On current events, people & their opiums...

The potential for knowledge, wisdom and understanding has never been greater than in today's world, where information is constantly being produced, recorded and consumed. Every home has at least a television screen if not also Internet access, through which global events are reported by numerous state owned, independent, amateur & professional media outlets. So why then are we witnessing an apparent decline in consciousness throughout Europe and America, a sort of regression to childlike simplicity, authoritarianism and an increase in the products of ignorance such as xenophobia, fear, irrationality & paranoia?

I.             The explanation apparently favoured by the liberal intelligentsia, is the idea of 'Post-Truth' media and politics. The Oxford Dictionaries named the adjective "relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,"[1] it's 'word of the year' for 2016, where political polarization & appeals to pathos were the defining characteristics of the EUref & US election. The phenomena is often attributed to the rise of 'independent' online media outlets, which are un-constrained by the running costs of professional media, being (overtly) usually only comprised of a small team for whom social media is a cheap, unregulated platform offering direct, intimate access to masses of people's lives, at any time, anywhere on the planet.

This is just the latest in a long line of self aggrandizing emanations, from an increasingly irrellevent political and media mainstream, in which they demonstrate a complete absence of self-reflection & their alienation from large swathes of the population. Adherents of the Fukuyamaist notion of 'History having ended' with the fall of the Berlin Wall, of this being a 'post-Ideological' world founded on the acceptance of the capitalist market, and liberal state as the foundational structures of a healthy economy, have had a rocky few years.

According to this pervasive ideology, liberal capitalist Democracy is the best of all possible worlds, only to be improved upon slightly by moderate reforms, implemented first by marginally Left of center Governments, favouring 'redistributive' social policies such as a 50% tax rate for the highest earners, to fund State run public services; investment in infrastructure; social welfare etc,.--- and then by marginally Right of center Governments, favouring 'free market' economic policies, such as a 40% tax rate for the highest earners; the introduction of the profit motive and competition into State run public services; selling off  infrastructure etc,. The pendulum swing of policy making produced by this situation, often referred to as 'consensus politics', offers not only the illusion of Democratic choice, but also various investors the confidence that any changes will be marginal, their effects entirely predictable and in no way irreversible.

Until a few years ago, this was the accepted, dominant model of politics in not only the British, European & American democratic system, but having been exported, shaped and instituted by those Nations, in more or less every Democratic state in the World. In large part it's failures have been the cause of growing populist counter movements, and basis of numerous sensationalist critiques from extremes of both the Left & Right Wing.

This way of doing things while superficially avoiding conflicts & ideological antagonisms, repressing them through moderate, symbolic concessions to all sides, is apparently leading to greater conflicts and antagonisms both internally, and with other Nations further along the path of rejecting the Liberal Democratic consensus. Particularly those manufacturing more extreme forms of Autocratic absolutism, such as Russia under Patriarch Kirill and Vladimir Putin, Libya under Ghaddafi, Assad's Syria & Saddam's Iraq.

II.            The explanation offered by those accused of employing these underhanded propaganda techniques, is surprisingly not too different. It runs something along the lines of: 'people are waking up to the lies and propaganda of mainstream media & politicians', we are asked to believe 'they support 'mavericks' who reject the mainstream narrative'. The President of the USA himself a supposed maverick, has accused many professional outlets of manufacturing "Fake-News", & consequently banned the likes of CNN & the BBC from White House press briefings. All it took were a few crowd pleasing slogans like "drain the swamp", & repetition ad-nauseum how 'anti-establishment' he is, for him to quickly assume the mantle of anti-establishment hero amongst his supporters, despite being very obviously a millionaire businessman more interested in his holiday privileges & personal advancement, than serving the interests of the American people, or upholding the Constitution. As he said during his election campaign; "I love poorly educated people."
 
It seems this rejection, the abstract, symbolic act in itself, whether of Hillary Clinton or the EU, is the motivating, determining factor in their apparent popularity, regardless of the alternative policies proposed, or lack thereof, potential repercussions etc,. In this sense as some have suggested, being based exclusively on action (the act of rejection) without any coherent theoretical aims or underpinnings, these movements do resemble fascism.

When the victors of the aforementioned popularity contests declare their respective campaigns as 'revolutions', or 'the people fighting back against the establishment', it is the bland, conformist Liberal democratic system of consensus politics they are encouraging the rejection of, in favour of a more radical conservatism. This terminology stolen from the Left obscures their radical counter-revolutionary, 'reactionary' nature, and is yet another example of the way in which Conservative forces have set about redefining the content & meaning of words, in order to weaponize political language for use in widescale psychological subversion. They bemoan the "state of the race" or Nation, & seek to 'repair the harm's' they perceive liberalism, Jews, Feminists, 'race-mixing', promiscuity, Homosexuals & Communists are doing. Roughly, the reversal of minimal progress they misrepresent variously as Marxist, Jewish, Feminist etc,. subversion, is what is meant by the empty slogan "make America great again".

So we see two diametrically opposed explanations, both seemingly designed to influence the thoughts and actions of what is treated as a passive, entirely impressionable mass, in relation to each group's general political opponents. While both generally agree that 'Leftists', assorted groups of feminists, radical activist networks & students or "SJW's", are to blame, in the case of centrists for the rise of the radical Right, & in the case of the radical Right for the effects of centrist policy over the last decade, the Liberal media is telling you the alt-media is lying, & vice versa, while Right Wing populists are telling you Liberal centrists are lying, & vice versa. Here at least, both appear to have a point.

III.           Though we're told we've entered a 'post-truth' era, has there ever actually been a time in the history of the world, when those with the power to manipulate human emotions, thoughts & actions haven't done so? When people haven't made use of other's ignorance, fears and desires in order to further their own agenda? Or where institutions of power and control haven't provided numerous 'opiums' to shield their followers from painful realities?

We can read from around the time of the founding of the United States, when Thomas Paine rightfully rebuked the tendency towards melodrama "where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect."; through the propaganda techniques elaborated by the Nazi party in WWII; to the recent exposure of "sexed up" 'truths' in the case made for the War in Iraq, that we've actually never reached a state of universal, widespread, or even general veracity in everyday life.

Despite the progress made during & since the rational enlightenment, the large majority of human beings are still denied, by material circumstances, social status and the proliferation of ideology, either a rational or enlightened perspective on the realities they endure. The political framework which has sustained our "post-ideological" world is collapsing, and with it the framework which sustains definitions of fetishized concepts such as Democracy, progress & truth, to name just a few. Even the term enlightenment in the 21st century, is more commonly attributed to the solipsism of a Siddhartha Gautama, or sought in an Indian ashram, rather than the radical inquiries of a David Hume or Francis Bacon.

It seems as though one of many antagonisms within the Capitalist economic system is coming to fruition, it is despite all assertions to the contrary, a division within the establishment, namely that between traditionalists and modernizers; nationalists & globalists; romanticists & rationalists; high capitalists & aristocrats; monetarists & social Imperialists. It manifested recentley within the UK Conservative party, leading to the EUref as a means of salving such irreconcilable divisions, & consequent resignation of David Cameron & George Osborne. It also upended Margaret Thatcher's reign under similar circumstances decades earlier. These are emissaries of what one of the Trump movement's ideological father's, religious demagogue Pat Robertson, referred to as "The New World Order". Modernizing, free-trade policies threatening traditional bonds of Nation, Race, Monarchy & Church, bonds which have been loosened in Europe & which were severed in the USA, but which will now be strengthened there & accross Europe, as Nations begin to close their borders, emulate the primitive accumulation, & ultra-capitalist reforms enacted in Russia since the fall of Socialism.

Perhaps what we're witnessing is less the dawning of a new idea, than it is the declining relevance of an old one? The human face is being ripped off our capitalist Democracy, the Liberal political establishment's greedy bigger brother Capital, has stolen the facade and thrown it on a rubbish heap, where imperialistic & aristocratic values are using it to enhance the appeal of their decayed visage.


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[1]  President Casper Grathwohl's statement.
[2] "As to the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, and accommodated to produce, through the weakness of sympathy, a weeping effect. But Mr. Burke should recollect that he is writing history, and not plays, and that his readers will expect truth, and not the spouting rant of high-toned exclamation."
"As Mr. Burke has passed over the whole transaction of the Bastille (and his silence is nothing in his favour), and has entertained his readers with refections on supposed facts distorted into real falsehoods, I will give, since he has not, some account of the circumstances which preceded that transaction."
Rights of Man

Three questions about jobseeking...

Do people grow up dreaming about "processing payment information to tight deadlines using advanced excel knowledge and attention to detail"?

Do they wake up one day with an incredible urge to "give clients a positive experience as you work to minimise risk, manage data protection and ensure compliance"?

Or are they thrust by circumstances beyond their control & understanding, to sell the only thing they own, their time and energy, to people without the inclination or need to do these things themselves?