Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. The world is better off being controlled by the collective will of the people rather than the will of a few sociopathic oligarchs, and we absolutely have the ability to take that control by force whenever we want to. All we have to do is shift value and credibility from plutocrat-generated narratives to popular collective narratives, and cultivate an aggressive disgust for all attempts by the powerful to manipulate the public dialogue.
Once the way people think, act and vote is no longer manipulated by an elite class which does not represent the interests of humanity, our species will have a fighting chance at moving society out of its patterns of exploitation, war and ecocide and into a direction of health, harmony and thriving. I’m just going to keep pointing out that this is always an option, hoping for a spark to catch someday....Class struggle and consciousness-raising.
I am not suggesting that CJ is a Marxist or even a Marxian. For all I know, she may be even unaware of the parallel between what she is saying in the 21st century and what Marx wrote in the 19th century. Nor does one have to agree with Marx or even be aware of him to agree with her analysis of contemporary conditions.
Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue Journalist
What If There Were No Official Narratives?
Caitlin Johnstone
I believe that society would move slightly to the left if things were not manipulated by propaganda. I worked with working class people all my life, and they were not political. They used to be when i first started work, they tended to be informed and left, but after Thatcher things changed. As the years went by all i could find lying around the place was the Sun newspaper and occasionally the Daily Mail. Most people were not political but those that were tended to be working class Tories, maybe about one I thirty, and they were really horrible, not to work with, but their political views where they prided themselves on their meanness, selfishness, agressiveness, and Ayn Rand-ian type views. They are people who would early support fascism, indeed, they are proto-fascists.
ReplyDeleteSo, if we get our democracy back, let's hope the floating voter does not listen to that lot. It's these people that the aristocracy can influence so easily as they own the media, and through that they have wrecked our lives as well as the lives of the average Tory supporter. If we can show them this, we can win and build a more Scandinavian type society.
Maybe I'm over optimistic, but i think the ruling elite have pushed it too far and it's getting easier to expose their lies. Maybe there will be a soft revolution at some stage. Moderate conservatives, like those at the American Conservative, give encouragment. Both people on the left and right know something is seriously wrong.
I look in the Guardian every day to see if i can leave a comment but in all the articles about antisemitism in the Labour Party, the Skripal hoax, or Russiagate, CiF is always disabled, not that they wouldn't remove my comments anyway, but if you're careful about it you can sometimes get them to stay.
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking of sending some emails again to the Guardian editorial team with some indisputable facts in. I did that before over Russiagate and asked them why were they lying?
“They just keep saying it and saying it like it’s true until people start believing it without feeling any pressure at all to substantiate their narrative with facts.” ~ Caitlin Johnstone
ReplyDeleteRepeat any lie often enough and it becomes “true.”
911, Iraqi WMDs, Russia-gate, the Skripal “poisoning,” the “holocaust,”™ -- any lie repeated often enough becomes “common sense.” Anything other than the lie becomes “fake news” and a “conspiracy theory.” Anyone who questions the lie is evil, and must be silenced for the “good of society.”
Repetition is how lies become “facts.” It’s how we control groupthink. It’s how oligarchs stay in power. It’s how people are seduced into throwing their lives away in wars to make rich people richer.
“There’s a consensus, agreed-upon narrative about what’s going on in the world that is advanced by all mass media outlets regardless of what political sector those outlets market themselves to.”
Our consensus reality is based on a narrative. Whoever controls the narrative controls our reality, and with it the world.