable. However, the individual can “escape” the system through intimate relationships with fellow citizens.

we are in a collective state of “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” This social domicide and de-rooting makes us long for a place to call home and a group of people to call our own.

Hanna Arendt