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| "What's troubling you is the nature of my game." |
I. Introduction
The very first post on
Dredd Blog was entitled "
It's The Peace Stupid," which addressed the
Israeli vs. Palestinian "problem."
That problem is another one of those "Groundhog Day" problems (
Groundhog Day & The Climate of Fear) that never change at the core.
What does change is the news media's
use of magic tricks which are designed to make us think those problems change.
Some of today's news media stories, as well as the very first
Dredd Blog post ever (a post about Gaza / Israel) could be written with the same words then published today (7/14/14) with only the date changed.
But, today's post belongs to a series that focuses on "business deceit" (
The Deceit Business) which, strange as it may seem, is subject matter related to them.
Yes, today's post is in a series which began on the same day (January 9, 2009) as the "
It's The Peace Stupid" post mentioned above.
Eventually, this series was somewhat supplanted by the various additional series on
the subject of propaganda, with a focus on
Edward L. Bernays, the
Father of American Propaganda (e.g.
The Ways of Bernays,
Exceptional American Propaganda Inspired NAZI Goebbels).
So, today, I am going to tie those
flavors of American propaganda together, in an attempt to show that, like several vines that have grown together,
American mass propaganda has fused together into
a chimera.
II. The Emperor's New Camouflage Uniform
One of the
major structural accomplishments of that chimera,
the modern American media, is that it includes the
military mass media (
Warriors Press For Propaganda) as well as what passes for the
civilian mass media (
Blind Willie McTell News).
The
major functional accomplishment of that structure is
the deceit of the masses, a deceit subject to an imperialist agenda driven by the money religion ("
All money is a matter of belief." -
Adam Smith) together with the most sophisticated fear-mongering of all history
(
The Toxic Bridge To Everywhere,
Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 4).
This
subterfuge was done via
camouflage on steroids, which was primitively explained later, to a degree, by the description that
President Eisenhower used to try to convey a message: "military-industrial complex."
Regular readers know that
Dredd Blog calls that entity's current form, using today's language and facts, the military-oil-media complex (
MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen).
Some of our best intellectuals, teachers, historians, propagandists, and activists have precisely described these dynamics:
"One of the most important comments on deceit, I think, was made by Adam Smith. He pointed out that a major goal of business is to deceive and oppress the public.
And one of the striking features of the modern period is the institutionalization of that process, so that we now have huge industries deceiving the public — and they're very conscious about it, the public relations industry. Interestingly, this developed in the freest countries — in Britain and the US — roughly around time of WWI, when it was recognized that enough freedom had been won that people could no longer be controlled by force. So modes of deception and manipulation had to be developed in order to keep them under control" [quoting Noam Chomsky].
...
THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are
governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.
Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons — a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty [now 320] million — who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
...
It is the purpose of this book to explain the structure of the mechanism which controls the public mind, and to tell how it is manipulated by the special pleader who seeks to create public acceptance for a particular idea or commodity. It will attempt at the same time to find the due place in the modern democratic scheme for this new propaganda and to suggest its gradually evolving code of ethics and practice. [-quoted from "Propaganda", by Edward L. Bernays]
(
The Ways of Bernays, cf.
A Social History of Spin). We won't tend to see this
uniform and universal camouflage unless we are closely watching.
The
camouflage uniform exercise is to hide
the evolving fusion of the military and civilian realms (
Will The Military Become The Police?) to cover up the old, slow, ongoing coup-by-morph.
A morph from a
civilian dominated governing entity into a
military dominated governing entity (
A Tale of Coup Cities - 2).
III. The Emperor's New Feudalism
The MOMCOM of today suffers
multi-personality disorder which has led to the
rhetoric of peace while at the same time colonies are and have been built around the world to
closely watch over MOMCOM's world (e.g. think military NSA).
Modern feudal lords and vassals have replaced the castle and plantation with the military fortress around the world (
American Feudalism - 6) as they wear the camouflage to cover up and hide their spirit of modern feudalism (
American Feudalism, cf.
2,
3,
4,
5,
7,
8,
9,
10).
Here are some direct quotes from
Adam Smith, who
Noam Chomsky read and paraphrased in
Section II above.
Quotes which show the flavor of feudalism:
"No complaint ... is more common than that of a scarcity of money." - Adam Smith
“Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality.”- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
“Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.” ― Adam Smith
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." - Adam Smith
In closing this section, I will add:
"It is not from the benevolence of Oil-Qaeda, Coal-Qaeda, Gas-Qaeda, or Nuke-Qaeda that we expect our energy, but from their regard to their own interest."
(
Dredd, with an apology to
Adam Smith). Why are those XXX-Qaeda members of society (who kill the most people through pollution) not terrorists according to
the presstitutes?
IV. Agnotology: The Study of the Effects of Mass Propaganda
There is a specific discipline that studies the affects which this
mass propaganda has had on everyone it touches:
Agnotology "is the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data" ...
(
Agnotology: The Surge, cf.
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10). There are "reasons" for the mass generation and publication of
"inaccurate or misleading" scientific data.
Adam Smith mentioned one of those reasons:
“Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition.”
(
Adam Smith,
The Wealth of Nations). The heart breaking side of the current practice of mass propaganda is
the mental diseases it can engender (
Etiology of Social Dementia, cf.
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11).
V. Suicide By Any Other Name
One historian, who was once the most quoted historian, has an interesting observation of massive groups we call society, culture, nations, or empires:
"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee
(
The Queens of Stalingrad - 8). The
Dredd Blog series about
Agnotology, quoted from in Section IV above, explains a lot about how a modern, scientific culture could foster ignorance which eventually leads to self-destruction.
Especially a culture with all of the educational institutions we see abounding within it.
And more than that, how such societies continue to
commit suicide, as Toynbee described it, following his historical study of many of them.
One way it is done is to divide the minds up into small pieces in the name of
specialization, leaving other disciplines to the imagination:
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
"The learned ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.” ― Adam Smith
Was the U.S. President just fooling around when he recently directed ~14 federal agencies, including the
Department of Defense and the
National Security Agency, to immediately form a task force because of a dire threat to our food supply (
Will We Destroy Food - The Bees? - 2)?
VI. Conclusion
That is it for today (if you want more, peruse
The Matriarch of the Matrix - 3 as the EPA, one member of the president's task force, did earlier today).
In closing, let me emphasize that
mass ignorance (intentionally generated in the public sphere by the handiwork of the mass propaganda engines of society) has
dire consequences (
ibid @ "
Etiology of Social Dementia").
With that in mind, I will close with
the finality of the subject of
human extinction (
MOMCOM's Mass Suicide & Murder Pact,
2,
3,
4,
5).
There are two main positions on
human extinction in current
global warming science, as well as in those studies now contemplating current
nuclear war potential.
One position is "
near term human extinction," and the other position is "
long term human extinction."
In other words, the issue is not "if" human extinction will take place (under business as usual
status quo), rather, the issue is "
when" it will take place:
"The First Law of 'When': the more critical an issue is to the future of our civilization, the difficulty of determining when that critical issue will take effect tends to increase exponentially.
The Second Law of 'When': the greater the amount of time it takes for that critical issue to play out completely tends to exponentially diminish Civilization's grasp of that critical issue.
The Third Law of 'When': the more destructive the impact which that critical issue would have on civilization tends to exponentially increase the time when that critical event will be understood to have begun to take place." - Dredd
(see e.g.
Clive Hamilton to Revkin). There will be more in this series in the future, assuming I can remain
a citizen journalist and share my research with you readers.
The next post in this series is
here, the previous post in this series is
here.
Bill Moyers interviews
Dr. Suzuki:
(Some insight into ignorance generators, but too much ancient "
hopium?"):
