The righteous quest of misrepresenting reality
Concurrently, I found myself contemplating the catchphrase, Don't Be Evil, a motto firmly entrenched in Google's corporate code of conduct, rather like a zombie refusing to die, while watching spellbound the US Senate's grilling of Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump's fiercely conservative pick to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg for the Supreme Court.
Making implausible denials, deflecting criticism, and offering answers to questions that had not been asked and that convey nothing of any substance, Coney Barrett was hailed unflappable by the very media she later accused of caricaturing her catholic faith as she faced an 11-hour inspection over her views on abortion, health care and the peaceful transfer of power after the November election.
The judge's views on the forthcoming election, in particular, are crucial. Judging by her past record when, just three years out of law school, she was part of the legal team that stole the 2000 election for George W. Bush, Trump has selected the ideal person to assist not just his own personal efforts to stay in office, but to advance the theocratic, repressive, and regressive agenda of the modern Republican party. Should the ballot go down to the wire, ending up in the Supreme Court, there is no doubt Coney Barrett will vote according to her libertarian values.
This is the reason many Democrats are so concerned about her appointment, rather than the more moral issue of why the admittance of predetermined judgements might actually be a flaw in the workings of what is ostensibly the highest legal authority in the land of cowboys and guns.
That should not come as a big surprise. Amy Coney Barrett is only human after all. Most of us consistently allow our ingrained prejudices to bubble to the surface in the way we act, justifying our behaviours if we are pressed through a particular choice of language.
Language is the primary mechanism we have for making sense of what we see happening all around us - our reality - and then communicating that to others. The most common way we deny an inconvenient truth is to refuse to use the words that express it as such. Climate change deniers, for example, routinely resort to obfuscation. Another tactic, commonly used in media interviews, is to state an opinion, then repeat it often enough in the hope that eventually it is accepted as the truth. We can achieve the same goal by staying silent, resorting to euphemism, twisting the facts - or just plain lying.
Although we become outraged when we discover blatant lies have been told, especially if those lies are from people we trust, or they directly impact our sense of wellbeing, silence and euphemism can be just as harmful.
In some contexts, certain types of thinking or ideas can be deemed offensive, polarizing and unleashing anger among those too easily persuaded by emotive jargon, unfamiliar idioms, or a lack of civility. For example, it is impossible to conduct a sensible discussion on abortion in a nunnery. In Thailand it is dangerous to openly challenge or to criticise the monarchy. In the West we routinely refer to sustainable development at a time in history when society as a whole is essentially non-sustainable. Likewise developing nations are, more often than not, actually destitute nations. I well remember the trial by fire I suffered when first meeting with a union official, very much my senior, who had no respect for me or the advice I was giving my client for dealing with the forced redundancy of 20 per cent of his workforce. The air was blue with expletives as I sat back in my chair, shocked by the sudden onslaught, suffering a stream of abuse and unable to get a word in edgeways.
Euphemisms, on the other hand, can be insidious. For example, US politicians of both persuasions regularly talk about "collateral damage" instead of innocent deaths. They insist that "all options are on the table" when it comes to dealing with what is perceived to be a "rogue" state - Iran. Presumably that includes a pre-emptive nuclear strike, although the actual term nuclear war is studiously avoided. Even terms such as "justice" and "human rights" have to be redefined when spoken by those intent on extraditing Julian Assange for revealing the evils of US military hegemony.
Lying or manipulating evidence tends to betray a naivety bordering on the absurd. Yet we are so easily deceived. In the late 1990’s, for example, concerns arose over large tobacco companies setting out to falsify science. Phony experiments were conducted that "proved" nicotine was harmless and non-addictive, while expert witnesses were paid handsomely to testify under oath to these lies.
The lies fabricated to persuade the American people that war in Vietnam was a strategic imperative, or that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken to prevent Sadaam Hussein from using "weapons of mass destruction" were not taken seriously by anyone other than the dissemblers, who then started to believe their own falsehoods, and that section of society who were duped into supposing their government would never knowingly deceive them.
These days cynical efforts are still being used by the mining industry to persuade a gullible public that coal and gas are the keys to future clean energy, when they know full well that mining, drilling and burning fossil fuels are major contributors to global warming - as well as a range of contributory issues such as land degradation, water pollution, acidification of the oceans, and toxic airborne particulates.
These are all forms of propaganda - used to cast doubt on the verity of a situation in ways that range from subtle innuendo to barefaced dishonesty.
The peak of duplicity comes from those we trust to care for our wellbeing. Increasingly it seems, individuals responsible for representing others - executives in terms of corporate shareholders and politicians in terms of the electorate - happily resort to propaganda, especially when a favorable spin on events is desired by those whose interests are best served by manipulating and distorting the truth. Indeed, we live in a society where PR professionals have become superbly skilled at convincing the public of half-truths, and the media so professionally adept at seeding disinformation that almost nothing is as it seems. It matters little whether we live in a totalitarian or a democratic state: the motive, intentions and results are the same. These strategies of deception are devised to implant doubt in the collective consciousness and to knowingly mislead.
Four contemporary institutions routinely use strategies of deception. Three of these are powerful, interrelated entities, particularly in the ways they overtly seek to sustain each other. I am of course referring to government - the instrument that makes decisions and enacts laws - often, it must be said, based upon ill-advised, or partial interpretations of the truth; business corporations - whose prime concern, even as we transition into an age of mutual accountability, is in growing wealth for their shareholders; and corporate media - comprising owners, editors and journalists who weave and shape the fictions the rest of us hear and believe.
The motives of all three have become fused in myopic self-interest. Governments want to stay in power, often dispensing with the truth and overlooking fraud in order to do so. In the case of business it is to become more profitable, year on year, all the while lobbying their local representatives in government to endorse policy outcomes that best meet their dedicated needs. Meanwhile, journalists now go to any lengths to control and shape the dominant narratives in society, blatantly treating fiction as fact if necessary.
All three distract public attention away from significant issues, which then results in a lack of informed debate. This subsequently leads to a dumbing-down of society to the extent that the capability to see beyond dystopia is lost. A crisis of imagination ensues. We see this so transparently today where a continuous recycling of used futures has become a substitute for genuine leadership.
In every case, too, the intention is simple: to conceal, confuse, manipulate, and cast doubt in the minds of those who are mere witnesses to history and who have no immediate way of voicing their disapproval or outrage, other than civil disobedience and public protest.
And that is the cue for introducing our fourth institution - a more amorphous, shadowy force that has stepped into the leadership vacuum, though not to the extent that would be noticed by the average person. Lacking any overt palpability, it nevertheless includes and transcends all three established entities, charming its way into society as an additional and important layer of proficiency, for the sole purpose of using its wealth and influence to determine the direction society will take.
I am referring to the plutocratic billionaire class. This of course is not a unified entity by any stretch of the imagination. It arose not from any secret collusion, malicious or otherwise, nor from any devilish scheme to take over the world, but from the intentional design of a capitalist architecture totally reliant on socio-economic stratification for its prime impulse, and whose staying power can be traced back to 1944, the creation of the Bretton Woods Agreement, and the unleashing of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Almost by default, the plutocracy, those industries it has within its grasp, together with a cadre of affiliated non-government organizations, such as the World Economic Forum, has become ringmaster of the global economic circus. It determines, often in a dilettante and aleatory fashion, how the wealth we create will be spent, what laws can be dispensed with or replaced, primarily to corral resources while sustaining production and demand, and how the international order can improvise a defense in response to any event or dynamic threatening its dominion.
Because of its vacillating and emergent nature it is often characterized as the deep state, or a secret cabinet of illuminati. This is not particularly helpful as it leads to wild conspiracy theories about "big brother" without necessarily adding to our comprehension of what is really going on in the wings. Naming such a force in this way detracts from understanding its incredible potency while ascribing a legitimacy to it that is tenuous. I am sure the Jedi Master Yoda would disparage such labels as pure falsification.
In more than one sense the so-called trade war between the US and China, as well as the supplementary alpha-male side-show between two narcissistic combatants in Presidents Trump and Xi, is actually a collision between this force - designed and consummated by and within the old Western empires - and the unlikely axiomatic appeal of a distinctly sinic-motivated paradigm seen, by perhaps 70 per cent of the world, as a more fit-for-purpose model for the 21st century.
Of course this force is not just a club for individuals but wealthy multinational enterprises and entire industries. We have seen during the current COVID-19 panic how rapidly large pharmaceutical and vaccination companies, along with their backers in various regulatory networks, such as the World Health Organization and Center for Disease Control, have successfully shaped the official narrative explaining this disease, which was then adopted and used universally to quarantine healthy people and lockdown the economy.
Incidentally, the amorphous "they" we should be holding to account are not the various state and national politicians who so promptly fell into line, but the non-elected force of which I speak.
Strategies of deception have been devastatingly successful for the greater part of at least two centuries. Within the past decade, though, they have become all-pervasive. Evading the truth and speaking falsehoods is now routine. Opinions and sentiments, informed by nothing other than self-righteous recklessness and hot air, collide and fracture in a froth of deceit, corrupting any sense of coherence and stability. The 4.78 billion people who own mobile phones today, around 61 per cent of the population, have become playthings in a game controlled and played by ruthlessly self-serving monopolies.
As a consequence, the ability to challenge any orthodoxy, including the authority of the state, by taking collective action in ways which were admittedly inconceivable just a few years ago, are now rapidly fading. The internet has become just another medium for algorithmically-curated propaganda.
But three questions intrigue me...
Firstly, are those with power and influence, whether in formal positions or hiding behind the veil of the plutocracy, really so powerful if they feel the need to resort to false pretexts in order to persuade the public of the desirability of a particular course of action? Surely it is fear, vulnerability and ignorance that most often generates the need for deception? Enduring strength, we know, arises from engagement and dialogue.
My second question relates to the bewildering choices made by governments everywhere to subsidize certain industries, or pursue particular policies, at great cost to the public purse, when being transparent about such subsidies and the damage they cause would almost certainly receive the endorsement of a grateful electorate and enable more intelligent choices to be made.
For example ethanol manufactured from plant material is a good green fuel additive. The US government subsidizes domestic production of ethanol and penalizes imports. But what the public is not told is that they are footing the tax bill - estimated at somewhere between $5.5 billion and $7.3 billion a year - and that corn-based ethanol, the sort produced in the US, requires almost as much energy to produce as it releases when it burns! How stupid is that? If the US government stopped taxing good ethanol - the kind made from sugar cane - and stopped subsidizing bad ethanol the world would be greener and the American taxpayer would be better off.
Thirdly, how might the locus of power shift even further and faster with the advent of peer-to-peer and regenerative technologies – the future organizing principles for almost everything? I have no answers to that one... Yet.
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