How To Tell
Real News From Useless Narrative Fluff
By Caitlin
Johnstone
April 06, 2020
"Information
Clearing House"
- When Zen teacher Issan Dorsey was asked to
describe the essence of Zen art, he answered, “Nothing
extra.”
“Nothing extra”
is also of course the essence of Zen living itself:
perceiving life as it actually is, as opposed to
perceiving it through a bunch of believed narrative
filters about yourself, about others, about reality, and
so on. These narrative filters are an extra pile of
layers that are added on top of the actual experience of
life, and they give a distorted view which causes a lot
of confusion and suffering. Relinquishing belief in them
brings clarity and peace.
This is also
the essence of clearly understanding what’s really going
on in the world. Like so much else, the approach to the
large is the same as the approach to the small, which is
to say the approach to seeing clearly in the big picture
is the same as the approach to seeing clearly as an
individual: you need to learn to look at it without the
extra narrative overlay.
Because
the news media are
controlled by plutocrats
who have a vested interest in
protecting the status quo
upon which their kingdoms are built, almost everything
in the news is useless narrative fluff. It doesn’t tell
you what’s really going on, it rather tries to
influence what’s going on by manipulating the
perceptions of the audience. It does this by either (A)
distracting from what really matters by focusing on what
doesn’t matter, or (B) actively working to manipulate
how the audience thinks about a given issue.
When you strip
away all the empty fluff and manipulative spin, there
are basically only four often-overlapping pieces of
information that really matter in the big picture: (1)
where the money is going, (2) where the resources are
going, (3) where the weapons are going, and (4) where
the people are going. When it comes to understanding
world dynamics, accurate information about these four
things is the only real news you’ll ever encounter.
Everything else is empty narrative spin meant to
justify, distort, or distract from information about
these things.
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If you
ignore everything else and only focus on finding
the most accurate information possible about
these four items, you will have an infinitely
clearer understanding of what’s really going on
in the world than someone who trusts news
reporters to walk them through it.
Watch where the money is going
because you can trust the raw numbers of financial
transactions a lot more than you can trust the stories
people are telling. A massive percentage of daily news
coverage goes toward analyzing the latest foam-brained
gibberish that came out of Donald Trump’s mouth even
though we all know he’s going to contradict himself two
days later, but the fact that he’s been
heavily funded by an oligarch
who happens to have been a longtime proponent of the
Iran policies this administration has been advancing is
much more solid.
Zoom out
and watch where the money is going in the big picture
and you’ll see that a grossly disproportionate amount of
it is moving away from the general public and toward a
very small group of people, which we just saw
illustrated in the historically unprecedented
multitrillion-dollar wealth transfer
in the US corporate bailout. If you watch this small
group and pay attention to the projects, candidates,
think tanks and media outlets they pour their wealth
into, you will notice that they exert an incredible
amount of influence on all four crucial factors: where
the money goes, where the resources go, where the
weapons go, and where the people go.
Watching where the resources are going gives
you an even clearer image of what’s going on because
resources, unlike money, are completely independent of
narrative. There is no such thing as “money” without the
thoughts that humans agree to collectively think about
it, but oil would still be oil even if all humans were
wiped off the face of the earth. When you see the US
ramping up escalations against Venezuela,
ignore the narratives about “drug trafficking” and what
a bad, bad man Nicolás Maduro is, and look at
what resources lie beneath the ground in that nation
to find out what this is really about. Mentally “mute”
the soundtracks the political/media class spout about
who’s doing what to whom and just watch where the
resources are going, and who’s controlling them. That
way you’ll be able to discern the powerful from the
disempowered and the takers from their victims.
Watch where the weapons are going because
those are another non-narrative factor which exerts a
huge influence on the world; a bullet will stop a
beating heart regardless of what the mind thinks about
it. Ignore the irrelevant narrative fluff about where
the coronavirus originated and whether or not it’s
racist to say “Wuhan virus”, and look at
the ring of US military bases encircling China and
the way the Marine Corps
is shifting its attention onto that nation.
Ignore Trump’s gibberish about ending wars and note that
he’s been expanding them and
increasing foreign troop presence.
Ignore the Democratic Party’s nonsense about Trump
having loyalties to Russia and watch his
administration’s many dangerous
nuclear escalations against that nation.
Ignore international finger-wagging at humanitarian
abuses by Israel and Saudi Arabia and look at who’s
still selling them weapons and supporting them
militarily.
Watch where the people are going for
another important piece of real information that isn’t
dependent on narrative. Where are the prisoners? Where
are the refugees, where are they going, and what are
they fleeing? Where are people moving to, and what do
they want?
With each of
these four items you can simply watch raw data and
ignore all the stories the establishment spinmeisters
tell about that data. As long as you make sure you’re
getting the most accurate data possible, it’s like
you’re looking at a globe and watching lines in four
different colors moving around in it from place to place
and person to person. And without anyone’s stories
tainting your view.
You will
notice that there’s a heavy degree of overlap between
these four items. You see the weapons moving toward
China and you notice that’s the nation with the US
hegemony-threatening Belt
and Road Initiative
(where the resources are moving) and the key player in
the
US dollar-threatening Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(where the money is moving). You see Julian Assange
locked in prison (where the people are going) for
exposing US war crimes (where the weapons are going).
You see US troops illegally
occupying Syrian oil fields
(where the weapons and resources are going)
to prevent the Syrian government from using it
to rebuild the nation (where the money is going). And so
on.
Nearly
everything that makes it to the top of the daily news
churn is either propaganda distortion or distracting
drivel, and either way you can safely ignore it. Just
watch where the money is going, where the resources are
going, where the weapons are going and where the people
are going, and ignore all the narrative chatter.
Nothing extra.
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