I am enjoying an infinitely long podcast about the Civil War. One of its lessons, and of that period in history generally, is that incredibly large numbers of people can, for decades, believe convenient or politically motivated falsehoods. The gulf between the Declaration of Independence and the reality of slavery was there for all to see, particularly in the South. But it took a century for the issue equality to come to a head in the war, and then another century for it to come to a head again in the civil rights movement. And we are far from done with it now.
Decades were spent explaining away the obvious with justifications ranging from the nakedly instinctive and economic to the scientific and religious, that people are not after all created (legally, politically) equal, and even if they were, to the victor belong the slaves. It took a national movement of abolition, and particularly the book Uncle Tom's Cabin, to rub people's noses in the fundamental contradiction and injustice. And even then, half the country, full of perfectly respectable and intelligent people, fought a bitter war to escape the truth of the matter. It is appalling to look back at the time spent, and the lives wasted and lost, in this process of slow awakening.
"You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." - attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but of uncertain provenance.
Smoking is another, smaller, example. The tobacco companies didn't really need to work very hard to convince people that smoking was safe, since most of the country was addicted to nicotine and didn't want to know the truth. But a concerted campaign of disinformation and unconscious conditioning, through floods of advertising and copious product placements lulled the addicts to somnolence, while continuing to draw in new generations of "rebellious" young customers.
Now our politics seem to be in another decades-long process of denial and division. The racial issue still lives as part of the divide, as does resurgent economic inequality, but more important is the environmental issue. The earth is in peril, and it is our own greed and ignorance that put it there. Half of our political system is dedicated to denial, which is getting more flagrant with each election. Perhaps, like the period before the Civil War, the more endangered one's comfortable lies are, the more vociferously, even militantly, they are defended. At this point we have a chief executive who lies maliciously about everything, as a matter of habit, and we hardly bat an eye. Particularly telling is his advice to men accused of sexual assault - "You have to deny everything"- advocating perjury.
Interestingly, the parties (though not the regions) responsible for these epochs of lying and denial have switched dramatically. The Republican party brought us the clarity of abolition, union, and Lincoln. The exodus of Democrats from congress during the Civil War allowed a fresh wind of progressive legislation, such as fiat money, income tax, and the land grant education system. Now, Republicans are the party of the South and of vested priviledge- racial, economic, and patriarchial. It is for all these fossilized interests that Republicans maintain a policy of denial, shamelessly serving the wealthy and the industries they run, like the Koch conglomerate, and the coal and oil companies. Lies serve as a defense against rational policy and democracy. They serve as a screen against understanding and care for the future by the electorate- especially the vaunted "base", of which it is difficult to say whether it is predominated by ignorance, cynicism, meanness, or worse.
In the Civil War era, the purveyors of lies were mostly conservative social habits and structures that served the powerful- the dominance of the planter elite and the religions which supported them unstintingly. Power ruled nakedly, over slaves, but also over the social system more generally, including its media. Power is again, obviously, the problem today. It is those in power who do not want change, do not want to make the economic system more equal or sacrifice even a pittance for the future of the biosphere. The Supreme Court has pronounced money to be speech, which means the dominance of corporations and the rich. History is a litany of struggle for power between the rich and the poor, conducted by various mythologies and lies. The left has its problems with truth as well, particularly in its Marxist incarnation, which went so far as to claim itself as a science of history, economics, and social justice. Naturally, the lying reached an appalling crescendo when the Marxists gained maximum power under Stalin. Whatever the party, the powerful have the most to hide, and engage in the most habitual and cynical lying to keep it hidden, sometimes via blatant lying, but more often in plain sight via elaborate ideologies of other-denigration and self-justification.
But there are also technological issues. An internet that was supposed to spread truth and information is instead ridden with button-pushing trolls and corporate propaganda, while killing off the professionally edited media. Putin's Russia has refined disinformation to an alarmingly precise science, and Trump has been their most attentive student. Between them and the FOX propaganda channel, Rush Limbaugh and colleagues, independent thought hardly stands a chance. One characteristic of the lying is their loud claims of truth, such as the slogan "Fair and Balanced", and the reflexive denigration of any source of thoughtfully investigated and edited information as "fake news". Unbeknownst to the innocent, what were previously channels of information have transformed into fronts of warfare- class warfare.
"In science, if you stand up and say something you know is not true, that is a career-ending move. It used to be that way in politics." -Bill Foster, physicist and member of Congress
- Tom Tomorrow on fake news.
- Ten commandments may need a minor update.
- Our system has a problem with minorities.
- Republican reminiscences.
- Weaponizing the dollar.. would be much more effective if we had friends.
- Defunding the IRS for complete impunity... of the powerful.
- "In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent."
