March 09, 2020 "
Information
Clearing House" -
The saying resembles a logical syllogism in
structure, but it isn’t. Taking it apart in
thirds, it’s doesn’t follow that “you can fool
all the people some of the time” because it’s
too much to assume you can know “all” (an
absolute) the people.
It also doesn’t
follow that you can fool “some of the people all
the time” because it’s too much to assume you
can know “all” the time (that absolute again).
However, the
third part rests on secure grounds because of
the negative phrasing, substituting “cannot” for
“can”. Here you’re not positing anything about
“all” the people or “all” the time, so the
absolute is turned on its head into an admission
of its unknowability.
Therefore, the
third part is true. You can’t fool all the
people all the time, but that’s not saying much
and cold comfort it is because the people that
fool people merely rely upon fooling a
sufficient number of people a sufficient amount
of time. That’s the operating principle. Whether
it’s called public relations, advertising, spin,
fake news, or propaganda, it’s all lying. We’re
lied to every hour of the day, every day of the
year.
There’s a
tendency to think disinformation is growing
worse in kind in an internet age. It’s not. It’s
the same rain over a larger area. The problem of
disinformation can be traced to self-interested
hierarchy. It should not surprise that those
with power and authority have need to shape
public perception. How else to maintain a
position of disparity and gain a proper level of
obedience, when the clumsy methods of brute
force and bribery are bypassed?
At a basic
level of self-defense, the task of the free
person is to maintain a critical attitude. Not
to do this is surrender. As protection against
unjust hierarchy, the task of a free society is
to insist that systems of authority must justify
their continued existence. This is in the spirit
of anarchism. Not the blowing up of buildings
but the blowing up of mirages.
The United
States government took a very important lesson
from Vietnam. It reasoned that in order to
retain control of its imperialistic agenda it
had to eliminate forced conscription. By putting
its pocketbook to work, and paying volunteer
soldiers well and paying mercenary contractors
extremely well, it took care of campus and
associated problems while it could assure
Americans that nobody had been forced to fight.
You see, they’re all patriotic.
Maybe not
forced directly, but by lying to Americans about
the need to fight (and remember that polls
showed most Americans in favor of attacking
Iraq), the forcing took the form of manipulated
public opinion through a mass media amplifying
the deceit, overwhelming conscientious and
informed dissent. Millions of dissenters here
and many millions more around the world. For
nothing. The USG had reasoned correctly that its
predominant propaganda apparatus could control
the population to align itself (unknowingly)
with US imperialism.
