Defining Freedom in 21st Century in Light of Determinism

Posted on October 15, 2024 by greg

Since the time of the French Revolution, freedom has been regarded as the greatest value of culture. Today in modern society, we are trying to restore the value of individual freedom, which we formally perceive as one of the rights of man and citizen. The concept of “freedom of the individual” is increasingly used in the media, in the speeches of political leaders, as well, is declared by the US Constitution. However, the meaning invested in this concept by different people is different – often the most opposite ways of solving the problem of freedom of the human person are offered. Today the economic elite claim, there is a threat to other freedoms with any reduction to economic freedom (i.e. regulations). For some freedom has nothing to do with democracy or speech or individual rights: for the neoliberal it is about the freedom of the market and the elites who control those markets.

Life is an unstable equilibrium between agency and determinism. Human agency is a collective of systemic thinkers and doers creating conditions where individuals can transform the status quo. Causal determinism is the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature.  Agency assumes intellectual creativity that enables individuals to conceive original ideas and then have the freedom to act on these inspirations – often in opposition to limitations that are imposed within a particular environment. Personal agency is the humanistic term for the exercise of free will. Hegel developed a philosophy of action in which the spirit is always active in the search of some aim, in realizing one’s potential or self-actualization. Hegel’s concept of freedom can best be regarded as the answer to a problem – the problem of how a man can be free in a universe which is governed by necessary laws.

Newtonian determinism explained the equilibrium of the free-market system described by Adam Smith. Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) developed and applied evolutionary theory to the study of society. Spencer applied Newtonian determinism to his analysis, making him one of the first people since the Enlightenment to exclude free will from his analysis. He believed that human society reflects the same evolutionary principles as biological organisms do in their development. Following a universal law, Spencer believed, social institutions such as economics can function without control. His claim social laws are as deterministic as those governing nature supported his concept survival of the fittest and allowed Spencer to believe that the rich and the powerful become so because they are better suited to the social and economic culture of the time. Spencer preferred the Lamarckian evolution of adapted characteristics in which he believed that societies like living organisms evolve from simple states into highly complex forms – equating evolution with progress.

Spencer’s survival of the fittest concept was believed to be natural, hence morally correct. During the 19th century, cracks appeared in the wall of the belief of determinism. The random possibilities followed by choice introduced by Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection soon destroyed the efforts to apply Newtonian determinism to social issues. It introduced the concept of freedom based on chance and choice. When Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) applied the Darwinian evolutionary theory to societal changes he found that laissez-faire capitalism created two groups, with the rich getting richer and the income gap between the rich and the poor widening. Veblen coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. He pointed out that that Darwinian evolution did not guarantee progress; the leisure class reacted differently than the middle class from the environmental stimuli in a system in which each individual looks after his own interests.

Julius Evola (1898-1974) claims freedom and equality are tools of manipulation, and after the movement leaders get what they want, they’ll toss you aside. Evola explains, “Practically speaking, it is only a revolutionary weapon: freedom and equality are the catchwords certain social strata or groups employed in order to undermine other classes and to gain pre-eminence; having achieved this task, they were quickly set aside.” When the fascists came to power in Italy in 1922, Evola jumped on board and became a regular contributor to the regime’s mouthpiece magazine, Difesa della Razza (Defense of the Race). But Evola’s message, soaked in conspiracy theories, has quietly endured in the underground and has reemerged on the surface recently, thanks to the popularity of conspiracy theories. Christians in the far right rationalize their fascination with the philosopher, arguing Evola’s main teaching was to go back to tradition.1

The Heritage Foundation is a think tank that develops policies for the Republican Party. The Heritage Foundation policies supported determinism in the 20th century.  Ronald Reagan liked the Heritage Foundation so much that he implemented about sixty percent of their recommended policies during his first year as president. Ronald Reagan’s policies called for widespread tax cuts, decreased social spending, increased military spending, and the deregulation of domestic markets.  Reagan facilitated neoliberalism becoming a mainstream ideology. Following Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, the Heritage Foundation obtained influence in his presidential transition and administration. Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation’s plan for how Trump, should he win the November election, can vastly remake the federal government. Project 2025 would undercut economic security by lowering corporate taxes while increasing taxes on the middle class, lower the threshold for overtime eligibility, weaken child labour protections. Project 2025 supports determinism in 21st century.

In an age where information flows like an endless river, a new theory emerges to explain our relationship with the digital world: info-determinism. This concept posits that the ways information moves through our world create an intricate web in which we are all ensnared, shaping our thoughts, actions, and very perception of reality. The Internet has evolved into two bipartisan camps in US politics. The spread of conspiracy theories ahead of the impending US presidential election make discussions of “echo chambers” or “filter bubbles” seem ubiquitous. These terms capture the social media phenomenon of users increasingly surrounding themselves with likeminded compatriots. They are often blamed for the arguably highest levels of political polarisation in a generation. Today, many communication platforms in social media are persuasive and often work to change or influence opinions regarding political views because of the abundance of ideas, thoughts, and opinions circulating.2

Before the Enlightenment human beings were generally considered in terms of how they fit into social hierarchies and communal institutions, but following enlightenment the view was that the individual rather than society as a whole, is the most important entity. Self-criticism and self-denial were no longer in vogue, replaced by self-expression, self-realization and self-approval. Hegel explains the modern state is the institution that will correct this imbalance in modern culture. Although economic and legal individualism play a positive role in society, Hegel foresees the need for institutions that will affirm common bonds and ethical life while preserving individual freedom. Thus, freedom is compatible with determinism because freedom is essentially just a matter of not being constrained or hindered in certain ways when one acts or chooses. The hidden lesson of the subprime crisis – regulations make markets and property possible; allow all of us to exercise equal freedoms. 3

In 1762, Rousseau published the Social Contract in which he defined the ideal social contract, describing how man could be free and live together in a community. By ‘equality’ Rousseau did not mean that everyone should be exactly the same, but differences in wealth should not imbalance the state. Equality it seemed to him, is a necessary condition for the preservation of liberty, while property and material inequality are the root of human misery and evil. Rousseau observes, evil, greed, and selfishness emerged as human society began to develop. As people formed social institutions, they developed vices. One such institution was private property that encouraged avarice and self-interest. Thus, Rousseau asserts, that some level of material equality is necessary to ensure that liberty comes before profit. He also defended private property; if everything we did was for the state, we would no longer be free.

The lack of freedom to make choices creates a group working below their capabilities precisely because they have no other option, thus they become susceptible to rhetoric from populist politicians with simplistic solutions. An essential attribute of the good life is that people enjoy not just a range of personal freedoms, but an access to knowledge and a voice in public affairs. When asking searching questions of yourself, realize that freedom resides not in the brain, but in the traditions of critical thought and skeptical reason. Freedom is best exercised as a means to an end, but the end must be one that gives people the choice to make the best possible decisions to reach their full potential. It is necessary to stop Project 2025, by electing Kamala Harris and Democratic down ballot candidates to counter the far-right plan for controlling your life – which lies at the core of defining freedom in the 21st century.

1  https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/julius-evola-alt-right/517326/

2  https://braincuddle.medium.com/info-determinism-when-information-blurs-fact-and-fiction-bc0e93846c5

3  https://hls.harvard.edu/today/freedom-is-just-another-word-for-regulation/

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Countering An Existential Threat: Trump & Project 2025

Posted on October 1, 2024 by greg

Existential risks are defined as “risks that threaten the destruction of humanity’s long-term potential.” Over the long term, climate change is an existential threat, and it is younger generations and those still to come who will more fully bear the brunt of a warming planet. The precise method in which you deal with an existential threat depends entirely on its proximity and probability. Many “existential threats” are conspiracy theories, propaganda, or pseudoscience. Your first step should always be to make sure you’re not buying into one of those things. Once you have identified an existential threat, you must deal with it; such is their nature. Today, a truly existential threat to the United States would entail any combination of events orchestrated by individuals being able to permanently take away its freedoms and change its democratic form of government, regardless of the preference of the citizenry.

Donald Trump stunned the political world in 2016 when he became the first person without government or military experience ever to be elected president of the United States. Trump’s policy record included major changes at home and abroad. He achieved a string of long-sought conservative victories domestically, including the biggest corporate tax cuts on record, the elimination of scores of environmental regulations and a reshaping of the federal judiciary. Trump’s status as a political outsider, his outspoken nature and his willingness to upend past customs and expectations of presidential behavior made him a constant focus of public attention, as well as a source of deep partisan divisions. In addition to the intense divisions that emerged over Trump personally, his tenure saw a further widening of the gulf between Republicans and Democrats over core political values and issues, including in areas that weren’t especially partisan before his arrival.1

Donald Trump represents an existential threat to the current system. Trump won the nomination as the candidate who lied the most, won the presidency as someone known to lie; has an unshakable base despite ongoing lies. Underlying social issues made this possible. Enablers support the Trump’s behavior out of fear, love, or a misguided sense of loyalty. Autocrats, like Trump, surround themselves with their political cronies and lackies rather than competent people – have no way of eliciting, recognizing or assessing useful criticism. They are unwilling to hear anything negative – that leads to very bad decisions. There’s no doubt that Donald Trump was the instigator of the 2020 insurrection. But the former president’s schemes never would have gotten far (or even off the ground) without the participation of right-wing media executives, lawyers and pliant state officials. Without holding these enablers accountable, democracy and the rule of law will remain at risk.

New research suggests populism and conspiracy mentality are both rooted in a fundamental disposition of distrust. Populism is a political ideology that claims to represent the interests of the common people against those of the elite. Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, are beliefs that attribute secret or hidden forces, such as government agencies or powerful individuals, as the cause of significant events or outcomes. Both populists and conspiracy theorists tend to view the world in terms of a struggle between a malevolent elite and an oppressed common people. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, called for the president to clean out “leftists” from the State and Justice departments. Bannon has called not only for ridding the government of holdovers from past administrations, but for deconstructing the “administrative state.” It is no small wonder, with such advice, Trump doesn’t hesitate to sow distrust of the justice system.2

Trump draws fervent support from conservatives who believe the president is willing to restore the country to its moral and constitutional foundations. Conservatives accepted Trump because he appointed their judges, and rolled back regulations they hate. These conservatives claim liberals pose “an existential threat” to the country, and the response includes need to turn to Natural law which is the foundation upon which the spirit of the US Constitution is built. Today followers are reverse-engineering an intellectual doctrine to match Trump’s basic instincts. The movement has two disciples from California: Tucker Carlson advances a form of victim-politics populism and has learned to translate the New Right’s most interesting ideas into Fox-worthy bombast. Stephen Miller is credited with shaping the racist and draconian immigration policies of President Trump, which include the zero-tolerance policy, that includes family separation, the Muslim ban and ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. Both support Trump’s politics of white fear.

The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, advocated for pro-business policies and anti-communism in its early years, but distinguished itself from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) by also advocating for cultural issues that were important to Christian conservatives. Among the 2,000 Heritage proposals, approximately 60% of them were implemented or initiated by the end of Reagan’s first year in office. Reagan later called the Heritage Foundation a “vital force” during his presidency. In 1986, in recognition of the Heritage Foundation’s fast-growing influence, Time magazine labeled the Heritage Foundation “the foremost of the new breed of advocacy tanks.” Following Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, the Heritage Foundation obtained influence in his presidential transition and administration. One reason for the Heritage Foundation’s disproportionate influence relative to other conservative think tanks, was that other conservative think tanks had “Never Trump” staff during the 2016 presidential election, while the Heritage Foundation ultimately signaled that it would be supportive of him.

Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s plan for how Trump, should he win the November election, can vastly remake the federal government. An existential threat, put simply, is a threat to society – a veritable threat to existence does not have to be present for someone to experience a sense of existential threat. Right-wing misinformation is a direct and immediate threat to the American public. Today established Republican proxies are using social media to spread disinformation, suppress political participation, and undermine oppositional parties. Conspiracy theories are captivating because they provide explanations for confusing, emotional and ambiguous events especially when official explanations seem inadequate. Although conspiracies are frequently outlandish and implausible assertions, their power lies in the fact that they confirm what people want to believe. Conspiracy theories may be construed as opportunistic attributions of power that allow (relatively powerful groups) to advance their interests.

Basically, Project 2025 is a roadmap to create a society where personal freedoms are subordinate to the interests of a select few. It would take a wreaking ball to US institutions that are in place and undermine democratic processes that ensure democracy for all. While Trump tries to distance himself from Project 2025, we must focus on Trump’s connections to Project 2025. It would give Trump limitless power over daily lives and let him use the presidency to enact ‘revenge’ on his enemies, ban abortion nationwide and punish women who have an abortion, and gut the checks and balances. Ronald Reagan noted: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.” This existential threat to democracy makes 2024 election the most important one in decades.

Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Sometimes people don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.” Even what we believe we see with our own eyes is made up from memory. When referring to blind spots in our vision that we do not notice, much of what you see ‘out there’ is actually manufactured ‘in here’ by your brain. Malleable memory, the brain filling in gaps in vision, and the biggest culprit, defense mechanisms, as well as the desire to seek pleasure and avoid pain leading to an implicit preference toward a lie, should at least contribute to one realizing thinking cannot be trusted. People want to hear what they want to hear. When two candidates are running and one of them tells the truth and the other says what the public wants to hear (lies), regrettably, the one who says what the public wants to hear often wins the election.

When faced with an existential threat, what do you do? By working out what things we can control, let’s us make decisions about what everyone needs to know and how to act to meet those needs. Then by taking step-by-step action on those things identified, we can increase our sense of agency. We must become involved in the messages on social media. This requires balancing news on worst-case scenarios with other information and activities. Remember the damage already caused from involvement of the Heritage Foundation – the consequences of decisions around birth control and presidential immunity triggered by a conservative supreme court! It is necessary to identify the worst-case scenario, and get discussion of it in the general public, specifically, that Trump and Project 2025 are connected at the hip. These proposals threaten freedom from government interference should the Republican nominee win the 2024 presidential election. To counter this threat to democracy, everyone must show up at the ballot box to reject Trump and Project 2025.

1  https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/01/29/how-america-changed-during-donald-trumps-presidency/

2 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/03/history-trump-attacks-civil-service-federal-workers-mccarthy-214951/

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

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 How the Cult of Victimhood Dominates Politics

Posted on September 15, 2024 by greg

Privilege is the sin that must be checked so that the marginalized can continue their long march to freedom. In an empathetic society, victimhood and powerlessness becomes its own kind of power. A large part of understanding these processes lies in the power of victimhood. These identities are placeholders for suffering and signs of the justice of one’s cause. We need to distinguish between victimhood itself and the politics of victimhood – the process whereby suffering is fabricated or conferred, and then ‘weaponized’ for political purposes. That all makes it difficult territory for progressives, who believe real injustice happens every day and should be highlighted and resolved. Progressives must remain cognizant about the allure of victimhood politics. Today we have identity politics of aggressively competing victimhood, in which groups of people, based on religious, national, ethnic, sexual, or whatever else identity they chose, demand to have their victimhood status recognized and something done about it.

Populists like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, or some Brexit campaigners, construct fantasies of past national greatness and belonging to instil audiences with a sense of pride and nostalgia. At the same time, these political entrepreneurs use rhetoric that targets feelings of resentment and anger, representing themselves and their audiences as victims of the establishment. Populists promote an emotive politics of outrage which manipulates public sentiments for political gain and underwrites a radical departure from established political norms. Populist appeals to victimhood are used to assign blame with elites in politics, businesses, and media for a sense of loss and marginalization, for national decline from past imagined glories, and to foster political conflict. “Stories shape our feelings toward others and ourselves, toward what is right and wrong, and populist security narratives grip voters through their deep-seated emotional appeal” explains Dr Homolar.1

Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was widely viewed as a kind of populist revolt against the Washington establishment. As a candidate, the billionaire promised voters that he would take on the elite and fight for the “forgotten men and women” of America, and promoted himself as a man of the people. Yet after becoming president Trump did virtually nothing to improve the lot of ordinary Americans who work for a living. In fact, his administration’s policies had, for the most part, benefited people like President Trump – the super-rich – while hurting working class Americans. According to John Judis the exact designation of the terms: ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ don’t define populism; what defines it is the disagreement or argument between the two – or in the case of right-wing populism the three, as right-wing populists “champion the people against an elite that they accuse of favoring a third group,” which is typically an outsider group such as immigrants, foreigners or minorities.

Why is being a victim such a potent identity today? Lilie Chouliaraki identifies a theory of victimhood based on, what she calls, a “politics of pain” and argues that even though victimhood has historically been used in struggles for equality and freedom for the systemically vulnerable, social media platforms and far-right populism have turned victimhood into a weapon of the privileged. This absolves elites from the neoliberal burden of responsibility. Basically, victimization rhetoric heightens leader support because it specifically relieves followers of the pressure of having to take responsibility for negative life outcomes, especially when they subscribe to neoliberal competition ideology. Being granted victim status can remove some pressure to “win the game.” If the competition is unfair, one cannot be blamed for losing it. Thus, a leader who acknowledges the victimhood of individuals who subscribe to neoliberal competition ideology relieves these individuals from the burden of having to take responsibility for negative outcomes in their lives.2

White Americans who perceive significant discrimination against their racial group are more likely to harbor doubts about the integrity of election outcomes, according to new research published in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. The findings provide evidence that feelings of victimization are an important predictor of increased skepticism towards the democratic process: “Political elites, especially those associated with the MAGA movement, have implicitly and explicitly cultivated such grievances. This is a very dangerous game to play: democracy depends on citizens believing that institutions are generally fair and that even if their side loses today, they will get a fair chance to compete tomorrow.” Perceived victimhood, authoritarianism, populism, and white identity are the most powerful predictors of support for political violence in the US. Subjective feelings about being unjustly victimized (whether true or not) is at the heart of support for violence.

Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite for years to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than focusing on processes to counter the plutocrats who are ripping them off. Trump and his allies stoke racial tensions even as they seek to cut taxes on the rich by shedding affordable health care for everyone else, dismantle protection for workers and consumers, and tear down environmental protections that stop wealthy corporations from poisoning communities. Victim politics is cultivated for a reason – to keep workers distracted from the real causes of economic inequality. Populism is the new victimhood – now propelled by the digital revolution and the threatened insecurity. We need to distinguish between victimhood itself and the politics of victimhood – the process whereby suffering is confected or conferred, and then ‘weaponized’ for political purposes.

Over the decade prior to Trump’s victory, Steve Bannon developed an intricate multi-media machine into a sophisticated propaganda operation. Bannon identified Trump as being capable of delivering the ‘populist-nationalist idea’, and build a system to support the traditionalist movement to protect American culture. The alt-right coalesced around the Breitbart message: eight years of an African-American president had left whites disenfranchised. Breitbart and the Drudge Report moved views from the fringe into mainstream media via Fox news and Facebook. Breitbart helped focus election coverage on Trump’s immigration and grandiose job-creation rhetoric, and direct attention away from Clinton’s economic message and towards her email scandal. Bannon’s efforts, along with the Russian troll factories, recruited the necessary voting block needed to eke out an Electoral College victory – turned on little more than 100,000 votes in three crucial states that he won: Wisconsin, Michigan and Wisconsin.

In an individualistic consumer society, there is a strong focus on rights. Along with these rights are expectations of entitlement to goods and services.  In complaining, the individual establishes an image of himself that he knows what’s going on (even if it is wrong) and therefore establishes an image of himself as alert and knowledgeable. Complaining amidst a group of like-minded whiners forges a sense of togetherness and community. Donald Trump complained about unfair treatment since, well, pretty much since the beginning of his 2016 campaign. Trump is completely committed to complaining about being a victim. According to him, he’s misunderstood, mistreated, persecuted, falsely accused and unfairly punished. Trump is the complainer in chief, but tells Democrats who complain to leave the country. Cynical populism has created a cult of victimhood that dominates today’s politics. Trump played the victim card – basically the only card he has in his deck – during the presidential debate with Kamala Harris.

Donald Trump harnessed the resentment and sense of victimhood of the Republican Party. Trump comes across unceasingly pained, injured and aggrieved: the primaries were unfair, the debates were unfair, the general election was unfair. He gave a voice to that part of America that also feels aggrieved. Trump claims there is a conspiracy against him supported by ‘fake’ news. Today Trump’s paranoid third White House run continues to see ‘deep state’ enemies on all sides. He became the representative of the idea of the new whiny right: waning power of whiteness, privilege, patriarchy, access, and the cultured surety that accrues to those in possession of such. Trump who wants to restrict the overall number of immigrants argues allowing lower-skilled immigrants into the country hurts job prospects and suppresses wages for American-born workers. Trump has staked his future on stoking racial division so that he can emerge as the hero of the ‘victimized’ whites.

Marcuse argued that “capitalism and mass culture shape personal desires” so there is no essential or unchanging aspect to human nature. Mass culture results in domination of “the inner world of the human subject”. A man under capitalism is “one dimensional” since he bears no trace of the conflicts which make him multi-dimensional and capable of change. This is why Marcuse believes that people under Liberal Western capitalism are no freer than people under totalitarian role, their oppression is just transparent. For Marcuse the one-dimensional man is closely related to both consumerism and mass media that together serve as an ideological apparatus which reproduces itself through its subjects. This apparatus promotes conformity and is aimed at preventing resistance. The person who thinks critically demands social change. One-dimensional thinking does not demand change nor does it recognize the degree to which the individual is a victim of forces of domination in society.3

1  https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/researchers_point_to/

2  https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pops.12932

3  https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcuse/#OneDimThiDemRejDem

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How Propaganda Influences Opinions and Behaviours

Posted on September 1, 2024 by greg

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations. As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency. After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services.1

Billionaires do not hesitate to present their ideology as interpretation of truth. Hedge fund billionaire Bob Mercer and his family spent millions in GAI (Government Accountability Institute), Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 campaign to get Trump elected. Hillary Clinton did propose a tax on high-frequency trading of securities, which is reportedly a favorite of Mercer’s Renaissance Technologies. The Mercer Family Foundation gave nearly $3.6 million to Citizens United between 2012 and 2014, which sued for access to Clinton Foundation-related emails and whose president David Bossie also got a senior job on the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica was a data mining and data analysis company that obtained the data of 50 million Facebook users, constructed 30 million personality profiles, and sold the data to US politicians seeking election to influence voters, without the users’ consent. Mercer’s investments helped Trump win the 2016 election.

We are in debt to Donald Trump for exposing the ugly network of lies that Rousseau predicted that creates the society in which we live. He pulled back the curtain on the metaphor of the invisible hand exposing the oligarchy that is responsible for the increasing economic inequality between the wealthy and the rest of society. The ideology of neoliberalism drives the social agenda and economic goals of the economic elites. Trump also illustrated how emotion drives decisions – facts are now secondary – how politicians promise change to get elected, then once elected do an about turn and cater to corporate money. Trump ushered in the post-truth era in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts. Now that it is no longer necessary to debate what is true from what is false; we can now focus on distinguishing what is life-enhancing, and what is life-destroying.

Just as the early Internet fostered the illusion that it was inherently supportive of competition, so it fostered the illusion that it was inherently protective of personal autonomy. After all, no one compelled you to disclose your true identity online. Yet the digital world today has made possible the most comprehensive system of surveillance ever created; networked devices track our every movement and communication. The neoliberal consensus was that commercial surveillance on the Internet was a business like any other: best to let the market sort out the details. Both of these moments reflect the increasingly anti-democratic nature of communications policy-making in the United States. A new form of enterprise has emerged that Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism,” as Google, Facebook, and other firms sweep up data about our lives, preferences, personalities, and emotions “for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.”2

Propaganda isn’t just about war and lies. It’s about influential rhetoric that shapes public opinion. It doesn’t have to be a lie or come from the government. In fact, it thrives when it’s mundane. The real magic happens when propaganda molds our habits and opinions, making us accept certain ideologies as natural. Contrary to popular belief, neoliberalism isn’t about shrinking government; it’s about reshaping it. It uses state power to create and sustain free markets, pushing its jargon and way of thinking into almost every aspect of our lives. From increasing incarceration to tying welfare to work, neoliberal policies aim to change people by making every area of life amenable to market practices. Neoliberalism often co-opts terms like “democracy” and “freedom,” associating them with market logic. This stems from a flawed understanding of these concepts, reducing them to mere buzzwords that serve the interests of the market.

The so-called “free market” is anything but free. Under neo-liberalism, which is the most recent, viral form of capitalism, the 99 percent have become increasingly beholden to the top one percent of the rich. One of the actions taken by the rich this time around is that they have pretty much entirely bought up and controlled the news and entertainment media – which in this day and age aren’t necessarily two distinct categories. This means, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, that conventional wisdom is very largely under elite control … more so – ironically – in an “open and democratic society” than in an autocratic one where people know they are being manipulated. We think we are free and so we are easier to manipulate. Neoliberal propaganda is more than just flashy ads and political speeches; it’s a pervasive force that shapes our lives, values, and beliefs. Recognizing this is the first step toward meaningful change.

From 1977 to 1987, the difference in income between the top 1 percent of Americans and bottom 10 percent of Americans grew from 65 times as great to 115 times as great. This tremendous shift in income inequality may be attributed to the various neoliberalist policies Reagan enforced. These included sizable tax cuts which allowed affluent individuals to increase their wealth while removing money from government programs that could help poorer communities. Another way money moved from poor to wealthy communities was through lowering wages, which decreased the average income for low pay workers, while increasing the margins of profit for large scale investors and businessmen. Income inequality did not stop growing after Reagan’s reign – from 1979 to 2007 (18 years after Reagan left office) the incomes of the bottom 20 percent only rose 18 percent, while the incomes of the richest 1 percent rose 275 percent.3

Post-truth is a term that refers to the widespread documentation of, and concern about, disputes over public truth claims in the 21st century.  In an era when technological innovations support increasingly inexpensive and easy ways to produce media that looks official, the ability to separate real from artificial has become increasingly complicated and difficult. Conspiracy propagandists are part of the antigovernment movement. These groups and individuals intentionally spread disinformation and advance misinformation about government institutions and officials. The QAnon movement is the conspiracy theory probably most intensely connected to politics. The entire movement had originated from Internet sites and then spread into social platforms including Twitter or Facebook gathering thousands of believers. The idea started from an anonymous Internet user calling himself “Q.“, who, shortly after settling Donald Trump in the White House, claimed to be a top-clearance military official that would slowly reveal the “truth” about the political “deep state”.

It is often said that for ‘post-truth’ politicians like Donald Trump, ‘truth itself has become irrelevant’. The post-truth camp rejects the consensus of established expert authorities as untrue, implying that the ‘so-called experts’ are not really experts. The truth camp, in contrast, closely follows the established experts. Moreover, Trump presents ‘facts’ of his own and even makes them central elements of his rhetoric. The purported facts are often expressed in mathematical formats signaling hard, scientific expertise, that are easy for most to fact check. By setting himself as a crusader against Washington and the media, Trump has played on Americans’ declining trust in both. The practice of post-truth – untrue assertion piled on untrue assertion – helped get Donald Trump, who lied or misled at an unprecedented level, to the White House. With the rise of social media and partisan news outlets, everyone now has their own opinions and their own facts.4

Neoliberalism has not replaced the state with market mechanisms but has compromised the state’s ability to be self-enforcing. One of the goals of big businesses, which rely on PR firms that often hand copy to journalists, is to perpetuate a “narrative of normality,” in which their greed is kept out of public view for as long as possible. Media specialist Dr Joanna Redden notes that “mainstream news coverage narrows and limits the way poverty is talked about in a way that reinforces the dominance of neoliberalism and market-based approaches to the issue.” It’s important to realize that we are not being manipulated by a clever group of powerful people who benefit from manipulating us. Rather, we are being manipulated by a deluded group of powerful people who think they benefit from it – because they buy into the basic illusion that their own well-being is separate from that of other people.5

While post-truth is not synonymous with lying, fake news or other deception – but is about a public anxiety that there is no confident way to secure publicly accepted facts in political culture. The truth is important because it enables us to see the world how it really is, which in turn allows us to focus and solve the real problems we are facing. Social media plays a major role in spreading misinformation. Scientists and higher education institutions need to be more proactive in developing creative and compelling ways to communicate research findings to broader audiences. We need to get the gatekeepers back at the gates. If the media professionals restore public trust, they can still play the role of mirror for society, facilitate informed public debate and discussion, shedding light where there is darkness, pursuing vital stories that those in power try to hide from the public.6

1  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-problem-george-monbiot

2  https://prospect.org/power/how-neoliberal-policy-shaped-internet-surveillance-monopoly/

 3 https://medium.com/of-course-global/how-neoliberalism-has-caused-income-inequality-9ec1fcaacb

4  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/02632764221119726#bibr14-02632764221119726

 5  https://medium.com/@renegadeinc/how-fake-news-perpetuates-neoliberalism-cb9bf53c4952

6  https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/conspiracy-propagandists

Posted in authoritarianism, neoliberalism | Leave a comment

Role of Social Factors and the Limits of Medical Care

Posted on August 15, 2024 by greg

How does today’s economic governance affect population health? Thomas Piketty observes capitalism in the 21st century has concentrated so much wealth in the hands of so few, while the millions left behind are now angry at the system. The middle-class society that flourished for a generation after World War II has vanished. After 1980 the lion’s share of economic gains went to the top end of the income distribution, with families in the bottom half lagging behind. Piketty’s argument is that in an economy where the rate of return on capital outstrips the rate of growth, inherited wealth will always grow faster than earned wealth. Every human society must justify its inequalities: reasons must be found because, without them, the whole political and social edifice is in danger of collapsing. The coronavirus pandemic exposed the violence of social inequality. Economic neoliberalism creates levels of inequality that for all intensive purposes is not reversible by itself.

Trump’s corporate tax cuts failed to deliver promised economic benefits; and paved the way for inflation. Trump Administration officials claimed their centerpiece corporate tax rate cut would “very conservatively” lead to a $4,000 boost in household income. New research shows that workers who earned less than about $114,000 on average in 2016 saw “no change in earnings” from the corporate tax rate cut, while top executive salaries increased sharply. Similarly, rigorous research concluded that the tax law’s 20 percent pass-through deduction, which was skewed in favor of wealthy business owners, has largely failed to trickle down to workers in those companies who aren’t owners. Like the Bush tax cuts before it, the 2017 Trump tax cut was a trickle-down failure. On the other hand, health care spending – in both the public and private sectors – has long grown faster than the economy and is projected to continue doing so.1

Freud described the reality principle, the ability to evaluate the external world and differentiate between it and the internal world. The reality principle did not replace the pleasure principle, but represses it, such that, a momentary pleasure; uncertain of its results, is given up, but only in order to gain in a new way, an assured pleasure coming later. The reality principle strives to satisfy the id’s desires in realistic and socially appropriate ways. In neoliberalism the reality principle is replaced by the performance principle. The performance principle presupposes particular forms of rationality for domination that stratifies society, Herbert Marcuse observed, “according to the competitive economic performance of its members.” Domination is exercised by a particular group in order to sustain and enhance themselves in a privileged position. The neoliberal performance principle teaches us to conceive of social problems as personal problems – emphasizing individual responsibility while failing to address systemic state violence in all its manifestations – healthcare, education and the war on the poor.

A large and compelling body of evidence has accumulated, particularly during the last two decades, that reveals a powerful role for social factors – apart from medical care – in shaping health across a wide range of health indicators, settings, and populations. The limits of medical care are illustrated by the work of the Scottish physician, Thomas McKeown, who studied death records for England and Wales from the mid-19th century through the early 1960s. He found that mortality from multiple causes had fallen precipitously and steadily decades before the availability of modern medical-care modalities such as antibiotics and intensive care units. McKeown attributed the dramatic increases in life expectancy since the 19th century primarily to improved living conditions, including nutrition, sanitation, and clean water. While advances in medical care also may have contributed, most believe that nonmedical factors, were probably more important; such as public health nursing, including its role in advocacy, may have played an important role in improved living standards.

An example of the limits of medical care is the widening of mortality disparities between social classes in the United Kingdom in the decades following the creation of the National Health Service in 1948, which made medical care universally accessible. Although spending on medical care in the U.S. is far higher than in any other nation, the U.S. has consistently ranked at or near the bottom among affluent nations on key measures of health, such as life expectancy and infant mortality; furthermore, the country’s relative ranking has fallen over time. Other U.S. examples include the observation that, while expansions of Medicaid maternity care around 1990 resulted in increased receipt of prenatal care by African American women, racial disparities in the key birth outcomes of low birthweight and preterm delivery were not reduced. Although important for maternal health, traditional clinical prenatal care generally has not been shown to improve outcomes in newborns.2

Recognizing that health is much more than health care – political, economic, and resource distribution decisions made outside the health sector need to consider health as an outcome across the social distribution as opposed to focus solely on increasing productivity. The scope of the scale of the influence of social determinants illustrates that social and environmental influences are highly significant, contributing to between 45% and 60% of the variation in health status. Social determinants of health are the interconnected non-medical factors that affect our well-being. They include the conditions in which we are born, grow, work, live and age, such as income, education and housing. Many people low on the socioeconomic scale are likely to carry a higher burden of just about any disease. The societal cost of poor health extends beyond the cost to the healthcare system: healthier people lose fewer days of work and contribute to overall economic productivity.

What will happen when new scientific discoveries extend potential human lifespan and intensify these inequities on a more massive scale?  “In just the last five years, there have been so many breakthroughs,” says the Harvard geneticist David Sinclair. There are now a number of compounds being tested in the lab that greatly slow down the ageing process and delay the onset of diabetes, cancer and heart disease. The consequence of the development of novel compounds that slow or even reverse ageing, is an ever-expanding longevity gap. The wealthy will experience an accelerated increase in life expectancy and health, and everyone else will go in the opposite direction, says S. Jay Olshansky, a longevity researcher and professor at the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago, “And as the technology advances, the gap will only grow.”3

The high cost for health-care in the US is driving the debate for change. Consumers are paying more money in the form of higher premiums, deductibles and additional expenses. Forced to paying bills and having health coverage, many Americans are risking it and going without. The most difficult role is to develop the political will to support action to refocus agendas on the determinants of health. The quality of any number of social determinants of health within a jurisdiction is shaped by the political ideology of governing parties. The rich, via lobbyists and Byzantine tax arrangements, actively work to stop redistribution. This fits the neo-conservative political ideology whereby social problems are being continually framed as individual ones rather that societal (e.g unemployment, poverty, racism, etc,). The most difficult role is to develop the political will to support action to refocus agendas on the determinants of health.

Motivation is about shifting public, professional and policy maker’s focus. There is a need to shift from the biomedical model that Nettleson calls the “holy trinity of risk”, of tobacco, diet and physical activity. This means within the traditional health sciences approach health problems remain individualized, localized, de-socialized and de-politicized. This fits the neo-conservative political ideology whereby social problems are being continually framed as individual ones rather that societal (e.g unemployment, poverty, racism, etc,). This dominant lifestyle health paradigm needs to shift to social determinants of health perspective by collecting and presenting stories about the impact social determinants of health have on people’s lives. Improving people’s health means taking care of both medical needs and non-medical, health-related social needs. For example, making sure people have access to nutritious food, quality housing and critical social supports.

There was a time when the middle class – really anyone who falls between the rich and the working poor – occupied a wide and comfortable place in society. It meant a stable job, a house with a yard, a two-car garage, a perhaps a nice pension. Where did the middle class come from? During the 1950s the gradually expanding economy created prosperity throughout North America. The 1950s are considered the decade that eliminated poverty for the great majority of Canadian and US citizens. The decade was associated with the shift from suburban areas to suburbs, with the supply of housing increasing 27%. With a shorter workweek and increased disposable income the middle class adopted conservative values. The problem during the last four decades is the middle class has not grown (household incomes peaked in 1973). The existing middle class is now earning less compared to those higher up on the wealth scale, and they are working harder for what they get.

Hope and optimism of the future is key to health and well-being. A big part of wellness is having meaning in one’s life and the sense that one is contributing to the world whether it be making a difference in the lives of friends and family, ecology or vocation. This has a great deal to do with attitude. The healthiest (and happiest) countries in the world are not the richest, rather the countries where wealth is shared widely and more equally. These differences create health inequities. Removing barriers to health creates health equity – allowing everyone to reach their full health potential and not be disadvantaged from attaining this potential as a result of their class, socioeconomic status or other socially determined circumstance. This includes removing barriers to those with disabilities and creating opportunities to access good healthcare. Removing barriers to good health requires addressing the income gap between the wealthy and the rest of society.

While opportunities to advance health equity through clinical care continue to be important, addressing the ways in which social determinants of health increase or decrease the risk of poor health outcomes is critical to improving the nation’s health and wellbeing. By acknowledging the social determinants of health, we recognize that, although disease is a biomedical outcome, socioeconomic inequities are important drivers of disease variation in all jurisdictions. More specifically, socioeconomic factors alone may account for 47 percent of health outcomes, while health behaviors, clinical care, and the physical environment account for 34 percent, 16 percent, and 3 percent of health outcomes, respectively. These social determinants include access to affordable and safe housing, food security, reliable transportation, economic stability and many others. Understanding these factors in your community – and engaging with partners to effectively address them – are foundational activities as health systems expand their focus to population health strategies and outcomes.4

 1 https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/the-2017-trump-tax-law-was-skewed-to-the-rich-expensive-and-failed-to-deliver

2  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3863696/

 3 Linda Marsa (02 July 2014) The Longevity Gap https://aeon.co/essays/will-new-drugs-mean-the-rich-live-to-120-and-the-poor-die-at-60

 4https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/documents/e2b650cd64cf84aae8ff0fae7474af82/SDOH-Evidence-Review.pdf

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Rousseau and Freedom: A Renewed Social Contract

Posted on August 1, 2024 by greg

In 1762, Rousseau published The Social Contract in which he defined the ideal social contract, describing how man could be free and live together in a community. By ‘equality’ Rousseau did not mean that everyone should be exactly the same, but differences in wealth should not imbalance the state, as massive material inequality can put liberty up for sale. The poor would be willing to sell their freedom, and the rich would be capable of buying it. Both the very rich and the very poor would value money more than liberty. Thus, Rousseau asserts, that some level of material equality is necessary to ensure that liberty comes before profit. On the public level, Rousseau regarded anger or righteous indignation as a part of virtuous citizenship. Today, social media algorithms reward and amplify attacks precisely because they’re engaging. Studies show this makes outrage more potent and visible, giving users a warped view of what the public believes.

Rousseau maintained the wealthy trick the poor into creating a government with the sole purpose of protecting their property and locking in moral inequality as a permanent feature of civil society. In this manner, the social contract is promoted as treating everyone equally, but in reality, it is in the interest of the few who have become stronger and richer. He believed that the role of government should be to secure freedom, equality and justice for all within the state (regardless of the will of the majority). The only reason human beings agree to be ruled is because they believe that their rights, happiness and property would be better protected under a form of government. Everyone is free because everyone forfeits the same amount of freedom and imposes the same duty upon all. Rousseau said that vanity among human beings and differences in property led to inequality – the rich became richer and the poor became poorer.

A cultural process gave rise to the inequalities, Rousseau noted, it will take a change in cultural process to reverse the harmful inequalities. Equality it seemed to him, is a necessary condition for the preservation of liberty, while property and material inequality are the root of human misery and evil. Rousseau observes, evil, greed, and selfishness emerged as human society began to develop. As people formed social institutions, they developed vices. One such institution was private property that encouraged avarice and self-interest. Thus, Rousseau asserts, that some level of material equality is necessary to ensure that liberty comes before profit. He also defended private property; if everything we did was for the state, we would no longer be free. Rousseau’s critical views on the trends of the Enlightenment made him of great intellectual influence to both Romanticism and the French Revolution.

For Locke, the role of the social contract that placed authority over people was to protect human equality and freedom; this is why social groups agreed to a social contract that placed an authority over them. Top-down systems tend to deal with the abstract while bottom-up systems deal with ‘facts on the ground’. When something is designed and pushed down from the top there is an underlying belief that the few know better than the masses. We need to reject making public policy decisions through the lens of the market (complex and multi-faceted issues are oversimplified allowing self-responsibility to become the dominant issues, and life-style change the response) as determined by the few. Then we switch to filter social and economic policies through a bottom-up system like the lens of the social determinants of health, before they are implemented to ensure they support actions that reduce inequities in the system.

The economic system in the West, in the 21st century, is a top-down system. This top-down system is about cheap money and power staying concentrated with a small group at the top of the economic pyramid. Milton Friedman claimed that the system helps poor people by the trickle-down effect, and that economic growth flows down from the top to the bottom, indirectly benefiting those who do not directly benefit from the policy changes. The 2008 economic debacle was a top-down disaster. It was triggered by the consequences of policies championed by a small group of influential people. The financial sector took advantage of the system, empowered by reckless deregulation. There were 25 bank failures in USA in 2008. The present top-down system of trickle-down economics ensures the next generation in the workplace can not only expect to earn less than their parents, but are on track to enjoy poorer health.

It is about a system, corrupted by the influence of big donors and powerful interests, that makes voting more difficult than necessary, particularly for historically disadvantaged groups. Republicans are using the same baseless lies about voting fraud to push a staggering number of laws to scale back voting rights. The reason they’re willing to weaken American democracy is very simple: it’s all about retaining power. The rules being put into place will make it more difficult, if not impossible, for many minority voters to participate in elections. As corporations and oligarchs gain more control over politics and society, they erode the principles and institutions of democracy and human rights. They undermine the rule of law, the separation of powers, the freedom of expression, the right to privacy, the right to education, the right to health care, and other civil liberties. They also promote authoritarianism, nationalism, populism, fascism, and other forms of extremism.

It is time to reject the metanarrative of neoliberal globalization – postmodern thought – and chose action that is part of the process to address social inequality and social injustice. What the mainstream media have really supported is the neoliberal project that has reduced everything to markets, undermined regulation, stagnated wages, introduced risk, precarity and uncertainty, and brought about recurrent major economic crises. In all of this the mainstream media has been a significant enabler in the shift from the social democratic advances of the post-war period to the establishment of a corporate-financial oligarchy in which democracy in any real sense is meaningless. In this setting the media have not been the purveyors of truth which has weakened democracy. This assault on reality is the fraud used to support a specific formation of power. If Trump is elected again, America will be left with the trappings of a democracy – while the reality slowly disappears, replaced instead by a nationalist oligarchy.

Unfortunately, America’s social contract broke down in the 1980s when the gap between wage growth and productivity growth first started to appear, creating the conditions that Trump tapped into during the 2016 election. Trump used the primary contest as a tool for purging the party of dissent, and took over the Republican Party. In the false belief to achieve a new social contract workers may elect an authoritarian, in this case, Donald Trump. However, Trump is a symptom of the problem, not the cause. The Republican Party, is now a party without dissent or internal debate, one that exists only to serve the will of one man. Top Republicans are already rushing to buy into a new 2024 election fraud narrative sown by ex-President Donald Trump in their zeal to position themselves close to the centre of power in the country. Election rage shows why America needs a new social contract for American workers based on mutual respect and attuned to today’s workforce and economy. However, Trump’s Republican Party has no interest in a new social contract to ensure the economy works for all.

Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, which says that competition channels self-interest for the common good, is probably the most widely cited argument today in favor of unbridled competition – and against regulation, taxation, and even government itself. But what if Smith’s idea was almost an exception to the general rule of competition? Robert Frank, who coined the term “Darwin’s wedge” challenges this, resting his case on Darwin’s insight that individual and group interests often diverge sharply. Far from creating a perfect world, economic competition often leads to “arms races,” encouraging behaviors that not only cause enormous harm to the group but also provide no lasting advantages for individuals, since any gains tend to be relative and mutually offsetting. What Frank argues, is that Darwin’s understanding of competition describes economic reality far more accurately than Smith’s. Today inequality and competition drive the debate on how much government we need.

The Enlightenment was a movement to displace the dogged adherence to established opinions and customs, and to enlighten a population the system had kept in the dark. The Enlightenment era ushered in revolutionary ways of thinking. Carl Jung says, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” Many Enlightenment thinkers criticized arbitrary, authoritarian governments. They began to propose a different form of social organization, based on the idea of “natural rights” that all people had. Enlightenment thinkers held that society existed as a contract between individuals and some larger political entity. They advanced the idea of freedom and equality before the law. Enlightenment ideas about how governments should be organized and function influenced both the American and French Revolutions.

Was the French Revolution caused by the Enlightenment, or was it a repudiation of it?  Did it happen because Enlightenment had been pursued too strongly or not strongly enough? The Revolution was people’s revolt against the inequalities of French society, the corruption of royal officials, and despair owing to widespread economic hardship. Instead of the Internet creating a new age of enlightenment through easy communication and universal access to information, today we see the emergence of an increasingly polluted information environment. The expected turmoil in November 2024 – will it be caused by Trump’s conspiracy theories or will it be about outrage over them? The European Union is in the process of developing a renewed social contract.1 Will enough Americans vote for Democrats in November to reject Project 2025 and support a renewed social contract to address the growing inequalities within communities; and counter the increased levels of polarization and fragmentation at the political level?

 1https://www.politico.eu/sponsored-content/no-future-for-europe-without-a-new-social-contract/

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Revenge of the Autocrats: The Battle Over Future Freedom

Posted on July 15, 2024 by greg

The historian Jennifer Burns has this wonderful insight when she describes Ayn Rand as ‘the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right’ – justifying a certain picture of the world is learned at a very early age, that leads them down the path to narcissism. Because the current culture gives them just enough to behave in ways that the neoliberals describe as being the ideal entrepreneur of the self, confusing freedom with imaginary lack of constraint, and so on and so forth. No one has to read Foucault. Just remember watching The Apprentice, or spend a little time on Facebook. Philip Mirowski traces the origins of neoliberalism to Friedrich Hayek and a European thought collective called The Mont Pelerin Society, who saw markets as information processors, superior to human reason. When neoliberalism, as a real-world political project, expects ignorance of the masses, then spreading confusion becomes an acceptable mode of operation, and lying is not necessarily a bad thing.

Friedrich Hayek’s writing rejects such notions of political freedom, universal rights, human equality and distribution of wealth – democracy has no absolute value, in fact, liberty depends on preventing the majority from exercising choice over the direction that politics and society might take. Society reconceived as a giant market leads to a public life lost to bickering over mere opinions; until the public turns, finally, in frustration to a strongman as a last resort for solving its otherwise intractable problems. It isn’t only that the free market produces a tiny cadre of winners and an enormous army of losers – and the losers, looking for revenge, have turned to Brexit and Trump. There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in which we find ourselves; between the market as unique discloser of value and guardian of liberty, and our current descent into post-truth and anarchy.

What any person acquainted with history sees as the necessary bulwarks against tyranny and exploitation – a thriving middle class and civil sphere; free institutions; universal suffrage; freedom of conscience, congregation, religion and press; a basic recognition that the individual is a bearer of dignity – held no special place in Hayek’s thought. Hayek built into neoliberalism the assumption that the market provides all necessary protection against the one real political danger: totalitarianism. To prevent this, the state need only keep the market free. Rising inequality has become the defining challenge of the century; it has profound implications for the health and resilience of democracies everywhere. Inequality – and the fears of social decline and exclusion it generates – feeds social polarization and the shrinking of a vital moderate center. One of today’s issues is the dissatisfaction and anger with a ‘system’ that creates increasing economic inequality for most.

Thus, the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. How did neoliberalism manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? There is a neoliberal counter-revolution based on polarization. Trump’s victim politics is a complete fraud, an old trick used by economic elite to keep working-class Americans fighting each other rather than taking on the oligarchs who are ripping them off. Trump and his allies are again stoking racial tensions even as they seek to cut taxes on the rich by shedding affordable health care for everyone else, dismantle protection for workers and consumers, and tear down environmental protections that stop wealthy corporations from poisoning communities. Victim politics is cultivated for a reason – to keep workers distracted from the real causes of economic inequality. Trump informs his followers: I am your retribution. Retribution is the act of taking revenge.1

Feelings of vengefulness are bred in us by neoliberal capitalism, a system that is itself vengeful. Neoliberal society is experienced by most of us as a set of profoundly unfair, inexplicable and disconnected humiliations. It exhorts us to see ourselves as competitive free agents ’empowered’ to skillfully manage debt, risk and opportunity. But for the majority of workers, debt and risk are unmanageable and the promise of opportunity or fairness feels everywhere foreclosed. We blame ourselves for our failures (leading, among other things, to skyrocketing mental illness), but we also blame others. Today’s capitalism produces a kind of spirit of vengeance, which it then parasitically feeds on in the commodification of what one can call revenge culture. Like the commodification of revenge culture, the instrumentalization of revenge politics by the far-right preys upon and offers a false solution to the sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness and betrayal that life under neoliberalism generates.

A narcissist will seek revenge the instant you challenge them, bruise their fragile little ego or don’t play along with their false reality showcasing their greatness, their grandiose delusions of self-importance and self-righteousness. The term ‘vindictive narcissist’ is not a clinical or official diagnosis. Instead, the term is used casually to describe someone with NPD (or someone with narcissistic traits) who tends to be mean, callous, and cruel towards others. Vindictive narcissists tend to hold onto grudges, often feel anger and resentment, and find ways to seek revenge against people who they feel wronged by. Vindictive narcissistic behaviour includes such things as keeping track of people who have wronged them, trying to either one-up or put down a person they view as a threat or competition; projecting blame onto someone else (even if they’re innocent) serves many purposes – in particular they weaponize information.

The Trump presidency demonstrated the appeal of populist authoritarianism to many Americans. The non-complex and familiar language that Trump uses is the true language of populism. The Republican party has taken a sharp populist turn in the Trump era. The protection of political freedoms and minority rights is an essential test of democracy. Populist leaders not only attack the institutions of global capital, they also disregard the checks and balances of institutional democracy. This creates a dichotomy between “the people” and the (largely unspecified) “ruling elites”, despite the reality that populist leaders themselves are clearly part of the latter. No matter. Their ability to channel anger and frustration at the status quo, and to promise easy solutions, seemingly grants them immunity from being attacked for their own exploitation of the system. We need to understand how politicians, propped up by the rich, use our anger to manipulate us.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz observes, “Trump is what neoliberalism produces. Trump’s agenda boils down to tax cuts for businesses and the rich, while his own voters lose out.” There was, from the beginning, an inevitable relationship between the utopian ideal of the free market and the dystopian present in which we find ourselves; between the market as unique discloser of value and guardian of liberty, and our current descent into post-truth and illiberalism. There is a bigger problem. Donald Trump’s talk of punishing his critics and seeking to “weaponize” the US justice department against his political opponents has experts and former DoJ officials warning this is evidence that if they achieved power again Trump and his MAGA allies plan to tighten his control at key agencies and install trusted loyalists in top posts at the DoJ and the FBI, permitting Trump more leeway to exact revenge on foes, and shrinking agencies Trump sees as harboring “deep state” critics.

Francis Bacon observed: “A man that studieth revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal and do well.” This quote implies that, in order for us to move forward in life, we much put the past behind us and just proceed. Donald Trump – figured out how to harness voters disillusionment and growing anger – is superior to the others in exploiting the narcissism of small differences to recruit the Republican base. Scholars and ex-justice officials increasing see Trump’s angry mindset was revealed on Veterans Day when he denigrated foes as “vermin” who needed to be “rooted out”, echoing fascist rhetoric from Italy and Germany in the 1930s. Trump’s revenge game-plan has been palpable for months. At a kickoff campaign rally in Texas in March, Trump warned: “Either the deep state destroys America or we destroy the deep state,” and vowed that “for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Neoliberalism has shaped and encouraged narcissism – creating a cultural shift towards narcissism in the last 40 years – as not merely something to aspire to, but to exalt. But what is it actually doing is destroying us. Narcissism reduces everyone to an object to be maneuvered for the narcissist’s pleasure. Rand’s objectivism supports narcissism by demonizing altruism. Neoliberal political economy reanimates attitudes and values that legitimate the consolidation of power over others, evidenced for example in the creation of an indebted population who must play by the dominant rules of the game in order to survive. Moreover, the narcissist is typically at a state of constant antagonistic warfare with others in order to assert dominance. Collective narcissism is associated with hypersensitivity to provocation and the belief that only hostile revenge is a desirable and rewarding response. It arises when the traditional group-based hierarchies are challenged and empowers extremists as well as populist politicians.

Collective narcissists (narcissism exhibited by an individual on behalf of any social group or by a group as a whole) may be particularly inclined to believe that revenge gives good feeling, and especially attracted to experiences that may temporarily improve their mood, such as aggression. Holding such a belief may be a way of coping with tension and a way of justifying aggression against out-groups. Trump’s talk of seeking “retribution” against foes, including some he has branded “vermin”, has coincided with plans that MAGA loyalists at right-wing think-tanks are assembling to expand the president’s power and curb the DoJ, the FBI and other federal agencies. Ian McFee links vengeful tendencies primarily with two social attitudes: right-wing authoritarianism, and social dominance, and the motivational values that underlie those attitudes. Basically, he found “People who are more vengeful tend to be those who are motivated by power, by authority and by the desire for status. They don’t want to lose face.”

Trump’s base has transformed Trump’s embarrassments into an insult against their own personal identities and belief systems, egged on by their media bubble.  Many of Trump’s voters can’t accept what’s happened over the past several years, and they blame other Americans, and want revenge. Unlike in previous elections, the motivation of these Trump loyalists isn’t really about policy, and it’s not really about “the border” or trans kids. It’s about a sense of revenge that Trump has cynically, deliberately cultivated in them – so they can finally come out on top.2 To craft a more powerful presidency, MAGA loyalists at a number of well-financed conservative think tanks led by the Heritage Foundation and the Center for Renewing America have produced an almost 1,000-page handbook, dubbed “Project 2025”, to help guide a second Trump term. Ongoing lies and feelings of vengefulness continues to fuel overheated rhetoric that is consuming the country, and threatening to trigger increased violence.

1  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/22/trump-revenge-game-plan-alarm

2  https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/17/2217978/-Trump-voters-are-now-motivated-by-one-thing-above-all-Revenge

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Social Determinants of Health: epigenetics and chance events

Posted on July 1, 2024 by greg

The need to control information and incorporate new ideas to support the status quo is not new. During the Middle Ages, the predominant corporation in the West was the Roman Catholic Church. With the rediscovery of Aristotle in the Middle Ages, the church scholars developed a system in which Aristotle’s writings supported the structure of the church. Every word of Aristotle’s writing – or at least every word that did not contradict the Bible – was accepted as eternal truth. Fused and reconciled with Christian doctrine into a philosophical system known as scholasticism, Aristotelian philosophy became the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church. The Medieval Church believed that any challenge to its dogma was evil, and justified suppression of any variation, and opposition of the individual and some scientific discoveries. The dogma of the church had nothing to do with spirituality and everything to do with maintaining social and political control.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, blends free market, reason and individualism supports the largest institutions of the 21st century – the corporations and dynamics of globalization. The most prominent institution of the 21st century, the corporation, needs to ensure small government and minimal regulation mantra with the purpose of maximizing their power and wealth. The present laissez-faire system allows a few to control the economic system in a democracy. Apologists claim the capitalist system can only function efficiently with minimal government and minimal regulation. They warn that this structure is the basis for jobs and prosperity in the country, and any changes would spell economic disaster. Economics is about the use of models to impose a description of the way we think, and to analyse and isolate important economic mechanisms. This drives discussion on the need for change. The greatest barrier is the inability to see beyond current models of thinking.

The meaning of chance is supposed to be apparent only at a level of abstraction afforded by large sets of data to the cool eye of a scientific observer or the indifferent machinations of an algorithm. But markets, for Hayek are held to be the only social form that properly accounts for the chance or randomness that is by nature a part of the spontaneous development of order within complex – that is to say partly chaotic systems. Klein observes that the neoliberal system of laissez-faire is the obscure, disavowed public face – anonymous, implacable, inscrutable – of an authoritarian scheme to restrict chance to fate. In summary, they use a heady brew of chaos and market (dis)order to protect the largest and most powerful interests – the 1% – at any cost. Thus, neoliberalism seems to have it both ways: to both restrict the meaning of chance in advance, and to reproduce randomness, risk and disorder that is susceptible only of market “solutions.”

Nietzsche claims, “No victor believes in chance.” Many of the individuals that Trump has pardoned do not leave things to chance: Michael Milliken rose to prominence the 1980s as the head of the high-yield bond department, also known as junk bonds, at the now defunct firm Drexel Burnham Lambert. Milliken was accused of taking part in an insider trading scheme and eventually pleaded guilty to several counts of securities violations. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist in the Whitehouse, raised more than $25 million from Trump supporters through “We Build the Wall” crowdsourcing, and used hundreds of thousands for personal expenses. Former Rep. Chris Collins, the first member of Congress to endorse Trump, is sentenced to 26 months in prison in insider trading case. “I am not upset that you lied to me. I am upset that from now on I can’t believe you,” concludes Nietzsche.

Foucault’s theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Power is all the more cunning because its basic forms can change in response to our efforts to free ourselves from its grip. The contemporary neoliberal “regime of truth,” to use a term from Michel Foucault, greatly influences the ways in which knowledge is being interpreted and implemented. Recognizing that reason has been one of the disciplinary technologies of modern societies, Foucault repeats, reminds us that much of history cannot be explained by anything other than ‘the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance’ (quoted from Nietzsche’s Dawn). Foucault celebrated the role of chance in history because chance makes change easier to imagine. If we do not think of history as proceeding in some inevitable or predictable manner, then history is not so deterministic, and it is easier for us to imagine that things might be different in the future.

Two of the most clinically problematic classes of disease impacting the world’s aging populations are cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Although there are stark differences between cancer cells and neurons, with the former dividing rapidly and the latter relatively quiescent and non-replicating, a growing body of evidence supports common genetic mechanisms involved in dysregulated cancer cell growth and the progression of neurodegenerative disease. Mutations in a variety of genes involved in regulation of the cell cycle, DNA repair pathways, protein turnover, oxidative stress, and autophagy have been implicated in both of these otherwise dichotomous diseases. Most gene mutations occur after you’re born and aren’t inherited. A number of forces can cause gene mutations, such as smoking, radiation, viruses, cancer-causing chemicals (carcinogens), obesity, hormones, chronic inflammation and a lack of exercise. Trends in incidence, on the other hand, would suggest changes in risk. Existing studies of trends in the incidence or prevalence of dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease need further analysis.

In his influential article on the social and cultural framing of disease, historian Charles E. Rosenberg argued, “In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming and responding to it”. From mid-1930s through the 1950s, a number of American psychiatrists led by David Rothschild responded to the challenge of dementia in the state hospitals by framing dementia as a psychosocial problem rather than a brain disease. Rothschild and his followers argued that the observation of inconsistent correlations between clinical manifestations of dementia and pathological findings could best be accounted for by people’s differing ability to compensate for brain damage. Seen this way, age-associated dementia was more than the simple and inevitable outcome of a brain that was deteriorating due to aging and/or disease. It was the interaction between the brain and the psychosocial context in which the aging person was situated.

Human cancers develop due to the accumulation of genetic and epigenetic alterations. Both alterations are now known to be present not only in cancer cells but also in normal cells long before cancer develops. Specific patterns of alterations are associated with exposure to environmental factors. The accumulation is associated with cancer risk and can be utilized for cancer risk diagnosis. Evidence suggests that approximately 80% of human cancers are linked to environmental factors impinging upon genetics/epigenetics. Alzheimer’s disease and other idiopathic dementias are associated with epigenetic transformations. Nanoplastics, widely existing in the environment and organisms, have been proven to cross the blood-brain barrier, increasing the incidence of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s disease. On the other hand, besides their strong antioxidant properties, naturally occurring polyphenols are reported to have neuroprotective effects by modulating the Aβ biogenesis pathway in Alzheimer’s disease.

People who live in poverty are significantly more likely to develop dementia compared to people of higher socioeconomic status, regardless of genetic risk, new research concludes. People living in the poorest neighborhoods had the highest risk for brain changes typical of Alzheimer’s disease. Irrespective of income or education, people living in disadvantaged neighborhoods show early signs of cognitive decline. Living in a poorer neighborhood is linked to accelerated brain aging and increased dementia risk early in life, regardless of income level or education, a Duke University-led study finds. These findings suggest that early improvement in social determinants of health through targeted structural policies may lower dementia risk later in life. Specifically, better access to free, quality education, healthcare, and basic living standard together with employment opportunities could reduce risk of dementia.1

Epigenetic risk is not merely a medical risk, but implicates the fundamental principles of fairness and justice underlying the present social contract. The role of epigenetics provides high quality evidence supporting the importance of DNA in shaping people’s lives. While epigenetic changes can be passed on from parents to children, they can also be altered by stress, diet, environment and behavior. Early life stress alters how DNA is packaged, which makes cells function differently than their original mandate. These epigenetic switches are triggered by many factors such as our lifestyle, environment, diet, stress, emotional deprivation or hormones and our age, and as the development of a growing fetus in the womb is totally dependent on these signals, it can alter the function of its cells. Epigenetics explains how environmental factors can switch genes on and off, based on choices we make. Early studies show an association between epigenetic marks (in the human genome) and socio-economic status.

The emerging field of epigenetics provides a chain of connections between what used to be qualified as social and natural inequality, leading to a reformulation of these contested boundaries. This also leads to a rethinking of the time-frame and scope of equality of opportunity. Epigenetic risks explain how environmental factors can switch genes on and off, based on choices we make. We now realize we can change gene expression by the way we think about our lives and ourselves – epigenetic marks are reversible. Controlling epigenetic harms, or environmental harms, is about treating an individual’s potential as a freedom. It is necessary to challenge the status quo of neoliberalism with its causal determinism, and create conditions where individuals can incorporate epigenetic risk into a new social contract. The relevant consequence of this approach should be a society that increases the chances or opportunities for individual fulfillment for all members of society.





1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10030911/

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Conspiracy Theories: A Threat to Democracy & Freedom

Posted on June 15, 2024 by greg

Georg Hegel (1770-1831) who saw a world governed by individual self-interest believed that we are controlled by external forces, and are nothing but pawns in the game. Hegel believed that we do not perceive the world or anything in it directly and all that our minds have access to is the ideas of the world – images, perceptions, and concepts. For Hegel, the only real reality we know is virtual reality. Hegel believed that the ideas we have of the world are social, which is to say, the ideas that we possess individually are for the most part shaped by the ideas that other people possess. Our minds have been shaped by the thoughts of other people through the language we speak, the traditions and mores of our society, and the cultural and religious institutions of which we are a part. Hegel notes, “When liberty is mentioned, we must always be careful to observe whether it is not really the assertion of private interests which is thereby designated.”

Misinformation is not like a plumbing problem you fix. It is a social condition, like crime, that you must constantly monitor and adjust to, observes Tom Rosenstiel. Cognitive biases reflect mental patterns that can lead people to form beliefs or make decisions that do not reflect an objective and thorough assessment of the facts. For instance, people tend to seek out information that confirms pre-existing beliefs and reject information that challenges those beliefs. This bias is the tendency in all of us to believe stories that reinforce our convictions – and the stronger the convictions, the more powerfully the person feels the pull of the confirmation bias. The Federal Trade Commission has accused Facebook of breaking antitrust law by gobbling up many smaller social media start-ups and acquiring several large, well-established competitors, in what amounts to a concerted effort to build a social media monopoly.

The power elite control what you think through proxies who control information and communication, and through their lobbyists who influence what most of your politicians believe. Social computing shows that you don’t necessarily have to read people’s brains to influence their choices. It is sufficient to collect and mine the data they regularly – and often unwittingly – share online. Therefore, we need to consider setting for the digital space a firm threshold for cognitive liberty. Cognitive liberty highlights the freedom to control one’s own cognitive dimension (including preferences, choices and beliefs) and to be protected from manipulative strategies that are designed to bypass one’s cognitive defenses. The EU data protection authority has underscored if recklessly applied to the electoral domain, these activities could even change or reduce “the space for debate and interchange of ideas,” a risk which urgently requires a democratic debate on the use and exploitation of data for political campaign and decision-making.

The concept of information manipulation has largely remained the same through time; however, the speed at which it spreads and the magnitude of influence it holds today makes it very different from its historical counterpart. Today established political parties are using social media to spread disinformation, suppress political participation, and undermine oppositional parties. With every click, like and follow, we leave our digital footprints all across social media and the web. This is a fertile ground for deception – technology that leverages your online activities combined with the power of big data, super computing and artificial intelligence. Lies are always coercive for the one being lied to: Lies seek to persuade not by appealing to our freedom to choose but by compelling us via deception to narrow our field of choice. Conspiracy theories may be construed as opportunistic attributions of power that allow (relatively powerful groups) to advance their interests.

No one equivocates or dis-informs with greater conviction than the narcissist-politician, whose blatant disregard for facts can at times be mind-boggling. Trump’s opponents learned explaining and defending against the narcissist leaves you open to more abuse. When you address the content of what is being said and explain and defend your position, you endorse Trump’s right to judge, approve, or abuse you. Your reaction sends this message: “You have power over my self-esteem. You have the right to approve or disapprove of me. You’re entitled to be my judge.” People must appreciate how important emotions are in making decisions that impact on making a better world. People tend to overestimate their emotional intelligence – the ability to read, understand and respond to emotions in ourselves and others. But Trump’s schemes never would have gotten far (or even off the ground) without the participation of right-wing media executives, lawyers and pliant state officials.

Karl Popper claims democracy is representative and not directly participatory. One’s only role is to judge and dismiss the government, a device to protect ourselves against the misuse of power. People never have any real power over politics. The best one can achieve is to determine which of a few candidates will exercise political rule over them. Democracy masks the true source of power in the hands of the few. Importantly, Popper’s theory of democracy did not rely upon a well-informed and judicious public. “We (who support democracy) are democrats,” Popper wrote, “not because the majority is always right, but because democratic traditions are the least evil ones of which we know.” Popper contends that a society that tolerates intolerant ideas will succumb to the forces of the intolerant, which are inherently dangerous. The paradox: an excess of tolerance allows intolerant extreme conduct that can destroy tolerance.

Individuals engage in motivated reasoning as a way to avoid or lessen cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort people experience when confronted by contradictory information, especially on matters that directly relate to their comfort, happiness, and mental health. The conspiracy theory they believe in provides a framework for understanding the world and bringing order to random events, and provides them with a community of similarly disaffected thinkers who can validate one another’s anxieties and shared worldview. One of the reasons why conspiracy theories spring up with such regularity is due to our desire to impose structure on the world, and incredible ability to recognize patterns. It’s not just social media that contributes to fearmongering and the spread of misinformation: Certain advocacy groups spread conspiracy theories not because they believe in them and want to warn the public, but because they may have other agendas.

“Conspiracy theories are appealing to people in particular when they have important psychological needs that are not being satisfied, “notes Karen Douglas, University of Kent professor. The first use of the term, conspiracy theory, in its modern sense is credited to British-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, just after the Second World War. He was one of the vanguard of thinkers then to suggest conspiracy theories developed as a form of theism, an attempt to “fill a void that has been left by the Enlightenment” and the abandonment of religion. You’re not imagining things: conspiracy theories are leaving the fringes for the mainstream to drive real-life action, from protests against coronavirus restrictions, to the rejection of vaccines, to the burning of cell towers — to possibly even murder. Social media is rife with wild, conspiracist explanations for our era’s multiple shocks. They’ve become so pervasive that we’re now used to hearing them from former U.S. president Trump.1

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are captivating because they provide explanations for confusing, emotional and ambiguous events especially when official explanations seem inadequate. Although conspiracies are frequently outlandish and implausible assertions, their power lies in the fact that they confirm what people want to believe. There still are professional news media (often public service media) who inform about and debunk CTs, sometimes with dedicated fact-checkers, as do some government websites and academics. Yet, there are also actors who actively promote CTs suiting their political or financial goals: Many Republican politicians embrace QAnon, a far-right political movement rooted in a baseless conspiracy theory that the world is controlled by the “Deep State,” a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles, and that former President Donald Trump is the only person who can defeat it. Unfortunately, many news media are sacrificing professional norms for more clicks and revenue, as well as other economic actors striving for financial gains.

Karen Douglas notes: “But I think that it is definitely the case that even if we can’t say for sure that social media has increased conspiracy theories, it’s certainly changed the way in which people access this information, the ways in which they share this information, and also I feel that in many cases, for people who do have, I guess, an underlying tendency to believe in a particular conspiracy theory or conspiracy theories in general, it’s much easier for people to find this sort of information now than it ever has been before.” Many people are convinced that ‘the information is out there’, that is, that it is easy to find – this widespread ‘folk theory’ often goes hand in hand with a lack of trust in established news media and a high self-assessment, which mostly does not correspond with their actual information literacy. Thus, global platform companies such as Google contribute to the digital (information) divide.

If a healthy democracy relies on the trust of its citizens, then conspiracy theories show what happens when that trust begins to fray,” AP reporter David Klepper wrote. Conspiracy theories are mucking up the 2024 election. Conspiratorial rhetoric has become more mainstream in the conversation,” notes Cynthia Wang. “We’re seeing candidates inviting fringe conspiratorial communities onto their platforms.” When there’s uncertainty and fear, people are going to cast about for explanations that make sense to them, even in the face of contrary facts. What’s new is a whole host of media outlets that do all they can to reinforce these false beliefs. Former President Donald Trump is going all in on his new election-related conspiracy theory: that almost every one of his legal problems have been personally orchestrated by President Joe Biden.  When casting your vote in November 2024, remember the Republican Party is not the party of freedom. Its all about maintaining power.

1 https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/conspiracy-theories

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Responding to a Society Controlled and Manipulated by Lies

Posted on June 1, 2024 by greg

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four doublespeak included: use of euphemisms, jargon, vagueness, intentional omission, misdirection, and idioms in order to obscure the truth and engage in Machiavellian behavior. Doublespeak is language that deliberately obscures, disguises, distorts, or reverses the meaning of words. One of Orwell’s most important messages in 1984 is that language is of central importance to human thought because it structures and limits the ideas that individuals are capable of formulating and expressing. The true value of Nineteen Eighty-four is it teaches us that power and tyranny are made possible through the use of words and how they are mediated. The theme of lies in 1984 is: lying, deception and false appearance is usually connected with the want for power and control, the belief that no one will find out, and avoiding punishment. This is not so dissimilar from the radical right in the lead up to the 2024 US  election.

“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind. However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” (On the manipulation of language for political ends.) “As far as the mass of the people go, the extraordinary swings of opinion which occur nowadays, the emotions which can be turned on and off like a tap, are the result of newspaper and radio hypnosis.  We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”1 Nineteen Eighty-four was written as a warning of what could happen if people allowed their governments to obtain too much power after Orwell saw what happened to the people in Nazi Germany.

Albert Einstein’s most famous quote on thoughts and consciousness is: “The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.” False consciousness is a concept in sociology which states, among other things, that individuals in a society are not aware of what their true interests are, or have an otherwise incorrect idea of what constitute their true interests, because the dominant ideology in society has succeeded in effectively deceiving them into thinking that their true interests are something other than what they in fact are. Why, for example, individuals in a capitalistic society more often than not choose lives of complacency in regards to social hierarchies that continue to grow, leaving the masses poor and a few individuals extremely wealthy. As well, working-class people believing that certain politicians and policies will benefit the working class when they actually represent and benefit the ruling elite.

Society is controlled and manipulated as a direct consequence of the practice of a ‘false consciousness’ and the creation of values and life choices that are to be followed. In ‘advanced’ industrial (countries) societies, hegemonic cultural tools, such as compulsory schooling, mass media, and popular culture, indoctrinate workers to a ‘false consciousness.’  False consciousness denotes people’s inability to recognize inequality, oppression, and exploitation in a capitalist society because of the prevalence within it of views that naturalize and legitimize the existence of social classes. One example of false consciousness is when a person votes in such a way that might actually benefit those of a wealthier class rather than benefiting those in his or her own economic range. Voters need to focus on the roll backs of previous progressive legislation, and not be overwhelmed by the manipulative rhetoric of the various front men for the economic elite.

Both religion and ideology are sets of beliefs or ideas which try to explain how things work in the world and society and based on it create a set of rules people may follow. Both espouse world views that are seen as complete by their followers: as “total” systems, concerned at the same time with questions of truth and questions of conduct. Both consider opposing views as incorrect. Both tend to impact human psychology in similar ways through creating an ‘us and them’ mentality. Louis Althusser argues that religion is a part of the ideological state apparatus. Along with education and the media, it transmits the dominant ideology and maintains false class consciousness. False Consciousness doesn’t mean the working classes are idiots, but it does mean that they have been systematically fed untruth. The challenge today is that the masses are being redirected to the right.

One modern example of false consciousness is the American Dream – the belief that, by hard work, anyone can increase their social status, regardless of the conditions they were born into. Although influential, false consciousness has been criticized for its perceived elitism, authoritarianism, and unverifiability. Yet the idea that every American has an equal opportunity to move up in life is false. Social mobility has declined over the past decades, median wages have stagnated and today’s young generation is the first in modern history expected to be poorer than their parents. The lottery of life – the zip or postal code where you were born – can account for up to two thirds of the wealth an individual generates. The growing gap between the rich and the poor, the old and the young has been largely ignored by policymakers and investors until the recent rise of anti-establishment votes, including those for Brexit and for President Trump.

Neoliberalism calls for a government that enables rather than provides. That is, in a neoliberal society the government is only willing to acknowledge a much-muted commitment to look after and be responsible for the well-being of its citizens. Rather the government is tasked with the responsibility of creating enabling conditions that make it possible for all entities, whether they be individuals or complex organizations, to be responsible for their welfare through enterprise and competition in a marketized society. It’s important to realize that we are not being manipulated by a clever group of powerful people who benefit from manipulating us. Rather, we are being manipulated by a deluded group of powerful people who think they benefit from it – because they buy into the basic illusion that their own well-being is separate from that of other people. They too are victims of their own propaganda, caught up in the webs of collective delusion that include virtually all of us; one of the poisons – ignorance.2

Individuals support forms of domination with varying levels of understanding that they are doing so. In many cases, those very structures of domination distort our conceptions of them through mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, implicit bias, affected ignorance, false consciousness, and belief polarization. These various epistemic (relating to knowledge) distortions, in turn, cause social conflict, notably by promoting political polarization. Those worried by social conflict have spent a great deal of energy decrying the increasingly polarized contexts in which we live. However, epistemic distortions in our sociopolitical beliefs also maintain systems of domination, are misrepresentative, and prevent human needs from being met. People turned against each other cannot turn against those responsible. The more we’re thrown into conflict with each other through engineered distrust, the less able we are to unite against those responsible. Trump’s social media use has fueled the fire of extreme polarization, which, in turn, has contributed to the erosion of trust in democratic institutions.3

Self-deception is a personality trait and an independent mental state, it involves a combination of a conscious motivational false belief and a contradictory unconscious real belief. Existentialists observe: We are destined to be self-centered and deceptive unto ourselves. Worst of all we can’t simply stop being reflective and introspective, it’s a part of being! Unfortunately, there is no way out of self-deception while we exist. This is why so many consider Existentialism a philosophy of negative concepts. Self-deception isn’t merely a philosophically interesting puzzle but a problem of existential concern. It raises the distinct possibility that we live with distorted views that may make us strangers to ourselves and blind to the nature of our morally significant engagements. In the philosophy of existentialism, bad faith refers to a state of self-deception. Many of us deceive ourselves about our freedom and about our capacity to change our condition in the world.

Trump’s messaging on January 6 is precisely in line with how he’s historically addressed violence on the part of hate groups and his supporters: He emboldens it. As far back as 2015, Trump has been connected to documented acts of violence, with perpetrators claiming that he was even their inspiration. Trump has continually refused to recognize what’s at the core of this violence: hate nurtured under a tense national climate that he has helped cultivate. Trump’s campaign rallies have always been incubation grounds for violence. His messaging on January 6 is precisely in line with how he’s historically encouraged physical harm against dissenters. On the day that Congress moved to certify the 2020 presidential election results confirming Biden as the winner, Trump encouraged thousands of his supporters to dispute vote counts. He encouraged them to head to the Capitol to support objections to certification of the vote.4

The “narcissism of small differences” was Freud’s 1917 term for his observation that people with minor differences between them can be more competitive and hateful that those with major differences. This concept posits that human nature is essentially egoistic, capable of forming groups only by virtue of shared enemies, a prospect made more depressing because it posits group identities as fictitious, contrived on the basis of denial and distortion. Trump has raised denial to an historical new level. Trump harnessed the social media companies using denial to increase polarization in America. Social media companies do not seek to boost user engagement because they want to intensify polarization. They do so because the amount of time users spend on a platform liking, sharing, and retweeting is also the amount of time they spend looking at the paid advertising that makes the major platforms so lucrative.5

Ideology is a set of collectively held ideas about society, usually promoted in order to justify a certain type of political action. The theory of ideology is an attempt to explain the existence of false consciousness, and false consciousness is a matter of individuals’ acceptance, contrary to their interests, of an oppressive order. In post-truth politics social media assists political actors who mobilize voters through a crude blend of outlandish conspiracy theories and suggestive half-truths, barely concealed hate-speech, as well as outright lies. These “populist” voters now live in a media bubble, getting their news from sources that play to their identity-politics desires, which means that even if you offer them a better deal, they won’t hear about it, or believe it if told. We now realize the need to control how social media is manipulated by big money.

Selwyn Duke observes: “The further a society drifts from the truth the more it will hate those who speak it.” People lie to have control over you. People lie to manipulate you. Excessive polarization leads people to disregard views different from their own, making it hard to achieve democratic solutions to societal problems. Trump deliberately divides the country, as his way of doing politics focuses on creating divisions. He has signaled that a second term would be more radical and vindictive than his first one. He plans to expand the powers of the presidency that he would then wield against a wide range of groups in America. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.6

1 From Facing Unpleasant Facts Quotes by George Orwell

2  http://neolib.uga.edu/neoliberalism-introduction.php

3  https://sofheyman.org/events/beyond-polarization-epistemic-distortion-and-criticism

4  https://www.vox.com/21506029/trump-violence-tweets-racist-hate-speech

5  https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/26/trump-and-false-consciousness/

6 from Partners in Ecocide: Australia’s Complicity in the Uranium Cartel, by Venturino Giorgio Venturini in 1982.

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