A few months ago a reader asked a rhetorical question. Why, she demanded, should we trust those who can’t call a genocide a genocide on anything at all? I’ve since used it a number of times, most recently when someone more than two decades my senior – believe me, they are few and far between – voiced horror at what Israel is doing. Why, she wanted to know, aren’t we doing anything?
I put it to her that if “we” were simply “not doing anything”, life would improve massively for Arabs in Palestine and beyond, since Israel could not continue its mass murder another week without “our” active supply of ordnance and intel.
A few minutes later – our conversations are always wide ranging – she moved to what a Very Bad Man that nasty Mr Putin is, citing Navalny, the Skripals and of course the Ukraine. I asked how she had arrived at her assessments on these matters.
It’s all over the papers …
Readers I give you – and we’re all of us affected – the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect:
You open a newspaper to an article on a subject you know well, and see the journalist has zero understanding of the facts or issues. Often, the article is so wrong it reverses cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
A month or so ago I was watching a dialogue between economist Richard Wolff and Stanford symbolic logician Robinson Erhardt. Towards the end of a fascinating discussion – but for its three hour length I’d have posted it – Richard speaks of how corrosive advertising is. Why? Not only because the dark arts of manufacturing opinion in the market place carry over into that of political opinion. More corrosive still is how they form the fabric of a society in which mendacity is a thing quite unremarkable. As with so many other aspects of capitalism, a world of deceit and mass manipulation appears perfectly natural, making it hard going on impossible for us to imagine any other.
Here’s Caitlin Johnstone, eighteen months ago:
Western civilization is dominated by a power structure that has invested more heavily in “soft power” (mass-scale psychological manipulation) than any other in history. It pervades our media, our internet services, our art — literally all of mainstream culture.
The politicians lie, the news media lie, the movies lie, the internet lies, the advertisements lie, the shows between the advertisements lie. They lie about our world, they lie about our government, they lie about what’s important, how we should think, what we should value, and how we should measure our level of success and worthiness as human beings.
In US Neocons & Israel’s far Right: Part 2, I wrote …
The Reagan-Thatcher transformation in the eighties, of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and to lesser extent of Western capitalism at large, did two things not apparent at the time. One, it oversaw the export, accelerating through the nineties, of manufacturing to the cheaper labour pools and ‘business-friendly’ regimes of the global south. (This being a definition of modern imperialism: export of capital; repatriation of profits.)
Two, the attendant financialising – FIRE – of the home economies allowed rentier capital to take over Western governments and establish de facto creditor oligarchies …
… before following with these (abridged) words by Chris Hedges:
Those who wrote trade deals to profit from underemployment of U.S. workers and sweatshop labor overseas are omnipotent. The insurance and pharmaceutical industries that run healthcare for profit are omnipotent. The intelligence agencies that spy on the public are omnipotent. The courts that reinterpret laws to excuse corporate crimes are omnipotent.
Politics is a tawdry carnival act where a constant jockeying by the ruling class dominates the news. The real business of ruling is hidden, carried out by corporate lobbyists who write the legislation, banks that loot the Treasury, the war industry and an oligarchy that determines who gets elected and who does not. It is impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, the fossil fuel industry or Raytheon, no matter which party is in office.
Some of this I spoke of with my nonagenarian friend, who listened with interest. Likewise when I spoke of this site. As I gave goodbye hug before getting into the van for a night by the Nene, she bade me take care; in so many words telling me – maybe because we’d traded her Navalny for my Julian Assange – there are Very Bad Men in positions of power somewhat closer to home than Moscow.
I assured her, as I do myself on occasion, I’m not important enough to draw their attention. All the same, her face as I left expressed the concern of one who cares.
My cue to hand over to Simplicius the Thinker. Every once in a while he takes a break from the daily grind of providing detailed sitreps – invaluable despite their criminal screen layout – on the proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine. Every once in a while he goes contemplative on the all-pervasive nature of the corruption of the Western collective psyche.
Twenty years ago a relationship therapist wrote a best-seller on Women Who Love Too Much. As self help groups sprang up across the West, those women who recognised themselves in Robin Norwood’s words vowed to break free of a toxic addiction to undeserving partners.
Now try Simplicius, writing yesterday on the Westerners who trust too much. And by the way, if you had to look up kayfabe, join the club.
Palladium
One of the primary faults in the way our societies function is that the systems in place have all been designed to operate under the assumption that the essential cogs behave both morally and ethically. This is true for both the micro and macro levels, and is a consequence of the general illusion—or self-deluded wishful thinking—that we all live in a relatively ‘high trust’ society.
Take America. Everywhere you look around you, systems are designed to work under the assumption that they will not be misused by members of the privileged classes. Sure, there’s a smattering of symbolic ‘fail safes’, designed more as token deterrences than any real mechanisms for accountability. The micro level fares better, because the average citizen is far more attuned to the natural savage state of Man. The higher up the food chain you go, to the corporo-governmental level, you find the pressure valves appear deliberately set to “loose”; it’s like a corrupt jail warden leaving the backdoor ostensibly ‘closed’, but unlocked, to allow illicit activity to slip past in the murk of night.
Someone famously said:
If you want to understand how the world works, imagine that every action is the result of a conspiracy by your enemies.
This may seem cynical on its face, even nihilistic when you really chase the thought down, but we increasingly find today that it is unfortunately a realist perspective. When it comes to analyzing the actions of government, political, and bureaucratic figures, one must always prudently start from the position that they are acting in an unethical, conspiratorial way against the best interests of the populace. It is a kind of tautology: corporate and governmental figures are corrupt because their goals and objectives conflict with those of the people, forcing them to pursue those goals in underhanded fashion; and they invariably counterpose the people in such a way because they are corrupt …
In each case, the same sordid and immiserating reality is revealed: that we’re witnessing a kind of theater consisting of secret handshakes, or more accurately, kayfabe in the form of wrestlers who whisper moves to each other as they pretend to drop anvil-arms on one another’s heaving bulks. The problem is, it’s not always a strictly deliberate kayfabe, but rather the illusion of one wrought of a system morally designed to function only at its most responsible.
Nature scorns the responsible. Instead, nature favors savage primacy.
What we get is a system without the proper brakes in place, a system easily cozened and manipulated, taken advantage of by people to whom such things are second nature. Like a form of insurance, a properly designed system should always assume the worst case scenario; its rules and catches should operate on the premise that society’s predatory worst are intent on bypassing them.
Instead, we have a veritably credulous system—one which assumes an ethical operator, in a game-theoretic sense, at the highest rungs of social status and power, continuing to offer indulgences and benefits of the doubt.
It’s not simply how our officials respond to adversarial corporate figures, it’s how the rules and regulations of the system itself are constructed. They require little oversight, which itself assumes any conflicts of interest between subject and overseer to be benign, with no safeguard in place to filter or vet such things. When FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb joined Pfizer’s Board of Directors literally two months after his FDA tenure, the presumption of innocence was a given, allowing for no mechanism to question—let alone actually act on—this inappropriate example of revolving-doorism. Countless others can be listed ad nauseam, like the well-established revolving door relationship between intel agencies and social media Big Tech firms …
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