Dec 17, 2017 TD originals
The Permanent Lie, Our Deadliest Threat
The most ominous danger we face does not come from the eradication of free
speech through the obliteration of net neutrality or through Google
algorithms that steer people away from dissident, left-wing, progressive or
anti-war sites. It does not come from a tax bill that abandons all pretense
of fiscal responsibility to enrich corporations and oligarchs and prepares
the way to dismantle programs such as Social Security. It does not come from
the opening of public land to the mining and fossil fuel industry, the
acceleration of ecocide by demolishing environmental regulations, or the
destruction of public education. It does not come from the squandering of
federal dollars on a bloated military as the country collapses or the use of
the systems of domestic security to criminalize dissent. The most ominous
danger we face comes from the marginalization and destruction of
institutions, including the courts, academia, legislative bodies, cultural
organizations and the press, that once ensured that civil discourse was
rooted in reality and fact, helped us distinguish lies from truth and
facilitated justice.
Donald Trump and todays Republican Party represent the last stage in the
emergence of corporate totalitarianism. Pillage and oppression are justified
by the permanent lie. The permanent lie is different from the falsehoods and
half-truths uttered by politicians such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and
Barack Obama. The common political lie these politicians employed was not
designed to cancel out reality. It was a form of manipulation. Clinton, when
he signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, promised NAFTA
means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs. George W. Bush
justified the invasion of Iraq because Saddam Hussein supposedly possessed
weapons of mass destruction. But Clinton did not continue to pretend that
NAFTA was beneficial to the working class when reality proved otherwise.
Bush did not pretend that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction once none
were found.
The permanent lie is not circumscribed by reality. It is perpetuated even in
the face of overwhelming evidence that discredits it. It is irrational.
Those who speak in the language of truth and fact are attacked as liars,
traitors and purveyors of fake news. They are banished from the public
sphere once totalitarian elites accrue sufficient power, a power now granted
to them with the revoking of net neutrality. The iron refusal by those who
engage in the permanent lie to acknowledge reality, no matter how
transparent reality becomes, creates a collective psychosis.
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth
is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a
lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real worldand
the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this
endis being destroyed, Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of
Totalitarianism.
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The permanent lie turns political discourse into absurdist theater. Donald
Trump, who lies about the size of his inauguration crowd despite
photographic evidence, insists that in regard to his personal finances he is
going to get killed by a tax bill that actually will save him and his
heirs over $1 billion. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin claims he has a
report that proves that the tax cuts will pay for themselves and will not
increase the deficitonly there never was a report. Sen. John Cornyn assures
us, countering all factual evidence, that this is not a bill that is
designed primarily to benefit the wealthy and the large businesses.
Two million acres of public land, meanwhile, are handed over to the mining
and fossil fuel industry as Trump insists the transfer means that public
lands will once again be for public use. When environmentalists denounce
the transfer as a theft, Rep. Rob Bishop calls their criticism a false
narrative.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, after ending net neutrality, effectively killing free
speech on the internet, says, [T]hose whove said the internet as we know
it is about to end have been proven wrong.
We have a free internet going
forward. And at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, phrases
such as evidence-based and science-based are banned.
The permanent lie is the apotheosis of totalitarianism. It no longer matters
what is true. It matters only what is correct. Federal courts are being
stacked with imbecilic and incompetent judges who serve the correct
ideology of corporatism and the rigid social mores of the Christian right.
They hold reality, including science and the rule of law, in contempt. They
seek to banish those who live in a reality-based world defined by
intellectual and moral autonomy. Totalitarian rule always elevates the
brutal and the stupid. These reigning idiots have no genuine political
philosophy or goals. They use clichés and slogans, most of which are absurd
and contradictory, to justify their greed and lust for power. This is as
true on the Christian right, which is filling the ideological vacuum of the
Trump administration, as it is for the corporatists that preach
neoliberalism and globalization. The merger of the corporatists with the
Christian right is the marrying of Godzilla to Frankenstein.
The venal political figures need not even comprehend the social and
political consequences of their behavior, psychiatrist Joost A.M. Meerloo
wrote in The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control,
Menticide, and Brainwashing. They are compelled not by ideological belief,
no matter how much they may rationalize to convince themselves they are, but
by the distortions of their own personalities. They are not motivated by
their advertised urge to serve their country or mankind, but rather by an
overwhelming need and compulsion to satisfy the cravings of their own
pathological character structures. The ideologies they spout are not real
goals; they are the cynical devices by which these sick men hope to achieve
some personal sense of worth and power. Subtle inner lies seduce them into
going from bad to worse. Defensive self-deception, arrested insight, evasion
of emotional identification with others, degradation of empathythe mind has
many defense mechanisms with which to blind the conscience.
When reality is replaced by the whims of opinion and expediency, what is
true one day often becomes false the next. Consistency is discarded.
Complexity, nuance, depth and profundity are replaced with the simpletons
belief in threats and force. This is why the Trump administration disdains
diplomacy and is dynamiting the State Department. Totalitarianism, wrote
novelist and social critic Thomas Mann, is at its core the desire for a
simple folktale. Once this folktale replaces reality, morality and ethics
are abolished.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities,
Voltaire warned.
The corporate elites, who even in the best of times stacked the deck against
people of color, the poor and the working class, no longer play by any
rules. Their lobbyists, bought-and-paid-for politicians, pliant academics,
corrupt judges and television news celebrities run a kleptocratic state
defined by legalized bribery and unchecked exploitation. The corporate
elites write laws, regulations and bills to expand corporate looting and
plunder while imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public, including
college graduates burdened by huge loans. They ram through austerity
measures that dismantle state and municipal services, often forcing them to
be sold off to corporations, and slash social programs, including public
education and health care. They insist, however, that when we have
grievances we rely on the institutions they have debased and corrupted. They
ask us to invest our energy and time in fixed political campaigns, petition
elected representatives or appeal to the courts. They seek to lure us into
their schizophrenic world, where rational discourse is pitted against
gibberish. They demand we seek justice in a system designed to perpetuate
injustice. It is a game we can never win.
Thus all our dignity consist in thought, wrote Pascal. It is on thought
that we must depend for our recovery, not on space and time, which we could
never fill. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of
morality.
We must pit power against power. We must build parallel institutions and
organizations that protect us from corporate assault and resist corporate
domination. We must sever ourselves as much as possible from the vampire
state. The more we can create self-contained communities, with our own
currencies and infrastructures, the more we can starve and cripple the
corporate beast. This means establishing worker-run cooperatives, local
systems of food supply based on a vegan diet and independent artistic,
cultural and political organizations. It means obstructing in every way
possible the corporate assault, including the blocking of pipelines and
fracking sites, and taking to the streets in sustained acts of civil
disobedience against censorship and the attack on civil liberties. And it
means creating sanctuary cities. All of this will have to be done the way it
has always been done, by building personal, face-to-face relationships. We
may not ultimately save ourselves, especially with the refusal by the elites
to address the ravages of climate change, but we can create pods of
resistance where truth, beauty, empathy and justice endure.
Chris Hedges