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Fake News, Mass
Hysteria and Induced Insanity
By Charles Hugh
Smith
The "fake news" is that we've never been healthier,
healthcare costs are under control and our economy
has fully "recovered."
December 30, 2016 "Information
Clearing House"
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"OTM"
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We've heard a lot about "fake news"
from those whose master narratives are threatened by
alternative sources and analyses. We've heard less
about the master narratives being threatened: the
fomenting of mass hysteria, which turns the populace
into an easily manipulated and managed herd, and induced
insanity, a longer-term marketing-based
narrative that causes the populace to ignore the
self-destructive consequences of accepting the fad/
ideology/ mindset being pushed as "good" and
"normal."
In terms of "fake news," it's hard to
beat the mainstream media and its handlers' attempts
to whip up mass hysteria via unsubstantiated claims
that Russian hackers working for Putin deprived
Hillary of the presidency. The
campaign to spark mass hysteria was launched with
great precision, unleashing the overwhelming forces
of endless repetition (the marketer's favorite tool)
and appeals to national security authorities: The
C.I.A., F.B.I, and all the other security agencies
purportedly concur that Russia "hacked" (whatever
that means) the U.S. election.
The intent of the campaign was
painfully obvious: by
wheeling out the big guns of authority without any
actual evidence, the campaign's designers hoped the
public would automatically assume the bizarre,
outlandish claim must be "true," even though no
evidence was submitted to substantiate this
fact-free claim, and respond as planned, i.e.
willingly join a mass hysteria herd in favor of
discrediting the U.S. election results.
Did the "hackers" change the election results issued
by voting machines? Did they "hack" the election
totals? Wouldn't there be tell-tale forensic
evidence of such tampering? How else could "hackers"
change the election other than by changing votes and
vote totals?
Or was the media campaign to generate mass hysteria
based on nothing but purposefully vague and
unsubstantiated claims of Russia-inspired "fake
news" that undermined the election by questioning
the mainstream media's biased coverage of the
presidential campaign?
"Fake news" is of course the staple
of marketing products that end up killing the unwary
consumers who buy the hype. The
classic example is the cigarette/ tobacco industry,
which ran adverts for decades proclaiming
absurdities such as the health benefits of smoking
(other than dying a horrible, needless death), the
"fact" that doctors preferred one brand of cigarette
over the other brands, and so on.
The industry famously went to truly monumental
lengths to hide the facts about the destructive
consequences of smoking from the public, and
aggressively attacked any evidence that smoking was
remarkably unhealthy as "unscientific," i.e. beating
back the truth with The Big Lie.
That a form of consumption that
killed the consumers was unquestionably accepted not
just as "normal" but as cool/hip for decades
illustrates the staying power of induced
insanity. Mass
hysteria eventually wears off, as it overloads the
emotional circuitry of the target audience; humans
soon become desensitized to the triggers used to
generate mass hysteria, and it takes heavier and
heavier doses of propaganda to maintain the
feverishly herd-inducing hysteria.
Eventually, the populace habituates to the stimulus
and becomes exhausted by the hysteria.
Induced Insanity, on the other hand,
is not an emotional state--it is a state of mind and
a state of perception that filters and interprets
inputs to produce the desired output--
an acceptance of insanity as "normal" and "good."
For example, eating mountains of food
that "tastes good" is positive and normal. Never
mind that we're eating/consuming ourselves to death:
Or that our medical costs are so out of control that
they're bankrupting households, enterprises and
eventually,the entire economy:
Or that much of the money is spent on shuffling
paperwork/ claims and counter-claims, complying with
thousands of pages of regulations and dealing with
the systemic fraud our system invites and rewards:
Induced insanity doesn't just describe our
acceptance of ill health and a doomed healthcare
system; it also describes our blind acceptance of an
economy that's throttling small business:
The "fake news" is that we've never
been healthier, healthcare costs are under control
and our economy has fully "recovered." These
sustained "fake news" campaigns are intended not to
induce hysteria, but an enduring acceptance of what
is visibly destructive and insane.
Food for thought as we enter 2017. Always
start every inquiry with a simple question: cui
bono--to whose benefit?
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The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |
