Objective Truth …
Idealists of the “enlightened reason” persuasion hoped that our information rich technologies from the printing press to computers would elevate the knowledge of the people so that our disparate uninformed beliefs would become unified by “common knowledge” and would ultimately converge toward agreement about “objective truths”. But the opposite has transpired. Innocent ignorance was replaced with malignant falsehood so that rather than humbly acknowledging that “I don’t know”, people now arrogantly assert the false ‘knowledge’ that has been pumped into their credulous minds to serve the plutocratic interests of their neo-feudal puppet masters. The people’s personal mental universes are inhabited by contradictory fabrications. Far from converging toward truth, the people now inhabit alien universes at war with one another.
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing”, if you lack sufficient information and context to judge ‘facts’ as true or false, and if you are easily convinced that the biased perspectives or outright lies that were cleverly presented to you as facts are true, and you become an unwitting supporter and a propagator of the biases and the lies. Mark Twain correctly observed,
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
… Becomes Only that which Agrees with Your Operating System
But as Kohr and Schumacher observe, modern consumers are so busy buying stuff and working to avoid bankruptcy that they have no TIME to research any issues. So they non-analytically digest the spoon-fed spins provided by television and other passively received mass media.
Victims of propaganda are full of knowledge of ‘facts’ that “just ain’t so”. And because they believe in the false facts their minds are closed to true information that opposes and contradicts what they already ‘know’, and they are hopelessly lost in the intellectual darkness of untruth. In fact they strenuously maintain and defend the very falsehoods that imprison their minds, because they believe that the prison world of lies that has been erected around them is “the real world”, and they believe YOU are the blind idiot who refuses to see ‘the facts’.
The “metaphysical foundation” of ALL their perceptions and beliefs and opinions is the false worldview that has been installed in their mind like a malevolent operating system installed on the pliant hardware of a meat computer. The operating system determines how you will interpret inputs. Once your brain has been loaded with a false worldview you only ‘see’ what you are programmed to see, and are blind to any other version of reality. The evidence “supports” your interpretation, because that is the way your operating system has been PROGRAMMED to interpret the evidence. You and God and reality are not the programmer of your mental worldview. Mass media propaganda is the programmer.
Mass Media Propaganda
Decades of pervasive ceaseless mass media propaganda has so blinded and confused the people that they are unable to mount any unified political opposition against their corporatist brainwashers and masters. Indeed, we are no longer even able to survive without the corporate production system that has swallowed up virtually all of the small producers and oligopolized the supply of many of our basic necessities of life like food and electricity. And if credible opposition does arise, the corporatists control the collective political powers to squash it. If government police or military force is uncooperative due to democratic objections of public interest, the metastasizing phenomenon of private ‘security’ contractors serve whoever pays them.
I’m not suggesting anybody give up hope or their reform efforts, because we still have the internet as a source of true information propagation and that’s a resource our historical democratic predecessors never had in their battles against self-serving purveyors of biases and falsehoods. (Note: Historically “pamphleteering”, inexpensive self-publication of heterodox ideas, may have been roughly equivalent).
But relatively few people possess the time or expend the effort required to inform themselves by researching in books and the internet, and the neo-feudal masters own and control ALL of the passively received media of mass propaganda, and they purchase the services of virtually all of the most psychologically astute and talented spin masters in media, law, finance, economics, etc, and they purchase (or hopelessly corrupt with money and disinformation) all of the political and judicial process, and they own and/or control all of the other levers of collective mind formation and power that nations possess.
Divide and Control
The opposition is blind and confused and divided by their irreconcilable beliefs in opposing fabricated versions of ‘reality’, false worldviews. Or, as in the case with hot button moral and ‘foreign policy’ issues in America’s two party system, the people are pitted against each other arguing about intractable disputes over values and opinions where there will NEVER be “consensus” and so are simply irrelevant distractions from the real political and economic issues confronting the nation. Again, sheer size works against rational resolution. Kohr observes, “The consequence of bigness is always the same: the inability to cope with the problems it creates.”
The plutocrats and corporatists, by contrast, though not necessarily meeting together in explicit conspiracy, are relatively few in number but are very clear and unified in promoting their common interests: their push for ever greater private control of the world (and freedom from democratic government taxation, oversight and regulation) that provides them ever increasing plutocratic wealth and power. And they are ruthlessly successful in shrouding your mind in obfuscation and buying your political process and other government systems. So while we cannot know that it is positively “futile” to resist the emerging plutocracy, with Revelation 13:4 I ask,
“Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?”
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About the Author
Derryl Hermanutz is a frequent contributor to Global Economic Intersection (Opinion and Analysis) on topics related to theory of money and relationships between current events and economic history and philosophy. He has a degree in Philosophy and Political Economy from the University of Alberta (1997).