The Greater Danger

To a surprising degree these days I am amazed by the amount of agreement that exists between intelligent people on the right and those on the left. This leads me to believe there is something very wrong with the center, the mainstream, the official narratives that are only the beliefs of the majority because they are forced down our throats by the major media players.

It’s funny how it has taken me over a year to distill my thoughts, observations, and gut feelings into a simple thesis statement, but I notice even the official narrative has never gotten beyond RUSSSIA! RUSSIA! RUSSIA! In truth, the mainstream does have a central message it never wavers from, though it does not state it explicitly. It is this: Russia is bad, Russia has harmed us, Russia is our enemy, we must do something about Russia. Whatever the other allegations, whatever the changing assertions, from hacking, to colluding, to influencing, it has never wavered from that. Turn on your TV or radio, or read the paper, and that, behind whatever the story might be, is the message you are meant to receive.

Of course, the media will never explicitly state their central thesis: liars never do. Liars and gaslighters never give you simple and honest answers, they want to keep you in the dark. They want to keep you doubting yourself so that you trust them instead. They want you to hand over to them your personal autonomy so that they can rule you. Oh, you might get a certain illusion of power in the exchange. They will permit you your rage so that you feel like you are accomplishing something, but that rage is only permitted so long as it is directed by them and supports their cause. You will only ever be permitted to punch down, never up at the ones who dictate your reality. Step out of line and you will catch all hell for it. They will demand all the obedience an army drill sergeant does, and you will find it easiest to obey until you no longer realize that that is what you are doing.

It is not your will so much that they shut down as your mind. Once your mind ceases to function logically, critically, and skeptically, will is easily overcome. Once you react in fear rather than thoughtfully, the natural response is to retreat to safety. As a child retreats to the safety of his parents, so too does the adult retreat to the safety of his government, the flock, whatever source of authority  speaks loudly and forcefully and seems to know what’s going on and what needs to be done. The mainstream media also fits that bill.

If I make a comparison to Nazi Germany, you will surely object. I merely do so to point out the worst-case scenario for how this sort of manipulation and surrender of rational thinking to fear, the surrender of autonomy to a domineering government, can occur. It can occur, make no mistake about it. I do not say that in this case it will go as far as it did in Nazi Germany, I only say it is going in that direction and no one can really determine how far it will go. But seeing as how we live in an age where weapons are infinitely more powerful than any that existed in World War II, we don’t have to go nearly as far in the direction taken by 1930’s Germany in order to come up with an unimaginably worse scenario.

I mentioned I finally distilled all my thoughts and observations and fears into a single, declarative statement. It is this: Anyone who ignores the mountain of evidence that our media has provided us with willfully deceptive information, in order to focus on the allegations that Russia should be our primary focus, is lacking any sense of proportion.

From there, the rest of the argument springs naturally. But first let me briefly support the central thesis. You can see the evidence elsewhere on my blog. I have constantly pointed out examples of journalism that is not merely incompetent but willfully misleading. I have pointed out a certainty that should never exist in any respectable reporting, a one-sidedness on par with anything Nazi Germany called news. But the primary evidence can be seen simply by turning to your favorite news source. Is it providing you with useful, actionable, accurate and nuanced information? Is it doing a good job discussing and reporting on issues such as global warming and is it giving it the attention it deserves? Did it do a good job reporting on the 2016 Presidential election? Did it do a good job of getting to the truth behind Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq or babies being torn from incubators in Kuwait?

If you can honestly answer yes to any of the questions above, then there might be some room to argue against my assertion. Otherwise, you should agree that the primary source of misinformation is our own media and therefore any attempt to place alleged Russian interference (claimed by the very media that is the admitted greater problem) as a primary concern lacks proportionality.

Now back to what can be argued from my central thesis. Anyone who has demonstrated no capacity for proportionality on the Russian issue does not deserve our trust. Whether they be willful agents of a skewed perspective or merely mindless bits of driftwood being pulled along in the great flood of the narrative, they clearly lack the capacity for leadership. If we are talking about politicians, they are unworthy of your vote. If they are journalists, they are unworthy of the time you spend reading their reports.

This is not to dismiss the Russian interference or anyone who believes that such a thing took place. But we need to acknowledge there has been an unprecedented propaganda push that has taken place. It could be argued that a dysfunctional media that sees profit as its only obligation is to blame, but cause is not the immediate concern. That can be sorted out later, the issue we need to address in the moment is that we have a media and political system that must be fixed. Only those in the broken systems, or those who have uncritically accepted their narrative, would say differently.