President Obama, in one of his most recent weekly addresses from the White House, said something very revealing. He said, amongst other things and in reference to the spread of Ebola, that “meeting a public health challenge like this isn’t just a job for government; all of us – citizens, leaders, the media – have a responsibility, and a role to play.”

Citizens, leaders, and the media: these are the three estates of today’s society; not just the liberal democracies of the west, but conceivably in those of communist dictatorships, pariah states and probably even failed states. In the Middle Ages, society was explicitly divided along the lines of social function into three estates: those who work (peasants, by whose labour the essentials and infrastructure of society are provided); those who fight (knights, who, in exchange for land, were required to provide military service to the king, who also fell into this category); and finally, those who pray (monks and clerics, who prayed on behalf of the other two estates, for their salvation). Obviously today’s estates or orders have but a passing resemblance in their tripartite structure, and little else in common with these, but as a medievalist I couldn’t resist the comparison.

It is very clear, from what Obama said, that Citizens, Leaders and the Media are the constituent groups which go together to make up ‘all of us’, i.e. a society, nation, whatever. It is also clear that within the social framework, these groups are somehow apart. ‘Citizens’ are not everyone, although everyone is a citizen (presumably) – they stand apart from or perhaps in contrast to Leaders: the relation between these two is clear and perhaps the closest parallel to the feudal estate systems mentioned above. Leaders are a caste who ‘lead’ (a euphemism for ‘rule over’) the Citizens. Lead them how? Lead them where? Lead them on, perhaps? Even if we do not like this, these two castes are clear cut enough. But of this inhuman spectre, the Media, both somehow outside the Master-Slave realm, and yet at its very centre, reporting on all for everyone. It is pervasive, ubiquitous, and unaccountable?

Where exactly does Obama stand in all of this? His address comes via the Media, and he is unquestionably a Leader, yet he pronounces upon the duties of ‘Leaders’ as group – is he apart from them, as supreme leader?

Let’s not forget that these were the exact words used by arguably the most powerful man on earth to both compartmentalise and fully express society as a whole. Leaders and the Media are not Citizens, it seems, and nor do constituent members of the latter group have ‘a role to play’ in either of the other domains. Each group has “a responsibility, and a role to play,” he argued, and of course this responsibility and role is different in each case, but the duty to perform it is the same. The responsibility of Citizens is not to panic and so disrupt the relatively smooth functioning of society, to not barricade themselves up in their homes (and god forbid, stop spending), and not to give into fear and start behaving in unpredictable ways. Their role is to continue to be the Leaders’ docile investments. The responsibility of the Leaders is to make sure that Citizens perform their responsibility; one can easily imagine that by ‘leaders’ Obama means avatars of the State present throughout every layer of Citizen society, ensuring conformity and smooth running. That of the Media, finally, is to toe the line and not give in to the demands and opportunity of capital by either sensationalising what might in truth be a minor situation in order to sell papers, or, conversely, to toe the line of quasi-objective reporting, subordinating the Truth of truly sensational stories to the need for calm and control in society as a whole.

It is telling that in Obama’s tri-colon ‘The Media’ is left to the last: we have Citizens and Leaders, a good classic dyad of social functioning, and then ‘the Media’, an odd body, feared by the ruling estate. Why? Private Citizens, and more importantly, the public body of Citizens, have nothing to fear from the Media in its pure state – the public body has nothing to be exposed, and, if it did, the audience for such an exposure by the Media is precisely the public body. It is individual leaders, and their illusion of power, which stands to lose out from the Media’s inspection. Of course, the public body as it stands today truly wants such exposure just as little as the Leaders do: it would upset the balance of comfort, and would show us all up for the gullible lazy compromisers we all are. The Leaders depend upon this fact alone; that we would prefer the current order to some sort of embarrassing and chaotic upheaval.

Somehow in all this, the Media has become subservient to the Leaders – if they could be convinced to shift their loyalty to the Citizens, the Leaders would finally operate within the correct atmosphere of fear, rather than the other way around.

So the functions are thus: Citizens are still those who work; Leaders, like the feudal lords, are those who reap the benefits of the Citizen group; and the Media have replaced the Church. They do not pray for our salvation, but rather, enlisted in the service of our Leaders, they provide us with enough fantasy to obfuscate the bars of our cages, and with enough fear to never venture forth far enough to touch them.