Bingo!
By "propaganda" Caitlin Johnstone means "narrative control."
Maintaining narrative control was relatively easy prior to the Internet and social media. Now, the process has turned to access and exclusion as the means of censorship through control of the media and social media in particular. Access and exclusion have always been a reality in the case of print media. Now this is being extended to digital platforms.
Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems
Caitlin Johnstone
4 comments:
Quite right. The plebs and even most of the intelligentsia can be made to think just about anything.
A small example of this is that I have been temporarily banned from Twitter for having the temerity to say that Muslims were responsible for 9/11 and that Trump and Obama banned immigrants from Muslim countries. Those two statements are factually correct, but that counts for nothing. The point is that both statements put Muslims in a bad light, thus the leftie/Muslim propaganda machine does not want those statements to appear in public. The truth or otherwise of a statement is of no interest to propagandists.
A few days ago I got robbed by a Christian.
A Christian family not far from where I live have kept all of their children completely out of school-no home schooling, nothing for years.
I said here recently about my neighbours who are all very conservative, and are very very nice friendly people. I tried to figure out what makes them conservative, and I can only think is that they believe the ruling establishment are the party of law and order, honour, the good society, and will stop anarchy.
They probably see Labour as the party that's soft and terrorists, and soft on Britain's enemies. And I think they probably see the Royal Family and all of the establishment as being highly moral and principled, who look out for our interests.
They view labour, and the unions, and the working class, as not abiding to authority and promoting anarchy. It's rather like at school where the teachers and the prefects keep the bad boys under control. Authority! Yes, we do need law and order and a civic society.
My neighbours don't seem to think too deeply about politics and accept the propaganda. Its instinctual.
I wrote I under a Tommy Robinson YouTube video the other day how Churchill starved to death 3 million Indians to death when he took away their food. A few people commented on what I said and called me a traitor, and then they said to ignore me. I gave them links to articles about it.
I also gave links to how Churchill fire-bombed German cities with phosphorus deliberately burning them all to death. I said they I had seen the video footage of British fighter jets flying into the parks, where all the women and children were running to escape the fire and suffocation (most of the men were at war), and the British were gunning them down. I put in links to the videos, but I was called a traitor.
We see the world very differently. To them, Hitler did far worse crimes so what Churchill did to them was justified. To me, fighting evil with evil is just more evil - it doesn't make you good.
In my many conservative values are archaic and primitive, suited to an older world. But I admire some conservative values, like not living beyond your means, and saving, and working hard to acheive a good life (but i hate the protestant work ethic), the good society, law and order, but these are universal values. I never liked the Rolling Stones, or Iggy Pop, and many other dreadful bands because of their decadence. My GF loves Celebrity Big Brother but I hate it because of the appalling attitude of the contestants. Russell Brand has superb values, though (even if i don't like the tattoos).
The British are ruled by propaganda and are being lied to. They are susceptible to lies because they believe in the goodness of the establishment. I have a post coming out on this soon.
The economist as storyteller
Comment on Caitlin Johnstone on ‘Propaganda Is The Root Of All Our Problems’*
There is the infinite reality and there is the limited individual consciousness, and between the two is a medium. This epistemological condition has been captured by Plato in the Allegory of the Cave: “Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners’ reality. Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are not reality at all, for he can perceive the true form of reality rather than the manufactured reality that is the shadows seen by the prisoners. The inmates of this place do not even desire to leave their prison; for they know no better life.”#1
The situation has not fundamentally changed since the ancient Greeks. Newspapers, radio, TV, and social media only multiply the shadows on the blank wall. The situation is summarized with a graph on Wikimedia.#2
There are three relationships between reality and consciousness:
(i) Faithful mapping from A-reality to A'-consciousness.
(ii) Reduction of B-reality to zero, i.e. to conscious non-existence.
(iii) Blowing up NONENTITIES to predominant C'-consciousness.
Alternative (i) is what science/philosophy is supposed to achieve. Alternatives (ii) and (iii) constitute the prisoners’ manufactured reality. As physical force is applied in order to control the physical realm, communicative force is applied to control the mental realm. This communicative force is called propaganda and it comes either in the religious, political, or entertainment garb.#3 In the real world, both forces are of roughly equal importance. Professional storytellers (historians, priests, romancers, journalists, movie makers) tend to think that the ‘pen is mightier than the sword’: “As I never tire of saying, the real underlying currency in our world is not gold, nor bureaucratic fiat, nor even raw military might. The real underlying currency of our world is narrative, and the ability to control it.”
Maintaining narrative control is also the main business of the economist.#4, #5, #6, #7, #8
Scientific truth has two inseparable methodological components: material and formal consistency. This, of, course, holds also for economics: “In order to tell the politicians and practitioners something about causes and best means, the economist needs the true theory or else he has not much more to offer than educated common sense or his personal opinion.” (Stigum)
To this day, economists do not have the true theory. Economics is fake science since Adam Smith. The major approaches ― Walrasianism, Keynesianism, Marxianism, Austrianism, MMT ― are mutually contradictory, axiomatically false, materially/formally inconsistent, and all got profit ― the foundational concept of the subject matter ― wrong.
Economists have produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years. This does not matter much, though, because in the political Circus Maximus there is a greater demand for storytellers, blatherers, trolls, actors, clowns, and propagandists than for scientists.
As failed scientists, economists easily get a second chance, for example as exhibitionist of the Conscience of a Liberal in a propaganda outlet of the Oligarchy or as a billionaire-sponsored troll in the econoblogosphere.
Time for a dishonorable discharge of these stupid/corrupt folks from the sciences.
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
References
https://axecorg.blogspot.com/2019/06/the-economist-as-storyteller.html
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