Clickbait trivia, fake news and faux outrage: every day until we demand truth:
In The Country of the Blind, HG Wells showed that the proverbial one-eyed man, far from being crowned king, is likely to be deemed insane. Westerners who have realised we do not live in a functioning democracy, but are ruled by powerful elites, already knew that. The existence of a ruling class is one of three things – the others, corollaries, being the ongoing reality of empire long after colonial rule, and corporate media’s systemic inability to prioritise truth over power 1 – which form a yawning gulf between the perspective of sites like mine, and that of the majority of my fellows, who pay little attention to such matters.
We who do contemplate the implications of class rule in the post-truth world of a dying empire are poor at conveying them in ways that are simple without being simplistic, concrete without losing the generalisability of abstraction, and concise without omitting what is crucial. None of these being easy – since the ruling ideas of any age are those of its ruling class – we too often retreat into the comfort of echo chambers for the likeminded.
If class rule and its two corollaries only made ours an unjust world, I doubt I could muster the energy to do what I do here. But unfair distribution of earth’s bounty, though now at levels as economically and politically dysfunctional as they are morally offensive, is the least of this. An economy driven by private profit for the few, rather than the needs of the many, has brought us to the brink of environmental catastrophe, and of global war in a thermonuclear age. It has also delivered a problem without precedent. As I’ve said in three prior posts, most recently this one:
For the first time ever, hundreds of millions of men and women are permanently surplus – with billions likely to join them soon – to economic requirement. In a society whose economy served humanity not profit, this would be a blessing. It would free us to develop morally, spiritually and intellectually to realise our full potential as homo sapiens sapiens; doubly wise in that we know that we know. In the one you and I live in, however, the implications are dire when its elites have zero interest in changing that equation: sell your labour-power, no matter how diminished and cruel the market for it, on pain of mounting deprivation and despair.
A few days ago a friend sent me a fifteen minute video featuring Shiva Ayyadurai, an unusually bright sixty-something born in Mumbei who moved as a child to the US, where he flourished as an academic and the outspoken entrepreneur who says he invented email.
I’ve watched twice and am underwhelmed by the remedy he points to in his final four minutes. (On a conspiracism he flirts with – but denies through a ‘swarm’ analogy which likens the group intelligence of a ruling elite to that of a beehive, ant colony or migrating flock – I keep an open mind. 2 ) In the preceding eleven however he sets out a description of the workings of class rule which, on the criteria set out earlier …
simple without being simplistic, concrete without losing the generalisability of abstraction, and concise without omitting what is crucial
… is communicated with rare aplomb. Solely on that basis, and despite Dr Shiva coming across like a gifted snake oil peddler whose ‘remedy’ – insofar as I even understand it – suggests that despite all he’s said up to that point he hasn’t grasped the essence of what ails us, I say give it a viewing.
Maybe two.
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- On the systemic nature of media services to power, obscured by shows of independence on important but non crucial matters, see my post on the advertising model, that on the role of liberal media, and that on the wider role played by ideology.
- As I put it three weeks ago:
I now use ‘conspiracy theory’ neutrally: not to smugly dismiss a given example without troubling to appraise the evidence for it, but to denote any explanation of major events hinging on a conspiracy which may subsequently be upheld or refuted evidentially. A priori dismissal of such an explanation on the sole ground it invokes conspiracy on high now strikes me as lazily reactionary.