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by David Bell
July 31, 2024
from
Brownstone Website
Spanish version
Public life has become disorienting...
Most people, by and large, previously
expected to hear the truth, or some semblance of it, in daily
life.
We would generally expect this from each other,
but also from public media and authorities such as governments or
international agencies set up ostensibly for our benefit.
Society cannot function in a coherent and stable
way without it, as so much in our lives requires us to place trust
in others.
To navigate the complexity of existence, we generally look for
guidance to certain trusted sources, freeing up time to sift through
the more questionable ones.
Some claim they always knew everything was fake,
but they are wrong, as it wasn't (and still isn't).
There were always liars, campaigns to mislead,
and propaganda to drive us to love or to hate, but there was a core
within society that had certain accepted norms and standards that
should theoretically be followed.
A sort of anchor...
Truth is indestructible but the anchor cable
connecting us to it, ensuring its influence, has been cut.
Society is being set adrift.
This really broke in the past four or five
years.
We were already in trouble, but now public
discourse is broken...
Perhaps it broke when governments elected to
represent the people openly employed behavioral psychology to
lie to their constituencies on a scale we had not previously
seen.
They combined to make their peoples do things
they rationally would not:
The media, health professionals, politicians, and
celebrities all participated in this lie and its intent.
Virtually all our major institutions.
And these lies are continuing, and
expanding, and have become the norm...
We are now reaping the harvest of untruth...
The media can openly deny what they
said or printed just months earlier about,
a new candidate for presidency or the
efficacy of a mandated vaccine...
A whole political party can change its narrative
almost overnight about the fundamental characteristics of its
leader.
People paid as "fact-checkers" twist reality to
invent new facts and hide the truth, unflustered by the transparency
of their deceit.
Giant software companies curate information,
filtering out truths that run contrary to the pronouncements of
conflicted international organizations.
Power has displaced integrity...
Internationally, we are pummeled by agencies such
as,
...to give up our basic rights and hand their
new masters our wealth on
claims of threats that can unequivocally be
shown to be
false...
Paid-off
former leaders, grasping legitimacy
through the legacy of greater minds, reinforce
mass falsehoods for the benefit of
their friends.
Once aberrations that a free media might
highlight, fallacies have become norms in which the same media is
openly complicit.
The frightening part is not the lies, which
are a normal aspect of humanity, but the broad disinterest
in truth...
Lies can stand for a time in the presence of
a people and institutions that value truth, but they will
eventually fail as they are exposed.
When truth loses its value, when it is no
longer even a vague guide for politics or journalism, then
recovery may not occur.
We are in an incredibly dangerous time, because
lies are not just tolerated but are now the default approach, at the
national and international level, and the fourth estate that was to
shed light on them has embraced the darkness.
History has witnessed this before, but on a lesser scale.
In Germany, a way of running society built
entirely on acceptance of lies led to the wholesale massacre of
millions, from individuals whose disabilities were considered a
burden on the majority, to people of specific sexual
orientation, to entire ethnic groups.
It was ordinary people like us who served to
facilitate, and implement, this slaughter. A barrage of lies
disoriented them, allowing them to be separated from their
conscience or appreciation of goodness.
As Hannah Arendt
noted:
The sad truth is that most evil is done by
people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
And
further:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not
the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but
people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e.,
the reality of experience) and the distinction between
true and false (i.e., the standards of thought)
no longer exist.
But this passivity of the 'people' is not
necessarily inevitable, or applicable to society as a whole.
We are all capable of implementing tyranny, but
this does not remove our capacity to insist on equality (or, to use
its analogy in this context, freedom).
The regime of lies from which Arendt fled was halted through an
invasion of foreign armies.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin's regime
faltered with his death.
But we are now in a place where the
all-devouring dictator is a coalition of fascist interests broad
enough to be resilient to the death of any of its members.
It has no physical borders to be invaded...
Although feudalism has long been the greed-driven
default of society, we are now in uncharted territory, facing a
devouring confluence of interests on a global scale with no obvious
counter.
They anoint national leaders from New Zealand to
North America to the States of Africa and the EU and control what we
then hear and read of them.
No white knight or armed coalition
is going to ride to our rescue as we cower in a bunker or simply
keep our heads down, keep our thoughts to ourselves, eat what we are
fed, and fit in.
It is only we who can actually make a stand.
Otherwise, we - humanity - simply lose...!
But taking a stand is in the capability of all of
us.
We could first recognize where we are.
We could then make hard decisions and risk
being outcasts by supporting people we ourselves assess as
telling the truth, and absolutely refuse support to those who
are not.
We will make ourselves really unpopular by
doing so, as unpopular as those who protected neighbors rather
than report them, or refused to raise the arm or the little red
book.
They were vilified, derided, and assigned
to those the media termed vermin.
We could make a stand in workplaces, in
conversations with friends and family, and it may be the last
conversations they will accept.
And we can do it through the way we vote,
which may mean breaking with all we had once claimed to be
indisputable.
All that we thought we stood for, and that our
chosen media had confirmed for us. And we will have no personal
reward at the end - this does not collect likes and followers.
As Arendt also said,
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the
irreversible flow of history...
But forgiveness will also make us unpopular, even
hated, by many who thought we were allies.
Or,
We can buy into the fallacies, blank our
minds, accept that the past never happened, and lie into the
pillow of deceit the media are providing us.
We can accept the assessment of liars and
follow their lead over that of our own eyes and ears. 'Truth'
can become subject to convenience and to what our friends and
colleagues would prefer.
We can all participate in the farce,
embrace the comfort of blank self-deceit, and pretend to live
life as we always have.
One day, we will find how deep the hole is we
have dug for ourselves and our children...
In politics, in public health, in international
relations, and in history, the best times were always when truth was
valued above all, however imperfectly applied.
What the media, governments, and the empty husks
that now direct them are offering is something quite different.
Let us hope enough are repulsed by it to take
the risks that are necessary.
Don't stay safe.
Get to a place that is quite the opposite.
Light overcomes darkness but it also makes it
very hard to hide.
A very dark future can be avoided, but not
by keeping it hidden...
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